The economic rhetoric about reform and change, now

In an article written in 2017, Stuti Khemani of the World Bank reviews the reasons that economists have provided for the difficulties that democratic societies face undertaking what many have called "reforms," and sometimes "srtructural reforms". There is some understanding that these reforms refer to policies that in some objective way are desirable, but that are blocked by interest groups or some other political difficulty. More modernly, the obstacle to "reforms" seems to be populism. In an initial period, the literature focused on reforms about fiscal consolidation, to open up later the scope to the analysis of liberalization reforms. Since in theory, the winners could compensate the losers, in some sense much of this literature is redundant, because it is well known that social choices by majority rule, or some other voting procedure, do not guarantee efficiency. But beyond interest groups and the difficulties of democracies with efficiency, the article of Khemani is interesting because it opens up a new reason why policies that are socially desirable in some objective way are not developed. This reason has to do with the difficulties of spreading the social norms and preferences that make change possible. Of course, these days this should be applied not so much to fiscal consolidation or liberalization, but to policies that mitigate climate change (and other related hazards such as pandemics) and that reduce inequalities, which by the way are sometimes in conflict with fiscal consolidation or liberalization.
The role of interest groups is actually related to social norms and preferences, because as the author argues
"Part of the power of groups to block reforms, despite the evidence that the reforms would benefit an overwhelming majority, is likely to come from their ability to persuade the “winners”— society or citizens at large—that the reforms are not in their interest. Or, to distract citizens into valuing other aspects of policy-making (such as social and religious policies), systematically mobilizing citizens on those non-economic policy dimensions, while deliberately pursuing economic policies to the detriment of those citizens."