Knowledge And Decisions

Many decisions which involve status ascription might be regarded from some other points of view as ordinary social decisions involving efficiency or other such mundane considerations. However, what is striking about recent times is precisely the growth of an ideological passion which regards particular decisions and decision making processes as symbolic of status rather than simply instruments of social expediency. One of the more extreme examples of this was the insistence of French-Canadian authorities in Canada’s Quebec Province that airline pilots landing at their airports converse with the control towers only in French. Even though hundreds of lives are at stake in conversations between pilots and control towers, this social expediency consideration was subordinated to status ascription issues involved — the general controversy over the preeminence of French language and culture in Quebec. Only a concerted refusal of international airline pilots to fly into Quebec forced the government to reconsider this policy. In the United States, various groups have regarded various laws and policies (private and public) as involving the status of its members — their ultimate value as human beings — rather than simply questions about the best way to get a given job done or the social expediency of particular processes. Even where there are demonstrable behavioral differences between groups — e.g., a decade’s difference in longevity between men and women — the law has forbidden employee pension plans to treat men and women differently, as a violation of their equal status.⁸¹ The separation of boys and girls in athletic and social activities is also challengeable in courts, even where such separation is by nongovernmental, voluntary organizations like the Boys Club, and even though there are numerous demonstrable behavioral differences between boys and girls, including not only physical strength but maturation rates as some of the more obvious examples. Yet the passion behind objections to differences in treatment turns on status questions rather than behavioral questions. Moreover, the issue is often posed as if it were inherently and solely a status issue — as if there is no conflict between behavior-based and status-based decisions, and therefore opponents of particular status-based decisions are depicted as advocates of inferior status for a group in question. Even groups defined by behavioral differences (homosexuals, alcoholics) claim denial of their equal status when treated differently by others. Carried to its logical conclusions, this trend would argue that social processes should make decisions solely on the basis of status rather than behavior: if there are homes for unwed mothers, there should be homes for unwed fathers. While few would go that far, the point is that the principle invoked — and the categorical way it is invoked and its opponents smeared — provides no logical stopping point short of that. The only practical limit is what status ascription advocates find intuitively plausible or politically feasible at a given time — and neither of these considerations provides any long-run constraint on carrying the principle into regions of diminishing or negative returns.

The link between status ascription and political power is apparent in the “redistribution” of income and other economic benefits. While growing governmental control over the output generated by private activity is often described by its hoped for result as “income redistribution,” statistical data show that the actual “redistribution” of money and power from the public to the government vastly exceeds any “redistribution” from one income class to another. The percentage of the aggregate American income earned by the top fifth, bottom fifth, etc., has remained almost unchanged for decades⁸² while governmental powers and welfare state expenditures have expanded tremendously. There has been “less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.”⁸³ International comparisons show the same result as intertemporal comparisons: “In all the Western nations — the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Germany — despite the varieties of social and economic policies of their governments, the distribution “of income is strikingly similar.”⁸⁴ What the national differences in “welfare state” policies actually affect is the distribution of money and power between the public and the government.