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Open-Sourcing Civil Society

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Exploring the Social and Political Economy of Alexis de Tocqueville

Part of the book series: Mercatus Studies in Political and Social Economy ((MSPSE))

Abstract

What role does civil society play in managing the effects of creative destruction? What are the prospects of open-source social networks? Can new technologies like the blockchain enable the rebirth of mutual aid societies? I argue that we can draw broad lessons about how to build communities in the internet era from the successful operation of open-source projects. Open source is successful because of a technological infrastructure that enables people to interact in particularly productive ways. I discuss the limits of open source and ask whether the same kind of infrastructure can be adapted for social purposes, and for expanding the operation of non-profits.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Social preferences” are utility functions that partially depend on what other people have.

  2. 2.

    Leeson and Coyne (2012) disagree with me on this point, which is why they conclude that “given that the wisdom and alterability benefits of private rules [contracts] are much greater than those of both legislation and norms and, further, these benefits likely weigh more significantly in citizens’ cost-benefit calculus than the potential costs associated with social rules, many societies currently governed by legislation and norms may be governed inefficiently”.

  3. 3.

    There is a debate about the extent to which corporate social responsibility can take upon the role of civil society organizations, but I’m not going to elaborate on these themes here (Aligica and Tarko 2015).

  4. 4.

    Version control is similar to “Track Changes” in Word or with the history of edits on Wikipedia, but operates on a complex collection of files rather than just on a single document, and it allows the owner of an open-source project to easily see what changes others have proposed and to easily revert changes if they prove misguided. This also allows developers to try out different ideas without fear of breaking the product.

  5. 5.

    I should mention here that existing tax law biases organizational forms toward non-profits, which is probably inefficient. It’s hard for me to tell what the situation of higher education would be if this legislative bias wouldn’t exist.

  6. 6.

    I say “might” because, even if the identities are anonymized, it might still be possible to recover them by interpolation. This is, for example, an issue with Census data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Vlad Tarko

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  1. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Peter J. Boettke

  2. Free Market Institute, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

    Adam Martin

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Tarko, V. (2020). Open-Sourcing Civil Society. In: Boettke, P., Martin, A. (eds) Exploring the Social and Political Economy of Alexis de Tocqueville. Mercatus Studies in Political and Social Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34937-0_10

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