Anti-Burkean Progressivism at the Margins
Why we should be a little bit less concerned about shaking things up, at the margins
Edmund Burke was famously a conservative, thinking that it was important to conserve various existing institutions. For this reason, he supported the American revolution, but he opposed the French revolution — the French were just too radical in their revolutions. They attempted too dramatic a shift — one that Burke thought would be unsustainable and undesirable.
A classic analogy when understanding conservatism is that of Chesterton’s fence. Suppose you see a fence. The progressives, applied to the fence analogy, would take down the fence — it’s just a waste of space and there’s no good reason for it. But the conservatives do see a good reason for it. The good conservative keeps around Chesterton’s fence. Even if they don’t see a good reason for it, as long as there’s no great reason to take it down, they’re perfectly happy keeping it around. After all, in the absence of a pressing reason, one should go with tradition — and keep the fence around. One should keep things as they are — maintaining tradition and such — in the absence of a compelling reason to make a change. If someone took the time to put up the fence in the first place, there was probably some reason to do so. If you don’t know what it is, you should hesitate before deciding to take it down.
I basically disagree with Burkean conservativism. While I think that, in the absence of any good reason to either keep or take down the fence, if you’re unsure about whether to take down or keep the fence, you should take down the fence. People are too unwilling to make significant changes. Fears of going against tradition are overrated.
One reason to think this is based on the prevalence of status quo bias. We know that people are biased in favor of keeping things as they are. If informed that something is the way that one has been investing, people are less willing to advise changing their investments. Wikipedia has a page showing the significant evidence for status quo bias — people just want to keep things as they are.
There’s also the phenomena of loss aversion. People are more averse to giving up on something when it’s framed explicitly as a loss, rather than just things that aren’t gained. There’s a similar wealth of evidence showing that people have significant loss aversion.
Thus, we have various psychological phenomena that we should expect would bias people towards maintaining the status quo — even when doing so is not a good idea. But this is not all the evidence that people should shake things up at the margins — we also have evidence about how much people’s lives improve when they take actions — disrupting the status quo — at the margin.
Levitt conducted a very interesting study. He asked people to make important life decisions by coinflip. For example, people who were deciding whether or not to get a divorce would decide by coinflip. Then, he compared how happy the people who made a dramatic life change as a result of the coinflip — e.g. a divorce — were to the people who hadn’t made a dramatic life change as a result of the coinflip. He found that the people who made dramatic life changes were subsequently much happier than the people who weren’t.
This seems to show that, if a person is undecided about a big change, they should, in general, make the change. We have both plausible theoretical and empirical reasons to expect people to underestimate the value of large changes. So go ahead, on the margin, ask someone on a date, get married, get divorced, move in with someone, move to a new house, get a new job, leave your job, and generally make your life different!