Marglin Podcast

A recent Econtalk Podcast was with Stephen Marglin about his new book, "The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community". As always the podcast was very interesting. I heard about his book a couple of weeks ago and was somewhat skeptical and this podcast didn't change my opinion.

His main point seemed to be that conventional economic analysis undervalues the benefits of "community" where community is some kind of group thats costly to leave. As a critique of main-stream, highly technical economics may have some substance but from what I understood his reasons for not being a Hayek-ian were highly confused. If joining a community is so beneficial then why not leave that up to individuals? Surely communities have--and could, if people wanted it--develop ways of voluntarily making a credible commitment to join the community such that it would be extremely costly for an individual to leave that community. Does he think that there is no way for people to voluntarily credibly commit to joining a community? Alternatively, does Marglin think that people, irrationally, underestimate the benefits of joining a community and, as such, are unwilling to join communities that require them to voluntarily make the initial credible commitment to join? I couldn't work it out.

I could think of a lot of organizations that require a very heavy upfront voluntary commitment to join and the members of the community endure very heavy losses to leave. These communities are mostly religious cults where the leader usually absconds with the community members' money but they do seem to exist.