newyorker | The closest Hirschman ever came to explaining his motives was in his
most famous work, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” and even then it was only
by implication. Hirschman was interested in contrasting the two
strategies that people have for dealing with badly performing
organizations and institutions. “Exit” is voting with your feet,
expressing your displeasure by taking your business elsewhere. “Voice”
is staying put and speaking up, choosing to fight for reform from
within. There is no denying where his heart lay.
Early in the
book, Hirschman quoted the conservative economist Milton Friedman, who
argued that school vouchers should replace the current public-school
system. “Parents could express their views about schools directly, by
withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another,
to a much greater extent than is now possible,” Friedman wrote. “In
general they can now take this step only by changing their place of
residence. For the rest, they can express their views only through
cumbrous political channels.”
This was, Hirschman wrote, a “near perfect example of the economist’s bias in favor of exit and against voice”:
In the first place, Friedman considers withdrawal or exit as the “direct” way of expressing one’s unfavorable views of an organization. A person less well trained in economics might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them! Secondly, the decision to voice one’s views and efforts to make them prevail are contemptuously referred to by Friedman as a resort to “cumbrous political channels.” But what else is the political, and indeed the democratic, process than the digging, the use, and hopefully the slow improvement of these very channels?
Hirschman
pointed out the ways in which “exit” failed to send a useful message to
underperformers. Weren’t there cases where monopolists were relieved
when their critics left? “Those who hold power in the lazy monopoly may
actually have an interest in creating some limited opportunities
for exit on the part of those whose voice might be uncomfortable,” he
wrote. The worst thing that ever happened to incompetent public-school
districts was the growth of private schools: they siphoned off the kind
of parents who would otherwise have agitated more strongly for reform.
Beneath Hirschman’s elegant sentences, you can hear a deeper argument. Exit is passive.
It is silent protest. And silent protest, for him, is too easy.
“Proving Hamlet wrong” was about the importance of acting in the face of
doubt—but also of acting in the face of fear. Voice was courage.
