Congratulations! Your political party has won control of the vital levers of American government. Presumably, your party was elected on a platform to solve several pressing challenges facing the country. Now it is time to govern.
You have two choices:
1. Govern badly, and voters will throw you and your party out, mercilessly.
2. Govern well, and you will solve the pressing problems that brought you to power. Over time, however, your agenda and message will become stale as voters develop new issues and concerns, and they will vote you out. This will happen more quickly than you expect.
Congratulations! Your opposition is crazy and/or inept. One of two things will happen:
1. They will grow irrelevant, making your party enormous. However, your party will fracture and split under the pressure of so many competing interests and views. Eventually, a new party will emerge, combining the ashes of your old opposition and the malcontents in your big party.
2. They will wise up, adjust their policies, nominate better candidates, and challenge your rule.
In American government, the majority party is doomed. It always was, and always will be.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Friday, October 24, 2014
Quick Thoughts on Ebola and Quarantine
As far as I can tell, to date, very few people are panicking about Ebola. Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist and Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard have done a pretty good job refuting this media-driven narrative of panic about Ebola. And some of us who would respond "yes" to questions about concern about an Ebola outbreak are worried for the sake of our friends and family members who work in medicine, rather than for ourselves.
(Also, poll respondents may be answering different questions than the ones being asked! But that's a different post.)
However, panic is not an impossibility. I think John McCormack is dead on:
Moreover, the first secondary infection in the US is likely to be out and about for a longer period of time than our previous Ebola patients, because Ebola isn't going to come up on the medical questionnaires that the patients will be answering. (Have you recently traveled to West Africa? No? Probably the flu.) So, then you could see additional secondary infections off of that first secondary infection.
Let's be clear: thinking about this outcome does not keep me up at night; it is unlikely. But it is not outside of the realm of possibility.
Fortunately, we have a fairly straightforward way to prevent this: mandatory three-week quarantines for potential disease vectors. The most likely disease vectors for Ebola are not regular people from Liberia or Guinea or Sierra Leone. It's the health care workers who are returning home from those countries. These people are doing great work (some would say God's work), and they deserve our respect and gratitude. The likelihood of something very bad happening because we do not compel quarantine is very small, but the cost of doing what it takes to prevent that very bad outcome is so small that to risk the very bad outcome doesn't make sense. The calculation here is fairly straightforward; mandatory quarantines for 21-days are low cost, and their likely effectiveness at preventing secondary infection is extremely high.**
If we're concerned about the unfairness of quarantine, as Sarah Kliff of Vox.com is, we can offer compensation for medical volunteers forced into quarantine. And frankly, it's three weeks out of their lives in 2014, the age of Netflix, tablets, e-Readers, and smartphones. The quarantined people might become stir crazy, but this isn't cruelty, if managed correctly. (We may well want to provide bonuses for doctors traveling to these areas to treat this epidemic, anyway. It strikes me as a worthy expenditure of tax dollars.)
One final note: we are doing a pretty darn good job treating Ebola patients in the US, which has led some experts to suggest that the mortality rate on Ebola with effective treatment would be closer to 10 or 20 percent. But this is very likely because of the quality of medical attention we have been able to provide the handful of patients that we have dealt with. If Ebola becomes more common in the US, the level of attention will drop, and it is likely that the mortality rate will rise. If we're dealing with more than a handful of cases, we can't get every Ebola patient to Emory, Omaha, or the National Institute of Health.
**This sort of cost/benefit calculation is why one can support this sort of prophylaxis against Ebola while rejecting current proposed prophylaxis against global warming.
(Also, poll respondents may be answering different questions than the ones being asked! But that's a different post.)
However, panic is not an impossibility. I think John McCormack is dead on:
The real Ebola freakout doesn't begin unless/until there's a secondary infection--i.e. not a health care worker treating Ebola patient.
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) October 24, 2014
In other words, we don't see panic until some random person catches Ebola on the subway by touching an infected surface and then scratching his/her eye. If that happens, panic and a larger economic impact--in addition to the actual human impact--becomes much more likely.Moreover, the first secondary infection in the US is likely to be out and about for a longer period of time than our previous Ebola patients, because Ebola isn't going to come up on the medical questionnaires that the patients will be answering. (Have you recently traveled to West Africa? No? Probably the flu.) So, then you could see additional secondary infections off of that first secondary infection.
Let's be clear: thinking about this outcome does not keep me up at night; it is unlikely. But it is not outside of the realm of possibility.
Fortunately, we have a fairly straightforward way to prevent this: mandatory three-week quarantines for potential disease vectors. The most likely disease vectors for Ebola are not regular people from Liberia or Guinea or Sierra Leone. It's the health care workers who are returning home from those countries. These people are doing great work (some would say God's work), and they deserve our respect and gratitude. The likelihood of something very bad happening because we do not compel quarantine is very small, but the cost of doing what it takes to prevent that very bad outcome is so small that to risk the very bad outcome doesn't make sense. The calculation here is fairly straightforward; mandatory quarantines for 21-days are low cost, and their likely effectiveness at preventing secondary infection is extremely high.**
If we're concerned about the unfairness of quarantine, as Sarah Kliff of Vox.com is, we can offer compensation for medical volunteers forced into quarantine. And frankly, it's three weeks out of their lives in 2014, the age of Netflix, tablets, e-Readers, and smartphones. The quarantined people might become stir crazy, but this isn't cruelty, if managed correctly. (We may well want to provide bonuses for doctors traveling to these areas to treat this epidemic, anyway. It strikes me as a worthy expenditure of tax dollars.)
One final note: we are doing a pretty darn good job treating Ebola patients in the US, which has led some experts to suggest that the mortality rate on Ebola with effective treatment would be closer to 10 or 20 percent. But this is very likely because of the quality of medical attention we have been able to provide the handful of patients that we have dealt with. If Ebola becomes more common in the US, the level of attention will drop, and it is likely that the mortality rate will rise. If we're dealing with more than a handful of cases, we can't get every Ebola patient to Emory, Omaha, or the National Institute of Health.
**This sort of cost/benefit calculation is why one can support this sort of prophylaxis against Ebola while rejecting current proposed prophylaxis against global warming.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Ebola and Organizational Behavior
Graham Allison's Essence of Decision is a remarkable book with almost universally applicable insights. I don't own the book, but enough of Allison's writing is available online to cite usefully here. I'll be pulling various quotes from a 1968 article by Allison, currently located at the RAND Corporation's site.
If you can't get around to reading the book, the paper seems worthwhile.
Let me summarize the key points of Allison's organizational process model, as I understand them:
Feel free to skip ahead to Organizational Behavior and Ebola Treatment if you're not interested in Graham Allison; I provide a bit more context for that summary in the next few paragraphs.
Allison's Essence of Decision looks at the Cuban Missile Crisis through three lenses: the rational actor model, in which governments make decisions like chess players; the bureaucratic political model, in which government decisions are driven by institutional positioning and self-interest; and the organizational process model, in which the capabilities of organizations govern government decision-making. Allison demonstrates that all three models are useful for analysis, but it largely serves as a corrective for analysis that relies entirely on the rational actor model. If you're not thinking about bureaucratic politics or organizational behavior when you're analyzing decision-making, you're missing a ton of texture.
For my purposes today, the organizational process model is the most useful. Allison points out that part of the way that the US detected the missiles in Cuba was because Soviet soldiers had put red stars on their buildings that were visible from their roofs; it was standard operating procedure to do so at a Soviet site. (Another example: the spy satellites saw soccer fields. Russians played soccer; Cubans played baseball. A really good deception program would have accounted for that, but organizational behavior was what it was.)
On organizational capabilities, Allison writes,
Organizational Behavior and Ebola Treatment
So, we know that organizations can have strong capabilities, but they also have severe limitations.
Let me pose my theory of what happened at Texas Presbyterian Hospital, from a Graham Allison-organizational process perspective.
A patient who claims to have been to West Africa comes in with symptoms resembling a bad virus. He has a very high fever, but people really haven't been paying much attention to the news, and they're not inclined to think hemorrhagic fever unless the patient is... you know, hemorrhaging from the eyes, vomiting blood, etc. So they assume "sinusitis" and send him home with antibiotics, just in case it was bacterial.
Personal aside: I was once hospitalized with sinusitis. This wasn't an unreasonable diagnosis, based on the symptoms. I felt like death, had a very high fever, and ended up spending five nights in the hospital. Sickest I've ever been.
Two days later, he comes back, obviously very sick. They're now thinking Ebola, and they got the diagnosis right.
Hospitals use "standard precautions" in dealing with infections to avoid sickness, as well as to avoid spreading infections between patients. (See the sad case of Ignac Semmelweis and puerperal fever for their importance.)
Hospital workers and administrators know that Ebola is serious, but they also know that they have "standard precautions" to follow. The initial thinking is that the precautions will work, provided that they're careful. They work, after all, on the most comparable virus we know about: HIV. And on a gut level, the two are similar: they are not airborne, thankfully. They are spread through contact with bodily fluids. And they are very serious.
This was the first error, though. While HIV and Ebola are comparable on a surface level, there are some significant differences. Ebola is actually more contagious; HIV does not survive outside of the body for longer than minutes, but Ebola can survive on surfaces for much, much longer. (Believe it or not, most people catch the flu the same way they could, in theory, catch Ebola: contact with infected surfaces and then putting their fingers in their mouth, or nose, or eyes. The flu is airborne, but it's really the contact with surfaces that causes most cases, if I understand it correctly.)
Moreover, while HIV destroys the immune system, Ebola overwhelms the entire body. A late-stage HIV patient is most vulnerable to an opportunistic infection that a person with a fully-functioning immune system would fight off. Ebola just reproduces and reproduces until the body basically excretes it from all points of exit.
The HIV analogy is not good enough.... but the procedures come from the HIV analogy.
This basically seems to be what happened. The Dallas Morning News writes:
Now we're hoping for luck. Not only are the health care workers at risk, but other patients in the hospital that the health care workers dealt with are also at risk.
The story continues. They eventually realized that standard precautions were not enough, so they started putting on more gear. But it appears that there was a failure in training, or just flat inexperience; US hospitals do not deal with this level of infection. Most really sick people in hospitals have cancer or organ failure, not infectious disease. That's a good thing, but it means that organizations don't really know how to handle those cases that do emerge.
As the patient got sicker, the hospital implemented standard operating procedures for critical care. I'm not a health professional, but I assume it's something like this:
- Able-bodied man's kidney's start to fail? Get him on dialysis.
- Airway obstructed/breathing problems? Tracheal intubation.
With a late-stage Ebola patient, these procedures are incredibly dangerous. The later into the disease a patient is, the more contagious they are. But these are the standard operating procedures in critical care, and this is what the hospital implemented.
So we had a systemic, procedural failure at Texas Presbyterian, brought about by procedures that were not equipped to deal with the nature of the problem they faced. Note that this problem isn't even remotely due to the activities of health care workers. They were implementing procedures. It is the job of management to ensure that procedures make sense for the circumstances that line workers face.
What should be done going forward?
Only the government could have changed these procedures. It was never something that a conventional hospital was going to be able to handle. That's the critical failure here; the workers at Texas Presbyterian were left out in the cold, when they actually would have required some assistance from our medical establishment.
First and foremost, Thomas Frieden should be fired at the end of this crisis. He is just now striking the right chord, in terms of what hospitals should be thinking with Ebola. But for weeks, he has downplayed the risks faced by American health care professionals. When Frieden says, "One of thing we want to emphasize is virtually any hospital in the country that can do isolation can do isolation for Ebola," that's a signal to hospitals that this isn't a big deal. Over and over, literally for months, we have heard that "Western infection controls" should be able to stop Ebola. We haven't heard the necessary message: that Ebola is extremely dangerous, and is very contagious in late stages, and that health care workers are very much at risk.
Moreover, this isn't just a messaging problem. CDC hasn't been taking it seriously enough, if a nurse involved in the treatment of Thomas Duncan was allowed to fly before the end of the incubation period. They genuinely do not seem to have a grasp of the risk of what they are dealing with. It is classic overconfidence.
In general, this "everybody be calm!" message has been coming from every official we've heard from, presumably to prevent a panic. This backfires, though, when the reassurances prove wrong; people become (rightfully) skeptical of what they hear from those officials. And frankly, there are worse outcomes that a few people panicking.
Next, we really do need to step up procedures for decontamination, and we need to roll out a lot more training on it, fast. It is possible that we're going to see more cases, maybe even enough to swamp our ability to send CDC teams out to handle treatment.
Additionally, we may need to consider restricting critical care procedures. If someone is so sick from Ebola that they need kidney dialysis, we just may not be able to provide the care in a way that will keep our medical professionals safe. This is a sad potential reality, but it may well be true. For severe Ebola cases that do not show signs of improvement, we may need to shift to palliative care rather than our era's preferred model of heroic medicine. I am not an expert on the subject, but I hope that someone, somewhere, is having this conversation.
Lastly, people need to stop mocking those who are worrying about Ebola. Vox.com, voice of the glib Left-leaning establishment, put out a graphic like this a few days ago:
This glib approach is so, so bad. It signals to people that they don't have to worry. But they should worry, at least a little bit.
Part of why we haven't been wiped out by something like Ebola is because people who appropriately worry about things have acted appropriately. It's the same thing with the notion of the "arc of history" or whatever. Human action shapes the arc. It's not just something that happens, and assuming that the "arc" will carry us to where we want to go is just incredibly naive.
The "go team" approach is the right one, because CDC specialists will have a better chance of implementing the proper procedures for infection control. But, again, this is too late for the health care workers who are now at risk. And they were utterly, utterly failed by a hubristic establishment. Chris Hayes, correct again.
If you can't get around to reading the book, the paper seems worthwhile.
Let me summarize the key points of Allison's organizational process model, as I understand them:
- Organizations are designed to be able to coordinate the actions of multiple people to accomplish things that would not be able to be done independently.
- Organizations are very often blunt instruments: they rely on standard procedures, whether explicated or implicit.
- In approaching new problems, they tend to look for similarities to older problems, and often act by analogy.
- Those procedures and organizational habits are very difficult to supplant, though it can be done in limited cases.
Feel free to skip ahead to Organizational Behavior and Ebola Treatment if you're not interested in Graham Allison; I provide a bit more context for that summary in the next few paragraphs.
Allison's Essence of Decision looks at the Cuban Missile Crisis through three lenses: the rational actor model, in which governments make decisions like chess players; the bureaucratic political model, in which government decisions are driven by institutional positioning and self-interest; and the organizational process model, in which the capabilities of organizations govern government decision-making. Allison demonstrates that all three models are useful for analysis, but it largely serves as a corrective for analysis that relies entirely on the rational actor model. If you're not thinking about bureaucratic politics or organizational behavior when you're analyzing decision-making, you're missing a ton of texture.
For my purposes today, the organizational process model is the most useful. Allison points out that part of the way that the US detected the missiles in Cuba was because Soviet soldiers had put red stars on their buildings that were visible from their roofs; it was standard operating procedure to do so at a Soviet site. (Another example: the spy satellites saw soccer fields. Russians played soccer; Cubans played baseball. A really good deception program would have accounted for that, but organizational behavior was what it was.)
On organizational capabilities, Allison writes,
Many organizations must be capable of performing actions in which the behavior of hundreds of individuals is carefully coordinated. Assured performance requires clusters of established, rehearsed standard operating procedures for producing specific actions, e.g., fighting enemy units or constructing military installations. Each cluster comprises a "program"... which the organization has available for dealing with a situation. The list of programs relevant to a type of activity, e.g., fighting, constitutes and organization repertoire. The numbers of programs in a repertoire is always quite limited. When properly triggered, organizations execute programs; programs cannot be substantially changed in a particular situation. The more complex the action and the greater the number of individuals involved, the more important are programs and repertoires as determinants of organizational behavior.He continues,
Where situations cannot be construed as standard, organizations engage in search. The style of search, and the solution in any particular case are largely determined by existing routines. Organizational search for alternative courses of action is problem-oriented: it focuses on the atypical discomfort which must be avoided. It is simple-minded: the neighborhood of the symptom is searched first; then, the neighborhood of the current alternative. Patterns of search reveal biases which reflect special training or experience of various parts of the organization, expectations, and communication distortions.Lastly, Allison wrote, "Government leaders can intervene and disturb organizational propensities and routines. Central direction and persistent control of organizational activity, however, is not possible." Allison was writing about government, but really, we're talking about the impact of an external force on an entrenched organization via coercion, cajoling, etc.
Organizational Behavior and Ebola Treatment
So, we know that organizations can have strong capabilities, but they also have severe limitations.
Let me pose my theory of what happened at Texas Presbyterian Hospital, from a Graham Allison-organizational process perspective.
A patient who claims to have been to West Africa comes in with symptoms resembling a bad virus. He has a very high fever, but people really haven't been paying much attention to the news, and they're not inclined to think hemorrhagic fever unless the patient is... you know, hemorrhaging from the eyes, vomiting blood, etc. So they assume "sinusitis" and send him home with antibiotics, just in case it was bacterial.
Personal aside: I was once hospitalized with sinusitis. This wasn't an unreasonable diagnosis, based on the symptoms. I felt like death, had a very high fever, and ended up spending five nights in the hospital. Sickest I've ever been.
Two days later, he comes back, obviously very sick. They're now thinking Ebola, and they got the diagnosis right.
Hospitals use "standard precautions" in dealing with infections to avoid sickness, as well as to avoid spreading infections between patients. (See the sad case of Ignac Semmelweis and puerperal fever for their importance.)
Hospital workers and administrators know that Ebola is serious, but they also know that they have "standard precautions" to follow. The initial thinking is that the precautions will work, provided that they're careful. They work, after all, on the most comparable virus we know about: HIV. And on a gut level, the two are similar: they are not airborne, thankfully. They are spread through contact with bodily fluids. And they are very serious.
This was the first error, though. While HIV and Ebola are comparable on a surface level, there are some significant differences. Ebola is actually more contagious; HIV does not survive outside of the body for longer than minutes, but Ebola can survive on surfaces for much, much longer. (Believe it or not, most people catch the flu the same way they could, in theory, catch Ebola: contact with infected surfaces and then putting their fingers in their mouth, or nose, or eyes. The flu is airborne, but it's really the contact with surfaces that causes most cases, if I understand it correctly.)
Moreover, while HIV destroys the immune system, Ebola overwhelms the entire body. A late-stage HIV patient is most vulnerable to an opportunistic infection that a person with a fully-functioning immune system would fight off. Ebola just reproduces and reproduces until the body basically excretes it from all points of exit.
This basically seems to be what happened. The Dallas Morning News writes:
The 3-day window of Sept. 28-30 is now being targeted by investigators for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the key time during which health care workers may have been exposed to the deadly virus by Duncan, who died Oct. 8 from the disease.
Duncan was suspected of having Ebola when he was admitted to a hospital isolation unit Sept. 28, and he developed projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea later that day, according to medical records his family turned over to The Associated Press.
But workers at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas did not abandon their gowns and scrubs for hazmat suits until tests came back positive for Ebola about 2 p.m. on Sept. 30, according to details of the records released by AP.Seems like standard precautions were in place, rather than biohazard level 4 precautions, as Ebola really warrants.
Now we're hoping for luck. Not only are the health care workers at risk, but other patients in the hospital that the health care workers dealt with are also at risk.
The story continues. They eventually realized that standard precautions were not enough, so they started putting on more gear. But it appears that there was a failure in training, or just flat inexperience; US hospitals do not deal with this level of infection. Most really sick people in hospitals have cancer or organ failure, not infectious disease. That's a good thing, but it means that organizations don't really know how to handle those cases that do emerge.
As the patient got sicker, the hospital implemented standard operating procedures for critical care. I'm not a health professional, but I assume it's something like this:
- Able-bodied man's kidney's start to fail? Get him on dialysis.
- Airway obstructed/breathing problems? Tracheal intubation.
With a late-stage Ebola patient, these procedures are incredibly dangerous. The later into the disease a patient is, the more contagious they are. But these are the standard operating procedures in critical care, and this is what the hospital implemented.
So we had a systemic, procedural failure at Texas Presbyterian, brought about by procedures that were not equipped to deal with the nature of the problem they faced. Note that this problem isn't even remotely due to the activities of health care workers. They were implementing procedures. It is the job of management to ensure that procedures make sense for the circumstances that line workers face.
What should be done going forward?
Only the government could have changed these procedures. It was never something that a conventional hospital was going to be able to handle. That's the critical failure here; the workers at Texas Presbyterian were left out in the cold, when they actually would have required some assistance from our medical establishment.
First and foremost, Thomas Frieden should be fired at the end of this crisis. He is just now striking the right chord, in terms of what hospitals should be thinking with Ebola. But for weeks, he has downplayed the risks faced by American health care professionals. When Frieden says, "One of thing we want to emphasize is virtually any hospital in the country that can do isolation can do isolation for Ebola," that's a signal to hospitals that this isn't a big deal. Over and over, literally for months, we have heard that "Western infection controls" should be able to stop Ebola. We haven't heard the necessary message: that Ebola is extremely dangerous, and is very contagious in late stages, and that health care workers are very much at risk.
Moreover, this isn't just a messaging problem. CDC hasn't been taking it seriously enough, if a nurse involved in the treatment of Thomas Duncan was allowed to fly before the end of the incubation period. They genuinely do not seem to have a grasp of the risk of what they are dealing with. It is classic overconfidence.
In general, this "everybody be calm!" message has been coming from every official we've heard from, presumably to prevent a panic. This backfires, though, when the reassurances prove wrong; people become (rightfully) skeptical of what they hear from those officials. And frankly, there are worse outcomes that a few people panicking.
Next, we really do need to step up procedures for decontamination, and we need to roll out a lot more training on it, fast. It is possible that we're going to see more cases, maybe even enough to swamp our ability to send CDC teams out to handle treatment.
Additionally, we may need to consider restricting critical care procedures. If someone is so sick from Ebola that they need kidney dialysis, we just may not be able to provide the care in a way that will keep our medical professionals safe. This is a sad potential reality, but it may well be true. For severe Ebola cases that do not show signs of improvement, we may need to shift to palliative care rather than our era's preferred model of heroic medicine. I am not an expert on the subject, but I hope that someone, somewhere, is having this conversation.
Lastly, people need to stop mocking those who are worrying about Ebola. Vox.com, voice of the glib Left-leaning establishment, put out a graphic like this a few days ago:
This glib approach is so, so bad. It signals to people that they don't have to worry. But they should worry, at least a little bit.
Part of why we haven't been wiped out by something like Ebola is because people who appropriately worry about things have acted appropriately. It's the same thing with the notion of the "arc of history" or whatever. Human action shapes the arc. It's not just something that happens, and assuming that the "arc" will carry us to where we want to go is just incredibly naive.
The "go team" approach is the right one, because CDC specialists will have a better chance of implementing the proper procedures for infection control. But, again, this is too late for the health care workers who are now at risk. And they were utterly, utterly failed by a hubristic establishment. Chris Hayes, correct again.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Conservative and Progressive Approaches: Flaws, Solutions
(Part 1 of this post available here.)
Conservatives have a lot of good instincts, I'd say. But really, the progressive instinct is the better one.
Even as a conservative, I believe that. Why shouldn't we admire those of us who see oppression and demand its end? Not everyone does. I daresay the average person is not a progressive; it takes a certain disposition to the world to identify oppression, particularly when you come from a position of privilege, as many white progressives do. As a non-progressive, this stuns me: many progressives grow up in a position of wealth, with their parents making six figures and living in a safe neighborhood with great schools. The world is their proverbial oyster; they are some of the wealthiest people in the history of mankind. But they don't cling to their comfortable lives. They insist that we can make the world better for other people, even at cost to themselves.**
Or look at once-disadvantaged progressives. Many have pulled themselves up from incredibly difficult circumstances. But they can't take... perhaps the obvious advice: don't look back. They must look back; they care too much about where they come from.
Or the still-disadvantaged progressives. A thoughtful progressive who grew up in poverty and remains in poverty, but still has the passion to agitate, to challenge, and to think about the structures of inequality is doing something remarkable. It would be perfectly reasonable to drop out of the political conversation altogether, or to lose hope in our ability to improve the world around us. But they do not.
These are good, decent, kind-hearted people. It is unfortunate that many conservatives do not seem to share this instinct for seeing oppression and desperately wanting to root it out. For me personally, that is not a natural way of thinking, as a conservative; I see the need for charity, but I have to work to see structures of oppression, even though I am pretty well convinced that they exist. And I see it is a weakness in conservative thought.
So, why am I not a progressive? Because that instinct about oppression is good and important, but it's not enough.
Conservatism is a series of balancing tests, essentially, as its practitioners grapple with living in complex, hard world. Its foundational principle, above all, is that people are flawed, and that institutional structures and habits are the best way to prevent those flaws from swallowing society. It is, when practiced right, a philosophy of humility: humility about what we can and cannot know, humility about what we can and cannot do, and humility about we can and cannot see. Conservatives have goals, but their adherence to process inevitably limits what they can accomplish. And this is, by and large, a good thing.
Progressivism, on the other hand, recognizes few, if any, limits, in seeking its goals. It will go to any practical length in its quest for social justice. It must immanentize the eschaton. But it charges boldly into a world that it cannot understand--that we cannot understand. It is the proverbial bull-in-the-china-shop in public policy. Even if the bull came in because it wanted to buy crockery, it's still going to cause damage.
Ultimately, its flaw is in its lack of humility: the structures that conservatives support are built to protect us from ourselves and our own weaknesses. But progressivism, in its triumphant view of what can and must be done, simply has no room for that posture, and all-too-human failings--pride, hubris, greed, corruption--sink its good and decent intentions. While conservatives are just as guilty of those human failings, their ideology accounts for them. Progressivism does not; it wishes for better men and better women in positions of power and influence, but it never gets them.
And so it always seems to fall short; its governments simply cannot do what it asks of them. Its social problems are more intractable than anticipated. Its solutions often cause unintended consequences that cascade far beyond what could have been reasonably anticipated. (And, in the ultimate irony, the structures it sets up to solve problems become the most conservative institutions in the world: stagnant, collectively-bargained government agencies.)
My "solution," such that it exists for these flaws, is fairly simple: in an ideal world, progressives would set the agenda, and conservatives would drive policymaking and governance. If conservatives were compelled to generate policy solutions to solve the various problems that progressives identify, the solutions would be significantly better than what we get today. But conservatives have squandered those opportunities, and when progressives attempt to borrow conservative ideas, they do so clumsily and without an understanding of core conservative insights. (Moreover, such a setup does not fit in with our model of government.)
I suppose that I would be more willing to entertain progressivism if it accepted precautionary limits on power when it was in power. But I'm not holding my breath.
**I have less sympathy for the "limousine progressive" who would refuse to sacrifice anything themselves for their progressive aims. But I'll be charitable and suggest that this is a small minority of an otherwise-honorable population.
Conservatives have a lot of good instincts, I'd say. But really, the progressive instinct is the better one.
Even as a conservative, I believe that. Why shouldn't we admire those of us who see oppression and demand its end? Not everyone does. I daresay the average person is not a progressive; it takes a certain disposition to the world to identify oppression, particularly when you come from a position of privilege, as many white progressives do. As a non-progressive, this stuns me: many progressives grow up in a position of wealth, with their parents making six figures and living in a safe neighborhood with great schools. The world is their proverbial oyster; they are some of the wealthiest people in the history of mankind. But they don't cling to their comfortable lives. They insist that we can make the world better for other people, even at cost to themselves.**
Or look at once-disadvantaged progressives. Many have pulled themselves up from incredibly difficult circumstances. But they can't take... perhaps the obvious advice: don't look back. They must look back; they care too much about where they come from.
Or the still-disadvantaged progressives. A thoughtful progressive who grew up in poverty and remains in poverty, but still has the passion to agitate, to challenge, and to think about the structures of inequality is doing something remarkable. It would be perfectly reasonable to drop out of the political conversation altogether, or to lose hope in our ability to improve the world around us. But they do not.
These are good, decent, kind-hearted people. It is unfortunate that many conservatives do not seem to share this instinct for seeing oppression and desperately wanting to root it out. For me personally, that is not a natural way of thinking, as a conservative; I see the need for charity, but I have to work to see structures of oppression, even though I am pretty well convinced that they exist. And I see it is a weakness in conservative thought.
So, why am I not a progressive? Because that instinct about oppression is good and important, but it's not enough.
Conservatism is a series of balancing tests, essentially, as its practitioners grapple with living in complex, hard world. Its foundational principle, above all, is that people are flawed, and that institutional structures and habits are the best way to prevent those flaws from swallowing society. It is, when practiced right, a philosophy of humility: humility about what we can and cannot know, humility about what we can and cannot do, and humility about we can and cannot see. Conservatives have goals, but their adherence to process inevitably limits what they can accomplish. And this is, by and large, a good thing.
Progressivism, on the other hand, recognizes few, if any, limits, in seeking its goals. It will go to any practical length in its quest for social justice. It must immanentize the eschaton. But it charges boldly into a world that it cannot understand--that we cannot understand. It is the proverbial bull-in-the-china-shop in public policy. Even if the bull came in because it wanted to buy crockery, it's still going to cause damage.
Ultimately, its flaw is in its lack of humility: the structures that conservatives support are built to protect us from ourselves and our own weaknesses. But progressivism, in its triumphant view of what can and must be done, simply has no room for that posture, and all-too-human failings--pride, hubris, greed, corruption--sink its good and decent intentions. While conservatives are just as guilty of those human failings, their ideology accounts for them. Progressivism does not; it wishes for better men and better women in positions of power and influence, but it never gets them.
And so it always seems to fall short; its governments simply cannot do what it asks of them. Its social problems are more intractable than anticipated. Its solutions often cause unintended consequences that cascade far beyond what could have been reasonably anticipated. (And, in the ultimate irony, the structures it sets up to solve problems become the most conservative institutions in the world: stagnant, collectively-bargained government agencies.)
My "solution," such that it exists for these flaws, is fairly simple: in an ideal world, progressives would set the agenda, and conservatives would drive policymaking and governance. If conservatives were compelled to generate policy solutions to solve the various problems that progressives identify, the solutions would be significantly better than what we get today. But conservatives have squandered those opportunities, and when progressives attempt to borrow conservative ideas, they do so clumsily and without an understanding of core conservative insights. (Moreover, such a setup does not fit in with our model of government.)
I suppose that I would be more willing to entertain progressivism if it accepted precautionary limits on power when it was in power. But I'm not holding my breath.
**I have less sympathy for the "limousine progressive" who would refuse to sacrifice anything themselves for their progressive aims. But I'll be charitable and suggest that this is a small minority of an otherwise-honorable population.
Sunday, August 3, 2014
Conservative and Progressive Approaches: Talking Past Each Other
Conservatives tend to view policy issues across multiple dimensions. They rely on a diverse array of rules, established processes, heuristics, and principles in determining their social and political preferences. Because of this texture, conservatism in some respects is a constant internal struggle between various ideas and dispositions.
Here are some of those "conservative" principles that I think stand out:
All of this leads to fairly nuanced takes on issues and much internal disagreement at the high-end intellectual level. It allows for the same movement to differ dramatically on something like constitutional interpretation, where you get one movement conservative (Thomas) operating on a very strict, original meaning view of the constitution, and another (Alito) doing jurisprudence very differently. It leads to disputes between libertarian populist conservatives and reform conservatives over whether government can actually solve--or at least palliate--socioeconomic problems. It causes heartburn over executive assumptions of power in a time of war. The list goes on.
This is in stark contrast with modern progressivism, which has one single lodestone: the oppressor/oppressed frame. (I'm borrowing here from Arnold Kling's three axis model.) In essentially every public policy issue, the challenge for the progressive is to determine which side is the oppressed in a given relationship, and to put one's thumb on the scale in that side's favor, as much as can be done. Everything else--processes, history, reciprocity, the rule of law, etc.--all of those things are merely tools for moving the scales. In the eyes of modern progressive ideology, they have no intrinsic value outside of the broader goal, which is to attack oppression. The only real limiting principle behind the use of these tools is political expediency; in other words, what can be done before inciting a reactionary backlash? If there are internal disagreements among progressives, it's over how to address oppression, not about its (appropriate) centrality to the worldview.
I obviously disagree with this approach to the various tools of power, but it's entirely justifiable, in a sense. Those tools largely emerged from contexts that were deeply and structurally oppressive. Do they have any intrinsic legitimacy, considering their origin? Why should we be restricted from doing what is right because the "rule of law" suggests that we may want to exercise power less arbitrarily? There are past grievances and inequalities that we can rectify; we can't be held up by abstract concepts.
The discrepancy between the conservative frame and the progressive frame result in some stark disagreements. Conservatives see progressives as utterly lawless and Machiavellian. Progressives, in turn, see conservatives as racist and bigoted. In particular, progressives see the use of the various conservative heuristics and principles as mere smokescreens to facilitate a continuation of oppressive circumstances. (And to be fair, sometimes, they are right about this.) Other progressives may see those principles as fundamentally oppressive in their own right.
There are many, many examples of disagreement between right and left where these differences are really apparent. I'll provide four.
Halbig v. Burwell: To a conservative, Halbig is a question of balancing three heuristics: the rule of law, the supremacy of the political branches, and a preference for slow change.
On the one hand, from a certain standpoint, the Halbig case is fairly open and shut. The law defines what constitutes a state, and then explicitly authorizes only those purchases made on state-established exchanges to receive federal subsidies. Moreover, earlier versions of the bill included language that allowed for subsidies for individuals who bought insurance on the federal exchange. As a rule of statutory interpretation, though, the removal of legislative language implies that the intent of the legislature was to exclude the language. Libertarian blogger Megan McArdle summarizes the situation from a right-leaning perspective very cleanly here:
On the other, removing the subsidies from so many recipients would be massively disruptive on a human level (violating "slow change" heuristic), and it would be a fairly aggressive judicial move, violating the heuristic of comity with the other branches.
Meanwhile, for progressives, the decision is much more straightforward: the "oppressed" actor in this instance is the person who got health insurance from PPACA. The "oppressor" is the part of society trying to take it away. Consequentialism reigns supreme here; "sloppy language" in the text and a "common sense" reading of "legislative intent" are all that the progressive Left needs to uphold the law.
Hobby Lobby v. Burwell: One more PPACA example here. This is an easier call for a conservative than Halbig, in my estimation, because most (if not all) of the heuristics point in the same direction. The Hobby Lobby case was about whether a regulation implemented by the executive branch under PPACA could compel Hobby Lobby to provide 20 types of birth control under its insurance plan. Hobby Lobby objected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), saying that it was comfortable providing 16 of the 20, but viewed the additional 4 as abortifacents. Hobby Lobby contended that having to pay for the birth control was an infringement on their religious freedom.
Freedom of conscience points in the direction of religious carve-outs. Moreover, from a rule of law perspective, RFRA is actually quite clear and unambiguous. The law establishes a two-pronged test that the government must meet:
The principle of judicial minimalism serves as one conservative objection to this opinion, but on this issue, essentially, we were looking at two statutes in opposition to one another. Either decision would represent a fairly broad act of judicial activism; either RFRA would be weakened, or PPACA would be weakened.
For progressives, the "oppressed" actor is the woman working for Hobby Lobby who is being deprived of birth control. The "oppressor" is the corporation that doesn't want to provide birth control.
Welfare/Poverty: While some conservatives reject the idea that government should have a role in caring for the poor, conservatism in general, when practiced right, does take an interest in poverty. But a conservative discussion of poverty will drift, almost by definition, towards something that sounds a bit like blaming the victim. Conservatives often blame "culture problems" in "inner-cities" in a way that sounds almost racist. They'll also be screaming about able-bodied men (mostly) refusing to work and living on the largess of government, or "welfare queens" who bilk the system for thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Poverty is one of those areas where several conservative principles align. At one level, the conservative is simply unhappy about the wasted money (preferring low levels of government spending), and believes that poor people should simply "take more responsibility" for themselves.
On a higher level, though, the conservative sees the government handout as actually destructive to the soul. "Work" is seen as one of those things that foster virtue: responsibility, a positive work ethic, etc. Giving people money for not working is seen to sap virtue and poison the society.
Progressives, on the other hand, see the poor as the oppressed, through and through. They are victims of poor circumstances, misfortune, and, most critically, of unequal structures. The only way to address that is with money, preferably federal dollars taken from the upper-income brackets, who are the beneficiaries of this structure (the oppressors).
Border crisis: Ross Douthat's strident, almost angry column captured the underlying debate about the border crisis perfectly.
But again, this sort of executive overreach doesn't seem to phase progressives. What matters is that the oppressed actors--the child refugees--must be saved from their oppressors. To progressives, they are flanked by oppression on two sides: by gang violence in Central America, and by Republicans in the United States.
These are just four examples; I could write of many more. The Israel/Palestine situation is a textbook example of the oppressor/oppressed frame rising above all others. I would also argue that the burgeoning debate about college rape is a situation where women are seen as oppressed and requiring protection, to the point that we are moving in the direction of dispensing with the criminal justice system and the rights of the accused in college justice. There are many other issues where this would be the case. Simply identify the "oppressed" party in a conflict, and that's where progressivism will be.
My contention is that most of our arguments are about the fact that conservatives are using their principles and heuristics, and progressives are focused entirely on structures of oppression.
Part 2 will be a brief post of what I see as the flaws in each approach.
Here are some of those "conservative" principles that I think stand out:
- The rule of law is a deeply important part of a free society, and government must be compelled to execute the laws faithfully.
- The separation of powers is vital for the sustenance of the republic.
- In times of war and emergency, the executive must assume broad powers.
- Local control is preferable to national control.
- Personal honor is important.
- We should be deeply skeptical of government interference in the economy and society.
- We have a responsibility to provide charity to the less fortunate (though this usually rests at private charity).
- Freedom of conscience is an important component of a free society.
- Small government is generally better government.
- We should work to foster "virtue" in people: thrift, compassion, personal responsibility, etc.
- There is wisdom in long-surviving practices and traditions, even if we can't explain why they work.
- Rapid change is often destructive.
- "Intermediaries" separating the state from individuals are an important part of a thriving society. A robust civil society should serve in place of much potential direct interaction between the individual and government.
- Ideally, personal lives and associations should not dictate political lives and associations.
- In general, courts should defer to the "political branches," because they are more accountable to the broader public.
All of this leads to fairly nuanced takes on issues and much internal disagreement at the high-end intellectual level. It allows for the same movement to differ dramatically on something like constitutional interpretation, where you get one movement conservative (Thomas) operating on a very strict, original meaning view of the constitution, and another (Alito) doing jurisprudence very differently. It leads to disputes between libertarian populist conservatives and reform conservatives over whether government can actually solve--or at least palliate--socioeconomic problems. It causes heartburn over executive assumptions of power in a time of war. The list goes on.
This is in stark contrast with modern progressivism, which has one single lodestone: the oppressor/oppressed frame. (I'm borrowing here from Arnold Kling's three axis model.) In essentially every public policy issue, the challenge for the progressive is to determine which side is the oppressed in a given relationship, and to put one's thumb on the scale in that side's favor, as much as can be done. Everything else--processes, history, reciprocity, the rule of law, etc.--all of those things are merely tools for moving the scales. In the eyes of modern progressive ideology, they have no intrinsic value outside of the broader goal, which is to attack oppression. The only real limiting principle behind the use of these tools is political expediency; in other words, what can be done before inciting a reactionary backlash? If there are internal disagreements among progressives, it's over how to address oppression, not about its (appropriate) centrality to the worldview.
I obviously disagree with this approach to the various tools of power, but it's entirely justifiable, in a sense. Those tools largely emerged from contexts that were deeply and structurally oppressive. Do they have any intrinsic legitimacy, considering their origin? Why should we be restricted from doing what is right because the "rule of law" suggests that we may want to exercise power less arbitrarily? There are past grievances and inequalities that we can rectify; we can't be held up by abstract concepts.
The discrepancy between the conservative frame and the progressive frame result in some stark disagreements. Conservatives see progressives as utterly lawless and Machiavellian. Progressives, in turn, see conservatives as racist and bigoted. In particular, progressives see the use of the various conservative heuristics and principles as mere smokescreens to facilitate a continuation of oppressive circumstances. (And to be fair, sometimes, they are right about this.) Other progressives may see those principles as fundamentally oppressive in their own right.
There are many, many examples of disagreement between right and left where these differences are really apparent. I'll provide four.
Halbig v. Burwell: To a conservative, Halbig is a question of balancing three heuristics: the rule of law, the supremacy of the political branches, and a preference for slow change.
On the one hand, from a certain standpoint, the Halbig case is fairly open and shut. The law defines what constitutes a state, and then explicitly authorizes only those purchases made on state-established exchanges to receive federal subsidies. Moreover, earlier versions of the bill included language that allowed for subsidies for individuals who bought insurance on the federal exchange. As a rule of statutory interpretation, though, the removal of legislative language implies that the intent of the legislature was to exclude the language. Libertarian blogger Megan McArdle summarizes the situation from a right-leaning perspective very cleanly here:
... We can’t rely on memory to tell us what the intentions were, because as this episode has demonstrated, memories are extraordinarily unreliable. And the written record is extremely thin, because -- as best I can tell -- it simply never seriously occurred to any of us that states would fail to set up exchanges.
That does not mean, as some of the law’s supporters have suggested, that we must therefore defer to the Internal Revenue Service's interpretation allowing subsidies to be offered on federal exchanges. The logic of this seems to be that Congress meant to pass a law that worked; this will make the law not work; therefore, this cannot have been congressional intent. As a friend points out, by this logic, Congress could have just written “ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY” for 2,000 pages, and whatever the regulatory agencies did would be fine, because hey, Congress wanted the law to work.
But you cannot run a country that way. Nor do political parties get to take a mulligan and effectively rewrite the law because they screwed up the first time. There are very good reasons that we demand that agencies hew to the law that was passed, not the law as it should have been passed or the law as a hazily shining dream in the hearts and minds of the congressmen who voted for it.
So we have to fall back on our written memory: the legislative history and the text of the law. ...In other words, we rely on text, because other solutions are much, much worse. Good intentions should not--cannot--supplant plain readings of text, because the alternative is arbitrary enforcement of power, violations of the rule of law, and an unpredictable legal regime.
On the other, removing the subsidies from so many recipients would be massively disruptive on a human level (violating "slow change" heuristic), and it would be a fairly aggressive judicial move, violating the heuristic of comity with the other branches.
Meanwhile, for progressives, the decision is much more straightforward: the "oppressed" actor in this instance is the person who got health insurance from PPACA. The "oppressor" is the part of society trying to take it away. Consequentialism reigns supreme here; "sloppy language" in the text and a "common sense" reading of "legislative intent" are all that the progressive Left needs to uphold the law.
Hobby Lobby v. Burwell: One more PPACA example here. This is an easier call for a conservative than Halbig, in my estimation, because most (if not all) of the heuristics point in the same direction. The Hobby Lobby case was about whether a regulation implemented by the executive branch under PPACA could compel Hobby Lobby to provide 20 types of birth control under its insurance plan. Hobby Lobby objected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), saying that it was comfortable providing 16 of the 20, but viewed the additional 4 as abortifacents. Hobby Lobby contended that having to pay for the birth control was an infringement on their religious freedom.
Freedom of conscience points in the direction of religious carve-outs. Moreover, from a rule of law perspective, RFRA is actually quite clear and unambiguous. The law establishes a two-pronged test that the government must meet:
Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person—
(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; andNeither PPACA nor RFRA make a carve-out for the Dictionary Act, which signifies that corporations are legal persons. From this interpretation of the relevant text, the government fails on the "least restrictive means" portion of the test, and the decision is fairly straightforward, not broaching constitutional issues at all.
(2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.
The principle of judicial minimalism serves as one conservative objection to this opinion, but on this issue, essentially, we were looking at two statutes in opposition to one another. Either decision would represent a fairly broad act of judicial activism; either RFRA would be weakened, or PPACA would be weakened.
For progressives, the "oppressed" actor is the woman working for Hobby Lobby who is being deprived of birth control. The "oppressor" is the corporation that doesn't want to provide birth control.
Welfare/Poverty: While some conservatives reject the idea that government should have a role in caring for the poor, conservatism in general, when practiced right, does take an interest in poverty. But a conservative discussion of poverty will drift, almost by definition, towards something that sounds a bit like blaming the victim. Conservatives often blame "culture problems" in "inner-cities" in a way that sounds almost racist. They'll also be screaming about able-bodied men (mostly) refusing to work and living on the largess of government, or "welfare queens" who bilk the system for thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Poverty is one of those areas where several conservative principles align. At one level, the conservative is simply unhappy about the wasted money (preferring low levels of government spending), and believes that poor people should simply "take more responsibility" for themselves.
On a higher level, though, the conservative sees the government handout as actually destructive to the soul. "Work" is seen as one of those things that foster virtue: responsibility, a positive work ethic, etc. Giving people money for not working is seen to sap virtue and poison the society.
Progressives, on the other hand, see the poor as the oppressed, through and through. They are victims of poor circumstances, misfortune, and, most critically, of unequal structures. The only way to address that is with money, preferably federal dollars taken from the upper-income brackets, who are the beneficiaries of this structure (the oppressors).
Border crisis: Ross Douthat's strident, almost angry column captured the underlying debate about the border crisis perfectly.
In defense of going much, much further [on immigration reform], the White House would doubtless cite the need to address the current migrant surge, the House Republicans’ resistance to comprehensive immigration reform and public opinion’s inclination in its favor.
But all three points are spurious. A further amnesty would, if anything, probably incentivize further migration, just as Obama’s previous grant of legal status may well have done. The public’s views on immigration are vaguely pro-legalization — but they’re also malleable, complicated and, amid the border crisis, trending rightward. And in any case we are a republic of laws, in which a House majority that defies public opinion is supposed to be turned out of office, not simply overruled by the executive.
What’s more, given that the Democrats controlled Congress just four years ago and conspicuously failed to pass immigration reform, it’s especially hard to see how Republican intransigence now somehow justifies domestic Caesarism.The president is apparently considering executive action to do what the Congress refuses to do: to provide legal status to a large swath of undocumented immigrants. Conservatives here mostly settle on the rule of law as the governing factor; the system has a separation of powers in place, and presidents do not unilaterally craft domestic policy. More broadly, undocumented immigrants have broken the law and have, in some respects, jumped ahead of people who attempted to follow our (arcane, awful) legal system. Conservatives would find any large-scale executive action on immigration to be an extreme overreach and a violation of the separation of powers.
But again, this sort of executive overreach doesn't seem to phase progressives. What matters is that the oppressed actors--the child refugees--must be saved from their oppressors. To progressives, they are flanked by oppression on two sides: by gang violence in Central America, and by Republicans in the United States.
These are just four examples; I could write of many more. The Israel/Palestine situation is a textbook example of the oppressor/oppressed frame rising above all others. I would also argue that the burgeoning debate about college rape is a situation where women are seen as oppressed and requiring protection, to the point that we are moving in the direction of dispensing with the criminal justice system and the rights of the accused in college justice. There are many other issues where this would be the case. Simply identify the "oppressed" party in a conflict, and that's where progressivism will be.
My contention is that most of our arguments are about the fact that conservatives are using their principles and heuristics, and progressives are focused entirely on structures of oppression.
Part 2 will be a brief post of what I see as the flaws in each approach.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
On the Decline of Summer Jobs
A couple of weeks ago, Danielle Kurtzleben wrote an interesting, short piece over at Vox today about the disappearance of teenager summer jobs. It was a good piece, but I don't think it quite gets at the most important stuff. I want to sketch out two stories, of Jill and Karen.
In 2000, Jill and Karen enter high school. Jill comes from a family of means; her parents both work and make $150,000 per year combined, and she has only one sibling. Jill is smart and has very good grades. Karen enters high school and has very good grades as well. But Karen's father left when she was 3 and her younger sister was an infant. Her mom works 50 hours a week and pulls in $40,000 a year. So they're doing OK, but it's a tough go of it.
As first year high school students, Jill and Karen both excel. Jill goes to a two-week summer camp that specializes in piano. Karen stays home around the house for much of the summer.
Jill and Karen both do very well as sophomores. The following summer, Karen nabs a job at a snack bar at a local public pool. Jill spends three weeks volunteering in another Western Hemisphere country.
Karen wants more money, so she works 15 hours per week at a local McDonalds starting in her junior year. She ups her hours for the summer to 40 hours per week. Jill, on the other hand, takes a SAT prep course to get ready for her SATs.
They're both smart, so they both do well on their SATs. Karen gets a solid 1400. Jill gets a 1440, with the help of that course.
Skip ahead a bit, college rolls around. Karen gets a substantial financial aid package and leverages it to go to a Northeastern liberal arts school, Haverford. Using her experience in the Dominican Republic as the foundation of her essay, Jill gets into Harvard. Both fell in love with All the Presidents' Men and want to be political journalists.
Both continue to excel freshman year as political science majors. Karen comes home to work at McDonalds for the summer, because her savings account is entirely depleted from some of the expenses that emerged while she was in college. (Traveling home, school supplies, eating out with friends a few times). Jill, meanwhile, takes an unpaid internship for a media company in Washington, DC. Her room and board is subsidized by her parents.
Karen decides that she isn't really interested in journalism at this stage, having caught up with her friend Jill and heard about the cutthroat environment in DC. She decides that she'd rather transition into a more practical field. She drops polisci and picks up biology, with the ambition to work for a biological research firm.
Their college careers play out in a similar way; both get good grades (though Jill's are stronger, because political science is easier than biology). Karen grows more comfortable in her bio classes and finishes with a strong 3.75. Jill gets the vaunted 4.0 and is offered a junior position with the Atlantic in Washington. Karen takes a position with a pharmaceutical company as a lab worker.
Both successes, right?
I would say "absolutely, yes." But a big part of that success for Karen was the $15,000-$20,000 or so that she pulled in over the 4-5 years she was working at McDonalds and at that pool snack bar. Those experiences were really important to her development for a few reasons. At the most basic level, the spending money itself represented a vast improvement in her quality of life. She could afford to go to the movies periodically, or to see her favorite bands play, or to meet up with friends for late night half price appetizers, or whatever it is that young adults like to do. But more importantly, they also taught her the importance of work and the need to be realistic about her career goals.
We read this story and say that Jill was lucky to have the advantages she had growing up, and that's certainly a piece of it. But Karen is very lucky too, because she was able to leverage her talent into a potentially productive career. Karen shouldn't have any resentment about the way things turned out.
But in a world without those part time jobs, things are pretty different for Karen:
- Karen is short $15,000 over several years, which translates from "enough money to buy things sometimes" to "basically no money at all."
- Karen probably gets less useful life experience.
- Karen might get depressed by not being able to participate in things.
- Karen might wallow in self-pity and lose her initiative and spark.
Now all of a sudden we have a very different person in Karen.
My point is: when you have these discussions about low-wage jobs for young people, it's Karen's story that matters. Jill doesn't need that job; she'll be successful by taking the unpaid internship path. My fear is that, for all of their inclusive liberalism, most of the journalists we have that take interest in these stories are a lot like Jill, who got into the field because they had the necessary scaffolding from family and relatives along the way. But not everyone does. And those are the people who need these part time jobs.
Full disclosure: I identify more with Karen than Jill here, though I didn't switch to biology. And I don't resent that, even a little. But I sure as heck would be a lot worse off if not for the supermarket jobs I carried through most of my college breaks. (I was working as a cashier during my winter break even as a college senior.)
** I used women here because I try to avoid gender bias in my writing. But part-time jobs may even be more important for men than women, many of whom face a persistent social expectation of paying for dates.
In 2000, Jill and Karen enter high school. Jill comes from a family of means; her parents both work and make $150,000 per year combined, and she has only one sibling. Jill is smart and has very good grades. Karen enters high school and has very good grades as well. But Karen's father left when she was 3 and her younger sister was an infant. Her mom works 50 hours a week and pulls in $40,000 a year. So they're doing OK, but it's a tough go of it.
As first year high school students, Jill and Karen both excel. Jill goes to a two-week summer camp that specializes in piano. Karen stays home around the house for much of the summer.
Jill and Karen both do very well as sophomores. The following summer, Karen nabs a job at a snack bar at a local public pool. Jill spends three weeks volunteering in another Western Hemisphere country.
Karen wants more money, so she works 15 hours per week at a local McDonalds starting in her junior year. She ups her hours for the summer to 40 hours per week. Jill, on the other hand, takes a SAT prep course to get ready for her SATs.
They're both smart, so they both do well on their SATs. Karen gets a solid 1400. Jill gets a 1440, with the help of that course.
Skip ahead a bit, college rolls around. Karen gets a substantial financial aid package and leverages it to go to a Northeastern liberal arts school, Haverford. Using her experience in the Dominican Republic as the foundation of her essay, Jill gets into Harvard. Both fell in love with All the Presidents' Men and want to be political journalists.
Both continue to excel freshman year as political science majors. Karen comes home to work at McDonalds for the summer, because her savings account is entirely depleted from some of the expenses that emerged while she was in college. (Traveling home, school supplies, eating out with friends a few times). Jill, meanwhile, takes an unpaid internship for a media company in Washington, DC. Her room and board is subsidized by her parents.
Karen decides that she isn't really interested in journalism at this stage, having caught up with her friend Jill and heard about the cutthroat environment in DC. She decides that she'd rather transition into a more practical field. She drops polisci and picks up biology, with the ambition to work for a biological research firm.
Their college careers play out in a similar way; both get good grades (though Jill's are stronger, because political science is easier than biology). Karen grows more comfortable in her bio classes and finishes with a strong 3.75. Jill gets the vaunted 4.0 and is offered a junior position with the Atlantic in Washington. Karen takes a position with a pharmaceutical company as a lab worker.
Both successes, right?
I would say "absolutely, yes." But a big part of that success for Karen was the $15,000-$20,000 or so that she pulled in over the 4-5 years she was working at McDonalds and at that pool snack bar. Those experiences were really important to her development for a few reasons. At the most basic level, the spending money itself represented a vast improvement in her quality of life. She could afford to go to the movies periodically, or to see her favorite bands play, or to meet up with friends for late night half price appetizers, or whatever it is that young adults like to do. But more importantly, they also taught her the importance of work and the need to be realistic about her career goals.
We read this story and say that Jill was lucky to have the advantages she had growing up, and that's certainly a piece of it. But Karen is very lucky too, because she was able to leverage her talent into a potentially productive career. Karen shouldn't have any resentment about the way things turned out.
But in a world without those part time jobs, things are pretty different for Karen:
- Karen is short $15,000 over several years, which translates from "enough money to buy things sometimes" to "basically no money at all."
- Karen probably gets less useful life experience.
- Karen might get depressed by not being able to participate in things.
- Karen might wallow in self-pity and lose her initiative and spark.
Now all of a sudden we have a very different person in Karen.
My point is: when you have these discussions about low-wage jobs for young people, it's Karen's story that matters. Jill doesn't need that job; she'll be successful by taking the unpaid internship path. My fear is that, for all of their inclusive liberalism, most of the journalists we have that take interest in these stories are a lot like Jill, who got into the field because they had the necessary scaffolding from family and relatives along the way. But not everyone does. And those are the people who need these part time jobs.
Full disclosure: I identify more with Karen than Jill here, though I didn't switch to biology. And I don't resent that, even a little. But I sure as heck would be a lot worse off if not for the supermarket jobs I carried through most of my college breaks. (I was working as a cashier during my winter break even as a college senior.)
** I used women here because I try to avoid gender bias in my writing. But part-time jobs may even be more important for men than women, many of whom face a persistent social expectation of paying for dates.
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Deconstructing Pro-Life and Pro-Choice
For exceedingly good reasons, it is difficult for men to write about abortion. We should have to be careful what we say; after all, we are not the ones who are ultimately responsible for taking on the biological risks of both pregnancy and its termination. I had some thoughts about the abortion debate, though, and I thought it would be good to get them into a post. Two disclaimers, though:
1. I am trying to write this as an impartial observer, rather than with a preset opinion on the issue. Basically, I want to deconstruct what it is we actually talk about when we talk about and argue about abortion, rather than offering an opinion of my own.
2. I'm not a huge fan of "pro-life" and "pro-choice" as labels, but I will use them here because that is the commonly used term. To change one term would require changing both, for purposes of fairness, and I'm not that interested in getting into a long discussion about language (today).
At its core, I see the abortion debate as being about sanitization and normalization. In other words, pro-choice activists want to remove the problems that could befall someone who chose to have an abortion, while pro-life activists want the decision to be as painful as possible. I see four areas where this is the goal:
- Legal sanitization: Women should not risk prosecution for simply seeking out this medical procedure. They should face no legal sanctions at all for the decision.
- Medical sanitization: Kermit Gosnell and his ilk aside, no pro-choice activist would tell you that they want abortions to be unsafe. I think it is actually fairly safe to say that if there were a broad consensus in favor of abortion, activists would be deeply concerned with the safety conditions of medical facilities. As it is now, this is a secondary priority to access.
- Economic sanitization: No woman should be prevented from getting an abortion simply because she is not economically well off. Costs should not be borne by the poor on this issue.
- Emotional sanitization: Women should not feel emotional guilt over getting abortions; it should just be a medical procedure like any other.
Meanwhile, on the pro-life side, you see varying degrees of resistance to each of these forms of sanitization:
- Legal sanitization: At their most ardent, pro-lifers want to criminalize abortions. They want to prosecute practitioners, and they want to prosecute the women who get abortions. They see this as the only way to ensure that innocent human lives aren't ended.
- Medical sanitization: This is less of an issue on the pro-life side, but some pro-lifers would affirmatively argue that they would rather abortions be phyisically risky, in a sort of Machiavellian, "ends-justify-the-means" position. If abortions are risky, perhaps that will dissuade women from seeking them out.
- Economic sanitization: The pro-life right makes common cause with the libertarian movement here, as both are strongly opposed to taxpayer funding of abortions, either via direct subsidy or via cost-shifting. Because they are bolstered by libertarians and business conservatives, this is the most fertile ground for the pro-lifers.
- Emotional sanitization: To the pro-life right, abortions should be difficult for the women who choose to get them. They should have to feel the guilt of terminating life. With luck, it will deter them from having the abortion at all.
Buffer zones are part of the normalization process. We don't, after all, see people getting harassed as they walk into the hospital for surgery to remove an appendix or a gallbladder. But we do often see it for women getting an abortion. So, how would we make an abortion more like an appendectomy? Well, for one, we have to simulate the conditions of the former, in terms of the lead-up to the operation. This means that we don't want our patients getting harassed by activists. But activists want to harass. So one way to prevent that is to grant the clinics an exemption, of sorts, from activists, via a buffer zone. The law will then assist abortion in the long road to normalization or sanitization.
The larger the buffer zone, the harder it is for activists to make the decision uncomfortable.
It is really emotional sanitization where the rubber meets the road on this issue. Pro-lifers feel this one intensely: if society ever gets to a point where people no longer have emotional guilt over the procedure, then the pro-life cause will have lost. Sure, they can put up roadblocks in other ways, but once the average person stops worrying about the moral consequences of the decision, the other sanitizations happen sort of happen automatically, over time:
- If it's just another medical procedure, how can we tolerate unsafe medical conditions?
- If it's just another medical procedure, how can we possibly prosecute someone for it?
- If it's just another medical procedure, why wouldn't Medicaid or the ACA have to cover it?
So one can see why the pro-life cause takes the buffer zone issue so seriously. The emotional distress caused by abortions is the absolute center of gravity of this issue for the pro-life cause; it is the source from which the cause draws its strength. And pro-choicers, in classic Clausewitzian fashion, are smart to attack it.
1. I am trying to write this as an impartial observer, rather than with a preset opinion on the issue. Basically, I want to deconstruct what it is we actually talk about when we talk about and argue about abortion, rather than offering an opinion of my own.
2. I'm not a huge fan of "pro-life" and "pro-choice" as labels, but I will use them here because that is the commonly used term. To change one term would require changing both, for purposes of fairness, and I'm not that interested in getting into a long discussion about language (today).
At its core, I see the abortion debate as being about sanitization and normalization. In other words, pro-choice activists want to remove the problems that could befall someone who chose to have an abortion, while pro-life activists want the decision to be as painful as possible. I see four areas where this is the goal:
- Legal sanitization: Women should not risk prosecution for simply seeking out this medical procedure. They should face no legal sanctions at all for the decision.
- Medical sanitization: Kermit Gosnell and his ilk aside, no pro-choice activist would tell you that they want abortions to be unsafe. I think it is actually fairly safe to say that if there were a broad consensus in favor of abortion, activists would be deeply concerned with the safety conditions of medical facilities. As it is now, this is a secondary priority to access.
- Economic sanitization: No woman should be prevented from getting an abortion simply because she is not economically well off. Costs should not be borne by the poor on this issue.
- Emotional sanitization: Women should not feel emotional guilt over getting abortions; it should just be a medical procedure like any other.
Meanwhile, on the pro-life side, you see varying degrees of resistance to each of these forms of sanitization:
- Legal sanitization: At their most ardent, pro-lifers want to criminalize abortions. They want to prosecute practitioners, and they want to prosecute the women who get abortions. They see this as the only way to ensure that innocent human lives aren't ended.
- Medical sanitization: This is less of an issue on the pro-life side, but some pro-lifers would affirmatively argue that they would rather abortions be phyisically risky, in a sort of Machiavellian, "ends-justify-the-means" position. If abortions are risky, perhaps that will dissuade women from seeking them out.
- Economic sanitization: The pro-life right makes common cause with the libertarian movement here, as both are strongly opposed to taxpayer funding of abortions, either via direct subsidy or via cost-shifting. Because they are bolstered by libertarians and business conservatives, this is the most fertile ground for the pro-lifers.
- Emotional sanitization: To the pro-life right, abortions should be difficult for the women who choose to get them. They should have to feel the guilt of terminating life. With luck, it will deter them from having the abortion at all.
Buffer zones are part of the normalization process. We don't, after all, see people getting harassed as they walk into the hospital for surgery to remove an appendix or a gallbladder. But we do often see it for women getting an abortion. So, how would we make an abortion more like an appendectomy? Well, for one, we have to simulate the conditions of the former, in terms of the lead-up to the operation. This means that we don't want our patients getting harassed by activists. But activists want to harass. So one way to prevent that is to grant the clinics an exemption, of sorts, from activists, via a buffer zone. The law will then assist abortion in the long road to normalization or sanitization.
The larger the buffer zone, the harder it is for activists to make the decision uncomfortable.
It is really emotional sanitization where the rubber meets the road on this issue. Pro-lifers feel this one intensely: if society ever gets to a point where people no longer have emotional guilt over the procedure, then the pro-life cause will have lost. Sure, they can put up roadblocks in other ways, but once the average person stops worrying about the moral consequences of the decision, the other sanitizations happen sort of happen automatically, over time:
- If it's just another medical procedure, how can we tolerate unsafe medical conditions?
- If it's just another medical procedure, how can we possibly prosecute someone for it?
- If it's just another medical procedure, why wouldn't Medicaid or the ACA have to cover it?
So one can see why the pro-life cause takes the buffer zone issue so seriously. The emotional distress caused by abortions is the absolute center of gravity of this issue for the pro-life cause; it is the source from which the cause draws its strength. And pro-choicers, in classic Clausewitzian fashion, are smart to attack it.
Sunday, June 29, 2014
What should we want in a society?
It's a hard question to answer in a short blog post, much less in a long book, or in a lifetime of writing. But let me take a stab here, in one sentence:
I want a society with incredible economic dynamism, and the social institutions to assist the losers of that dynamism.
What does that look like?
Well, for one, I want labor churn. Sure, people get hired and fired regularly. But private companies have great difficulty in laying people off these days, to the point that many are burdened with so-called zero-marginal product workers. We should make it harder for people who get fired to launch lawsuits.
This is particularly important in public sector employment, where the "no firings" problem is even worse. Public sector unions should be barred from collective bargaining, and hiring/firing should be liberalized there.
On the other side of this, I want so many people to get laid off so often by failing businesses and government agencies that the stigma of getting laid off goes away. In a world where everyone is at great risk of losing their jobs all the time, it becomes virtually impossible to avoid hiring people who have lost jobs. This is more fair than a society that makes it difficult to fire people. Those who do lose their jobs in such a system have great difficulty getting back into the labor force, because of the stigma. Stigma is good sometimes, but not on this.
This great labor churn will encourage risk-taking and will destigmatize personal failure. People learn from their failures. If we can minimize the broad consequences of failure and limit failures to the local, we will be healthier as a society.
In general, our economic institutions should be steered towards continuous innovation. This means that starting a business should be very easy. Regulation should not put in hard employment caps before certain requirements kick in; that just disincentives hiring. In general, regulation should have a light touch, and each new regulation promulgated should have to pass a rigorous cost-benefit calculation. We want food safety inspections; we want drug testing; we want (some) environmental protection. Things like Sarbanes-Oxley need to go away.
The professional guilds, in general, should be fought relentlessly, for their interests are not on the side of innovation. Licensing requirements should be reduced. We should be explicitly open to new models for service delivery: nurse practitioners providing primary care; non-certified teachers exploring new types of education in decentralized settings; computer programs producing legal documents; etc. Some of these will fail, but the successes will push the overall quality of life forward.
I'm asking for a lot here, in terms of the stresses of capitalism. A lot of safe jobs will be destroyed, with successful risk-takers essentially taking some of the money now delegated to public servants.
For social harmony, great labor churn requires a robust safety net for those who are willing to work. Unemployment benefits should be fairly generous. We should even consider temporary wage subsidies for people who get back into the labor force and take lower salaries, because we want to foster an ethos of work.
I want strong community institutions and religious institutions doing the role of keeping people mentally and spiritually sane and healthy. People who are successful should happily offer some of their free time towards those who the modern era leaves behind. I also want politics to play less of a role in daily life as well. It is bad when we self-segregate from people we disagree with. We should be able to disagree without disdain for our opponents. We should also have a high degree of tolerance for dissent.
I want the government to be largely unseen in people's daily lives. We shouldn't have to think about what's going on in Washington when we think about what's going on in Portland, or Peoria, or the Pine Barrens. This implies that presidents should reduce their public schedules. Thomas Jefferson made two public speeches in office: his first inaugural, and his second inaugural. I wouldn't necessarily have the president appear so seldom, but would it be the end of the world if no one saw the next president for a couple of weeks here or there? Do we really need to know the president's tastes in music, or his opinion about local crime stories, or his thoughts on the name of a sports franchise?
Long-term, I want people not to think of the government as being "here to help." It has a lot of things to do. People's personal difficulties should be more often responded to locally than federally, when at all possible.
Lastly, of course, we should move slowly in this direction. These are big changes, and big changes are difficult to accomplish without fostering backlash and resentment.
Lastly, of course, we should move slowly in this direction. These are big changes, and big changes are difficult to accomplish without fostering backlash and resentment.
This is (mildly) Utopian, obviously. But this is the broad outline of what I would like to see in the country. And if you agree with me that this would be a good place to go, you should loathe the recent state of affairs, because it is basically the opposite of my position on every single point.
Saturday, June 21, 2014
On the VA and Organizational Death
Unsurprising news from the Department of Veterans Affairs, courtesy of the Washington Examiner:
But the difference between the public sector and the private sector is not that one is intrinsically inefficient. It's the ever-present threat of organizational death.
Government agencies rarely die. If they do, it was because they were established for an extremely narrow purpose and failed to expand their mission. More often, organizations that were formed for one thing grow and expand their authorities and missions. (The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are archetypal examples on the international stage.)
Meanwhile, in the private sector, just like in government, Facebook, General Motors, Sears and most other private companies can deceive themselves with bad metrics, or saddle themselves with destructive and incompetent employees, or simply fail to fulfill the needs of their customers. But the difference is simple: barring government protection, those companies will die if they fail. Organizational death serves two purposes:
1. It puts the fear of God into managers, who are more likely to endeavor to fix their issues.
2. It cleans the economy of less efficient business models.
In a well-functioning private economy, bad business models die, and good business models live. There is a great deal of churn as this process unfolds: people lose jobs, start-ups form and create new jobs. When it's working right, more jobs are created than destroyed. Companies that are struggling have two options: either they fix their problems, or they die.
But the public economy is different. Bad models do not die. In fact, they often attract more money, at the behest of well-intentioned bureaucrats and politicians, who argue that more money can fix the issues. They may be right sometimes. But the incentives don't change, and the fear of organizational death never arrives.
One of our public policy goals should be to try to transition as much public service delivery as we can to arenas where the fear of organizational death can reign. That implies more decentralization and much less of a role for a big government. Instead, it seems to me that the recent policy regime has been to move more of the private economy into a world where organizational death is not an option. (See: General Motors.) That's a real shame.
Postscript: Using this framework, one can argue that the US military, which is highly effective at certain things while still being incredibly bureaucratic, succeeds because the fear of organizational death is supplanted by the fear of actual death, which is a far stronger motivation.
Every top manager of the Department of Veterans Affairs received a positive performance evaluation for the past four years, and 78 percent got a bonus in 2013, despite a string of patient deaths and falsification of records related to patient wait times, according to congressional testimony Friday.
Agency executives write their own performance evaluations, which seem to receive only cursory reviews from their supervisors, several committee members said in questioning the VA’s top personnel officer.
While everyone was deemed at least “fully successful” in meeting their performance goals, 57 percent of top managers were rated to have exceeded expectations and another 21 percent were found to be “outstanding,” according to testimony from Gina Farrisee, assistant secretary for human resources and administration at VA.A very common retort to conservative criticisms of public sector inefficiency is the production of valid private sector counterexamples. And this is a perfectly reasonable retort to any argument simply that government is inherently inefficient. Large organizations, to an extent, all generate a degree of drag. Firing bad employees is difficult for private sector companies, too, what with the lengths that companies go to prevent lawsuits from former employees claiming wrongful termination. So liberals, on this point, are entirely correct: private organizations and public organizations all can be highly inefficient.
But the difference between the public sector and the private sector is not that one is intrinsically inefficient. It's the ever-present threat of organizational death.
Government agencies rarely die. If they do, it was because they were established for an extremely narrow purpose and failed to expand their mission. More often, organizations that were formed for one thing grow and expand their authorities and missions. (The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are archetypal examples on the international stage.)
Meanwhile, in the private sector, just like in government, Facebook, General Motors, Sears and most other private companies can deceive themselves with bad metrics, or saddle themselves with destructive and incompetent employees, or simply fail to fulfill the needs of their customers. But the difference is simple: barring government protection, those companies will die if they fail. Organizational death serves two purposes:
1. It puts the fear of God into managers, who are more likely to endeavor to fix their issues.
2. It cleans the economy of less efficient business models.
In a well-functioning private economy, bad business models die, and good business models live. There is a great deal of churn as this process unfolds: people lose jobs, start-ups form and create new jobs. When it's working right, more jobs are created than destroyed. Companies that are struggling have two options: either they fix their problems, or they die.
But the public economy is different. Bad models do not die. In fact, they often attract more money, at the behest of well-intentioned bureaucrats and politicians, who argue that more money can fix the issues. They may be right sometimes. But the incentives don't change, and the fear of organizational death never arrives.
One of our public policy goals should be to try to transition as much public service delivery as we can to arenas where the fear of organizational death can reign. That implies more decentralization and much less of a role for a big government. Instead, it seems to me that the recent policy regime has been to move more of the private economy into a world where organizational death is not an option. (See: General Motors.) That's a real shame.
Postscript: Using this framework, one can argue that the US military, which is highly effective at certain things while still being incredibly bureaucratic, succeeds because the fear of organizational death is supplanted by the fear of actual death, which is a far stronger motivation.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Scattered Thoughts on Higher Education
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"The good news is more young people are earning college degrees than ever before. That's something we should be proud of, and that's something we should celebrate. But more of them are graduating with debt. Despite everything we're doing, we're still seeing too big a debt load on too many young people." - President Barack Obama
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"The sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a f***ing education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" - Will Hunt, in Goodwill Hunting, to a Harvard graduate student who was embarrassing his friend by spouting off grad school history cliches in an attempt to look intelligent.
*****************************************President Obama has made focusing on the cost and value of higher education a significant part of his domestic program. He has spoken out on numerous occasions about the need for increasing federal grants and loans to lower-income students. He is in the process of implementing a federally-backed ratings system of schools. And he has spoken frequently about how important college is. The quote at the top of the post is yet another pronouncement from him extolling the increase in college graduations.
All of those things on their own seem like good ideas. But I tend to think it's missing the point a bit. The higher education system in this country is too rigid and too expensive, and will only be fixed by starting to break it apart.
I will generalize a bit from my own college experience. Feel free to take or leave whatever you want, but these are the facts as I see them.
- I majored in history in college, and had a good experience, in which I learned a great deal about a variety of subjects. I had at least 6 excellent history professors, all of whom taught interesting, stimulating classes.
- I read a ton of very good books in college.
- I worked harder than just about any history major I knew and rarely attended parties.
- The average GPA is incredibly high these days in American undergraduate universities. One does not need to work nearly as hard as I did to get a great GPA.
- My GPA and the name of my liberal arts school have been the most valuable things I have taken into my professional life.
- I had a significant scholarship and need-based aid. I graduated with approximately $60,000 in debt in 2008.
- Of the non-history courses I took, I look back fondly on exactly 5 of them: a linguistics class, a class on constitutional law, a class on race and politics, an educational psychology class, and a music appreciation class.
- The best paper I ever wrote as an undergraduate, I wrote as a sophomore.
- I learned more about formulating a persuasive argument from my own independent reading of books, blogs, and their comment threads than in school.
My conclusions from those facts: as a liberal arts major, I spent at least 4 semesters longer in college than I really needed in terms of my own intellectual development. This cost me roughly $35,000 in debt. The cost was worth it to graduate, but only because the GPA and diploma have made me more employable than I would have otherwise been. If not for the signaling value of the GPA and diploma, I probably could have gotten the exact same intrinsic benefit for much, much cheaper. This would have required the following:
- A long list of books to read based on areas of interest.
- A vibrant online community of motivated learners with whom to exchange ideas, perhaps moderated by history "buffs" or enthusiasts.
- One or two semesters of a "post-high school" program entirely focused on critical reading, writing, and analysis. (Or, alternatively, cover those areas more rigorously in high school.)
- A la carte access to courses at a major university, or at least similar online offerings.
Those four things would have gotten me 90 percent of the way to the intrinsic benefit I derived from school, at, at the absolute most, half cost. I suspect it would have been much, much lower in cost. Note that this is not about puffing up my own ego. It's about reflecting on where I could have learned the most, or grown the most intellectually. I would have been better off personally spending two additional years in the real world, learning there, reading there, and asking questions there. Instead, I spent an additional two years in the higher education bubble, and paid for the privilege to do so.
The issue in higher education remains that we conflate intrinsic benefit with a signaling benefit. But it goes beyond that. The current model takes our most intelligent, broad-based thinkers (in the liberal arts, at least), and then encourages them relentlessly to focus on an extremely narrow intellectual area for 5-7 years, in order to pursue a limited number of jobs in a field that just produces more of the same. It's a tremendous, systematic squandering of human capital.
This is not a particularly conservative line of thinking from me, but my point is that we should be thinking a lot about ways to get at the intrinsic benefits of higher education at a lower cost than what we are doing today. Decentralize this process and let a hundred flowers bloom.
Some potential objections, and my rejoinders:
1. It's different in the sciences! Absolutely. But the need for longer educational programs in more complicated fields can be addressed by more on-the-job training, or employer-sponsored education. In other words, it makes sense, on some level, for Intel, Google, and Microsoft to be paying for top-notch professors of computer science and engineering than it does for Stanford and Princeton. It would also make sense to move some of the current federal outlays on need-based aid ($50 billion+, according to the New America Foundation) into direct research expenditures, instead of counting on a Rube Goldberg-style web of cross-subsidization.
2. There is a real social benefit to college! Balderdash. There's a real social benefit to interacting with other people in all sorts of settings. Such a benefit does not require geographic isolation, class affinity, or age similarities. In fact, limiting interactions to only fellow students is part of why inequality is growing in America. Colleges become areas of sorting, and people who aren't part of it have a major disadvantage. (See Charles Murray's Coming Apart for more on this.) And even without the sorting problem, this is not a good enough reason to crush an entire generation with six figures of debt.
3. What about professional degrees? Law school? Medical school? Business school? All could be dealt with on more of an apprentice model, supplemented by a la carte coursework. Medical school is already halfway there, at least, with its residency requirements. And blowing up the professional schools would do wonders to fight the cartelization of those fields.
4. This is unrealistic! Probably true. But if we must continue to pour tax dollars into this field, we need to think more about what it is we're actually doing with the money. The current model is defective.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
On Social and Legal Requirements and Expectations
I've been thinking a lot about social expectations and requirements over the last few days. Sometimes, it is unclear what we should be able to expect of other people, versus what we should, as individuals or society, require of people. While we can talk about these things, we each have to make those decisions ourselves, based on our own values and worldviews. There is, though, a distinction between expectations and requirements.
I thought it would be useful to lay out a heuristic that I have been using to keep that distinction clear. I argue that there are five levels of requirements and expectations, with every person getting to set their own standards for what conduct falls into each level.*** For this, I will use a fairly prosaic example, with Jane as my protagonist:
Level 1: Whether Jane does or doesn't do something is entirely up to Jane.
Much of life exists in Level 1. This morning, for example, at 11 AM, I chose to practice playing guitar. This was me acting of my own volition and was a perfectly reasonable thing to do with my time at that time in the day. So, let's say that Jane did the same: she practiced guitar at 11 AM.
Level 2: Jane should (or shouldn't) do something because it is good to do (or not), but people shouldn't hold it against her if she does not do it.
Let's say that instead of practicing guitar at 11 AM, she starts practicing at 9 AM. That's a bit early, but it's not unconscionable if her neighbors happen to overhear her. It would have been more considerate of her not to play that early, but it is defensible.
Level 3: We should be able to expect that Jane will do something because it is the right thing to do.
This time, she is playing guitar at 8 AM. Now we're getting to the point where she's being genuinely inconsiderate. Her neighbors may have a grievance at this stage. But Jane has rights, being that she is at home, so we are loath to criticize openly.
Level 4: We should be able to apply social and economic pressure on Jane to cajole her to act a certain way, or to punish her for failing to act a certain way.
Unless she were playing very, very quietly, playing guitar at 3 AM one time would qualify as something that would warrant social sanction from her neighbors. They should be able to criticize her conduct vociferously and openly in an effort to get her to stop.
Level 5: The state should exert legal pressure on Jane to act a certain way.
This time, she is playing guitar at 3 AM, but she has also cranked the amp all the way up to 11 and has the windows open. Now her conduct has reached the point of public nuisance/disturbance, and it would be acceptable for local police (officers of "the state") to exercise punitive measures to get her to stop playing.
Some examples that I was thinking of:
Thus it is always and forever a balancing act, between an overly puritanical**, critical society and an overly permissive and lenient one.
**I use "puritanical" in both the religious sense and in a secular sense, where much personal conduct and speech can be deemed inappropriate by social elites. Likewise, in an overly permissive society, certain offensive conduct, like discriminatory remarks, would receive social acceptance rather than social opprobrium.
***Catholic aside here: when I started thinking about this, my mind drifted to Luke 6:37. I am basically providing a cheat-sheet of how to judge people (which is problematic!). Here is how I reconcile the two:
I thought it would be useful to lay out a heuristic that I have been using to keep that distinction clear. I argue that there are five levels of requirements and expectations, with every person getting to set their own standards for what conduct falls into each level.*** For this, I will use a fairly prosaic example, with Jane as my protagonist:
Level 1: Whether Jane does or doesn't do something is entirely up to Jane.
Much of life exists in Level 1. This morning, for example, at 11 AM, I chose to practice playing guitar. This was me acting of my own volition and was a perfectly reasonable thing to do with my time at that time in the day. So, let's say that Jane did the same: she practiced guitar at 11 AM.
Level 2: Jane should (or shouldn't) do something because it is good to do (or not), but people shouldn't hold it against her if she does not do it.
Let's say that instead of practicing guitar at 11 AM, she starts practicing at 9 AM. That's a bit early, but it's not unconscionable if her neighbors happen to overhear her. It would have been more considerate of her not to play that early, but it is defensible.
Level 3: We should be able to expect that Jane will do something because it is the right thing to do.
This time, she is playing guitar at 8 AM. Now we're getting to the point where she's being genuinely inconsiderate. Her neighbors may have a grievance at this stage. But Jane has rights, being that she is at home, so we are loath to criticize openly.
Level 4: We should be able to apply social and economic pressure on Jane to cajole her to act a certain way, or to punish her for failing to act a certain way.
Unless she were playing very, very quietly, playing guitar at 3 AM one time would qualify as something that would warrant social sanction from her neighbors. They should be able to criticize her conduct vociferously and openly in an effort to get her to stop.
Level 5: The state should exert legal pressure on Jane to act a certain way.
This time, she is playing guitar at 3 AM, but she has also cranked the amp all the way up to 11 and has the windows open. Now her conduct has reached the point of public nuisance/disturbance, and it would be acceptable for local police (officers of "the state") to exercise punitive measures to get her to stop playing.
Some examples that I was thinking of:
- Paying attention to politics (or not paying attention to politics) is Level 1.
- Listening to and engaging with people you disagree with is Level 2.
- Argumentum ad hominem is Level 3.
- Discriminatory remarks are Level 4.
- Hate crimes, especially violent ones, are Level 5.
Thus it is always and forever a balancing act, between an overly puritanical**, critical society and an overly permissive and lenient one.
**I use "puritanical" in both the religious sense and in a secular sense, where much personal conduct and speech can be deemed inappropriate by social elites. Likewise, in an overly permissive society, certain offensive conduct, like discriminatory remarks, would receive social acceptance rather than social opprobrium.
***Catholic aside here: when I started thinking about this, my mind drifted to Luke 6:37. I am basically providing a cheat-sheet of how to judge people (which is problematic!). Here is how I reconcile the two:
- I try to keep as much conduct in Level 2 as I possibly can.
- We can accept that social stigma is sometimes necessary, but we must always be compassionate about the individuals who are acting a certain way. We never know the full story about another human's motivation. Basically, "hate the sin and love the sinner" here. Don't use the levels to criticize other people or to self-aggrandize; merely use them to see how we should evaluate the conduct at hand...
- ... which is the only way to handle this, because as Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry puts it, we are all sinners.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
A Fictionalized Dialogue about the Future, c. 1985
After reading Josh Barro's interesting piece about the execrable Cliven Bundy, my mind drifted off to the past. The year is 1985. Two people sit in a bar: Randy and Devon. They chat about politics. (I offer no endorsement of either one of our barflies; both people in the conversation annoy me a bit, when I read it over.) Let's listen in.
Randy: Life is great! Ronald Reagan just smoked your guy. Everyone knows that big government liberalism doesn't work; all we have to do is bring out the spectre of Carter, and everything is great for us. Conservatism has won!
Devon: Oh, please. Reagan's just running up the deficit and stimulating economic growth. He's being a Keynesian, except he's just wasting money on charades like Star Wars. And it's all on the backs of the poor.
Randy: You're just ticked off because America has once and for all rejected the European path. We're self-reliant, independent, patriotic! Thank God for Margaret Thatcher. Otherwise, Europe would be a total sinkhole.
Devon: Your man is an idiot. Did you see him trying to steal "Born in the USA" for his campaign? That's a negative song about America and the treatment of veterans, not a jingoistic anthem!
Randy: Come on, now. Springsteen's politics may be liberal, but he understands us, you know?
Devon: Us?
Randy: You know, real Americans!
Devon: No, I don't.
Randy: You'll never get it.
Devon: I must say that I'm pretty optimistic, though. Let me tell you about the future.
Randy: Go ahead. It's morning in America!
Devon: Roughly 14 percent of the electorate this time around wasn't white. Eighty-five percent of those non-white voters voted for Mondale! And Mondale was a disaster of a candidate.
Randy: Yeah, so?
Devon: Well, what if the non-white share of the electorate increases? And I hear your boy Reagan is going to support an amnesty bill that gives three million illegal immigrants citizenship. Most of them aren't white.
Randy: Don't be a racist. Republicans can win non-white voters, too. They just need to see that our policies are best for everyone.
Devon: Oh sure, maybe they'll say that when times are good. But what about when things get rough again? You know they will someday. Capitalism eats its own.
Randy: Marxist.
Devon: I'm being serious! Capitalism, for all of its perks, has booms and busts. Someday we'll have another bust.
Randy: I don't know, maybe.
Devon: I expect quite a bit of immigration over the next couple of decades. Some of them will become like you, certainly: wealthy, uncaring, and boorish.
Randy: Thank you! I'm not really wealthy, though. I'm middle class.
Devon: Sure. But a lot of others are going to be struggling, and they're going to want a helping hand. Do you think Republicans are going to provide it? Your party is already incredibly white. And people get afraid of difference in bad times.
Randy: America is all about individual achievement and entrepreneurship. Anyone who comes here gets that.
Devon: Not really. They're coming here to make a better life for their families, but most aren't particularly ideological. If anything they'll be coming from countries that don't have the American cultural tradition of limited government. So certain conservative ideas might be a little... foreign, for them?
Randy: Say whatever you want to say to make yourself feel better. Limited government has won here, and that's a fact.
Devon: This is the truth: in 28 years, you're going to nominate a handsome, religious, brilliant man for the presidency. He's going to focus a big portion of his campaign on private entrepreneurship and individualism. He's going to argue about how the incumbent is fundamentally hostile to those things because of his intense promotion of the role of the federal government in virtually all spheres of economic activity. He'll mostly be right about that argument. And your guy is going to get destroyed.
Randy: Come on!
Devon: I swear to you, that is the future. I won't agree with your guy, but his critique of the incumbent will be part of an honest argument that he will lose, quite badly, on Election Day.
Randy: You're serious?
Devon: Completely.
Randy: Let's say I accept your prophesizing here. What percentage of the electorate is going to be non-white in 2012?
Devon: 28 percent.
Randy: What percentage of those will the incumbent win?
Devon: 76 percent.
Randy: Wow.
Devon: Yep.
A long pause follows.
Randy: How do Republicans stop this?
Devon: I'm not going to tell you that! The future is bright.
Randy: I guess the first thing we have to do is stop immigration, or at least slow it down! Can't let people change what makes America great.
Devon: What are you implying?
Randy: I really don't mind immigration. But they have to assimilate to our way of life! We shouldn't just let anyone in here. We should protect our borders from this sort of fundamental change in our country!
Devon: A lot of immigrants are in dire poverty and horrible conditions. We can make their lives immeasurably better just by letting them into the country!
Randy: I see your point. Our country is magnanimous and generous, after all. But I'm really worried about your story now! What would you do if you were a Republican strategist?
Devon: Screw that, I want this outcome.
Randy: Come on! Just for shits and giggles, what would you do?
Devon: OK, fine. Your party needs to make a concerted outreach to those voters now. Broaden your message. Denounce racism wherever you see it. Stop being so aggressively white all the time, and really reach out to minority communities to show that you care. Don't lecture them; listen to them. You have a guy, Jack Kemp, who focuses on the inner-cities sometimes. Listen to what he has to say about that. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a Democrat, but a lot of what he says is useful to you, too. It wasn't that long ago that Republicans were winning a sizable chunk of black voters. Jackie Robinson was a Republican. You can get back to that, at least a little, but you have to make an effort!
A long pause follows.
Randy: Nah, I don't think so. And you're full of shit about all of this. But we should really oppose immigration, just in case.
Devon: Sigh. I guess that's a perfectly rational response to this future. But I assure you, it won't work. We will be relentlessly demonizing you as heartless for wanting to restrict immigration and break up immigrant families, and we're at least a little bit right about that.
Randy: Whatever. What really matters is that Reagan's in charge now, and the Soviets are running scared.
Devon: Get used to the Cold War; the Soviet Union isn't going away anytime soon.
Randy: You're probably right.
Silence. Another long pause.
Randy: Hey, do you watch Cheers?
Randy: Life is great! Ronald Reagan just smoked your guy. Everyone knows that big government liberalism doesn't work; all we have to do is bring out the spectre of Carter, and everything is great for us. Conservatism has won!
Devon: Oh, please. Reagan's just running up the deficit and stimulating economic growth. He's being a Keynesian, except he's just wasting money on charades like Star Wars. And it's all on the backs of the poor.
Randy: You're just ticked off because America has once and for all rejected the European path. We're self-reliant, independent, patriotic! Thank God for Margaret Thatcher. Otherwise, Europe would be a total sinkhole.
Devon: Your man is an idiot. Did you see him trying to steal "Born in the USA" for his campaign? That's a negative song about America and the treatment of veterans, not a jingoistic anthem!
Randy: Come on, now. Springsteen's politics may be liberal, but he understands us, you know?
Devon: Us?
Randy: You know, real Americans!
Devon: No, I don't.
Randy: You'll never get it.
Devon: I must say that I'm pretty optimistic, though. Let me tell you about the future.
Randy: Go ahead. It's morning in America!
Devon: Roughly 14 percent of the electorate this time around wasn't white. Eighty-five percent of those non-white voters voted for Mondale! And Mondale was a disaster of a candidate.
Randy: Yeah, so?
Devon: Well, what if the non-white share of the electorate increases? And I hear your boy Reagan is going to support an amnesty bill that gives three million illegal immigrants citizenship. Most of them aren't white.
Randy: Don't be a racist. Republicans can win non-white voters, too. They just need to see that our policies are best for everyone.
Devon: Oh sure, maybe they'll say that when times are good. But what about when things get rough again? You know they will someday. Capitalism eats its own.
Randy: Marxist.
Devon: I'm being serious! Capitalism, for all of its perks, has booms and busts. Someday we'll have another bust.
Randy: I don't know, maybe.
Devon: I expect quite a bit of immigration over the next couple of decades. Some of them will become like you, certainly: wealthy, uncaring, and boorish.
Randy: Thank you! I'm not really wealthy, though. I'm middle class.
Devon: Sure. But a lot of others are going to be struggling, and they're going to want a helping hand. Do you think Republicans are going to provide it? Your party is already incredibly white. And people get afraid of difference in bad times.
Randy: America is all about individual achievement and entrepreneurship. Anyone who comes here gets that.
Devon: Not really. They're coming here to make a better life for their families, but most aren't particularly ideological. If anything they'll be coming from countries that don't have the American cultural tradition of limited government. So certain conservative ideas might be a little... foreign, for them?
Randy: Say whatever you want to say to make yourself feel better. Limited government has won here, and that's a fact.
Devon: This is the truth: in 28 years, you're going to nominate a handsome, religious, brilliant man for the presidency. He's going to focus a big portion of his campaign on private entrepreneurship and individualism. He's going to argue about how the incumbent is fundamentally hostile to those things because of his intense promotion of the role of the federal government in virtually all spheres of economic activity. He'll mostly be right about that argument. And your guy is going to get destroyed.
Randy: Come on!
Devon: I swear to you, that is the future. I won't agree with your guy, but his critique of the incumbent will be part of an honest argument that he will lose, quite badly, on Election Day.
Randy: You're serious?
Devon: Completely.
Randy: Let's say I accept your prophesizing here. What percentage of the electorate is going to be non-white in 2012?
Devon: 28 percent.
Randy: What percentage of those will the incumbent win?
Devon: 76 percent.
Randy: Wow.
Devon: Yep.
A long pause follows.
Randy: How do Republicans stop this?
Devon: I'm not going to tell you that! The future is bright.
Randy: I guess the first thing we have to do is stop immigration, or at least slow it down! Can't let people change what makes America great.
Devon: What are you implying?
Randy: I really don't mind immigration. But they have to assimilate to our way of life! We shouldn't just let anyone in here. We should protect our borders from this sort of fundamental change in our country!
Devon: A lot of immigrants are in dire poverty and horrible conditions. We can make their lives immeasurably better just by letting them into the country!
Randy: I see your point. Our country is magnanimous and generous, after all. But I'm really worried about your story now! What would you do if you were a Republican strategist?
Devon: Screw that, I want this outcome.
Randy: Come on! Just for shits and giggles, what would you do?
Devon: OK, fine. Your party needs to make a concerted outreach to those voters now. Broaden your message. Denounce racism wherever you see it. Stop being so aggressively white all the time, and really reach out to minority communities to show that you care. Don't lecture them; listen to them. You have a guy, Jack Kemp, who focuses on the inner-cities sometimes. Listen to what he has to say about that. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a Democrat, but a lot of what he says is useful to you, too. It wasn't that long ago that Republicans were winning a sizable chunk of black voters. Jackie Robinson was a Republican. You can get back to that, at least a little, but you have to make an effort!
A long pause follows.
Randy: Nah, I don't think so. And you're full of shit about all of this. But we should really oppose immigration, just in case.
Devon: Sigh. I guess that's a perfectly rational response to this future. But I assure you, it won't work. We will be relentlessly demonizing you as heartless for wanting to restrict immigration and break up immigrant families, and we're at least a little bit right about that.
Randy: Whatever. What really matters is that Reagan's in charge now, and the Soviets are running scared.
Devon: Get used to the Cold War; the Soviet Union isn't going away anytime soon.
Randy: You're probably right.
Silence. Another long pause.
Randy: Hey, do you watch Cheers?
Sunday, April 20, 2014
On that Men's Rights Reddit Survey
When I was in 7th grade, my English class had an assignment: look into our ancestry and try to find an instance, in our lives or family history, where our families were oppressed or disadvantaged because of stereotypes, race, or ethnicity. The assignment explicitly excluded Italian stereotype discussions because the teacher did not want to deal with half a class worth of discussions of mafia stereotypes, which was certainly defensible in Central Jersey.
I vaguely remember doing something on Danish people, as my mom's side of the family is part Danish. I don't recall what the nature of the grievance was, but I do recall that my great-grandfather from Denmark had dealt with some issues. In fact, I do not remember very much about the assignment or my project, other than that I loathed the assignment.
Fast forward a decade or so and I was in graduate school for history. Much of the discussions hinged on a series of issues or prisms of analysis regarding dynamics of power in empire and colonialism, and, usually, how they related to race, class, and gender. Arnold Kling would describe these discussions as fastened tightly to the oppressor/oppressed axis of the "three axes" of politics.*** Kling identifies two other potential axes: one, he dubs the freedom/coercion axis, and associates it with political libertarians. The third, he dubs the civilization/barbarism axis, and associates it with political conservatives.
This focus on the oppressed appeared in almost every book I read, every article I read, and every discussion: Discussions invariably moved to Gramsci, or Marx, or Foucault, or at the very least, garden variety blanket condemnations for Western colonialism and activity.
Of course, those condemnations are probably appropriate, considering the horrifying conduct of Europeans in the nineteenth century, and Americans into the twentieth. Indeed, we still see the aftereffects of those decisions everyday. My contention, though, is after four decades of relentless research, pedagogy, and argumentation, the oppressor/oppressed axis has essentially come to dominate intellectual discourse. The "freedom/coercion" axis is essentially a fringe world in academia, sometimes pursued by leading lights like Milton Friedman, but usually left to contrarians. The "civilization/barbarism" axis is systematically delegitimized in most polite, intellectual conversation; even highly-credentialed, intelligent professors like Harvey Mansfield are shunned by much of the academic establishment. This is unfortunate, and I think its absence shines through our entire academic and educational culture. With this in mind, that odd assignment in my 7th grade English class makes perfect sense: it was just another way to explore the oppressor/oppressed axis. I really don't believe that people think that they are using the axis; I just think that the oppressor/oppressed means of analysis has crowded out all other forms, so that one doesn't even see that there are alternatives.
Which brings me to an interesting survey performed recently about the Men's Rights Community on Reddit.com. Fully 90 percent of the users of the Men’s Rights subreddits were 20 years of age or younger. Now, young people may well be overrepresented on Reddit as a proportion of the population, but still, only about one-third of Redditers overall were younger than 25 as of 2012.
Let's accept that the data here is of questionable value, and certainly can't be given the sheen of validated social science. But there is something here: overwhelmingly, the participants in Reddit's community for Men's Rights are very young, aggrieved men. Why? My working hypothesis right now is that these young men have spent their entire lives in the educational establishment; few have any real world experience beyond school. And schools focus relentlessly on grievance, via this universal application of the oppressor/oppressed axis.
Educators, textbooks, etc. mean to instill young people with a notion about privilege, the idea that people have unequal advantages that they often cannot see from their own perspective. In theory, at least, educating people about privilege is a way to make them see their own advantages, and then work to keep the needs of those without privilege in mind as they go through their lives.
But not everyone likes the idea of thinking of themselves as privileged. And a certain subset of men look around themselves and can't see their privilege at all; all they see is boys doing worse in school, boys getting punished for misbehavior more regularly, and boys being relentlessly hounded about how they are the perpetrators of sexual assault. In my judgment, theirs is a distorted view of reality. But it persists.
So those men or boys look to the world around them. They see the discourse of "rights" and "privilege" and "oppression," and they then see themselves on the disadvantaged side of those relationships. Some gravitate to these online communities, where they make common cause with people who have reached the same conclusions about the world around them.
As people get further away from school and gain world real experience, they are probably more apt to see other ways of looking at the world, and then gravitate away from the simplistic, distorted "men's rights" frame. But young men are (apparently) vulnerable to this way of thinking.
The men's rights movement is a textbook example of the misapplication of the oppressor/oppressed axis. But its young practitioners probably don't have any better tools. They see themselves as disadvantaged by the system, and the only language they have available to explain that is the language of oppression. I see it as a classic example of the old aphorism: when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The oppressor/oppressed axis is the hammer. The unfortunate state of these young men is the nail. We need to do better by these students.
This is an area where an infusion of the civilized/barbarism axis would be a better corrective. A narrow view of the axis would view it as suggesting that certain people (us!) are civilized and that others (them!) are not. But that would be an incomplete interpretation. Certain conduct is better described as civilized than certain people. The language of shared obligation essentially falls into the realm of the civilized/barbarism axis, because the construction is, on some level, "The civilized do this thing," or "The civilized have this responsibility."
Even if we don't use those terms, the subtext is about fulfilling one's duty, and how failing to fulfill one's duty is a shortcoming. Instead of a relentless focus on oppression, an added focus on social obligation, community, and responsibility would give young people a different prism for viewing the world around them. Instead of dividing the world with a line, separating the oppressed and the oppressors, we could explore the idea of what we owe one another as people in general.
Discussions of the disadvantaged should start with the notion that we owe the disadvantaged our assistance because it is the right and decent thing to do in a "civilized society," rather than starting from the point that the disadvantaged are disadvantaged because of the oppression of a dominant group. This may not be as intellectually satisfying, but it is more likely to gain adherents than to foster resentment and backlash.
Bottom line: we spend so much time on the issue of oppression that we see it as the sine qua non of scholarly thought and analysis. Other potential axes, or prisms for evaluation, are discarded. And we see that intellectual poverty in things like the men's rights movement.
*** Kling wrote an excellent essay on his Three Axes Model for the Kindle. I recommend it heartily.
I vaguely remember doing something on Danish people, as my mom's side of the family is part Danish. I don't recall what the nature of the grievance was, but I do recall that my great-grandfather from Denmark had dealt with some issues. In fact, I do not remember very much about the assignment or my project, other than that I loathed the assignment.
Fast forward a decade or so and I was in graduate school for history. Much of the discussions hinged on a series of issues or prisms of analysis regarding dynamics of power in empire and colonialism, and, usually, how they related to race, class, and gender. Arnold Kling would describe these discussions as fastened tightly to the oppressor/oppressed axis of the "three axes" of politics.*** Kling identifies two other potential axes: one, he dubs the freedom/coercion axis, and associates it with political libertarians. The third, he dubs the civilization/barbarism axis, and associates it with political conservatives.
This focus on the oppressed appeared in almost every book I read, every article I read, and every discussion: Discussions invariably moved to Gramsci, or Marx, or Foucault, or at the very least, garden variety blanket condemnations for Western colonialism and activity.
Of course, those condemnations are probably appropriate, considering the horrifying conduct of Europeans in the nineteenth century, and Americans into the twentieth. Indeed, we still see the aftereffects of those decisions everyday. My contention, though, is after four decades of relentless research, pedagogy, and argumentation, the oppressor/oppressed axis has essentially come to dominate intellectual discourse. The "freedom/coercion" axis is essentially a fringe world in academia, sometimes pursued by leading lights like Milton Friedman, but usually left to contrarians. The "civilization/barbarism" axis is systematically delegitimized in most polite, intellectual conversation; even highly-credentialed, intelligent professors like Harvey Mansfield are shunned by much of the academic establishment. This is unfortunate, and I think its absence shines through our entire academic and educational culture. With this in mind, that odd assignment in my 7th grade English class makes perfect sense: it was just another way to explore the oppressor/oppressed axis. I really don't believe that people think that they are using the axis; I just think that the oppressor/oppressed means of analysis has crowded out all other forms, so that one doesn't even see that there are alternatives.
Which brings me to an interesting survey performed recently about the Men's Rights Community on Reddit.com. Fully 90 percent of the users of the Men’s Rights subreddits were 20 years of age or younger. Now, young people may well be overrepresented on Reddit as a proportion of the population, but still, only about one-third of Redditers overall were younger than 25 as of 2012.
Let's accept that the data here is of questionable value, and certainly can't be given the sheen of validated social science. But there is something here: overwhelmingly, the participants in Reddit's community for Men's Rights are very young, aggrieved men. Why? My working hypothesis right now is that these young men have spent their entire lives in the educational establishment; few have any real world experience beyond school. And schools focus relentlessly on grievance, via this universal application of the oppressor/oppressed axis.
Educators, textbooks, etc. mean to instill young people with a notion about privilege, the idea that people have unequal advantages that they often cannot see from their own perspective. In theory, at least, educating people about privilege is a way to make them see their own advantages, and then work to keep the needs of those without privilege in mind as they go through their lives.
But not everyone likes the idea of thinking of themselves as privileged. And a certain subset of men look around themselves and can't see their privilege at all; all they see is boys doing worse in school, boys getting punished for misbehavior more regularly, and boys being relentlessly hounded about how they are the perpetrators of sexual assault. In my judgment, theirs is a distorted view of reality. But it persists.
So those men or boys look to the world around them. They see the discourse of "rights" and "privilege" and "oppression," and they then see themselves on the disadvantaged side of those relationships. Some gravitate to these online communities, where they make common cause with people who have reached the same conclusions about the world around them.
As people get further away from school and gain world real experience, they are probably more apt to see other ways of looking at the world, and then gravitate away from the simplistic, distorted "men's rights" frame. But young men are (apparently) vulnerable to this way of thinking.
The men's rights movement is a textbook example of the misapplication of the oppressor/oppressed axis. But its young practitioners probably don't have any better tools. They see themselves as disadvantaged by the system, and the only language they have available to explain that is the language of oppression. I see it as a classic example of the old aphorism: when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The oppressor/oppressed axis is the hammer. The unfortunate state of these young men is the nail. We need to do better by these students.
This is an area where an infusion of the civilized/barbarism axis would be a better corrective. A narrow view of the axis would view it as suggesting that certain people (us!) are civilized and that others (them!) are not. But that would be an incomplete interpretation. Certain conduct is better described as civilized than certain people. The language of shared obligation essentially falls into the realm of the civilized/barbarism axis, because the construction is, on some level, "The civilized do this thing," or "The civilized have this responsibility."
Even if we don't use those terms, the subtext is about fulfilling one's duty, and how failing to fulfill one's duty is a shortcoming. Instead of a relentless focus on oppression, an added focus on social obligation, community, and responsibility would give young people a different prism for viewing the world around them. Instead of dividing the world with a line, separating the oppressed and the oppressors, we could explore the idea of what we owe one another as people in general.
Discussions of the disadvantaged should start with the notion that we owe the disadvantaged our assistance because it is the right and decent thing to do in a "civilized society," rather than starting from the point that the disadvantaged are disadvantaged because of the oppression of a dominant group. This may not be as intellectually satisfying, but it is more likely to gain adherents than to foster resentment and backlash.
Bottom line: we spend so much time on the issue of oppression that we see it as the sine qua non of scholarly thought and analysis. Other potential axes, or prisms for evaluation, are discarded. And we see that intellectual poverty in things like the men's rights movement.
*** Kling wrote an excellent essay on his Three Axes Model for the Kindle. I recommend it heartily.
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