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Sludge in the Growth Machine

Albert Hirschman and Kenneth Boulding, move over! Like you and other maverick economists, Mancur Olson insists on writing books mainstream economists sometimes admire yet never emulate. Meanwhile, noneconomists-including sociologists-make them essential reading. Olson's Logic of Collective Action hardly made a splash in economics but stirred up a whirlpool in sociology and political science. The Logic first appeared in 1965, when leftist sympathizers with a variety of popular movements (I include myself in that broad category) were trying to construct rationalaction alternatives to the irrationalist models of collective behavior then prevailing in the social sciences. The Logic made their task more difficult. It laid waste the commonplace versions of rational-action accounts without providing a compelling new explanation of collective action. Somehow Olson's appeal to the effects of group size, compulsion, and selective incentives did not convince most observers of real-life collective action that they now understood the causes of what they saw. Much less did it persuade participants, direct or vicarious, that they now had an intelligible account of the movements they knew best. In his ambitious Rise and Decline of Nations, Olson builds on the weaker terrain of The Logic. He reverses its negative emphasis, stressing the advantages of properly organized groups: "Those groups that have access to selective incentives will be more likely to act collectively to obtain collective goods than those that do not, and . . . smaller groups will have a greater likelihood of engaging in collective action than larger ones" (p. 34). Such groups are more likely to act collectively because, on the average, they enjoy higher benefit/cost ratios than do larger groups and groups lacking access to selective incentives. Olson draws interesting implications from these elements of The Logic's logic. Employers, for example, generally have the collective-action advantage over workers, because employers are usually fewer in number and have greater access to selective incentives; freedom of association, evenly applied, is likely to benefit the bourgeoisie more than the proletariat. Beyond this sort of direct application, Olson makes little effort to specify which sorts of groups have these collective-action advantages or