Value Competition

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.

Moral Progress (2)

My former Rutgers Business School colleague Ed Hartman presented on Thursday at NYU's Paduano seminar on Aristotle, virtue ethics, character, and business ethics.  A fair amount of the discussion focused on a decision made in 1977 by a boss of Ed's at a management consulting firm to send him to London rather than a female colleague with stronger qualifications because "the Brits won't work with a woman."  The decision was reversed by a senior partner with more backbone, and/or better judgment; the woman was sent instead of Ed and did very well. 

A value competition take on why the once-controversial idea of treating women equally in business has become an accepted principle in the US, the UK, and certain other parts of the world involves the idea of competing value systems reaching consensus.  As a general proposition, left-of-center economic egalitarianism on behalf of less well-paid groups such as women has not won assent from conservatives.  (Similarly, right-of-center belief in the moral rightness of paying and treating people according to their market value has not won general assent from liberals.)  But on the particular issue of an equally qualified and productive woman receiving equal treatment and equal pay, the way in which a position originally identified as liberal also resonates in terms of conservative pro-market values has fostered a moral consensus.

Managerial Values Come Home for Thanksgiving

The Dining section of the 11/26 NYT has a semi-humorous piece, "The CEO of Thanksgiving Dinner," complete with quotes from HBS professor Amy Edmondson http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facEmId=aedmondson on how the host should choose between a tightly controlled, "organize to execute" management style and a looser, "organize to innovate" style:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/dining/26dele.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Well...perhaps this is an arena in which the host(ess)'s competing managerial values should be active but latent, rather than having one side selected with the clarity Professor Edmondson advocates...

More seriously: The ability of contemporary middle-class adults like those being satirized and lauded in the article to deploy ambivalent managerial values in their home lives and to inculcate these values in their children strikes me as a highly valuable feature of cultural modernity.  It also strikes me as a concern, though, if working-class adults and their children do not have a like ability to swing back and forth flexibly in their lives between the "organize to execute" and "organize to innovate" poles. 

18th-Century England and New Jersey

In a departmental get-together, a new colleague of mine who has taught in the San Francisco and Minneapolis metro areas noted some deficiencies of NJ and the Newark metro area compared to CA and MN, including poor road signs, endemic local corruption, and seriously decayed city neighborhoods.  I'm a strong NJ loyalist who's been here most of the years since 1964--that said, he's right.  One story as to why that also explains some appealing features of NJ, such as its strong localist, village-oriented spirit of self-government: NJ has considerably more 18th century (and earlier) English localism and inefficiency than the more recently settled and rationally planned Upper Midwest and West do.  Just as the US as a whole clings to an obsolete English system of measure abandoned in the UK and the rest of the world, NJ (and other Atlantic seaboard states) cling to a broader set of colonial-era English folkways largely left behind in the old country and never adopted in newer parts of the US.

The value competition take?  A pro-NJ story would be that the state is better run than newer parts of the US because it features more of a fruitful competition between traditionalism and modernity (pharm, affluent commuter suburbs, etc.).  A pro-MN or CA story, which I find more persuasive, is that those states are better run than NJ, partly because their relative modernity itself involves an enhanced level of usefully competing values on matters like efficiency and equity in government.

American Politics in 2050: Thoughts Provoked by Junot Diaz

In Oscar Wao, Diaz's Dominican-American narrator uses the N-word as his general term for Dominicans. That provoked the following value competion reflections:

A bad possibility, per VC: The N-word has become widespread among latinos as well as blacks but remains taboo among whites; this pattern has accompanied a long-term increase in  racial/ethnic polarization in American politics, with latinos as well as blacks voting overwhelmingly for Democrats and whites voting fairly heavily for Republicans.

A good possibility, per VC: By around 2030, working class traditionalist values and middle class modernizing values converge to make the n-word in its "n-a" form an acceptable alternative to "you guys" in addressing whites; after a period of heavy use by younger whites for ten years or so, the n-word declines overall while moving its way up the age spectrum.  Meanwhile, racial/ethnic polarization in American politics declines, and by 2050 blacks as well as latinos and whites support the parties in fairly similar proportions.

A prediction: The fate of the word and of racial/ethnic polarization in U.S. politics hang together.  The word matters, though it may be as a signal rather than as an independent variable.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz's novel http://www.junotdiaz.com/ didn't work for me most of the way through, and then did.  I didn't find the narrator's incessant n-word references to Dominicans--perhaps another post on that theme--or his gangsta, babe-magnet persona persuasive, and the equally incessant Tolkien and other fantasy/sci fi references and analogies--Trujillo as Sauron, etc.-- seemed peripheral, distracting, and/or politically confused for a few hundred pages.  The story coalesced for me with the return of Oscar, the love-obsessed, fantasy/sci-fi-obsessed New Jersey Dominican-born hero, to the DR to meet his doom.  A semi-VC line on why: In New Jersey, the heroic quest of Frodo Baggins and the chivalry of Sir Galahad, and the aspirations of Oscar Wao to follow in their footsteps, are casualties of modernity and its rational culture of efficiency and democracy.  In the more traditional culture of the DR, on the other hand, Oscar in his fatal quest for the love of a prostitute with a vicious police officer boyfriend is more akin to Frodo and Sir Gawain.  Diaz does not make the lot of immigrants from the DR in New Jersey, or the possibility of the DR's becoming a modern, highly productive state like Japan, Norway, or New Jersey, nearly as sad as Tolkien made the passing of the age of the elves and Sauron--hurrah for that possibility, I should say, and I suspect Diaz might agree--but he did in the end make me believe emotionally in the analogy between beauty and brutality intertwined in a traditionalist, fatalist DR and evil and virtue bound together by rings and deeper forces of fate in Middle Earth before the Age of Man. 

Moral Progress

How is moral progress made?   According to the value competition framework, progress comes about when competing values come to an optimal consensus on a particular issue.

An example: Suppose I threaten to commit an action that costs me 10 and costs you 100 unless you pay me 50.  Such a threat is morally condemned by altruistic Benthamites (and other types of ethicists as well), and is characterized as lacking credibility by rational choice theorists, who point out that a rational actor will not benefit from carrying out his/her threat if the other party refuses to cave.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-credible_threats

In the culture of modernity that has risen unevenly around the world over the past few hundred years, there is a lively competition among and within individuals between egoistic, self-advancement "economic man" values and altruistic Benthamite and Kantian values.  One beneficial offshoot of that value competition is an implicit agreement between the competing sides to ostracize those who make value-reducing threats of the "it'll hurt me but it'll hurt you more" type.