It explains the economic reasons why it is hard to get collective action to happen. It also explains why any government organization organized for collective action in time is likely to undergo regulatory capture, meaning that the people you wanted to regulate are in control of the regulations and manipulate them for their own purposes. It also studies the various approaches that have been taken to solve this, and how effective they have or haven't been.
You'll learn WHY we don't simply all self-organize to act in our collective best interest.
The description of the book seems to take "acting as a group is necessary" as a given, actually, by my read. Right up front! "Economists have long understood that defense, law, and order were public goods that could not be marketed to individuals, and that taxation was necessary."
So if the alternative is more self-motivated individual action, you obviously don't have to go far to find tons of examples of how that results in bad outcomes. Here's someone motivated to say "fuck you" to patent trolls. But the patent trolls themselves are motivated by self interest to be a troll in the first place, so "individual agency" here is at best a wash. Difficult collective action to reform the mechanisms patent trolls take advantage of still seem far more likely to work here than just hoping for more individuals willing to light their money on fire on principle.
If the book merely said that the cause was hopeless, I would not recommend it.
We are surrounded by successful examples of collective action. But they also tend to be interestingly suboptimal in lots of ways. The book provides a framework through which you can understand why this happens.
A public good is a good which, if it is provisioned, is available to all regardless of how much they contributed to its provisioning. There are many, many examples of public goods, but I'll use clean air as an example.
The problem with public goods is that it is only in your personal interest to contribute to the extent that you personally reap the reward from your contribution. So, for example, catalytic converters cost about $1500. If you live in a city, you personally benefit more than $1500 in life quality from the fact that everyone around you has a catalytic converter. But if your catalytic converter goes, you don't benefit $1500 from YOUR catalytic converter. And so almost nobody would, without some other motivation, bother spending $1500 on a catalytic converter.
And yet, public goods do get provisioned. Here are the basic ways.
1. A single large entity benefits enough from the good to provision it for everyone else, who gets to free ride. The book calls this, the exploitation of the large by the small. If ever you see someone arguing that some big country or company should do something nice for everyone, they're hoping for this.
2. A small group combined can provision it. This usually results in complex negotiations, cheating, and so on as each tries to do the minimum necessary. The history of negotiations within OPEC on controlling the supply of oil is a good example.
3. A fundamentally coercive organization which exists for some other reason can ensure the provisioning of it. For my catalytic converter example, that is the government. If you fail to have a $1500 catalytic converter, the government will take steps up to and including putting you in jail.
4. People seem willing to put a small amount of energy out for a good cause. For example a lot of people are willing to put the energy out to vote, even though your personal vote is unlikely to swing any election in your lifetime. Some people are willing to put a lot of energy out.
5. The good may wind up provisioned for some other reason. For example open source software is a public good, which programmers voluntarily create and maintain for a wide variety of reasons. But very few programmers are creating it out of some notion of acting to maximize the common good.
But that is a very short take with very few examples. The book is quite readable and offers a lot more on all of this.
It explains the economic reasons why it is hard to get collective action to happen. It also explains why any government organization organized for collective action in time is likely to undergo regulatory capture, meaning that the people you wanted to regulate are in control of the regulations and manipulate them for their own purposes. It also studies the various approaches that have been taken to solve this, and how effective they have or haven't been.
You'll learn WHY we don't simply all self-organize to act in our collective best interest.