Who whips the whippers? An infinite regress of political economy

The other day we shared this amusing-but-false story that appeared in the Journal of Political Economy a few years ago:

“On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging.”

Paul Campos shares some further background here about the original source of this tale.

But I want to step back a moment and think of this from the economics point of view. The argument is that the “oarsmen” hired the burly man because it was too difficult to assess their individual contributions to the effort. As the academic economists charmingly put it:

Discipline at the workplace—such as the coolie in Cheung’s story—may reflect demand for arrangements to help avoid the temptation to shirk.

But here’s my question: what about the man with the whip? What if he was tempted to shirk? You might think that a whipmaster would just naturally enjoy the task—but it’s a job like any other, and there’s no reason to think that all of them get a positive utility from hurting people, any more than we should assume that all University of California law professors are into torture.

Indeed, many whippers could well feel a . . . temptation to shirk. What, then, could allow them to resist?

The answer is obvious. The whippers need a whipper of their own, an even burlier “coolie” whose job is to whip the whippers if they are not whipping enough. But then these meta-whippers may need some encouragement . . . this will go on forever.

It seems that we have a potentially infinite regress of floggers, each burlier than the last. And if you think this might be a bit of deadweight loss, that’s just you being a naive Westerner, “horrified by this cruel treatment of the obviously overworked coolies. That is, horrified until it was pointed out . . .”

P.S. Could somebody please write up a few formulas for this idea? We could whip something up and get it published in a top-5 journal!

P.P.S. You might say that I shouldn’t be making fun of these poor scholars who innocently took a dubious story, elaborated it with a bunch of incoherent details, and then inserted it into the scholarly literature. All I can say is . . . Nobody forced them to do this! They could’ve played it on the straight and narrow and only included true, or at least well-sourced, stories in their article. If they and others are going to use this story as backing for their theoretical arguments, I think it’s only fair to take the story at face value and consider its full implications, infinite regress and all. If you want, you can make fun of me for writing a paper, way back when, called Enhancing democracy through legislative redistricting. In retrospect, that was a terrible title, and the article itself was flawed in only looking backward with no thoughts about how things could change. Writing that paper may have done all sorts of damage, much more than riverboat story.