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Joan Esposito is the afternoon drivetime presenter of WCPT and Arnd Bauerkämper is the adjunct professor of modern history at the Free University of Berlin.
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This piece is not about Trump.
I promise, this isn’t a piece about Trump.
Well, just a tiny bit, but really it’s hardly about Trump at all.
In fact, forget about Trump altogether for a bit.
Think about economists. Economists and public policy people. When they are discussing policy, policy proposals, different things that governments might or might not do, one concept that they have is about how distributed the costs and benefits of a particular policy might be.
Of course, they look at the pros and cons of any given policy, but they also look at who gets the pros and cons, and in particular whether the pros and cons are highly distributed, like I said, or highly concentrated.
The reason that they do this is because they know that studying any given proposal is all well and good, but it doesn’t really mean much if it can’t be put into force, and have noticed over the years that the policies that get accepted are not always the ones where the pros outweigh the cons by the most, or even outweigh them at all.
The reason is this. People, voters, care more about things that affect them a lot. Something that affects them a lot will, possibly, shift their vote, and politicians know this and react to it. Something that only has a small, marginal effect on their lives, not so much.
So when the benefits of a policy are highly concentrated on a few people, they will campaign hard to get it or keep it; and when the costs are highly distributed, the total cost might far outweigh the total benefits, but if that cost is thinly spread across a large number of people, none of those people are motivated enough to fight against it, or even reconsider their vote based on it. The reverse can be true as well.
A clear example of this was the campaign in Donegal for the taxpayer to foot the entire bill for the rebuilding of houses built with mica and other damaging minerals in the rocks; that’s the definition of a highly-concentrated interest; so highly concentrated that they got a TD elected, Charlie Ward, for the 100 per cent Redress party. They want the taxpayer to pay the bill, because, to be fair to them, I suppose that they didn’t expect much luck sending the bill to the quarries who supplied defective product, or the corrupt Fianna Fáil minister who scrapped the inspection scheme which would have avoided the disaster.
The cost of that redress is, of course, spread across all the taxpayers in the country, and I suppose the fact that we didn’t have any Zero per cent Redress TDs elected anywhere else shows that it is small enough not to move peoples votes in the opposite direction. But, of course, with enough special pleading from enough groups with their paws out, that cost mounts up.
But cost and benefit here doesn’t just refer to money. All sorts of policies have winners and losers, and the relative concentration of the winning and losing can have a far bigger effect on the policy, than the total cost or benefit.
We learnt last month that the roll out automatic red-light cameras at junctions in Dublin has been put on hold while the Department of Transport ‘considers’ a new national strategy for the expanded use of safety cameras.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the government here, not to mention the gardaí are reluctant to face the wrath of drivers who get a fine and penalty points for running a red light. Most of the offences here happen when cars stop somewhere in the region of a red light. One car behind the stop line, another car on the advance cycle stop area, another car on the pedestrian crossing, and another jutting out into the junction. The typical garda reaction is ‘a shur at least yerman stopped’.
But of course the real consideration here is that neither politicians nor gardaí want to deal with the wrath of a motorist outraged that they are expected to obey the law; they have no concern about the person trying to push a pram between the bumpers and the fumes of the cars who stopped, but only just, and are blocking the crossing. Those politicians and gardaí calculate that the highly concentrated wrath of the motorist is likely to be more hassle than the highly distributed inconvenience of the pedestrians.
The result of this is that we must have our entire road network built around non-compliance with basic rules of the road. Unlike almost every other country, Ireland does not have a red-orange phase on traffic lights to tell drivers get in gear and be ready to start, because we know that drivers would count it as a ‘go’ signal and blast straight through it. We also have to have longer downtime in traffic lights – where all roads are signalled to stop, because many Irish drivers think that the rule is green means go, orange means go, red means three more cars.
I’m sure that many drivers out there would be outraged if they got penalty points for following that rule – there’s your highly concentrated cost – but the benefit that would allow all of us to get around faster is highly distributed, so even though that benefit is much greater than the cost, it’s not big enough for any individual to persuade them to do anything about it.
This pattern happens all over Irish public life, but sometimes it’s harder to see. One huge issue that you would think would create a huge, active lobby group suffering from a highly concentrated problem is the housing crisis. People who can’t get on the housing ladder, or people who can’t get housing at all, surely they are motivated to move mountains, let alone move votes to get their problem solved.
You’d think.
And that’s where Donald Trump comes to our aid. But this isn’t about Trump at all really. I promise.
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Well it’s only about Trump in that he often says the quiet bit out loud. Like this.
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Politicians might not like to admit it, but they are keenly aware that there are a lot of people out there who are quite happy about stratospheric house prices. And the people with houses easily outnumber the people without them. And they are more likely to vote, or even be able to vote, given how difficult our electoral roll makes things for people moving regularly between rental accommodation.
But hang on, what about that whole thing of distributed and concentrated. For most people, most voters, regardless of whether their house price goes up or down, their house is still worth exactly one house. Their value from living in it doesn’t change at all. Even if they are avid Daily Mail readers who like to snobbishly think of how much it’s worth, surely that still counts as a much more distributed benefit than the highly concentrated cost on the people whose whole lives are disrupted by not being able to get adequate housing.
You’d think.
But then again, there are some people who have far more property than just their own house. Property prices for them are far more than a theoretical number, and those are certainly the sort of people who can and do bend the ear of politician, and try to make sure that they go easy on any measures that would actually work at reducing the cost of housing, be they in Ireland or the US or anywhere else.
So Trump might be good at seeming like he says the quite part out loud, in an effort to recruit the lucky ones who have a home of their own into supporting him, but maybe that’s not exactly what he is doing; maybe in the US, like in Ireland, there are other people who aren’t so anxious to be campaigning in public, but still push government policy towards to suit their own highly concentrated interests.
