Societal Problems as Public Bads

Nan de Graaf, Dingeman Wiertz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351063449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Corruption, crime, economic inequality, religious fundamentalism, financial crises, environmental degradation, population ageing, gender inequality, large-scale migration… This book tackles many of the most pressing problems facing societies today. The authors demonstrate that similar social mechanisms lie behind many of these seemingly disparate problems. Indeed, many societal problems can be traced back to behaviours that are perfectly rational and often well-intended from an individual perspective. Yet, taken together these behaviours can – paradoxically – give rise to unintended and undesirable outcomes at the society level.

In addition to addressing the causes of societal problems, the book explains why some problems rank higher on the public agenda than others. Moreover, it is shown how government intervention may sometimes provide a cure, yet other times exacerbate existing problems or create new problems of its own. This book includes an extensive amount of data on trends and geographic variation in the prevalence of different problems, as well as telling examples – both recent and historical – from a variety of countries to support its key arguments.

Employing a bold multidisciplinary approach, the authors draw on insights from across the social sciences, including sociology, economics, anthropology, criminology, and psychology. Throughout the book, students are introduced to analytical concepts such as free-riding, herding behaviour, principal-agent relations and moral hazard. These concepts are essential tools for better understanding the roots of many societal problems that regularly make headlines in the news. This improved understanding will, in turn, be critical for ultimately finding solutions to these problems.

1 Introduction

Chapter overview

In this chapter we introduce our approach to societal problems. Importantly, we draw a distinction between societal problems and social problems. The latter refers to problems occurring in social life – that is, in relations and interactions between people. These social problems only become societal problems if they are experienced by a large group of people and leave their mark on society as a whole. We begin this chapter with a historical overview of how societal problems have been approached over the past centuries by public thinkers as well as governments. We then discuss the process through which societal problems arrive onto the public agenda and eventually become targets for government policy. We also address the philosophical underpinnings of social norms, present a simple model of the structure of society, and provide a justification for our selection of societal problems. In particular, we focus on problems that emerge at the societal level from the aggregation of many individual actions. These problems can be viewed as public bads, which stand in contrast to their well-known counterpart, public goods.

Societal problems as public bads

This book deals with a number of pressing societal problems. The first chapter addresses the question of what societal problems are, and the second chapter explains how we approach these problems in this book. The third chapter considers the opportunities and limits of government intervention as a solution to societal problems. The following ten chapters are then devoted to the study of specific societal problems.

In a very general sense, there is a societal problem when a substantial group of citizens perceives a certain state of affairs as problematic. Importantly, we make a distinction here between societal problems and social problems. The latter refer to problems occurring in relations or interactions between people. However, social problems only become societal problems if they are shared by a large group of people and leave their mark on society as a whole. For example, an occasional case of theft or corruption does not necessarily constitute a societal problem. Certainly, there will be victims in those cases, but the phenomenon only becomes a societal problem once it is so widespread that it reduces social trust across large swathes of society. In such cases, corruption will also undermine the legitimacy of the government and harm the economy. More generally, societal problems will often have clear political and economic implications in addition to the social.

In this book, we view societal problems as public bads, which stand in contrast to their well-known counterpart, public goods. Indeed, some public bads concern the under-provision of public goods. Within this framework, societal problems are the unintended society-level consequences of numerous acts by individual actors. These individual actors could be actual individuals but also individual firms or states, and they do not usually intend to cause any harm with their behaviour. Indeed, the true origin of societal problems does not generally lie in the intentions of individuals, but rather in the aggregation of individual actions into society-level phenomena. The crucial aspect is that individual actors do not take into account the effects of their behaviour on others. In economics, these effects – which may be positive or negative – are called externalities. As a result of these externalities, together all individual actors produce too much of what is bad for society in the case of negative externalities; or too little of what is good for society in the case of positive externalities. Later in this chapter we present a typology of public bads, but first we turn to some background on how societal problems have been perceived in the past.

A brief history of the problematic society

Only fairly recently have societal problems become an issue of major public concern. While for many centuries societal problems had simply been perceived as a given, an inherent and unavoidable part of any society, this changed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This trend break was put in motion by philosophers of the Enlightenment such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Cesare Beccaria, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who began to think critically about the state and society. These philosophers started to develop theories in response to the question of why the circumstances in which people lived were often not in accordance with important moral principles such as liberty and equality.

The term society acquired its modern meaning after being used by these thinkers as the opposite to the term state. Whereas the state was seen as an institution of power based on hierarchy, society was considered to be an association of free people. In this light, the 1789 French Revolution was perceived as a revolt by society against the state – and against absolutist monarchy in particular. Ever since, the relationship between the state and society has remained subject to tension and change (see also the section “Social norms and the organization of society”).

Many Enlightenment philosophers, such as Rousseau and Baron de Montesquieu, had an optimistic view of society. They expected that if individuals surrendered to reason as a guideline for their behaviour, they would collectively be able to redesign society for the better. This spirit is clearly visible in Montesquieu’s theory of the trias politica (the separation of powers). According to this vision, the administrative powers of governments should be divided into three separate branches: executive, legislative and judicial. These three branches should be independent and thus balance each other in such a way that none of them could over-rule the others. This would in turn protect society against despotism.

The idea that society could be designed according to people’s preferences was put into practice by the rebels during the French Revolution. They tried to create a society founded upon the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. However, it turned out that the rebels had to resort to force and violence in order to achieve their goals. Their attempt to achieve liberty, equality and fraternity had thus led to tyranny. Reflecting on this revolution, the eighteenth century British philosopher Edmund Burke (2003[1790]:51) made his famous statement about perverse consequences, namely that “very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions”. Throughout this book, we present many examples of how innocent or even noble intentions can give rise to undesirable outcomes.

During the twentieth century, social science became firmly established as an area of academic inquiry that aims to increase our understanding of societal problems. The underlying goal is to ultimately help solve these problems. At the same time, social science has become increasingly associated with government policy. In the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists were, for example, actively involved in the development of Western welfare states. In the United Kingdom, the Beveridge Report (Beveridge 1942) laid the foundations of the welfare state as it was erected after the Second World War. The report identified five “Giant Evils” (want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness) and outlined a range of social reforms to address these problems.

Since the 1950s, governments have increasingly consulted social scientists on questions such as: How can economic growth be stimulated? How can we safeguard a satisfactory standard of living for the elderly? How should we tackle climate change? What is the best strategy to diminish crime or inter-ethnic conflicts? In short, as the state has become more involved in the organization of society (see also Chapter 3), this has generated an increased need for social scientific knowledge about society. More generally, it is the societal problems themselves that call for the development of theories and the acquisition of empirical insights on why and how such problems occur. Therefore, societal problems constitute the ultimate reason for the existence for social science.

When does a problem become a societal problem?

There will always be a certain level of disagreement among citizens on whether something constitutes a societal problem or not. As soon as one begins to discuss particular societal problems, opinions on their severity and whether any sort of corrective action is needed will differ. Some problems will be immediately recognized as such, whereas others will provoke fearsome debate. In addition, people may have mixed feelings about certain societal problems.

Take, for example, the case of greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions have skyrocketed during the past century, carrying “risks of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems, and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2015:v). Moreover, the IPCC (2015:v) concludes that it “is now 95 percent certain that humans are the main cause of current global warming”. From this perspective, few rational people would disagree that rising greenhouse gas emissions are an important cause for concern. Nevertheless, many people feel conflicted when it comes to cutting down on emissions.

This can be better understood if we consider the contexts in which individuals act. First, many people work in industries such as manufacturing that contribute strongly to global greenhouse gas emissions. While these people may subscribe to the general opinion that emissions should be reduced, they would probably oppose closing down the factories on which they rely to make a living. Likewise, companies in high-emission industries have set up a powerful lobby aimed at preventing, or slowing down, further environmental regulations. Second, many people have grown accustomed to travelling by car or airplane in their everyday lives. Even though these modes of transport are known to be a major culprit in the recent rise in greenhouse gas concentrations, people are reluctant to give up their habits. As a result, proposals for making these modes of transport more expensive by introducing carbon taxes generally meet fierce public opposition. Third, the fact that alternative energy sources, such as solar energy, are still very expensive leads some people to conclude that we should not throw away our old shoes before we have new ones. Indeed, a certain level of greenhouse gas emissions may, for the moment at least, be efficient – that is to say, the costs of preventing those emissions may exceed the harm done by them to society.

In summary, it is not always evident whether a certain situation constitutes a societal problem and, if so, what should be done about it. Indeed, the process through which societal problems are recognized as such and through which they may eventually bring about collective action inevitably contains elements of contestation. More generally, this process of forming a diagnosis and deciding on a treatment plan consists of several components, as illustrated in Figure 1.1.

The first condition in Figure 1.1 is closely connected to our view of societal problems as public bads. As described in the section “Societal problems as public bads”, these problems often originate from an aggregation of individual-level behaviours that generate unintended consequences at the society level. Because individual actors do not take these consequences into account when planning their actions, they end up doing either too much or too little of certain things, compared to what would be optimal from a societal perspective.

The example of greenhouse gas emissions again offers an illustration. After all, when individuals take their petrol or diesel fuelled car to drive somewhere, they are usually primarily concerned with the individual-level target of reaching their destination and only secondarily, if at all, with the environmental consequences of their behaviour at the societal level. As this holds for most individual car drivers, their joint emission of greenhouse gases is much bigger than societally optimal. Similar kinds of problems arise in other life domains. Most Western societies have, for instance, witnessed sharp declines in fertility in recent decades, which together with increases in longevity have resulted in an ageing population. Among other things, this puts pressure on the affordability of the welfare state, including retirement and health care policies. From a societal perspective, there is hence an argument for increases in the number of children that people have, but parents are unlikely to take such concerns into account in their personal family planning. In the financial sphere, problems such as stock market bubbles and bank runs can also be traced back to a collection of individual-level behaviours with unintended consequences. For individual investors it can be wise to retract their savings or sell their stock holdings when they are uncertain whether they will get their money back. However, by doing so, they may stir up similar feelings among other investors, who may follow suit, triggering a bank run or a stock market crash, eventually leaving the whole economy in crisis.

Figure 1.1 How societal problems are recognized and bring about collective action

The second condition in Figure 1.1 requires that the society-level situation arising from the collection of individual-level behaviours be recognized as a societal problem. This is a matter of both detection and evaluation: people need to be aware of the situation, as well as consider it to be in conflict with important values. Detecting a societal problem sometimes requires knowledge and expertise. There are a wide range of problems that resulted in a large-scale public outcry only after first being identified by experts. Many environmental problems can be grouped into this category. Consider, for example, the health risks of chemical pollution, the risks of nuclear power plants, the degradation of the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, or the exhaustion of fish stocks and other natural resources. Ordinary citizens cannot directly observe these problems. They only become anxious when there is a substantial rise in fish prices, when the supply of drinking water is disrupted, or when experts explain that people face increased risks of skin cancer due to the hole in the ozone layer.

After detecting a problematic situation, the phenomenon also needs to be evaluated as a critical issue rather than just an innocent imperfection. This can sometimes take a long time. For example, while many people today complain about low levels of air quality, air pollution actually occurred on a much greater scale in the nineteenth century. Families living in densely populated working-class neighbourhoods suffered heavily and respiratory diseases were very common. Yet, air pollution was not identified as a societal problem at the time. Writers who lamented the degradation of natural landscapes did not find widespread support; they were dismissed as romantic conservatives who idealized the past. Industrial development was considered necessary: industrial plants produced goods for the modern world, and workers earned their living from these plants. Pollution was seen as a price that had to be paid. It took until the 1960s for air pollution to be seriously addressed by governments in the Western world. For example, in the United States the Clean Air Act of 1963 represented the first federal law on air pollution control, with the Clean Air Act of 1970 subsequently setting up concrete programmes to regulate emissions from both stationary (e.g., factories) and mobile (e.g., cars) sources.

This story demonstrates that the prevailing values within society play a key role in whether or not a certain society-level phenomenon is regarded as undesirable. Only when there is a sharp conflict with dominant values, can there be a societal problem. In this context, even widespread human suffering is not necessarily a societal problem. Only when human suffering is considered ...