Luck Vs Government Essay

In this paper, I will examine the following argument: whether capitalists are not just systematically lucky; they have significant power over government. This argument, therefore, includes two important concepts: systematic luck and power. First, to examine the argument, I will show the concept of power as provided by Keith Dowding, whose concept of such is also divided into two terms: outcome power and social power. By developing a resource-based account of power, Dowding (1991; 1996; 2003) argues that capitalists are socially powerful because they can deploy their resources to shape preferences in society along their favour. Second, I will show that, however, capitalists are not just powerful, and I will therefore introduce the notion of

This means that power is attributed to particular kinds of agents, not structures. This notion of power can recognise a crucial aspect of it: power is exercised by individual actors who can decide whether not to use it. Although actors can choose not to exercise power, structures cannot. Since agents do have power within structures, the argument that claims structures have power, for instance capitalism has power is redundant or misleading (Dowding 1996: 28; 2003: 306). Therefore, Dowding takes power to be attributable to individual agents, not to

For example, according to Dowding, if a boy successfully goes to a midnight concert despite his father’s prohibition, he has exercised outcome power over his father. On the other hand, if governments give citizens incentives to behave differently by changing laws, they have exercised social power over those citizens (Dowding 2003: 313). The crucial point here is that agents exercising social power do not necessarily change subjects’ wants or desires. For example, a government may encourage citizens to eat more healthy food than oily food by giving health information or by imposing a tax on cooking oil. In the former case, the citizens who previously preferred oily foods might change their preferences because they want to live longer. In the latter case, they change their preferences because of taxation without necessarily changing their desire for oily foods. Dowding calls the former persuasion and the latter preference shaping, and he distinguishes these terms (Dowding 1991: 30-46; 2003: n26). In other words, when the government makes a law, they change citizens’ preferences by shaping, not by persuasion. In response to this aspect, Dowding develops a resource-based