In honor of International Women’s Day, I re-read “Power Walking” by Aminatta Forna. It’s still gorgeous and still relevant in 2021.
Ever since I first read it, I’ve been hyper-aware of the way I navigate London’s busy streets. Everything Aminatta writes about resonates with my own experimentation. In nearly every case where I am on a collision course with a male, I’m the one who has to get out of the way — sometimes stepping off the sidewalk (pavement, for my British friends) into traffic — to avoid a collision, while he continues on his path without even noticing.
Each time it happens, I am reminded of the book “Wisdom of the Crowds.” I read it in my first ever experimental economics course, taught by the Nobel Laureate in economics Dr. Vernon Smith. The premise of the book is that collective knowledge — an aggregate of people’s best guesses or decisions, for example — will lead to a better prediction or outcome than any single person could come up with, even if that person is an expert on that topic. Using results from lab experiments and real-world examples, the book makes a compelling argument for free markets and representative democracies over more centralized systems.
To illustrate this, there’s a scene in the book about crowded pedestrian streets — about how people make small, calculated adjustments in response to other pedestrians to avoid colliding with one another. The point is that there’s no better coordination mechanism than just letting people freely choose the best possible outcome for themselves.
So as I step off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic yet again to avoid getting body slammed by a white, male stranger, I think: it’s wisdom of half the crowds, then. Our entire market economy and democracy is based on the wisdom of the marginalized responding to the other half of the crowd, which gets to do whatever it pleases.
Importantly, in responding to them, we’re having to choose between sub-par options — in this case, risk getting hit by a car vs risk bumping into a stranger who could get upset (which implicitly poses a threat because he can resort to violence).
This is not a new idea. It’s just a perfect illustration of power dynamics appearing in our day-to-day life and of how blind economists are to them (and white men, as well, though there’s a huge overlap in those categories). I read this book a decade ago, and since then there’s been some acceptance of market imperfections (with a big push for this from the field of behavioural economics!) and the realization that some coordination is required to optimize efficiency. But there is still almost no grappling with power dynamics. Is it any wonder, then, that the state of politics is what it is today: white men doing whatever they please, while the rest of us negotiate and choose between devastatingly bad choices.
