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The Idea of the Commons
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0:08
Hi there. My name is Shamus Khan. I'm a professor of Sociology and American Studies here at Princeton University and what I've been asked to do today is to think about the idea of the commons. Now, when I think about the commons what I think about our ideas of public goods. Public goods are a particular kind of thing. They're very different than private goods in part because they have these two qualities to them. And I'm going to think through those two qualities today and ask, what does it mean
0:40
to think about political public goods? The reason I think this is such an important question is that many of us today are really worried about our politics, about what's happening to political life, how it's transforming, and how politics may be eroding or collapsing beneath us here in the United States.
1:01
I want to help us understand why that might be the case, but also suggest that maybe we shouldn't be so cynical about it. And to do that, I'm going to take you through four ideas. The first is to just outline what a public good is in general. Then I want to move into a discussion of Jürgen Habermas, a political theorist who thought a lot about what he called the public sphere. Now Habermas made this argument that within the public sphere frequently what we saw was that as public spheres
1:33
became more diverse, they collapsed. And so my third point is going to be about diversity and political groups. Finally, I'm going to move into my own research. So I'm a scholar of inequality and I primarily focus on elites. And so in the last section, I'm going to use some of my own scholarship on elites to think about this idea of the diversification of public spaces and what it means for politics. So let's dive into the first point. What is a public good? So when I teach about public goods,
2:06
I often use the example of pie. It may seem silly, but it actually helps us understand goods that are excludable and subject to crowding, which is to say goods that aren't like public goods. So if I have a pie and there's nine of us sitting around a table, I could choose if I'm being mean to not give pie to one of those people. In that sense, not everyone will get pie if I choose not to distribute it to everyone. The second thing is that pie is a limited resource.
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So if there are eight of us around the table, all of us can have a piece of pie, but if there are 800 of us around the table, we only get a tiny, tiny portion of pie. Pie then isn't a public good. Public goods are things where we can't exclude people from them or where if some people enjoy them, it doesn't mean that other people get less. Public goods then we think about as something like clean air. If I have clean air, I can't really exclude you from it. If you live next door to me, and if I
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breathe in clean air, it doesn't mean that you suddenly have less clean air. So, what we're going to think about today is what it means to conceptualize politics as a public good, where I can't exclude other people or we collectively can't exclude people from participating in political life and where, if I participate in politics, you don't necessarily have fewer political rights. So what would it mean to conceptualize a political sphere that we can't exclude others
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from and that isn't subject to crowding? That's what we're going to think about today. In 1962, a political theorist named Jürgen Habermas writes a book called, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. When I was a graduate student back in the early two thousands, this was a monumental classic of a book it'd become hugely influential. And the reason why was that Habermas was making a really powerful argument as a liberal political theorist. Now by liberal, I don't mean democratic.
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What I mean is that he was a political theorist who really saw the value in rational debate, who argued that it was essential to try and find a space where people could make reasoned arguments, and where people listened to those reasoned arguments and evaluated them on the basis of their quality. What Habermas said was that states weren't an ideal place to do this, in part, because they were ruled by power politics and markets weren't an ideal place to do this because
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they were marked by huge inequalities. And so really powerful people would have more say than less powerful people. But that in a particular period of time, back in the 17th century, there emerged this space between state and market where private individuals could come together and make reasoned arguments, listen to one another and use their own thought process to say, what is the best way to move forward? This idea of a public sphere was both incredibly powerful and very fragile.
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Now this was in some ways an idealized form of democracy where democracy wasn't about political parties and lobbying for interests, nor was it about private, powerful individuals seeking to use that power in order to influence the state. Instead, it was something else. Now what Habermas saw were places like coffee shops and journals and newspapers that allowed people to engage in argumentation and Habermas is really a liberal political theorist. By that, what I mean is that he
5:57
really sees the value of reason and rationality for advancing ideas. And that if reason and rationality can prevail, we may come to better decisions. So, what is this space? What is this public sphere? Well, interestingly for Habermas, there's a kind of inherent tension to the existence of this public sphere, to this space where people can make reasoned arguments about their particular interests to try and convince others of the value of those arguments. Habermas says first that
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that space is ruled by equality. A fundamental equality where the status of the people making the arguments doesn't matter. This is a profound transformation in political life, because for so long your status, whether or not you were close to the king or a serf, meant that what you said was evaluated not on the quality of the claims that you were making but instead as your positionality or whether or not you were powerful or totally disempowered. So Habermas
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says there's this moment in time where status doesn't matter as much, where reason becomes the realm of argument, not power, so that I make an argument grounded in reasons, and other people can begin to evaluate it. This idea of status, reason, and Habermas says, inclusivity, serves as the foundation of a public sphere. Now it might see my ideal. It might seem like, wow, this is the perfect thing that we could ever imagine. But Habermas notes something, he says this is a space that
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emerges for a brief period in time and then it collapses. Now, why does it collapse? Well, Habermas argues that as the public sphere began to democratize, as it got bigger and bigger and became more inclusive, as it was meant to be, something dramatic happened. And what happened was that people ceased to use arguments to advance their interest but instead fell back on interest group power politics. So, what Habermas says is that the public sphere was successful in part
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because even though it had an ethic of inclusion, it actually excluded a lot of people and where more and more people were included into that sphere, the sphere collapsed. Now this highlights a fundamental tension, an idea that as political spaces diversified they were ruled not by rational legal argumentation but instead by interest power politics. And suddenly that space in between the government and the market, where people could make arguments about what was politically valuable, collapsed.
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Now what the tension here is, is that if you're going to have that space it seems, as Habermas would suggest, what you need is in some ways an exclusive space, a place that's not big enough so that interest politics doesn't emerge. And so there is a fundamental flaw in the idea of a public space where people can make arguments, where it's inclusive and not subject to crowding, because as soon as it starts to crowd everything collapses. Now we might think, wow, if Habermas is right, there's no
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possibility for democracy. But I want to move us to an understanding of diversity. What do we actually know about diversity? So what do scholars like myself who do research on diversity know about how diverse groups work? Well, this is a sort of emergent literature. And so some of what I'm going to say, isn't really definitive, but I think that there's some core insights and I'm going to focus on two of them that can be really useful here. The first insight is the one
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that's a little bit more popular and it's an insight that says diverse groups make better decisions. And this is a really interesting insight because diversity here is measured in all kinds of ways. Sometimes we're looking at diverse groups where we look at racial and ethnic diversity and how people coming together with different backgrounds make decisions in different ways, but sometimes the measure of diversity is different. You look at cognitive diversity.
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So there are studies that look to see, how is it that groups of people who have different levels of IQs make decisions? The core finding here is that diverse groups tend to generate better decisions. I want to focus on the cognitive diversity one here because to me it's the most fascinating. There's been a series of experiments where basically researchers have gotten people together to make a decision. And in some they pick super high IQ groups and in others, they have a
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diversity of people in terms of their IQ. And the researchers ask who's going to come up with the best solution to a pretty complicated problem.
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And one of the things that some of this research has found is that the super high IQ groups come up with pretty good decisions, pretty quickly. It should make sense to us because you know, all of those people can kind of see the problem. And when a solution is offered, if it's a decent solution that they could be like, yeah, that's a good solution. Let's all agree. And they move forward with that. But interestingly, in these contexts where people are solving pretty
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complicated problems, groups that aren't just all high IQ people come up with slightly better decisions. Now, why is that? Well, one of the things that the researchers found is that in groups where you had a kind of cognitive diversity, people took more time to consider things. What they ended up doing was when somebody said I have a really good idea, here's a good solution. They had to talk through it with the broader group because not everyone understood it immediately. But through
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that process of discussion frequently they came to an even better decision. What this pointed to was how those cognitively diverse groups could come up with better decisions on average than ones with super smart people. Now, this research doesn't just focus on groups relative to IQ. Scholars have looked at this with gender diversity, racial diversity, class diversity, and found that on average diverse groups are generating slightly better decisions. That tells us a lot about
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the benefits to diversity. Now, what about that second point? Well, the second point isn't as positive, at least intuitively it's not going to be as positive because what the second point says is, even if those groups are making better decisions, they have a certain dynamic to them.
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They're more contentious. One of the things that we see with diverse groups is that there's more tension in them. And this is something that often, especially as Americans makes us uncomfortable, that the tension in those groups we see as a problem. But I want you to take away a couple things from this. The first is, that may be seamless processes where everything is easy and people agree, don't get us to the best solution. That tension can actually be productive, that friction creates heat
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which can actually catalyze things in a really powerful way. If we take this diversity insight, we can apply it to Habermas and maybe rethink a little bit of what he's saying. Because Habermas says to us as these groups diversify the political life collapses, in part, because they're ruled by contention. He may be right about that but where he might be wrong is that that contention is bad. That what we need is a kind of seamless, easy politics. So, if we think about our own country for
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a moment right now, we may think about ourselves as being ruled by contention and that that's a terrible thing. Well to a degree, it certainly is. There are clear problems with our political life, but I would say that maybe we should take one small step back and ask, can contention be productive? And more importantly, if we have an increasingly diverse political space, shouldn't we expect that contention and might we be getting at slightly better decisions not because we all agree,
14:44
but because things are kind of tense. So far, I've talked to you about three things. The first was explaining what a public good was and talking about it as something that is not excludable and not subject to crowding. Then we walked through a discussion of Habermas and his theory of a public sphere, this space in between politics and the market that may allow for rational deliberation. Then I just talked about diversity and how diversity can lead to better decision making
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but it also may lead to greater levels of contention. I want to end with a little bit of a discussion of some of my own research and I do work primarily on elite institutions. So here in Princeton, it's a good place to do that kind of research. I actually went to an elite boarding school and I wrote a book about that and I talked about some of the dynamics of elite spaces. Motivating that book was a puzzle and the puzzle was basically this. If we think about inequality in
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the United States, what we frequently think about is how moats and fences around resources are why we have inequalities. So what I mean by that is that people are excluded from participation and that that exclusion is why we have inequality. Think about a place like Princeton. Princeton used to be a very white institution. It used to be a male institution. It used to exclude lots of people sometimes by design and sometimes because of the ways in which we decided to admit people.
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Well, Princeton has made a decision to be much, much, much more open; bringing in a broad diversity of students. Now, if we think about the lesson we just learned about diversity. One of the things that we can expect is that our community is likely to be a little bit more contentious because of that, that we're going to see more contention within the community, and that might be okay.
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But I think about this, not just in terms of that contention but in terms of patterns of inequality more generally. Because one of the things that I think of as really curious over the last 50 years is how institutions have opened up considerably but so too has inequality increased. And this is a really kind of difficult thing to live with, a little bit, and a difficult thing to think through, and it's really motivated a lot of my own academic work. So, think back to the 1960s. In
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the 1960s, places like the Ivy league were pretty exclusive.
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They didn't accept a lot of Jews. They didn't have a lot of African-American students and at many Ivy league institutions women weren't allowed into the doors; and that has transformed profoundly.
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But, since the 1960s, we also see a massive increase in inequality in the United States. It really started in the early to mid-seventies. Now you may say, the Ivy league obviously isn't responsible for this. And I would say absolutely, but think for a moment about if we thought that inequality was because the world was more exclusive, could we explain what's happened over the last 50 years? And if I said to you, that inequality had increased in part because
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our world was more exclusive today than it was in the 1950s, hopefully many of you would denounce me. You might say Shamus, I don't know if you've heard about this group of people, they make up 50% of the world, they're called women. And since the 1950s, there's been a massive transformation in their position, or you might say Shamus, you may have heard of this thing, it's called the Civil Rights Movement. It was enormously important. Those movements weren't window-dressing, they
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led to fundamental profound transformations of institutions across our country. And yet as those movements happened, we similarly also suddenly became more unequal. So what I think through, a little bit, is how inclusion is not necessarily the pathway to equality. So what does this have to do with a political public sphere? Well, what it has to do with the political public sphere is that even if we start including more people into our political spaces, and as that
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happens, it's not like that is going to lead to a politics where everyone is broadly committed to human thriving. So I want to highlight something a little bit different than Habermas and a little bit different than the diversity literature, what Habermas and the diversity literature both agree upon is that as you create these more inclusive diverse spaces, you are going to get more tension. Where they disagree is the diversity literature says actually those diverse spaces are going to make
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better decisions then the more exclusive ones that Habermas set. And I would say that our empirical evidence is more in favor of that diversity literature, but I want to challenge us to think about public spaces as just things that are inclusive and subject to crowding. So in the end here, I want to blow up the idea a little bit and push us to think a little bit differently. So I opened by saying that the public sphere and a political commons, if we think about it as a public
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good, is a place that is non-excludable and not subject to crowding. That we can't exclude people from it and if I participate it doesn't lessen your participation. That's important, but it's not sufficient. And what I mean by that, is just including people into spaces isn't going to get us to where we need to be. And that has largely been our logic so far, where we thought about, well, if we just fill in those moats and take down those fences and give people access to
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opportunity, it's going to be sufficient. So all we need is access to political opportunity and things will transform.
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It's a naive understanding of how equality happens. So what's the problem with just including people? Well, I'm going to give you an example. It's kind of a very casual example. Actually. I'm going to give you two of them that really are grounded in some of the work that I've done. Let's imagine that two people are making an argument about American football and they're both making claims and let's say they're making exactly the same claim. One of them though is a woman and another is a man.
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Who's claimed do you think will be respected more? Now I would say, and I have some evidence to back me up on this, that the man's claim is going to be more respected, but it's exactly the same claim. So why is it more respected? In part, because of the status of the person making the claim. So, men are more likely to be listened to on issues of sport because men are presumed to know more about it. Or take another example, think about a discussion of classical music, maybe an
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opera and people are discussing the quality of an alto and the aria that she just sang. And one of them is Asian and one of them's African-American. They're going to be slight differences in the value that people place upon those claims, not because of the quality of the claims, but instead, because of the status of the person making those claims. This brings us back to a fundamental problem of political discourse,
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which is that the status of the people making arguments still matters. So if we imagine that we could just create an ideal political space, that's inclusive and we listened to people's arguments. It's not enough. In part because politics is not necessarily the pathway to equality. We imagine that if we can create a political sphere of inclusion, it's going to lead us to greater outcomes, primarily grounded in a respect for human dignity. But what I would say is that actually
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that political process, even if it's hugely inclusive, is destined to fail if there are significant inequalities between people before they walk into that room. And so the problem is not that we have a broken politics that's leading to the collapse of our country. It's part of the problem. But part of the problem is as well that we have had massive increases in inequality in our country, which has created huge status differences so that when people walk into
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that political space, the way that they're heard, even if they're making the same point, is radically different. So what should we take away from this? Well, I want you to take away a few things. It'd be great if you could remember this core idea of public goods and those special sets of things that aren't excludable and aren't subject to crowding. I also think it's important to think about political public spheres, where people make arguments that are grounded in
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reason, and some of the fragility to that. I hope that you remember something about diversity, about how there are values to diverse groups, but if you're in a diverse group it's more likely to be ruled by tension, and that a political public sphere isn't necessarily going to get us to ideal political outcomes just by making it more inclusive. We have to remember that the fundamental status inequalities before people even enter into that public space
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deeply influence our reception to one another. As a sociologist, I'm a scholar who's really grounded in empirical data. I like to do studies, but I also have a deep moral compass. And I think that when we talk about political spaces, we sometimes are too technocratic in imagining that if we just design the perfect space or institution, we're going to get the ideal outcome. Instead, I think we need to make arguments and also make commitments to an understanding of human dignity.
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Where a fundamental respect for human dignity, a fundamental respect for the equal moral status of all people is a prior, it's something that has to happen before people ever enter into political life. And if we don't have that, if we don't have that fundamental respect for human dignity and an understanding of a quality of persons before people ever enter into that public space of discussion, the outcomes of that political space are never going to be what we want them to be.
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