A theory to explain the chaotic world of 2006 – in which people from Baghdad to Beijing seem unable to cooperate on projects that would make them better off – was written in 1965 by an obscure American economist named Mancur Olson Jr. His short book, “The Logic of Collective Action, explained why big groups, including nation-states, cannot agree on actions that are in their common interest.
You can see this perverse “logic at work in nearly all the conflicts that vex the planet today. The divisive political dynamic that blocks collective solutions – what Olson described as the “surprising tendency for the exploitation of the great by the small – is apparent even in the United States. But I’m going to stick to foreign examples.
Start with Iraq, the conflict that is grinding up US soldiers and Iraqi civilians in horrifying numbers. Iraqis know they would all be better off if they could agree on a national compact that would subordinate sectarian differences to the larger national interests of stability and prosperity. Their leaders keep pledging support for this goal, but it doesn’t happen.
Why? Olson, who taught at the University of Maryland until he died in 1998, explained the underlying problem this way: “Unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests. The problem, he said, is that although everyone would benefit from the collective good of, say, greater security, it s irrational for any individual to make voluntary sacrifices to achieve it.
I put a version of this dilemma to L. Paul Bremer in Baghdad in January 2004, when he was head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. In an interview in the Green Zone, I said that although people were describing him as an imperial proconsul, his situation seemed closer to that of a bankruptcy trustee: If one of his three big creditors – the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds – decided to push for unilateral advantage and “call their loans, they would drive the enterprise into ruin. But if Bremer could coax the parties toward an agreement, everyone would emerge better off.
Bremer’s initial response to the bankruptcy analogy was unforgettable: “Is that Chapter 7, or Chapter 11? he asked. He went on to say that, like a bankruptcy trustee, he had to believe that the parties around the table were rational.
But individual rationality often pushes us toward solutions that are collectively ruinous. That was Olson’s point. He was writing at a time when most social scientists embraced upbeat theories about the inherent cohesiveness of politics. He showed why this optimism was misplaced. It was, in fact, irrational for any individual to pay taxes voluntarily to support an army; better to let your neighbor pay, and get the benefit for free. Groups that acted voluntarily for the common interest were “composed of either altruistic individuals or irrational individuals, he wrote.
Iran illustrates the Olson problem. Every Iranian I encountered on a recent trip there expressed a belief that this is Iran’s moment to emerge as a leading political and economic force in the Middle East. But to get this collective benefit every Iranian wants, the country’s leaders will have to limit a nuclear program that some Iranians want. Olson would tell us that, absent compulsion, it isn’t going to happen: Powerful pressure groups will prevent the collective good.
An Olson problem also afflicts North Korea’s neighbors as they deal with its nuclear weapons program. China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the United States would all be better off if they had stopped Kim Jong Il before he detonated a bomb. But it’s like paying taxes. It was easier to wait for someone else to do it – for Washington to wait for Beijing, and vice versa. And, of course, the job never got done.
Olson’s escape from this conundrum was his recognition that it’s necessary to compel the collective behavior that is in everyone’s interest. Workers must be compelled to join a union; otherwise, they’ll freeload. Citizens must be required by law to pay taxes; otherwise, they wouldn’t do it. Sectarian groups must be forced to obey the national government; otherwise they will create anarchy. And individual nations must be compelled to obey rules limiting the spread of nuclear technology and other threats to common security.
Otherwise, we will have unending wars.
In the international arena, the appropriate instrument of compulsion is not, as the Bush administration has believed, the United States. It is the United Nations. Making the UN effective enough that it can compel the common good is the right answer to Olson’s paradox.
Syndicated columnist David Ignatius is published regularly by THE DAILY STAR.
