constitutes a well-informed and demanding customer able to communicate its
needs. Ordinary consumers, however, with no competitive market-driven
producers to choose from, had no way of signalling exactly what they wanted;
indeed, consumer preference was not only unknown, but essentially non-
existent, because it requires knowledge of alternatives among which to have
preferences.
Nevertheless, centrally-controlled economies worked well in producing
major investment in infrastructure; what destroyed them were the increasingly
important inefficiencies of the system and its inability to satisfy consumers
increasingly aware, in part through the power of themass mediaof the
standard of living available in the West.
Committees
Even the most informal social organization will often have a committee to run
its detailed affairs, where the general membership does not have the time or
inclination to do so. In more serious political and business parlance, commit-
tees are technically groups of members of some deliberative or decision-
making body. They are charged with carrying out preparatory or investigatory
work on some issue, or with dealing with matters of detail under broad lines
agreed by the whole body. The main justification for committee work is that
detailed discussion can best be handled by a small number of people, and also
that committee members have more expertise, and more time, to dedicate to
specific topics than other members of the main body. As the institution of
which a committee is a subordinate part will usually have a much wider remit
than the scope given to any one committee, this allows for a division of labour
and task specialization which would otherwise be impossible.
A consequence of this delegation of responsibility is that committeesper se
cannot make binding decisions, but can only make recommendations to the
main body, or report their conclusions. In practice committees often wield
very considerable power precisely because members of the main body, a
parliament for example, or the governing council of a trade union or a board
of directors, are much less well-informed, and have much less time in which to
consider a matter, than the specialist committee. Consequently there is a
general tendency for committee advice to be taken, often with little debate.
Probably the most influential and famous political committees are the specialist
subject committees of the US Congress. In many areas these committees are
the effectivelegislatures, with the full Senate or House of Representatives
being in a position to do no more than endorse the committee resolutions. In
these cases, and many other political examples, no legislation or initiative that
is not favoured by a majority of the committee can hope even to be reported
on to the full legislative body, the committee simply refusing to act on it at all.
Committees