Human Differences, Leadership, and the Emergence of Politics

Economists and other thinkers often declare that their models are valuable in helping them to clarify their thoughts. They undoubtedly are, but models don’t always have this beneficial effect. Models differ among themselves in this respect. They tell us what variables to examine along with the relationships among those variables. Despite doing this work for us, they may mislead us because they ignore vital considerations that might have more significance than the included variables. They may misrepresent a situation that generates undesired observations, or they may fail to capture the causal processes at work in generating the observations. In contemporary times, the widespread embrace of such concepts as equality, equity, diversity, discrimination, and inclusion illustrates the ability of models to mislead thought by replacing reality with aspirations about reality. For many people, government action is the default remedy for alleviating both perceived public goods problems and perceived social problems. It’s important, then, to understand, scientifically, the inner workings of democratic processes. It is equally important to recognize that the leadership necessary to mobilize citizens to solve these sorts of problems can emerge in nonpolitical contexts as well as within political processes and to understand the differences in the types of leadership that emerge within each context.