I can think of various reasons why people might favor policies that favor their industry. For instance: (1) Naked self-interest. (2) False consciousness: They wrongly come to believe that what's good for the industry is good for America ("What's good for GM..."). (3) True consciousness: They've learned how important their industry is from the experience of working in it. (4) Self-selection: They were more likely to join the industry in the first place because they sympathized with its interests. (5) Coincidence.
Have these reasons been systematically categorized? Do they have "official names"? (I just made up the names in the list above.) Are there scholarly papers discussing this? (Responsive comments only please.)
A second, somewhat related question: How do people feel about a group pushing a policy if that group would benefit from the policy economically? I can think of two possibilities: (1) Self-seeking bastards! (2) If you disagree with the policy: Self-seeking bastards! If you agree with the policy: Thank goodness someone has an incentive to stand up for the right policy!
Note: I don't really care how you, the readers of the Volokh Conspiracy, feel about such groups. I do care what social scientists have discovered about how people feel in general about them. Any scholarly papers discussing this perception issue?
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I've always been puzzled by people who say:
Personally, I think inheritance is a great thing since without it, I would never have become rich.
I tend to think "Self-seeking people. Let me see which of their arguments I find meritorious, keeping in mind their biases."
When Charles E. "Engine Charlie" Wilson, head of General Motors, was nominated in 1953 to be Eisenhower's secretary of defense, he was asked in his confirmation hearings what he would do if a situation arose in which the interests of the nation conflicted with the interests of GM shareholders. He answered:
"I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist."
I think this nuanced idea is not the one the (mis)quote is usually taken to imply, and actually represents the attitude we should want in corporate leaders.
For what it's worth, I don't think the "correct" phrase is much better. It could mean that:
(1) "good for GM" and "good for US" are each determined by an objective standard, and these always coincide -- which is naive;
(2) only one of them is determined by an objective standard and the second is determined by equality to the first, which raises the possibility that (a) the misquote is correct, you decide objectively what's good for GM and that's good for the country, or (b) the misquote is reversed, you decide what's good for the US and then apply that to GM, which is bad corporate decisionmaking;
(3) each of them is determined by reference to the other, so in fact there's some different, external idea of what's good. This is the most likely reading of what he said, in which case it's just unhelpful and meaningless.
The true quote doesn't show much appreciation that conflicts of interest are real.
Indeed. Objectivism-leaning types tend to think "Of course they are self-serving. If they are not for themselves, who will be?"
This is all very uninformed but it's all I got. Cheers,
I also don't think your list is exhaustive. In particular, I think the label "false consciousness" could clearly be expanded. First someone might come to believe that what is good for their industry is good for America, not because it's in their self-interest, but because they are involved with an institution that indoctrinates them in such a way of thinking. Second, I think that false consciousness by itself is often not enough of an explanation. We know that people can sometimes advocate things that are directly opposed to their self-interest. How then do we explain the process by which they sometimes adopt of so-called "false consciousness" and they sometimes do not?
Finally, I'd suggest that when trying to link self-interest and ideas it's easy to forget how tricky it is to identify in what direction someone's self-interest ought to pull them. People can have self-interest in all kinds of things not directly related to their paycheck.
As to reading the quote the other way around -- the "vice versa" at the end -- I agree that it is more troubling, but it sounds more like a throwaway than a profession of faith.