Moats, Mole Catchers, Munchies, and Mortgages

Writing about web page http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/jun/19/mps-expenses-houseofcommons

What on earth were they thinking of, as they filed their claims for moat cleaning, mole catchers, munchies, and non-existent mortgages? Where was their sense of decency? Of reality?

The answer is most likely that members of Parliament are just ordinary people, doing what ordinary people do. Sometimes, ordinary people that join together in a crowd do things together that they would not do individually. Their sense of normality comes to differ from that of others, precisely because it comes from the crowd they belong to, not from outside; because of this they come to behave in ways that other ordinary people not in the group find ridiculous or abhorrent. The "in" crowd are not bad people, at least to start with, but they may end up doing bad things.

This is part of a growing field at the interface of economics and psychology -- the psychology of crowds, and the economics of herd behaviour. A recent article by Andrew Oswald on Herds, Housing, and the Crisis provides an application to the housing market bubble. It can also apply elsewhere. Recently, MPs have had a bubble of expense claims -- or is it that the public has overinvested in the trust we place in our representatives? Either way, the bubble has been well and truly pricked.

Yet the truth is that our MPs do represent us. We are, most of us, capable of being like most of them.

The best recent evidence of this comes from a recent study of MBA students carried out by Scott A. Snook, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. (His study will be published soon by Harvard University Press as Becoming a Harvard MBA: Confirmation as Transformation). Looking at their ethical maturity, Snook found that his students fell into three roughly equal groups.

One group of students had reached the fully-developed, self-authored adult perspective that we would like to think we all have. Deciding to undertake some action or other, they would judge: It’s okay because, having fully weighed the costs and benefits to others, I have decided that it is. At the other extreme, there was a group that operated from a largely "transactional" view of the world. They would act, having judged: It's okay if it benefits me. Of greatest interest to me was the intermediate group, described as predominantly other-directed. These would act on the basis: It's okay if others do it too.

It's really not difficult to construct the dialogue that most new MPs must have been through. "Can I really claim that?" "So, do the others claim it?" "Oh. Okay."

It doesn't make it right. It just makes it understandable. To me that's a good thing; I'm a social scientist, not a judge. Have we put too much trust in our elected representatives? Of course. Do we expect too much of them? For sure. Do they need new rules? Absolutely. But we need to remember they are just like us, even in ways that we might find uncomfortable; for one thing, they are no more (and no less) moral than we are.

In fact, they are just like us in every way -- but two: First, they are more ambitious than the average, and that is how they get to be where we put them. Second, we put them in a special club, the Houses of Parliament, a club where they learn from each other and learn to follow each other.

We need to get used to it.

Mark Harrison : 22 Jun 2009 20:18 |  Tags: Politics |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem