Charles E. Lindblom

Lindblom died on January 30, 2018 at the age of 100.

In The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It (2001), Lindblom echoed and expanded upon many of his concerns raised in Politics And Markets. The most important of these is that while the Market System is the best mechanism yet devised for creating and fostering wealth and innovation, it is not very efficient at assigning non-economic values and distributing social or economic justice.

Lindblom elaborated on his work in a 1982 Journal of Politics article. According to Lindblom, it is hard for politicians to implement change when those changes adversely affect those who control capital, because those who control capital create the conditions that determine the success of society. Unlike other actors, who must proactively advocate for and against policies, the owners of capital can by virtue of their importance for society shape public policy decisions.

In his best known work, Politics And Markets (1977), Lindblom notes the "Privileged position of business in Polyarchy". He also introduces the concept of "circularity", or "controlled volitions" where "even in the democracies, masses are persuaded to ask from elites only what elites wish to give them." Thus any real choices and competition are limited. Worse still, any development of alternative choices or even any serious discussion and consideration of them is effectively discouraged. An example of this is the political party system in the United States, which is almost completely dominated by two powerful parties that often reduce complex issues and decisions down to two simple choices. Related to this is the concurrent concentration of the U.S. mass communications media into an Oligopoly, which effectively controls who gets to participate in the national dialogue and who suffers a censorship of silence.

Lindblom was one of the early developers and advocates of the theory of incrementalism in policy and decision-making. This view (also called gradualism) takes a "baby-steps", "Muddling Through" or "Echternach Theory" approach to decision-making processes. In it, policy change is, under most circumstances, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. He came to this view through his extensive studies of Welfare policies and Trade Unions throughout the industrialized world. These views are set out in two articles, separated by 20 years: "The Science Of 'Muddling Through'" (1959) and “Still Muddling, Not yet through” (1979), both published in Public Administration Review.

Together with his friend, colleague and fellow Yale professor Robert A. Dahl, Lindblom was a champion of the Polyarchy (or Pluralistic) view of political elites and governance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. According to this view, no single, monolithic elite controls government and society, but rather a series of specialized elites compete and bargain with one another for control. It is this peaceful competition and compromise between elites in politics and the marketplace that drives free-market democracy and allows it to thrive.

Charles Edward Lindblom (March 21, 1917 – January 30, 2018) was an American academic who studied economics at the University of Chicago and was Sterling Professor emeritus of political science and economics at Yale University. He served as president of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, as well as director of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies.