The received wisdom among welfare state scholars is that policy feedbacks render social insurance programs durable. Yet, in the case of Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy, a voting majority of retired city workers accepted a settlement that asked them to waive key legal protections, formally accept gutted medical benefits, trimmed pension benefits, and a new public-private pension financing mechanism. This article synthesizes interactionist theories of loss to introduce the concept of “collective cooling.” I argue that collective cooling helps to establish the limits of policy feedbacks by explaining how a group of retirees’ collective self-understandings were adjusted from that of contractual rights holders to charitable dependents. Key components of this process included: First, seeking to adjust understandings of how pensioners were perceived by powerful outsiders; And, second, seeking to adjust the loss from one that reflected poorly on pensioners to one that did not. Implications are discussed for how people accept unexpected economic losses, especially those imposed by a trusted institution such as an employer or government organization.

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当政策反馈失败：底特律市政破产的“集体降温”

福利国家学者普遍认为，政策反馈使社会保险计划具有持久性。然而，在底特律市政破产案中，投票多数的退休城市工人接受了一项和解，要求他们放弃关键的法律保护，正式接受被削减的医疗福利、削减的养老金福利以及新的公私养老金融资机制。本文综合互动主义的损失理论来介绍“集体冷却”的概念。我认为，集体降温有助于通过解释一组退休人员的集体自我理解如何从合同权利持有人的自我理解调整为慈善受抚养人来建立政策反馈的界限。这个过程的关键组成部分包括：首先，寻求调整对有权势的局外人如何看待养老金领取者的理解；其次，寻求将损失从对养老金领取者反映不佳的损失调整为没有反映的损失。讨论了人们如何接受意外经济损失的影响，特别是那些由受信任的机构（如雇主或政府组织）强加的损失。