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More on Rum, Sodomy, and the Nash

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Henry Farrel has a nice example of the functionalist fallacy as applied by Stephen Bainbridge to the Royal Navy. He also has the single best title of any post I have seen in my blogging career. A functional explanation of an institution proceeds something as follows:

Institution X has characteristic Y because of societal need Z.

In other words, institutions fulfill the pre-existing needs of society. That kind of makes sense, up to a point; people with problems attempt to solve them by building institutions. Unfortunately, the logic doesn’t hold much farther than that, because the functionalist logic can be used to explain any feature of any institution as a remedy for a societal problem. This gives the impression that institutions are well oiled, efficient social problem solving machines, rather than a hodgepodge of practices, ideas, and second-best solutions thrown together by practitioners over the course of centuries.

For example:

The gist of Allen’s argument is that prize money has to be seen as just a part of an overall package of incentives:

… in conjunction with the system of prizes the British Navy used the Articles of War, battle formations and fighting instructions, discontinuous promotions, and patronage to monitor their captains. The entire governance structure encouraged British captains to fight rather than run. The creation of an incentive to fight led to an incentive to train seamen in the skills of battle.

To which Farrel replies:

Now I imagine that one could construct “just-so” stories which explained why most (or all) of these institutionalized features of Navy life contributed to the overall goal of maximizing the Navy’s efficiency as a fighting machine. But they would be just-so stories – not especially convincing on their merits. To the extent that O’Brian is right (and he clearly did a hell of a lot of research), the institutions of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars weren’t even a second-best solution. They were an ungainly compromise between a wide variety of different actors, each of whom had a strong streak of self-interest, and the ability and desire to bargain in order to achieve that interest, whatever this meant for the British Navy as a fighting force.

This debate nicely encapsulates the difference between the essentially ahistorical functionalist approach and an historical approach that focuses on real human beings with real interests and real problems. The former explains institutions from our point of view, while the latter explains institutions from their point of view. The latter is correct, by the way. In his response, Bainbridge asks how, if the institutions of the Royal Navy were not efficient and optimal, it continued to win battles against the French. This question is absurd, of course. Victory by no means demonstrates efficiency or optimality; you just have to be better than the other guy. Moreover, a functionalist logic would be hard pressed to explain why existing French naval institutions, presumably designed to solve the same problems as British naval institutions, failed to work as well.

For some time, I served as a tutor for the UW Athletic Department in several social science courses, including economics. Incidentally, I boast no responsibility for the recent failures of Husky football, although I’d like to. Anyway, a plurality of my charges came from an introductory microeconomics course. I read the textbook, which made the following argument about the development of representative institutions (and I paraphrase):

Representative institutions such as parliaments exist in order give committed minorities a stake in the democratic process. Without a parliament, minority groups with particular intense preferences would always lose to majorities with less intense preferences. In a parliament with public voting, vote trading allows committed minorities to acquire enough votes from less committed minorities to push through generally unpopular policies. This is why we have such institutions, rather than direct democracy.

The example issue that the professor used, of course, was abortion. Reading this, I had three reactions. First, I was somewhat impressed; this is rather an interesting insight into majoritarian representative institutions. Second, I was irritated; even a cursory glance at the historical development of such institutions renders this explanation absurd. Third, I was horrified; many of these students would wander out of this class and never take a political science or history course on the actual development of representative democracy.

Not for the first time, I reminded my charges that getting a good grade on the test and getting an education are not the same thing, and that doing well in economics often meant temporarily forgetting the things we actually knew about the world.

As should be clear, the functionalist logic has political as well as academic implications. If institutions exist to solve problems, then fiddling with them may be dangerous. This is a fundamentally conservative bias. When we try to explain the Electoral College throught the problems it purportedly solves rather than as an artifact of a series of obsolete compromises, we end up with an untenable system that defies democratic logic, and that occasionally elects boobs like George W. Bush to the presidency.

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