Value Competition

Literary examples of charismatic leadership from below

For leadership from below of the kind that is good for the firm and society:

1.  Billy Budd;

2.  Misail in Chekhov's "My Life";

3.  ?--would like a third example to reflect on...thinking of an old Updike story about a supermarket...is there a saintly cashier?...need to check...other possibilities?

For an example of the second kind of leadership from below that is bad for the firm and arguably for society:

1.  ?--maybe Jack London or another US or intl writer in the broad genre of proletarian fiction would be a good source here...

[day after follow-up--the Updike story I was thinking of features an A & P clerk who quits to impress some girls who have been reprimanded by his manager for wearing only their bathing suits in the supermarket...not a fit...a possible good fit is the bank clerk Jarvis Lorry in A Tale of Two Cities...here is Dickens' description of him: "His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance with his stockings, was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon the neighbouring beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far at sea. A face habitually suppressed and quieted, was still lighted up under the quaint wig by a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost their owner, in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and reserved expression of Tellson's Bank. He had a healthy colour in his cheeks, and his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on."

A story I ran across--"The Confrontation," by Raymond Barrio--on rebellion against a corrupt agent was interesting as an illustration of how anti-authority leadership from below can benefit an employer...not enough to the story, which was written in an agit-prop style, to make it interesting literarily as opposed to as an illustration of a point...]

 

 

 

Was Shared and Monotheistic Religion Pacifying in its Time?

Did life for the Jews and their neighbors become less violent as local myths gave way to the more sweeping tales of Yahweh, Baal, and other deities with a wider scope than their predecessors?  Did Greece become less bloody when local gods were replaced by a more or less shared religous pantheon, even as it remained politically divided?  Did the Dark Ages spread of Christianity across Europe lower homicide and war deaths, or at least make any increases caused by the collapse of the Pax Romana smaller than they would have been?

Pinker's tables in The Better Angels of Our Nature do not directly deal with this issue; his summary of the bloodcurdling contents of the Old Testament implies a negative answer.

My own intuition is that the move away from local gods and toward shared and monotheistic religion was pacifying in its time; raiding your neighbors at night to steal their sheep, kill their men, and abduct their women is less likely to appeal when that neighboring band's gods or god are also yours.

Indirect support for the shared religion as pacifying hypothesis can be found in Pinker's tables. It's interesting to compare Figure 2-3 on p. 53, which shows an average yearly war deaths rate of around 500 per 100,000 people in various 19th and 20th c. non-state hunter-gatherer and hunter-horticulturalist societies like the Hiewa of New Guinea that I suspect have fairly local gods to Figures 3-1, 3-2, and 3-3 on pp. 60-63, which show annual homicide rates per 100,000 in England and other European regions from 1200 to 2000.  The European homicide figures for 1200, when shared religion prevailed but central authority was weak or very weak, are a great deal lower--around 20 to 90 per 100,000--than the war-only estimated death rates for the societies in New Guinea, etc.

Three Imaginary Worlds

Many years ago, I read Tolkien and wanted to escape into a world of lore and magic that was gone and never had been.  Some years ago, I read J.K. Rowling to my children.  I wished I could find Platform 9 3/4 and go to Hogwarts, and wished more strongly that they could.  Now I'm reading George R.R. Martin.   He makes me feel one part of love, one part of wonder, and two parts of loathing for a world that was and still is--the pre-Enlightenment warlord and peasant world of honor, betrayal, blood, and dirt that endures in many parts of the world and in a part of every one of us.  I'd still like to escape to Middle Earth, or for that matter Hogwarts.  But I have no more desire to ecape to Westeros than to Afghanistan.  

Holiday Reading--Paul Auster

Okay, I'm not going to argue with James Woods' takedown that I read somewhere (TNR, I think) a few weeks back--yes, Paul Auster is Conan Doyle for hipsters, not Samuel Beckett.   But as one who likes Conan Doyle a lot (and J.R.R. Tolkien a lot more than a lot) and has doubts about Beckett and a number of the leading twentieth century modernists in literature and some other genres, I'm fine with that.  Invisible had the usual Austerian spooky thinness, along with a very nice moral puzzle that made me suspect Auster's been reading Jonathan Haidt on disgust.

The basics of the plot: Decades ago, in 1967, the narrator, a Columbia grad student, had a passionate summer of love with...his sister.  As in Haidt's scenario, there's no apparent harm to anyone and no pangs of guilt...and yet as the reader one has certain complex feelings of repulsion relating to the brother-sister sex...or perhaps one takes it in stride as nothing much or even as kind of hot, enlightened modern liberal that one is.  But Auster lays a trap for his readers that is very nice and that lifts up his plot from being a simple puzzle that is a mere gloss on Haidt and makes it into a tricky puzzle that happens to work as an invisible, imaginary criticism of Haidt's position that conservatives experience disgust more powerfully than liberals.

The incestuous narrator, who is shown as feeling nothing much at least on the surface about his own sister-loving, is consumed by vindictive rage over the actions of a mysterious French intelligence agent/poli sci prof.  In the same fateful 1967, the professor stabbed a young black man in upper Manhattan who brandished a gun and demanded the narrator's and the prof's money.  The youth was fatally wounded but not close to dying; knowing that, the professor dragged him into Riverside Park and stabbed him repeatedly to kill him and keep his mouth shut.  Lacking legal recourse against the professor (the narrator has fled after the initial stabbing and did not see the professor's later actions) and eaten up by a desire to ruin him, the narrator travels to Paris, charms the daughter of the woman the professor plans to marry, and tells her what he knows.

What the narrator is experiencing, I would suggest, is disgust that--like disgust at incest--cannot be adequately rationalized in terms of principles of harm or fairness.  The professor's initial defensive reaction, though extreme, is defensible; his later repeated stabbing does no additional harm, since the robber will die anyway--if anything it lessens the agony the youth would experience from a prolonged death.  And yet by certain lights--more I suspect by the lights of a modern liberal such as the narrator who takes incest in stride than by the lights of a traditionalist conservative who would be repelled by incest--the professor's repeated stabbing of the youth's dying body is disgusting and worthy of retribution.

"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.

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society

In his 1958 ethnography of life in "Montegrano," an impoverished village in the South of Italy, Edward Banfield contended that peasants and others in the village were "amoral familists" who acted to benefit the short-term interests of their nuclear families, assumed that others would do likewise, and avoided civic commitments.  Banfield suggested that enlightened self-interest (or what in value competition terms would be called egoistic values) on the part of villagers could help the situation, and made proposals for monitored local government and expansion of education, while expressing pessimism about the prospects for such measures being tried: 

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Backward-Society-Edward-Banfield/dp/0029015103

Assuming the basic accuracy of Banfield's portrayal of uncooperative, often unhappy villagers in Montegrano in the mid-1950s--though there has been a dispute about whether he underrated community networks in the village and by extension in Southern Italy in general http://www.arts.mun.ca/congrips/newsletter/44%20-%20Fall%201995.pdf --there is a question as to whether his portrayal of social dysfunction applies to traditional societies in general.  I'm doubtful that it does; the uncooperativeness, miseria,and strong if inchoate group antagonisms between the peasants and the gentry in Montegrano that Banfield describes seem closely connected to the village being a lagging part of a more or less modern Italian state.

The Opposable Mind

In his 2007 HBS Press book, Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, contends that many successful business leaders benefit from an ability to hold opposing concepts in their mind and then to come up intuitively with a third-way approach that avoids being captive to either side of the opposition.  Excerpts:

http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/rogermartin/ChoicesConflictandtheCreativeSpark.pdf

His examples, such as A.G. Lafley of P&G eschewing the commodity/high-end dichotomy in favor of combining cost-cutting with R&D, Isadore Sharp of Four Seasons avoiding the large hotels with services/small hotels without dichotomy in favor of smaller luxury hotels, and Jack Welch of GE combining his "Be #1 or #2" maxim on market share with a "Define your market so you have less than 10%" maxim, focus on the danger of being trapped by small-scale, field or organization-specific dichotomies.

My value competition take: In being able to avoid being trapped by polarizing local dichotomies, good managers benefit from an internal competition between calculation and culture that cuts across the local dichotomies, and that impels both sides of the manager to come up with creative, value-enhancing approaches.  Given my own rational choice proclivities, I think it's important to specify how that value-enhancing process works in an RC model, though there's also value in the qualitative empiricism of Martin's case studies.

Creative Capitalism

In the latest installment of his second career as Bill Gates' roving idea man, Michael Kinsley serves as the impresario of a collection of essays centered on a January 2008 speech Gates gave in Davos:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/speeches/2008/01-24wefdavos.mspx

Gates called for "creative capitalism," which appears to differ from some versions of corporate social responsibility by virtue of being oriented toward employing market mechanisms as much as possible, and secondarily by being premised on a utilitarian claim about market transactions insufficiently weighing the preferences of the poor rather than on some other ethical theory.  

The book:

http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Capitalism-Conversation-Buffett-Economic/dp/141659941X

The blog on which the book is based:

http://creativecapitalism.typepad.com/creative_capitalism/what-is-creative.html

A major virtue of Kinsley's CSR book, in keeping with his earlier career as a point-counterpoint television advocate on "Crossfire," is that it combines lively debate with avoidance of an overly simple dichotomy between pro-market skeptics of creative capitalism/CSR and egalitarian supporters of CSR.  He includes a substantial number of contributions by market advocates, many of whom (e.g., Gregory Clark, Clive Crook, William Easterly, Steven Landsburg, and Richard Posner, along with Milton Friedman in his famous 1970 NYT magazine article) are indeed mostly dubious about creative capitalism/CSR, but some of whom (e.g., Gary Becker and Ed Glaeser) are more favorable, as well as contributions by left-of-center egalitarians like John Roemer, Robert Reich, and Kinsley himself who are skeptical or ambivalent about CSR.

Per value competition (or one plausible interpretation of it), for creative capitalism/CSR to improve its efficacy, it is important to have competition between pro-market and egalitarian versions of the concept, with both sides keeping the other honest.  Such competition could take place externally, in the form of openly pro-market CSR NGOs arising alongside openly egalitarian CSR NGOs like the Workers Rights Consortium, or internally, with people in the Gates Foundation, Nike, etc., having both kinds of values inside themselves, or, most plausibly, in both internal and external forms.  None of Kinsley's contributors call for such competition directly, though there are hints of the idea of pro-market CSR in Steven Landsburg's call for firms to uphold market principles on issues such as protectionism even at a cost to themselves. 

I suspect that part of the problem with pro-market CSR surfacing relates to the prestige of Friedman as a market advocate and to his criticism of CSR as a reflection of socialist, collectivist values.  If pro-market CSR is to emerge, Landsburg, Becker, John Mackey of Whole Foods, or other similarly-minded folks need to say to Friedman's shade, "Milton, we agree with your pro-market values 100%.  But those values are sometimes most effectively advanced through pro-market CSR, and we should be creating pro-market CSR institutions, just as pro-market advocates in the US created market-oriented public interest law firms in response to the Naderite version." 

The Anxiety of Influence

In a 1973 work of criticism that owes a great deal to Nietzsche but that lacks Nietzsche's ability to fuse literary creativity with a scientific spirit--he has Nietzsche's passion and his flair for vatic utterances but not his logical clarity--Harold Bloom maintains that strong poets are formed through an agonistic, Oedipal grappling with their strong predecessors.  

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-influence.html

Bloom can be recast in rational choice terms: Poetry of the highest quality, like mathematics of the highest quality, demands familiarity with other work of the highest quality as a precondition to the advance of the discipline.  The lack of readily verifiable standards of quality and progress in poetry as opposed to mathematics leads to a personal engagement with past masters in the former discipline as opposed to the latter.

The RC recasting of Bloom, plausible as it is, leeches the lifeblood out of his portrait of the strong poet wilfully misreading his predecessors.  A value competition recasting, though not immune itself from the pale sickliness of utilitarian reason, is closer to the original: The strong poet is one in whom reverence for the tradition and iconoclasm are at war within the poet in an intense, fruitful way that for at least a moment, a moment that will soon enough be lost, lifts the poet's powers to the heights at which the great poets of the tradition dwelled in their moment. 

Waking Giant

Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, by David S. Reynolds  http://web.cuny.edu/academics/oaa/distinguished/view_profLast=Reynolds&profFirst=David.html , aims at the broad American audience that purchases biographies and narrative histories on the Revolutionary and Civil War eras.  Compared to Ellis, McCullough, McPherson, and other popular historians of those eras, Reynolds concentrates more on religion, art, and social movements, appropriately so given the less martial and revolutionary nature of the 1815-1848 period.

Narrative history is a genre conducive to a value competition approach that examines how internal and social clashes of values may be conducive either to social progress or to undesirable group polarization.   Compared to Sean Wilentz and Arthur Schlesinger, whose politically-oriented accounts of Jacksonian America laud the rise of the democratic principle, Reynolds tells a story about cultural diversity and progress that is more balanced in its allocation of credit between the populism of Jackson's Democratic Party and the comparative elitism of the Whigs and other anti-Jacksonians.  In particular, he describes artistically successful American writers of the period like Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe as drawing from both a popular culture of melodramatic fiction and an elite, Europeanized literary culture; his nice portrayals of them strike me as entirely consistent with a value competition framework that focuses on productive value tensions within individuals. 

In his wistful remarks on how James K. Polk might have helped stem the political wrangling that led to the Civil War by taking a moral stand against the spread of slavery to new territories, I suspect that Reynolds underestimates the counterproductive regional polarization that was built into the Jacksonian party system in the form of the Democrats' commitment to the South and slavery.  (I'm much more inclined to think that things could have worked out differently if Jackson, as opposed to the comparatively minor Polk, had had a different attitude toward slavery.)  But I strongly agree with him to the extent he is implying that the regional polarization that culminated in the Civil War was not foreordained and was fostered by contingent factors in the party system and in the psyches of individual leaders like Jackson and Polk.