Who’s in Charge?

In a profile of swing-state Wisconsin where affordable housing is a growing concern with voters, the Wall Street Journal quotes Kayla Lange, who’s struggling to make ends meet, saying, “It’s gotten out of control, and I blame the people in charge.” The story notes that voters ranked housing as their second biggest concern when it comes to high prices—behind only groceries—in a July WSJ poll. The trouble is that the people in charge don’t have much influence on the problem. Ogregores may be a better body to blame and try to affect.

The WSJ story notes that “Biden, like any president, is limited in his ability to significantly lower housing prices, since housing costs are influenced by interest rates and the supply of and demand for homes. Both factors are largely out of his control.” In other words, these are factors controlled by the Federal Reserve, a technocratic group agent, and system dynamics (supply and demand).

DALL-E-3, prompt "An image that represents
swing voters worried about housing in Wisconsin"

However, our preference for thinking in terms of human agents means we hold politicians accountable when they have little control. And not just politicians—tech czars, too. Agitprop documentary The Social Dilemma features a former Facebook employee describing Mark Zuckerberg as twirling three knobs that control his revenue-generating machine: user engagement, user base growth, and advertising. It doubles down by personifying this with three imaginary men at control panels, manipulating a helpless puppet representing the hapless user.

Simplifying using the Rule of Three, social phenomena can be ascribed to three kinds of actors:

1. Individuals, like politicians and corporate executives
2. Systems, like markets and networks of institutions
3. Collective agents (aka ogregores) that are bounded groups of people acting in a shared group interest, like federal agencies and corporations

We spend a lot of time obsessing over, and trying to influence, high profile individuals. We also agonize over amorphous phenomena like capitalism or the welfare state which are, at best, systems. I think the best marginal investment is trying to influence the ogregores.

Ogregores, even government ones like the Federal Reserve and the Supreme Court, are often largely beyond democratic control. (Legislatures are not—in a functioning democracy—but I don’t think they have enough shared interest to be a collective agent.) At least, beyond immediate control—but the things they measure and terms on which they make decisions can be influenced. 

Organizations like corporations and unions are more easily influenced, though to be effective one needs to think in terms of their collective perceptions and interests. The Bud Light consumer boycott seems to have had a hand in corporations backing away from identity politics, and California legislation has allegedly prompted companies to leave the state (per The Center Square, Right-Center Biased per Media Bias/Fact Check). The cultural and economic conditions in the US are probably a reason why eleven of the top fifteen global web site by traffic share are owned by US companies (Visual Capitalist).

Update, 22 Aug 2024

A stray remark on a podcast about gentrification made me wonder about a class of social phenomena that probably fit – uncomfortably – under "systems" in the tripartite classification of social actors above. They are processes of social change and transformation like

• automation
• commodification
• digitalization
• disintermediation
• gentrification
• globalization
• financialization
• secularization
• urbanization

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) suggests that non-human entities, including social processes, can be seen as having agency. Processes of transformation can be viewed as social agents in the sense that they (a) influence human behavior, (b) have unintended consequences, and (c) change over time, adapting to new circumstances (h/t Llama-3.1-405B via Poe). I'm reluctant to admit them as agents, though, because they don't have readily identifiable boundaries between the actor and the environment.