Principles, Expediency, and Imperfect Games

Steven Horwitz

I noted in an earlier post the controversy over the imperfect game in baseball this past week.  I want to use that situation to illustrate a broader point about Hayek’s social theory that I think is central to how he understands the world.

In that entry, I argued that having the Commissioner of baseball overturn the umpire’s call on the field would set a bad precedent.  What I meant was that it would open the door to the Commissioner’s office second-guessing any play on which umpire error seems to have taken place.  The problem, of course, is that such mistakes are rarely as clear-cut as Jim Joyce’s blown call at first was, and once that door is open, it will be hard to draw a line as to what sorts of calls the Commissioner might overturn, leading to teams flooding the office with requests.  The endpoint of that game is immense discretionary power in the Commissioner’s office and a diversion of resources from actually playing the game to, essentially, rent-seeking about particular outcomes.  Moreover, although we know the benefits from overturning the call, we cannot know the various costs doing so will bring with it, as many of them will be unintended and only emerge over time. Overturning the call seems to serve the interest of justice, but it does so only in the short run and at the expense of justice, and the rule of law, in the long run. 

This is a point that Hayek makes most clearly in his discussion of “Principles vs. Expediency” in the first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty.  He describes there the temptation that governments have succumbed to whereby they attempt to remedy individual cases of perceived injustice by breaking long-standing rules and principles to fix the problem.   In particular, he points out that we can never know the consequences of interfering with the rules that enable us to be free just to achieve some specific result, no matter how desirable it appears. Here’s Hayek (LLL I, pp. 56-57):

Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities is provides for unseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom.  Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known.  The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and therefore disregarded.  We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving a particular result by interference.

The simplest example is inequalities of wealth.  We might well perceive differences in wealth or income as injustices that the state should remedy.  This might be particularly powerful when we can see the cause, e.g., a large number of layoffs in a particular industry.  For deeply held evolutionary reasons, we want to somehow relieve the suffering of our fellows.  But doing so via the state would (did!) require violating rules about using the tax code for redistribution, the sanctity of private property, and the notion that government should not intervene to help specific persons, as opposed to maintaining the more anonymous rule of law.  With those principles, and the larger principle of freedom that underlies them, violated in the name of the expediency of immediately perceived injustice, the door is open to all who perceive themselves as victims of “injustice” to ask the state to intervene on their behalf.  And that means the end of the rule of law and the respect for rules more generally.  It also means that we will never know what might have been produced by the freedoms thus attenuated.

The hard lesson Hayek paints from his discussion is that the liberal order depends on us exercising forebearance and self-control, especially when sticking to the rules leads to outcomes that seem unjust.  Hayek is the first to admit that such outcomes will not be rare in a free society:  freedom can produce large differences in income and wealth, it can lead to people losing their jobs through no fault of their own, and some will get very rich by pure luck.  The proper response to such circumstances, if we wish to preserve freedom and real justice, is to grit our teeth and recognize that these are the price we pay for such freedom and justice in the long run.  And we should further recognize the cognitive bias involved:  we see the concrete benefits of addressing the apparent injustice, but it is impossible for us to know the costs.

The expedience of trying to address outcomes that seem unfair appeals to the atavistic sweet tooth  in our evoultionary hard-wiring, but what would work in the small band of long ago is not freedom and justice-preserving in the anonymous Great Society.  Sticking to principles, even when it hurts, is the adult thing to do.

So even if Bud Selig didn’t know it, he made a very Hayekian decision in not over-ruling the umpire’s call on the field.  Yes, the bad call led to an outcome that we all feel was unjust, but it is well worth asking if using the Commissioner’s power to overrule that decision wouldn’t have created a great deal more injustice in the future as it would have taken the game out of the hands of the umpires and put it in the hands of the “aristocracy of pull” that would have been the likely long-run result of opening controversial calls to the logic of rent-seeking.  There is simply no way to know with certainty today what those costs would have been in the future, but our own experience with the evolution of liberal democracies suggests that they would have been very, very high.

Sticking to the discipline of rules means we simply have to accept that doing so will produce the occasional imperfect game.

Three endnotes:

1. Yes, Major League Baseball is an organization not an order, but that doesn’t mean that the value of holding to the rules is obviated.  Think of parenting as another example of the same phenomenon.  It’s very tempting to want to break a rule in specific cases, but once you do, your kids will ask to break the rule repeatedly in the future.  So much for the rule, which might be the better way to parent in the long run.

2. In my original post, I floated the idea of having the official scorer change the play from a hit to an error as a Solomonic solution.  I now think that's a bad idea as my arguments above would apply to that solution as well.

3. Nothing in the above is an argument against instant replay.  In fact, I’d like to see more use of instant replay in baseball.  The best idea is to have a 5th umpire at games with a monitor who can buzz the field umpires when he or she sees play that was missed.  This is how college football works and I think it generally gets things right.  The key is that the person at the monitor is another trained professional umpire so the umps don’t feel as though they are being second-guessed by non-umps.

Comments

[Aeon J. Skoble]

The flaw in your argument is that in the cases Hayek is concerned with, we don't know the unseen and some people will be harmed by the meddling. In the baseball case, neither is true: it was the 27th out, so we _do_ know the unseen, and no one will be "harmed" in the sense that even the calling ump thinks the call was wrong. So the bogeyman of second-guessing the umps is not relevant here. I don't see the downside to having umps overrule themselves if they realize their initial view was wrong.

[Current]

I think there is a lot that can be learnt from sports. In Ireland and Britain it's interesting to compare the different organizations.

The Gaelic sports are operated by a central organization that has quite a lot of devolution, but unified finances - The GAA. The other sports, soccer, cricket and rugby are much more decentralised. Each club is a separate business. The central bodies generally only oversee the rules.

In GAA the unification of the games finances with the rule making has led to some "interesting" decisions. As in Soccer and Rugby there is the question of the rules surrounding a draw. What happens when the whistle blows and both teams have the same score. In Soccer the answer is: extra time and then possibly penalties.

In Hurling the GAA have declared that a replay should occur if there is a draw in an inter-county match. Many Hurling fans I've talked to have said that this rule was motivated by money-making. Because, if there is a replay then the fans must all buy tickets again. The peculiarities of the rules makes it look quite suspicious. Replays aren't played in lower level matches, those are decided by extra time, like soccer.

It's interesting that the idea of sports with widespread formalised rules seems to have been pioneered in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Games of mob-football played between villages have been going on since at least medieval times AFAIK. But, each locality would have it's own rules and customs. As far as I know, the idea of a common set of rules used over a wide area is quite recent.

There is some comparison here between the mediaeval system of agriculture - the "open field system". The manor court and the farms of a given village would have their own particular practices. Enclosure brought the possibility of uniform laws.

I can't help mentioning the following fact I find fascinating.... In England there are a few tiny areas that were never enclosed and still use the open field system. One of these is the area around Haxey in North Lincolnshire. This also one of the last places where an ancient form of mob football is played. Every December the crazy game of Haxey Hood is played across several acres of fields around the village. There is another link here, mob football can only really be played on unenclosed land. Enclosure made mob football impractical in most places and I suppose that may have paved the way for the sports we know today to arise.