Review - Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays
by Thomas C. Schelling
Harvard University Press, 2006
Review by Carlo Martini
Sep 30th 2008 (Volume 12, Issue 40)

This collection of essays covers a wide range of different topics, from the problems we face in our everyday lives to the big challenges of a globalizing world. What do questions like "How can I make sure I wake up on time for my morning flight?" and "How can we manage global warming?" have in common? How can the policy strategies applied under NATO agreements in postwar Europe be useful for directing policy strategies under the Kyoto protocol? Schelling's approach to the themes he addresses is open-ended: rationality (or lack of it) applies to individuals engaged in their daily routine as well as to states trying to come up with regulatory policies on transnational economic  issues.

The first section of essays deals with the very much-debated problem of climate change and with the even more controversial issue of the trade-offs between economic development and environment protection. That the planet is at risk due to human-produced carbon emissions is a hypothesis that most of the scientific community endorses, however, the numbers associated with such a hypothesis are hard to come by. Should we take the risk, and if so, what is the most efficient way to do it? Schelling puts forward the distinction between commitment to actions and commitment to results. I cannot commit myself to wake up early tomorrow morning, but I can commit myself to set up my alarm clock and position it far away from the bed in order to get up from my bed when the alarm goes off. The author calls the Kyoto Protocol a commission to results whereas successful examples of international cooperations (such as the NATO) were based on commitments to actions: not quotas or sanctions but reciprocal scrutiny among countries and diplomatic agreements on how to proceed. Moreover, Schelling defends the priority of scientific research (in the form of geo-engineering) over any political solution to climate change problems.

The second and third sections of the book are concerned with social issues. Policies will have different outcome depending on whether their feasibility has been rationally assessed and since most policies are meant to regulate people's behavior, understanding behavior is of main concern to economics. The author analyses several instances of common behaviors among people and challenges the assumption that individuals are characterized by values and constant preferences over time. When implementing policies dealing with euthanasia, hospital regulations, drug addiction, prostitution, etc. the fact that people change preferences and even values at different times of their life must be taken into account. The section, it has to be said, suffers a little from over-exemplification and the reader might sometimes get lost in the myriad of examples given.

Section 5 is a very nice example of what may be called Meta-economics, especially in the chapters "What Do Economists Know?" and "Does Economics Only Help with Easy Problems?" Schelling assesses economics as a science by looking at its successes and its pitfalls. The former chapter surveys some of the "consolidated truths of economics" while the latter is a discussion on the application of economic theories to policy-making and on the often cold reception of economic studies by the political arena. The last essay of the section "Prices as Regulatory Instruments" connects back to the opening of the book and explores how prices can be used efficiently in order to regulate dangerous carbon emissions.

The very brief section that follows contains a curious anecdote on the making of "Doctor Strangelove", some considerations on how major technological advances can result from research that was not initially meant to deliver them (the notorious example is nuclear power) and, as the title of the chapter says "Reflections and Lessons" learned from the war in Vietnam. However, the section does not fit properly with the rest of the book.

The sixth part of the book describes a mathematical model for segregation processes in social groups; no formulas are used, with only a few graphs and his skillfulness with words Schelling makes a rather complicated mathematical device quite intuitive and understandable to the non-expert.

The last section contains an analysis of the taboo towards the use of nuclear weapons that the world seems to have developed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Use of nuclear devices has been a repeated threat for many decades but for some reasons that the author tries to analyze, the world has managed to achieve, probably with a certain degree of luck too, more that 60 years of nonuse.

Accessible to most readers without a deep knowledge of Economics the book is very interesting for anyone who wants to gain insights on a wide range of topics related to the social sciences. For the nature of essays, one cannot expect to find very detailed accounts of the problems or lengthy expositions of the arguments. Although throughout the work Schelling constantly stimulates the mind of the reader, the lack of a bibliography makes it difficult for the curious ones to find further expositions and references.

© 2008 Carlo Martini

Carlo Martini is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Tilburg University (NL) where he works in collaboration with the local department of Economics and Business Administration on models for group decision making. He is also a member of the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science <TiLPS> where he co-organizes the seminar in Philosophy and Economics. More information can be found on his website [http://www.martinicarlo.net/].