Saturday, November 3, 2007

A few big stakeholders versus many small stakeholders

In seeking change, a significant problem exists whenever the interests of many persons with small stakeholder interests are up against a few persons with big stakeholder interests. This problem is that the few persons who individually have large financial interests will be highly motivated to protect and advance the same, while the many persons who individually have small intersts will frequently not do anything to ward off predatory activities of the former group because only a small amount is involved for each of the many and each of the many has more important things needing their attention.

Sometimes the many persons with small individual interests will decide that the predatory few who are taking advantage of the many should not get away with it, and the many will organize and collectively oppose the few. Organizing and accomplishing collective action is hard because there must always be overcome the weakness of individual motivations among the many.

I contend that the plaintiffs' lawyers are a group of a few persons with very large stakeholder interests, and that the rest of the society consists of many for whom only relatively small amounts are at stake on an individual basis. The consequence of this is a great inertia on the part of the rest of society to oppose the predations inflicted on them by the plaintiffs' lawyers who are highly, highly motivated to protect and expand their stakeholder interests.

The foregoing phenomenon will be frequently adverted to in this blog.

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