Capitalism, Corporate Liberalism and Social Policy: The Origins of the Social Security Act of 1935
This paper looks at the involvement and influence of capitalists on the Social Security Act of 1935. Instead of positing direct corporate control, the research shows how social security was formulated with in a corporate liberal ideological framework which defined problems and their solutions in terms of putting the maintenance of capitalism above the needs of individual workers. This framework set the limits of the social insurance debates long before the act itself was written. The thesis is that the Social Security Act came about as a result of an interplay between the environment and an ideology advanced by corporate leaders and reform-minded academicians.
Actuarialism as biopolitical and disciplinary technique
Reporting the costs of pension plans has “challenged the accountant's imagination” (Matthews, 1960) for decades. Recent financial reporting has been under pressure to reveal the more “true” costs of pension plans, even if that means revealing their failing health. As part of this call, the actuarial methodology upon which pension accounting is based has been criticized as being wholly incorrect and responsible for concealing that health. A much understudied profession, actuaries have been implicated in pension accounting from its very beginnings. This study goes back in time to actuarial intervention in industrial pensions in the United States. Drawing upon archival materials from the beginning of the 20th century and ending with the development of Accounting Opinion No. 8: Accounting for the cost of pension plans, published by the Accounting Principles Board in 1966, we develop a genealogy of that profession's connection to pension accounting. We find that the worker was rendered visible and enunciated via actuarial knowledge, and we trace the effects of that enunciation on the relations between the employer and the worker. We also examine the relations between the accounting and actuarial professions, and demonstrate how accounting intervened into actuarial expertise. We find that as a biopolitical technique actuarialism has, in order to predict costs, fit older workers into a system that traces employees' life patterns. In so doing, it only partly “destroyed” the individual subject, while still working as a mechanism that enabled old, and new, forms of individual discipline to exist.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.