Why is it so hard to organize people behind a project that benefits everyone?

Economist Mancur Olson won a Nobel Prize for his answer (which he laid out in his book The Logic of Collective Action), which in a nutshell is this: when multiple people work on some task that benefits all of them, each of them faces an incentive to shirk—meaning to work less hard on the task and wait for all the other people to pick up the slack. If the group succeeds even when an individual member shirks, then that member gets all the benefit for none of the cost (that is, the member is a “free rider”). Conversely, if the member puts forward full effort but not enough others do and the project fails, then the working member is a sucker (so to speak) and has suffered high costs for no benefit.

But if all the people have that incentive to shirk, then everyone will shirk and the project itself will not be accomplished. As a result, says Olson, only certain types of groups will successfully accomplish their goals.

The first type is a group working toward a goal that is so valuable, each of its members would do all the work necessary by itself if it had to.

The second is a group that is small enough that each of the members can monitor the others, to make sure that they all are pulling their weight.

The third type of group is one that manages to create “selective benefits” to reward its members for their participation, even where direct monitoring is infeasible. For example, the AARP is an advocacy group that also provides benefits like insurance or travel perks to its millions of members. That encourages people to pay the membership fees, which are then used to fund the AARP’s advocacy.

(A selective benefit can also be social, or even metaphorical. For example, most religious groups consider charity to be spiritually beneficial for the giver. Someone who holds this belief will tend to give charity even in the absence of a material incentive to do so.)

By contrast, large groups of people who cannot monitor each other, and who lack a selective benefit to encourage participation, will have a very hard time sustaining cooperation between their members to achieve their goals.

Olson notes that lobby groups are often small groups of actors seeking especially valuable payoffs. Citizens’ groups, by contrast, are relatively large, and often have a hard time providing selective benefits. As a result, narrow lobbies (which Olson later names “distributional coalitions”) routinely have a leg up in advocating their goals (in a democracy but also in other systems, such as autocracies where access to the ruler is restrictive), compared to the citizens’ groups who are often unable to stop them. Over time, therefore, public policy is likely to be more responsive to narrow lobbies than to the interests of the majority, or the populace as a whole.

Olson continued exploring this insight in a follow-on book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. As the title indicates, Olson is pessimistic about the implications of his theory. If society remains stable over time, the number and power of distributional coalitions will grow as time passes; and “there is for practical purposes no constraint on the social cost such an organization will find it expedient to impose on the society in the course of obtaining a larger share of the social output for itself.” (As Adam Smith noted in an earlier century, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”)

Distributional coalitions generally obtain “shares[s] of the social output” by securing special privileges for their members, such as by excluding competitors from their industries, or by getting a direct government subsidy paid for by general taxes. Typically, such privileges end up burdening the rest of society, and as such burdens accumulate, it becomes relatively less attractive for individuals to engage in productive activity—and more productive to devote your energies into fighting for a larger slice of the pie. Political life consequently becomes more and more acrimonious, a constant brawl of distributional groups against each other to see who can best expropriate the public.

As distributional coalitions proliferate and grow in power, society will reach a tipping point where its most talented people take up lobbying and rent-seeking rather than productive activity. At this point, the calcification of the economy accelerates. Worse, because much of the economy is now subject to the demands of distributional coalitions, and such coalitions make decisions slowly in a process of internal bargaining and consensus-building and lobbying the government, the economy as a whole grows less responsive to changing conditions. New technologies are adopted more slowly, resources are not reallocated to meet new crises and opportunities, and economic growth stagnates.

Importantly, the power of distributional coalitions depends on their relationships with the government and their dominance of their industries. Free politics and freedom of trade are therefore a threat to such coalitions; electoral turnover can bring less friendly politicians to power, and the rise of economic competition can disrupt the existing industry structure and dethrone those at the top. (Olson was writing before the rise of today’s powerful identity-based interest groups, or he would have said something similar about the power to define your own identity, rather than having it imposed on you by powerful interest groups that want to yoke you to their plow.) Therefore, distributional coalitions hate and fear freedom and seek to curtail it wherever possible. They much prefer stability, since that freezes their own advantageous position.

As a result, Olson concludes, long-lived societies tend to become shot through with durable class divides that harden over time, between those who amass special privileges for themselves and those who do not. (He discusses apartheid South Africa, Britain, the Indian caste system, and the pre-Communist Chinese guilds, among several other cases.) Those social groups with effective distributional coalitions tend to cement their power over time. As Olson notes, “There is greater inequality, I hypothesize, in the opportunity to create distributional coalitions than there is in the inherent productive abilities of people.”

The only way out, according to Olson, is to periodically disrupt society and shake up the cozy power arrangements that accumulate. The most common way in history that this came about was through conquest by a foreign power, unfortunately. But gentler means are also available, such as free economic and electoral competition.

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In your own worldbuilding, Olson’s theory can be a powerful tool in creating settings simmering with latent conflict. The old and decadent society that is ripe for revolution is a mainstay of fiction for a reason. As a first pass, think about who the most powerful groups in your invented society are, and ask how they got there. Then ask, what would they want to do next, and at whose expense?

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post will show up in the planned second and third books in this series, working titles Wealth for Worldbuilders and Tyranny for Worldbuilders respectively. No idea when they will be finished, but they should be fun!)