Value Competition

The Debunking of Liberalism and Conservatism--Sources

Who in law, political science, or elsewhere is now doing high-level work that contends that modern liberalism and conservatism do not embody a consistent adherence to a coherent set of principles?  One answer is the cls work of the 1970s and 1980s--Unger's Knowledge and Politics is one locus classicus--that focused on the contradictions of liberalism as an overarching system, as opposed to an ideology competing with conservatism.  But that work, though it continues (see Schlag, below), is neither being pursued with the vigor it once was nor is it focused on conservatism as well as liberalism.   Another answer is work that suggests ideology is detemined by genetics, group interest, or some other factor; what is not much in evidence, though, is work that combines such assertions of other causes with attention to the putative principles of liberalism and conservatism. 

Some relevant sources:

J.M. Balkin, Ideological Drift, Conn. L. Rev. 1993--change in left-right valence of legal principles over time;

J.M. Balkin, Deconstruction's Legal Career, Cardozo L. Rev. 2005;

Pierre Schlag, The Empty Circles of Liberal Justification, Mich. L. Rev. 1997

Duncan Kennedy, Review of P. Schlag, The Enchantment of Reason, U. Miami l. Rev. 2003;

Peter Berkowitz, edited Hoover volumes, Varieties of Progressivism and Varieties of Conservatism;

Conserving, Peter Berkowitz--review of Allitt on tensions within conservatism;

Constitutional Conservatism, Berkowitz, Policy Review--reacting to 2008 election; 

European and US Left, Berkowitz;

Justice Breyer's Mandarin Liberty, 73 U. Chi. L. Rev. 759, Ken Kersch;

Adam Benforado and Jon Hanson, Emory L. Rev. 2008--situationism associated with academia, etc., dispositionism with other sectors--situationism and liberalism, dispositionism and conservatism.

Hanson cites--See Jack Block & Jeanne H. Block, Nursery School Personality and Political Orientation Two Decades Later, 40 J. Res. Personality 734 (2006). Young children, who in adulthood came to identify themselves as conservative, were viewed by their nursery school teachers as uncomfortable with uncertainty, rigid, fearful, inhibited, easily offended and quick to feel victimized, and over-controlled. Id. at 740-41. As the authors readily concede, "The study is too limited by itself to admit of extensive efforts at rationalization of the dynamics between personality and political persuasion[;]" the findings, however, do suggest the potential operation of personality predispositions "dynamically interplaying with ... experiential factors such as parenting chronicities and the larger cultural surround" in forming later ideological identity. Id. at 747.

from Hanson--Neurocognitive research may eventually shed some light on this difficult causation question, as illustrated by a recent experiment by David Amodio and his collaborators, including Jost. David M. Amodio, John T. Jost, Sarah L. Master & Cindy M. Yee, Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism, 10 Nature Neuroscience 1246 (2007). The experiment, though small in scale, revealed that during a simple task, the brain activity related to processing conflicts was markedly different for liberals and conservatives. Id. at 1247. Subjects completed a survey (modeled on one earlier developed by Jost) evaluating their political attitudes. Id. Subjects then completed a simple Go/No-Go task on a computer. Id. The frequency of the Go stimulus that appeared on the computer screen created a habitual response in the subject. Id. When subjects were presented with a No-Go stimulus they were supposed to withhold a response. Id. at 1246-47. In the latter cases, the brain activity of the subjects, recorded for each stimulus, showed that conflict-related neural activity was significantly higher in liberal subjects. Id. at 1247. Liberal subjects also showed greater accuracy in withholding responses when appropriate. Id. Overall, the experiment suggests, but only vaguely, that liberals and conservatives have different cognitive styles when faced with a conflicting or ambiguous situation. Id.. Liberals are more likely to adjust their response to the conflict whereas conservatives are more likely to maintain a fixed response. Id.

John Alford and John Hibbing--political ideology and genetics--twin studies--also APSR article with same authors

Based partly on the above search, my sense is that from the 1950s to the present there has been a livelier debate within modern American conservatism over the internal consistency of conservatism than there has been within modern American liberalism over the internal consistency of liberalism.  That raises an interesting issue over whether liberalism is indeed more internally consistent than conservatism, which seems implausible if the two ideologies have a yin-yang, A-~A relationship.  Alternatively, a lesser level of concern about inconsistency within the liberal camp could be the result of the existence of a significant class of people (professors, government employees, employed professionals) for whom modern liberal ideology reflects group interests well, while the greater level of concern within the conservative camp reflects the lack of a comparably significant class for whom a fusion of cultural traditionalism and economic libertarianism reflects group interests.

 

Neuroscience and Ideology--Sources

Jost, Amodio, and Phelps on ideology and psychology;

Blank on the policy implications of neuroscience;

Lieberman review essay on neuroscience and political cognition;

Cunningham faculty profile--reference to 2005 paper

Review Essay on Ideology--Sources

Teixeira and Abramowitz on the decline of the white working class and the rise of a mass upper middle class;

2008 exit poll data broken down by education, income, etc.; 

2007 census data on educational attainment;

Bartels criticizing Frank: 

OpenLeft post by John Emerson with sources;

OpenLeft tables on 2008 election;

Teixeira and Abramowitz edited volume on demography and ideology.

Dilemmas of a Value Competition Believer

Going further into introspection with this post...

As a believer in a value competition analysis that says social value is generated by the competition of liberal and conservative ideologies that are both inconsistent on the individualism/communitarianism and pro-elite/ pro-majority dimensions, what ideology if any should I adopt?

Given my cultural identity--signaled by my beard and turtleneck--my comparative advantage lies on the left side of the spectrum.  People on the left are comfortable with my cultural characteristics, and I with theirs, in a way that I'm less sure of for people on the right, like the Republican Assemblyman and ex-high school principal I had an exchange with in Trenton the other day.  So by those lights I should be a centrist liberal, trying to help the Democrats turn in a more sensible direction on how to run the government and non-profits effectively and damping down my wilder forms of cultural liberalism, in keeping with a value competition analysis under which one should not be simply a tribune of an elite that favors both economic and cultural flexibility.  Or if I want to go the other way and join the conservatives I should cut my hair and beard, get some good suits, ditch the turtlenecks, and finally figure out how to keep my glasses clean and tuck in my shirt-tail properly...that last point I suspect might present me with an insuperable obstacle to changing my cultural identity, though...

But here's the rub: As a believer in a particular kind of value competition analysis, I believe that the system functions better when important cultural identities like CEO, bearded/casual professor, African-American, and so on, are split as close as possible to 50-50 rather than belonging to one side or the other.  So while I'm entirely comfortable with identifying as an eclectic utilitarian because doing so in my judgment accords with my comparative advantage as an individual, I'm not at all comfortable with identifying as a centrist liberal for the same reason.   My brand of value competition analysis tells me it' would be a good thing for my society to have more people like me be conservatives.  That collective case doesn't necessarily override the individual case for me identifying with the right side of the left.  But it creates a dilemma that makes the question of my optimal political ideology quite unlike the question of whether to espouse utilitarianism or deontology.

Administrative Tenure

This blog is about the analysis of values, including left and right values, and is not intended to be a forum for the expression of my own or other people's left and right values.  Accordingly, I'm a bit reluctant to include the following post, which consists of my testimony in Trenton last Thursday against tenure for principals, assistant superintendents, and other public school administrators.  The post does hook into the one I did a little while ago on how both parties have supporters (unions for the the Democrats, religious exclusivists for the Republicans) who are useful for the party and arguably the polity in enhancing voice for lower status people, but are also detrimental in policy terms.  Also, this post and my general interest in the administrative tenure issue could be regarded as an outgrowth or application of the value competition program--of course, the causality might actually run the other way, with my experiences with the school board, the Community Coalition on Race, etc. driving the program.

Since I find the left-of-center case for job security for bosses much more elusive than the left-of-center case for security for lower-ranking, lower-status workers, I think the administrative tenure issue is one on which liberals and Democrats as well as conservatives and Republicans may see a need for reform.  I'll be working with other South Orange-Maplewood school board members to push this issue forward--it'll be interesting to see what if any success we have. 

Why New Jersey Should End Administrative Tenure

[remarks prepared for General Assembly Education Committee hearing 12-3-09]

Wayne Eastman

South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education

430 Meeker Street

South Orange, NJ 07079    

weastman@business.rutgers.edu 

(973) 353-1001     

Good afternoon.  I’m Wayne Eastman, a member of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education, elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2009.  My background, briefly: I’m a professor in the Supply Chain Management and Marketing Sciences Department at Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick who was formerly a practicing lawyer in New York and New Jersey and who teaches business law and business ethics.  As acting director in 2007 of the Prudential Business Ethics Center at Rutgers, I organized a Rutgers Ethics Initiative on ethics in New Jersey government that led to a report covering pay-to-play, dual office-holding, and other matters.   Today I am speaking on behalf of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education in one respect, in that we have agreed as a body that administrative tenure as it now exists in New Jersey public schools should not be continued, and have established a Lobbying Committee to advance that position and other positions we hold collectively.  On the specifics of what I’m saying, though, I note that the words and arguments I’m using are my own rather than a collective position of the Board.

I want to begin by expressing my appreciation to Assemblyman Cryan.  I and three other members of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education—our President, Mark Gleason, the chair of our Lobbying Committee, Rowland Bennett, and another member of that committee, Beth Daugherty, along with our lawyer, Jessica deKoninck--had an excellent meeting back in mid-October in which the four of us on the Board expressed our opposition to administrative tenure.  The Asemblyman expressed strong interest in the topic and told us he would hold a hearing in the form of a round-table discussion in the lame-duck session.   A few weeks later, though, the Governor’s race turned out rather differently from what Assemblyman Cryan said he expected.  I would not have blamed the Assemblyman or anyone else if he had regarded his October statement to us as having an implicit contingency clause that his favored candidate for Governor win, given the understandable depth of his commitment to that candidate.  But Assemblyman Cryan went ahead with this hearing, and for that I strongly thank him.  I also want to express optimism about what I think this hearing can lead to.  Much as some issues--such as teacher tenure—are difficult or impossible to get a consensus on across partisan and ideological lines as of December 2009, I believe that the issue of ending administrative tenure while at the same time providing reasonable protection for current and new educational administrators is one that a Democratic legislature and a Republican governor can come together on right now.  The people of New Jersey need to see that their newly-elected leaders can work together to advance accountability and effectiveness in public education.  There is no better issue for that than administrative tenure, and I regard Assemblyman Cryan’s decision to proceed with this hearing as a highly hopeful sign that we can move forward together on this issue in New Jersey soon. 

Now, on to the substance of my remarks.  I have three main points to make.  First, based on my on-the-ground experience as a school board member for four years, I believe that administrative tenure is not a minor or abstract issue.  Rather, I believe it is a very serious obstacle to accountability and effectiveness in public education.  Second, administrative tenure is fundamentally contrary to the logic of having administrators be accountable to a school district’s top manager, the school superintendent. Finally, the tide of reform in the states and nationally is running against administrative tenure.  In the remainder of my written statement I will expand on these three points.  In the last part, I will then respond to three concerns about the abolition of administrative tenure and explain how abolition can be done in a way that is fair to current and new administrators.  At the end, I include a few links that may be helpful. 

I.  Administrative Tenure Is a Big Problem

Based on my experience on the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education, administrative tenure is a central obstacle to a superintendent running a school district sensibly, not a minor or peripheral issue.  What I’m going to say in this section is somewhat cryptic, given that both our able board attorney and my own background as a lawyer counsel me to avoid unnecessary references to pending or potential litigation or to individuals.   In making these remarks, I also want to stress that I regard my district’s administrators, past and present, as a highly skilled and dedicated group.

Now, the blunt part of what I have to say.  Many hours of board discussion and many thousands of dollars have been wasted in our district because of administrative tenure and litigation it spawned.  Without administrative tenure, it is possible that litigation would have occurred anyway, given that government employees have—and in my view should have—due process rights.  But without administrative tenure, any such litigation would have merely been a nuisance suit, rather than the significant drain on time and money that we have actually experienced.

In my experience, the requirement that a superintendent and a board make a decision within a limited number of years—frequently less than three because of shorter clocks for administrators with certain kinds of previous experience--on whether someone should have what amounts to a lifetime job as a high-level manager like a principal or assistant superintendent is a terrible one.  Even when nothing goes dramatically wrong, tenure plays a central, deforming role in high-level personnel decisions. I have found myself supporting tenure for principals where I thought that there was very limited evidence on progress in student achievement and building a strong school culture.  Even in cases where I thought there was good evidence of progress, I have never felt confident in what amounts to tying the hands of future superintendents.  The problem goes beyond the length of the tenure clock.  What the superintendent and the board know about a candidate is necessarily time-bound.  To ask a superintendent and a board to proscribe the judgment of all future superintendents and boards by granting tenure to an administrator is to ask them to engage in a fool’s mission.

On the other side of the ledger, I have also found myself troubled by my support for denying administrative tenure.  Absent tenure for administrators, superintendents and boards would be more willing to renew third year candidates who should not be given tenure, but who might prove to be very good if renewed for a year or another contractual period of time.  I’m not claiming that the main reason to end administrative tenure is to avoid firing administrators—but I do believe that some firings of third year administrators that now occur can and should be avoided by ending administrative tenure.

II.  Imagine if Christie (or Corzine) Couldn’t Change His Cabinet…

    As a result of an earlier reform, superintendents in New Jersey no longer gain tenure.  But all other administrators do, including the principals responsible for buildings and the central administrators who work closely with the superintendent.  Let me speak bluntly again.  For important administrators like assistant superintendents and principals not to be accountable to the superintendent they report to is absurd, judging not only by the standards of the business world but also by the standards that apply at the top of our state and federal government.  Anyone who proposed that the top staff who implement the vision of a CEO or the cabinet of a Governor or a President should have iron-clad job security would be considered completely out of bounds—but that is in fact the system we have in New Jersey public education. 

    At this point, I want to address the comparison between K-12 education in New Jersey and higher education, the sector in which I work at Rutgers.  There are major parallels between the two sectors.  As one who has tenure myself as a professor and whose wife is a tenured English teacher in a New Jersey high school, I feel those parallels keenly, all the more so because I am also an educational administrator myself as vice chair of my department.  Unlike my faculty position, my administrative position has no job security.  I have a one-year contract and otherwise serve at the pleasure of my chair and my Dean, as do other faculty and non-faculty administrators at Rutgers, who likewise are covered by contracts of differing lengths.  In other words, higher education in New Jersey already has the situation that should apply as well to K-12 education.

I see significant arguments for as well as against the faculty tenure that I and my wife have.  But I see no good reason for administrators whose job is to be accountable to a chair or a Dean or a superintendent to have tenure that makes it next to impossible for that chair or Dean or superintendent to remove them.  Whatever the ultimate merits of teacher or professor tenure, there is a serious case for it that there simply is not for educational administrators, who need to be accountable to the superintendent or dean who hires and evaluates them.

III.  The Trend is Against Administrative Tenure

Administrative tenure as it exists in New Jersey has been a minority position for a long time.  A 1983 survey by the National Association of Secondary School Principals found that only seventeen states had full-scale principal tenure, with the remainder having lesser protection or no principal tenure at all.  Since then, there has been a definite trend toward eliminating administrative tenure.  The best information I have been able to locate on the current situation comes from a document from the National Conference of State Legislatures, the relevant parts of which I have included in the sources section at the end of this statement, and which suggests that New Jersey is one of a small number of states with full-scale administrative tenure.  We may even have the dubious distinction of being the state with the most iron-clad system of administrative tenure, given that New York, which the NCSL document highlights as being similar to New Jersey, has a more limited mandate than we do, in that it does not include assistant superintendents and has been limited further in New York City. 

We should eliminate administrative tenure because it is the right thing to do, not just because we’re worried that Arne Duncan’s next speech or the latest federal regulations for Race to the Top eligibility will include administrative tenure here along with laws in California and New York prohibiting the use of student performance data in teacher tenure decisions as examples of reactionary, unjustifiable state laws.  But that concern about being out of step is another good reason for us to move away from administrative tenure in New Jersey.

IV.  But What About…?

    There are a number of concerns that can be raised about the elimination of administrative tenure.  In this section, I give responses to what I believe are the three biggest legitimate concerns and suggest ways in which the elimination of tenure can be accomplished in a way that is fair to current and new administrators.

Q. Isn’t it unfair to take away tenure from administrators who have already gained it?

A. Given the equity issue raised by the question, it makes sense for the elimination of tenure to be prospective rather than retroactive, which is to my knowledge the path followed in states that have eliminated tenure for administrators.  (Also, I would recommend that a provision be added to the legislation to make it clear that is is lawful for districts to offer a package in which a current administrator can voluntarily agree to forgo his or her tenure rights.  Further, it would be reasonable to include a provision stating that nothing in the legislation shall be construed to deny the right of an administrator under state public employment law and the state and federal constitutions as interpreted by the courts to due process in connection with a termination of employment.)

Q.    Isn’t it unduly harsh to fire an administrator who is not up to par as an administrator but was a perfectly good teacher before becoming an administrator?

A. Opinions on this may differ, since one can reasonably say that a teacher who chooses to become an administrator should simply accept the additional risk, just as a teacher does in giving up tenure when moving from one district to another.  In the interest of reaching agreement on legislation and given my own Rutgers experience, I personally believe it would be fine to have an teacher turned administrator retain tenure that he or she possesses in a given district as a teacher.

Q.    Aren’t the problems with corruption and politicization in some New Jersey school districts a good reason to retain administrative tenure?

A.   The overall answer to the question is no.  The reality that some school districts in New Jersey have past and present difficulties with corruption, poor personnel management, and failure to focus on student learning is not a good reason to hold back progress in the large majority of districts that are run professionally.  Instead, a better approach would be to recognize that problems exist in certain districts and to deal with that specific issue.  One reasonable way to do that would be a provision that requires school districts below a certain administratively determined level of performance on the state’s QSAC accountability monitoring to have their terminations of administrators with more than three years experience reviewed by the State Department of Education. 

V.  Conclusion

    The fact that the elected school board of South Orange and Maplewood, two of the deepest blue suburbs in New Jersey, supports the elimination of administrative tenure as we do is significant.  On some issues, my towns aren’t a bellwether.  But on the issue of administrative tenure, we are a very important indicator.  If we are against it, what part of New Jersey is for it?  Republican suburbs or rural areas in Morris County, Sussex County, Monmouth County, and Ocean County?  I think not.  I believe school boards and voters in those solidly Republican areas are with us in rock-ribbed Democratic South Orange-Maplewood in supporting change.  To the extent there are special issues in certain school districts, especially in our cities, they can be dealt with through enhanced state monitoring for these districts, as I’ve suggested.  Across party lines, let’s move forward in New Jersey to join the strong national majority of states and the strong national trend by eliminating administrative tenure and enhancing accountability in our schools.

VI.  Some sources:

1.   The National Association of Secondary School Principals (2000) and (1983): Although their material has some tilt toward the pro-tenure position (for instance, it repeats the frequently made but misleading claim that tenure simply guarantees a hearing and due process, which ignores the reality, clear in my experience as a board member, that it is in fact extremely difficult to remove a subpar tenured public school employee in New Jersey), it also includes an acknowledgement that many principals favor ending principal tenure, and has useful information on trends and the law:

http://www.principals.org/s_nassp/bin.asp?CID=680&DID=50140&DOC=FILE.PDF (2000)

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED238149&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED238149 (1983)

2.  Education Week: The title of this 1998 article--“Tenured Principals: An Endangered Species”--indicates its theme:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1998/03/04/25tenure.h17.html

3.  KPMG Peat Marwick report for North Carolina General Assembly: This 1992 report to the legislature advocates elimination of administrative tenure in North Carolina and notes various ways in which administrators without tenure can be protected from unfair discharge:

http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/GPAC/issue/e/GPACEDU071.pdf

4.  National Conference of State Legislatures document: This undated document, which appears to be a draft, contains information on state tenure laws, which is reproduced below:

 

 

 

7700 East First Place, Denver, Colorado, 80230, 303-364-7700

 

 

PRINCIPAL TENURE

 

 

States that grant tenure to principals:

New Jersey

NJSA 18A: 28-5

http://lis.njleg.state.nj.us/cgi-bin/om_isapi.dll?clientID=478476&Depth=2&depth=2&expandheadings=on&headingswithhits=on&hitsperheading=on&infobase=statutes.nfo&record={7D76}&softpage=Doc_Frame_PG42

 

New York

Education Law § 3012 (1) (b) Tenure: certain school districts.

http://public.leginfo.state.ny.us/menugetf.cgi?COMMONQUERY=LAWS

 

Utah

Utah Code Title 53A, Chapter 8, Utah Orderly School Termination Procedures Act

http://le.utah.gov/~code/TITLE53A/53A08.htm

Tenure for school employees is provided by school district policies or an agreement with an employee association. The Utah Orderly School Termination Act specifies procedures for the termination of tenured employees who have worked a minimum of three years for their employer. Termination Act procedures apply to licensed principals. In Utah, a principal can be hired without having an administrative license, but the person is an at-will employee.

 

States with some protection for principals:

Hawaii - Principals are union employees and enjoy all of the civil service privileges due to their bargaining unit. 

 

Nebraska - Principals are under the same continuing contracts as teachers. Under the group of statutes that are labeled "Tenure" in the codified statutes, teachers and administrators (other than superintendents) are protected from termination after their first 3 years in a district by continuing contracts and may generally only be removed for just cause as defined in the statutes or as part of a reduction in force.

 

Nevada - The Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) do not use the term "tenure" with regard to teacher and administrator employment.  Instead the terms "probationary" and "postprobationary" are used.  These are defined in NRS 391.311.  The following sections provide for employment of teachers and administrators. 

• NRS 391.3197 provides that a probationary employee is someone in his or her first 2 years of employment with the school district.  Receiving notice of employment for the third year entitles the individual to be a postprobationary employee. 
• NRS 391.3196 provides that postprobationary employees have an expectation of reemployment. 
• NRS 391.3197 provides that an administrator who has completed his or her probationary period and is promoted to the position of principal must serve an additional probationary year as a principal.  After that, he or she is a postprobationary employee in the position of principal.
• NRS 391.110 provides for the employment of superintendents.  An initial contract term may not exceed four years.  The term of any subsequent employment may be for any length of time. 
• NRS 391.312  lists grounds for suspension, demotion, dismissal and refusal to reemploy teachers and administrators.

http://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-391.html#NRS391Sec311

 

North Dakota - Principals are under continuing contracts, which includes due process.

http://www.legis.nd.gov/cencode/t151c15.pdf

 

West Virginia - Does not refer to it as "tenure", principals are awarded a  "continuing contract" under West Virginia Code §18A-2-2 after their  first three years of employment.  If you look at that code section,  although this statute refers to "teachers", §18A-1-1 says that   "professional educator" is synonymous with "teacher" and includes  "principals".  The statutes are not clear on the rights of probationary verses continuing contract employees. However, a legislative staff member, after looking at several grievance decisions and supreme  court cases, says that it appears that continuing contract employees are given more rights in terms of the reasons for which they can be dismissed, use  of seniority when a reduction in force occurs, and being placed on a  preferred recall list.  A probationary employee simply can be let go by not renewing his or her contract. 

 

Two Kinds of Multi-Racial Alliance

One prominent kind of multi-racial alliance sees itself as advocating for racial inclusion and equity and sees its opposition as a group or groups who are indifferent to or hostile to those values.  Another, less prominent kind of multi-racial alliance sees itself as working for values that cross racial lines and sees another side within the firm or community as also working for different values that also cross racial lines.  Both types of alliance can succeed.  The morally-charged single alliance approach has advantages when the objective is the dismantling of a political system of racial exclusion, such as legally segregated schools in the 1950s American South.  The second, two alliance approach has advantages in building a long-term politics in firms and communities that is not polarized along racial lines.  Compared to a racially polarized politics in which members of racial minorities have only the alternative of supporting their side or sitting out, the integration of different races into both sides gives members of racial minorities the power to support either side.   Having that power is beneficial both to racial minorities and to the community or firm as a whole.

Obama's Peace Prize

The following op-ed uses Obama's recent Nobel Prize to combine value competition ideas about good things arising from the competition of self-interested pols with classical/neoclassical economic ideas about good things arising from the competition of self-interested businesspeople:

Robbed by Oslo:

 

Obama and Other Peacemakers Whose Successes Were Overlooked

 

Wayne Eastman

Rutgers Business School—Newark and New Brunswick

1 Washington Park

Newark, NJ 07102

weastman@business.rutgers.edu

(973) 353-1001

 

    With its airy recognition of Barack Obama for potential rather than accomplishment--"for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples"--the Norwegian Nobel Committee did the President and the cause of peacemaking a disservice, but not for the reason that most critics of the award have suggested.

    In fact, Obama would have been a reasonable if controversial choice for a peace prize based on accomplishment, given his substantial contributions as an opposition politician and then as President to the winding down of the war in Iraq.

As an anti-war Democratic candidate in 2007, Obama took the position that the U.S. needed to withdraw large numbers of troops from Iraq relatively quickly.  At the time, that position was highly controversial though popular among many Democratic primary voters, and was opposed by Hillary Clinton, John McCain and other Republican candidates, and the Bush administration.   Two years later, Obama’s position has become conventional wisdom, and has gone along with a major reduction in violence and considerable political progress in Iraq. 

    It is true that the situation in Iraq was and is highly complex, and that figures in addition to Obama--David Petraeus with his military ingenuity and Nouri al-Maliki with his outreach beyond his political base are just two who come to mind—can also be credited with major roles in the reduction in bloodshed and increase in order.  Still, a Nobel award that recognized Obama “for his central role as a democratic opposition politician and then as President in fostering a resolution to a long-running war in Iraq” would have been sound in a way that the actual award citation was not.

Although the oddity of Obama’s being recognized by the Nobel Committee for the wrong reason makes his situation unusual, he stands in a long line of figures in politics and in business over the decades who have made major contributions to peace but have been unrecognized by Oslo, with its chronic bias toward noble gestures and diplomatic agreements.

Unless they engage in dramatic diplomatic deals, hardheaded democratic politicians like Obama who care about winning elections and who often wage war as well as peace are poorly represented in the roster of Nobel Peace Prize winners.  For example, Boris Yeltsin, whose decision to end Russian control over Ukraine and the other parts of the Soviet empire was intertwined with his own electoral calculations as President of Russia and who later went to war in Chechnya, did not win a Nobel.

Given the Nobel Committee’s tilt against practical politicians, Yeltsin’s failure to win is not surprising.  But considering that it was Yeltsin—not Mikhail Gorbachev, who wanted to preserve the Soviet Union—who ended the coercive Russian empire, the Nobel Committee wound up snubbing one of the century’s major contributors to peace. 

Another politician who didn’t fit the Nobel Committee’s preferences for idealism and diplomacy but who made a major peacemaking contribution was Charles de Gaulle.  Given his deep identification with the French military, French nationalism, and French party politics, along with his often undiplomatic diplomacy, de Gaulle did not fit the Nobel Committee’s criteria well at all.  But as the man who led his nation out of a brutal, futile, and very difficult to end war in Algeria in the early 1960s, he would have been a deserving winner.   

Hardheaded businesspeople who worry about profits are even more poorly represented among Nobel Peace Prize winners than hardheaded democratic politicians who worry about elections.  But business leaders who have knit the world together economically have likely done far more for international peace in the past several decades than many actual Nobel winners have. 

For example, Sony founder Akio Morita and long-time Toyota leader Eiji Toyoda would have been worthy Peace Prize recipients, given their roles in transforming a nation that had been convulsed by violent nationalism into a model of how to succeed through economic rather than military strength.  Neither Toyoda’s contributions to a just-in-time inventory system that has encouraged businesses to integrate their operations with those of other businesses around the world nor Morita’s contributions to innovations in electronics that in turn have contributed to a global popular culture fit into the familiar Nobel categories of idealism and diplomacy.   But if the right test is how much a life’s work has moved a nation and the world away from the ways of war to ways of peace, both men would have been good choices.

Given that consequences are tricky to evaluate and that hardheaded democratic politicians and businesspeople have multiple motives and are not saints, recognizing them for contributions to peace will always be controversial.   If Sam Walton had won a Nobel Peace Prize for his central role in knitting together the Chinese and American economies and in doing so enhancing the prospects for world peace, the award would have been simultaneously reasonable and open to reasonable criticism from the many critics of Walton and Wal-Mart.

   Likewise, it would undoubtedly have been controversial if Obama had been recognized in 2009 for his contributions over the last two years to reduced violence in Iraq, given the complexity of the situation there and the close connection between Obama’s actions and his political ambitions.  But such recognition would have been much more sensible than what the Nobel Committee actually did.

There have been all too many Nobels awarded over the years for high-minded but less than effective idealism and ultimately futile diplomatic deals.   Progress toward world peace has depended and will depend in large part on hardheaded, calculating actions by imperfect, unsaintly leaders like Boris Yeltsin, Charles de Gaulle, Akio Morita, Eiji Toyoda, and Sam Walton.  Perhaps in his acceptance speech in Oslo, Barack Obama can employ his formidable gift for explaining to tell us how he is proud to be one of those leaders, rather than the plaster saint that the Nobel Committee takes him for.

Black on the Block

While in Chicago recently for business ethics, marketing, and management conferences, I bought Mary Pattillo's book on the black middle class in North Kenmore-Oakland, a neighborhood in Chicago north of South Kenmore (home of Barack Obama) and Hyde Park.  There's lots of good stuff in the book--for example, she makes the correct point that middle-class blacks like Bill Cosby who criticize the behavior of poor blacks are showing their engagement with the idea of a black community.  Inspired by the book, I took the South Shore train to Hyde Park and walked to Kenmore.  I wasn't allowed to walk down Obama's block, which had barricades and police cars at both ends--no problem, though a middle-way approach like turning in all your stuff at a kiosk and then getting it back after completing the stroll down the block and back might better accommodate tourist interests as well as neighborhood and security interests.  Anyway, a few blocks away from chez Obama, North Kenmore, with plenty of vacant lots along with some beautiful old homes like Mary Pattillo's (although she'd moved, as I found out when I rang the bell) and some snazzy condos, was open for strollers.  I bought a decent taco at a decent price from a deli, Atlantic Foods, which I saw from the pictures on the wall--Malcolm X, other black luminaries, owner with aldermen and other politicians, community service recognition awards--was owned by a Sam Joudeh, who appeared to be from the Middle East.   That led me to think about how important or not the strong sense of racial identification/obligation by black middle class members that Pattillo discusses, and the different but also powerful sense of racial identification by poor blacks, are in encouraging or discouraging middle class blacks' from involvement in business in black neighborhoods.   My sense is that it's an important factor in deterring black-owned businesses in places like North Kenwood.  As a member of the black middle class running a deli in the ghetto, I believe you are externally and also internally or psychically vulnerable to poor blacks, like the young men standing around in front of the deli or the woman on Drexel Boulevard who told me she'd just failed a drug test and asked me to look after her stuff for a minute, asking you or hitting you up for money for good or bad reasons in a way that a non-black like Mr. Joudeh is not.  

"Auction a $20 Bill" or "Give Me $5"?

Rom and Ori Brafman's Sway is a light, Gladwellesque traverse through the greatest hits of behavioral economics and social psychology, ranging from prospect theory to groupthink to the fundamental attribution error of allowing a label to overcome reality: http://www.swaybook.com/

Chapter Two, "The Swamp of Commitment," uses business school professor  Max Bazerman's "auction a $20 bill" exercise as a parallel to LBJ's decision-making in Vietnam and, more briefly, to W's in Iraq.  In the auction exercise, a class of students is given the chance to buy the professor's $20 for as little as $1.  The nasty catch is that the second place bidder as well as the first place bidder has to pay the professor the value of his or her highest bid.  The result obtained by Professor Bazerman is that two bidders, neither of whom wants to lose, both wind up bidding more, sometimes much more, than $20.  The conclusion suggested by the brothers Brafman is that Vietnam and Iraq embody the auction exercise in real life, with US leaders initially hoping to win cheaply and then sucked in ever deeper by an irrational although behaviorally compelling unwillingness to let sunk costs be bygones and withdraw.  Here--as is usually the case in their book--the Brafmans uphold rational choice; by expounding people's deviations from RC in practice, they hope to encourage rationality.

Okay...but here, as is often the case with RC arguments, some cautionary notes are in order.  The world is full of models of how people deviate from RC, and it is often very hard to tell which if any model applies.  Further, it is sometimes very tricky to tell what the normative implications of an RC model are, assuming its applicability. 

Instead of the "auction $20" exercise, imagine a "Give me $5" exercise: Student A is given $20.  Student B can ask Student A for $5 on behalf of Students B-Z.  If Student A agrees, Student B must promise on behalf of the rest of the class that A will not be asked for more.  This promise is not binding on B or the other students, though, as the professor explains.  If it is broken by any of students B-Z asking A for another $5, another promise is made by the requesting student, and so on.  If A refuses at any point, the game ends and A has to give all his or her money to B-Z if a coin flip turns up tails; if the flip is heads A gets to keep what he or she has left.  The dominant interpretation of RC says that in the "Give me $5" (or "Munich" or "Falling Dominos" or "Bernie Goetz" game), a perfectly rational A who knows the other players are perfectly rational should refuse the first request for $5.  In practice, I suspect many students would wait to resist, a la Neville Chamberlain, and that a majority would fork over the first $5 if the game were played with only A and B rather than with B-Z.  To refuse the first request for $5, defensible as it is under RC, suggests that you are an untrusting person who would rather fight, with an expectation of only $10, rather than share and trust B or B-Z to keep B's promise and leave you with $15. 

None of this is intended to debunk RC.  The more RC stories one can tell and compare and contrast with an inevitably messier world the better, as long as one does not fall too much in love with any one of them and commit one's own RC version of the fundamental attribution error.  

 A VC story about how a society can reduce the likelihood and the magnitude of Chamberlain-style errors of appeasement on one side as well as LBJ-style errors of escalation on the other side:  In the current political system in the US and most other wealthy nations, a center-left that is more worried about errors of escalation competes for popular favor with a center-right that is more worried about errors of appeasement.  But the coalition of both sides as well as the group of voters in the middle contains numerous voters who not zealots for the party's tilt in favor of or against military force.  Compared to a consensus system like that of the US in the early 1960s in which the use of military force does not divide the sides, vote-seeking politicians of both the more force-averse center-left party and the more force-favoring center-right party have stronger incentives to look with care at the costs and benefits of military force and avoid being trapped in an escalation game or an appeasement game.  If there had been more of a division on military involvement between the parties under the New Deal system, Vietnam might well have been more like the comparatively manageable messes of Iraq and Afghanistan rather than the much deadlier quagmire it actually became. 

How about a flipped VC story, in favor of the New Deal system and against the current more polarized division between the Democrats and the Republicans?  There are plenty of those, some of which I find convincing.  But I can't think of one as of now that seems as convincing on Vietnam vs. Afghanistan/Iraq as the one I just gave.

Corruption Prosecutions in Purple States

Do purple states have a lower level of official corruption, or at least of federal corruption prosecutions?

The answer: It depends on whether you define purple states according to the current 2000-20008 electoral cycle or not.  The ten purple states over 2000-2008 tend to have quite good corruption rankings, bolstered by Colorado, Iowa, and New Hampshire ranking 46th through 48th in the rate at which their public officials were prosecuted from 1993-2002.  As a group, the current purple states average 32.5 out of 50, which I would guess is significant at the .05 though not the .01 level.  But the twelve purple states from 1992-2000, which would seem to be the more natural ones to use, are no better in their prosecution rates than the country as a whole, brought down by Lousiana and Kentucky, which ranked 3rd and 8th in prosecutions.

Data on per capita rates of federal prosecutions of public officials from 1993-2002 were taken from the following source:

http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/corruptreport.pdf