"The public interest"

What is the public interest? I ask because there's a campaign for a public jury to investigate how to regulate banks, the media and “political and corporate life” so as to “put the public interest back into the heart of the system.”
As it stands, this stance is inadequate because the phrase “public interest” is vacuous. I have three problems with it:
1. The phrase has so many conflicting meanings as to be useless. Does it mean Pareto optimality, or the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the will of the majority, or something else? Any of these conceptions is flawed in itself - the greatest happiness, for example, implies that we should favour unlimited population growth - and conflicts, in principle, with the other.
2. Arrow’s impossibility theorem tells us that, under reasonable assumptions, it is impossible to aggregate individual interests or preferences.
3. Talk of the “public interest” does not help us with the fundamental question of how to choose in the face of trade-offs.
Take banks, for example - because the campaign raises it. There’s a trade-off between a banking system that promotes growth, by lending freely, and one that’s safe and lends only cautiously. Which do we prefer? The very fact that there was no great public demand for lending restrictions in the mid-00s, when everyone wanted to jump onto the housing market bandwagon, tells us that public opinion is not obviously the right arbiter. But what is? The campaign seems to think that the answer is a public jury - which presumably will embody a rational, considered public opinion. But to pretend that this can discern the public interest is to beg the question.
So, am I opposed to the campaign?
No. I think the campaign is not about the public interest at all, but something else.
A clue to what that something else is lies in the fact that the campaigners are worried that “power will fall back into the hands of a small elite.”
And there’s the magic word. What the campaigners want (I hope) is for  working class people to have more power and for bankers, bosses and media moguls to have less.
I’m all in favour of this. But isn’t it a sad indictment of our low level of public discourse - and our squeamishness to discuss power openly - that such a demand has to be disguised by waffle about a meaningless public interest?

Comments

[Paulie]

"...isn’t it a sad indictment of our low level of public discourse - and our squeamishness to discuss power openly - that such a demand has to be disguised by waffle about a meaningless public interest?"

Exactly. When will we wake up to the simple truth that - as long as pressure groups are cultivated and rewarded - the value of most votes will be hugely diminished by comparision to the people whose interests are served by those groups?

[Gary]

WRT to the power point, it may well be that the intention is to dissipate power more generally, but that is not what it proposes. Rather the proposal is to appoint a 'secretariat' no less with "power" (to use their own words) to require attendance at hearings, fund research and set an agenda as what is important in the furtherance of the 'public good'.

This is at best a counterpoint to existing power, or more likely s transference of power to another sel-appointed elite who are feeling rather disempowered lately. Either way its not dissipating power unless we are in the land of Philosopher Kings.

[Paolo Siciliani]

Com'on Chris, the first paragraphs of this campaign are quoted below. On the face of it, the issue of power is tackled up-front, far from squeamish I would say....

"Something is unraveling before our eyes. From bankers to media-barons, private interests have bankrupted and corrupted the public realm. Power, for so long hidden in the pockets of a cosy elite, has been exposed. Those who wield it have been found wanting – in scruples, in morals and in decency.

Things are now in flux, but will not stay so for long.

Without decisive and sustained action, power will fall back into the hands of a small elite who have their own, and not the public's interest at heart.

They want to prevent public revulsion turning into public action. But, it's time for real change. Things cannot be allowed to turn back to business as usual.

Britain can no longer be just the plaything of a handful of powerful, remote interest groups treating the wider public with contempt"

[Phil]

Is it a sad indictment of your writing style that you seem compelled to muffle perfectly straightforward statements of opinion in rhetorical questions? I think so.

[Ralph Musgrave]

There is a little technical error in Chris’s article. He claims “There’s a trade-off between a banking system that promotes growth, by lending freely, and one that’s safe and lends only cautiously.”

This is a myth. Obviously it is one pushed for all it is worth by the bank industry, and politicians are fooled every time.

The truth is that if tighter bank regulation curtails bank lending, that need not curtail “growth” because there are two basic ways of paying for anything – whether it’s a family buying a PC or an oil company buying a new oil refinery. One way is to borrow the money, and the second is to pay out of your own pocket.

If lending is curtailed, there is no reason for demand or “growth” to be curtailed because the amount of money in everyone’s pockets (families, oil companies, etc etc) can be boosted by having the government / central bank machine create new money and spend it into the economy. The latter policy is advocated by Modern Monetary Theory and by the submission to the Independent Banking Commission by Prof R.A.Werner, Positive Money and the New Economics Foundation. See:

http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/NEF-Southampton-Positive-Money-ICB-Submission.pdf