4 comments

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  Jim Harper

  5 months ago

  Interesting thoughts as usual, Jerry.
  
  I think you (and others) might be a little ahead of the problem, off by a degree or two, or perhaps not sufficiently precise (one of the three! ;-) when you talk about the collective action problem. That has to be solved (and it may even solve itself) after you overcome the problem of rational ignorance. (Maybe in the orthodox public choice literature, rational ignorance is part of the collective action problem. I don't know - but I think there are important distinctions between knowledge and action that public choice terminology may not capture.)
  
  Before people can organize and take action to oppose a policy that causes them to lose out, they have to know that it exists and how it affects them. I wrote about rational ignorance and "rational inaction" some time back in my post Getting to Government Transparency.
  
  My favorite solution, taking a little chunk out of both rational ignorance and rational inaction is WashingtonWatch.com because it communicates the price of proposed public policies in a common frame of reference, information not found anywhere else. A million visitors will use it this year.
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  Jerry Brito

  5 months ago

  Thanks, Jim. That's exactly my point when I say, "It also seems to me, though, that the first step to the formation of Internet-facilitated ad hoc taxpayer lobbies is that it needs to be dead simple for taxpayers to know what to lobby against (or even for). This means improved government transparency[.]" That is the first step, so yeah, I guess I am getting ahead of the problem. When people ask me why I want e-transparency, I will point them to the possibility that we can use social media to do something about what we learn.
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  Tim Lee

  5 months ago

  Hey Jerry,
  
  This is a great post. The only thing I would add is to keep in mind that collective action problems are a matter of degree. Collective action problems will always lead to a lot of bad policy results. But the good guys do manage to organize against special interests once in a while. Deregulation did happen in the 1970s. We have beat back a lot of bad copyright proposals in the last 5 years or so. And so on. So "the collective action problem" isn't something we can solve at one fell swoop. Rather, the question is how we can expand the set of issues where overcoming the collective action problem is feasible. I think the Internet is clearly tilting the playing field in a good direction by increasing the efficiency of grassroots organization. But the result won't be the end of rent-seeking, just its reduction on the margin.
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  Jerry Brito

  5 months ago

  Thanks, Tim. I think your comments are spot on, and thanks for highlighting our successes on the copyright front. That might be a good case study to illustrate what I'm talking about. Ideas on any other similar successes against traditional special interests? Anyone?
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