Value Competition

A Concern about a Future Yin-Yang Faith



Major themes of Christianity--loving your enemies, God as universal rather than the God of a people, and the primacy of the spirit over the law--both arose from Judaism and are a reaction to Judaism.

The close but also antagonistic relationship between Christianity and Judaism has had some highly troubling consequences over the past two millennia.  If one were back with Paul as a colleague and trusted advisor as he wrote his epistles, could one have made that relationship work out better?    One may hope, but one may also believe that antagonism against the parent faith was a key part of what gave the Christian gospel of universal love its emotional power.

The history is relevant for those of us who hope for the rise of a yin-yang faith in opposites in the West and the rest of the world.  One logical way in which such a faith could come into being is as an offshoot of the political left and a reaction to it.   Yin-yang could rise as an affirmation of the spirit over the secular domain of politics, as an affirmation of a universal dual truth over a leftist-progressive truth, and as an affirmation of love for the enemy over partisan antagonism toward the enemy.

One may wish--should wish--that a future yin-yang faith will not have the tormented, often deeply hostile relationship with leftism that Christianity has had with Judaism.  But one may worry that yin-yang will be forever too dry, at least for Western tastes, unless it becomes both emotionally linked to and opposed to a leftist-progressive faith in secular salvation through politics.

 

 

[Imagined] Remarks by Elizabeth Warren

A while ago I pointed out that wealthy people owe a lot to the society that helped them earn their wealth.  I stand by what I said then.

Today I want to start by saying the same thing about those of us who are fortunate enough to be professors at universities like Harvard.  We owe a lot to other people, and I’m mindful of that every day.

With people who are enterprising and lucky enough to be rich, there’s an easy way to give back to society.   You can pay taxes, which I believe should be progressive.

With people like me who are smart and lucky enough to be professors at a place like the school where I teach, how we give back is a little trickier.

I try to give back by trying to make American society even better than it is already.

I could leave it at that, but I want to say more today.  

The person I expect to be running against come November—the one with the red truck he likes to drive around in when elections roll around—likes to criticize me for being a Harvard elitist.   I can get defensive about that and say he’s the real elitist and so on.  

But I want to say something else today.    I think people can have a point when they worry about a professor like me who wants to make the world a better place.  

I want to talk about why they can have a point.   And I want to talk about how I get that point.

So here goes.

I don’t think the real issue is whether I have fancy tastes in books or food or architecture, any more than horses or car elevators are the real issue with my opponent or Mitt Romney.

The real issue for Scott Brown and Mitt Romney and for me too is whether we get what people who aren’t as lucky as us live with every day.

I understand that people can wonder whether a professor who wants to make the world better looks down on other people.   I understand that people can wonder whether someone who has my passion for protecting people against rip-offs gets that all of us, middle class people and poor people as well as rich people, need to be accountable.

My answer is very simple.  Yes, I get it.  

It does not work either for the people who are supposedly being helped or for society to have a system in which adults are treated as dependents.    Bill Clinton was right to junk the old welfare system in favor of a system with more accountability.

As a deep-dyed believer in consumer protection, I make no apologies whatsoever for my activism against rip-offs of people by banks and other businesses.   I’m proud that it’s no longer possible for banks to impose huge overdraft protection charges on unwitting consumers, thanks to legislation I championed.

At the same time, I want to make very clear that I believe in freedom to make choices, and in accountability for bad choices.    If a consumer is notified and decides to authorize overdraft protection, that’s her business.   

It’s all about recognizing a simple principle.   Accountability is for everyone.  It’s for rich people and for poor people.  It’s for banks and for middle-class people.   It’s for every single one of us.

I get that.   I believe deeply in that principle. 

If I am lucky enough become your Senator, I will keep the principle of accountability for all close to my heart.   I will bear it in mind on every vote I cast.   I promise you that.

Desacralizing politics: A self-criticism

I just reread a personal essay on politics I wrote around April 2010, a little while after reading Christopher Hitchens' memoir.  What struck me was not the specifics of the ideas I advanced, but the emotional intensity I attached to them, shades of Hitchens himself.   That state of emotional elevation in relation to politics is error, I think, especially if one is a politician oneself. 

I'm very good with politics, and with my own small place in it, especially at this moment after a successful and hard-fought campaign for the school board in which my running mates and I won over three dedicated opponents.   But I and others who are politicians need to separate our political roles from what we hold to be sacred.   For nonpoliticians to worship politics as something outside themselves is one thing.  For politicians to do so is to engage in narcissism.   Politicians need a faith outside of politics, whether that faith is traditional religion or something more unorthodox.  

Social Preferences and the Unpleasant Math of Base Rates

Reflecting some more on the themes of the last post...Dolly Chugh's audit study of academics reminds me of my old days doing real estate tests to look for evidence of racial steering...a key assumption that audit tests like mine and Dolly's use is that to treat people from different groups with equal credentials unequally is discriminatory...

The point here is to introduce a toy model in which neutrality results in a substantial tilt in favor of members of a group with a higher avwerage level of skills, with the aim of suggesting that social preferences play an important role in achieving the social objective of treating people with the same credentials equally.

The toy model: Assume as in the previous post a stronger group S and a weaker group W.  Assume the employer needs a job candidate with an expected level of skill that is good or G.  The average member of S has an S average skill level, SA, while the average member of W has a below average skill level, BSA.  Among S members, 50% are SA, 20% are G, and 5% are very good or VG; 20% are BA and 5% are much below S average or MBSA.  Among W members, 1% are VG, 4% are G, 20% are SA, 50% are BSA, 20% are MBSA and 5% are very much below S average or VMBSA.

All candidates have credentials that allow the employ to evaluate them as VG, G, SA, BSA, MBSA, or VMBSA.  The credentials however are muddy signals.  There is a 20% chance that a candidate will appear to be one notch above his/her actual skill, a 5% chance of appearing two notches above, and a 1% chance of appearing three notches above.  The same numbers apply to the chance a candidate will appear one, two, or three notches below his/her true skill.

Now, suppose a candidate's credentials signal G.  What is the chance the candidate actually has a skill level of G or VG?   Here the base rate math has a nasty twist...

First, the math for an S candidate signalling G: The 20% of G candidates in the pool will signal G 50% of the time and the 5% of VG candidates will signal G 20% of the time.  Thus, 13.5% of S candidates  will sgnal G when they are G or VG.  Now, the weaker side: The 50% of SA candidates in the pool will signal G 20% of the time, and the 20% of BSA candidates will signal G 5% of the time; the 5% of MBSA candidates will signal G 1% of the time.  Thus, 11.05% of S candidates will signal G when they are SA or below.  The probability that a signal of G actually corresponds to a G or VG candidate equals 13.5/24.55 = 54.99%.

Now, the math for a W candidate signalling G: The 4% of G candidates in the pool will signal G 50% of the time and the 1% of VG candidates will signal G 20% of the time.  Thus, 2.2% of S candidates  will sgnal G when they are G or VG.  Now, the weaker side: The 20% of SA candidates in the pool will signal G 20% of the time, the 50% of BSA candidates will signal G 5% of the time, and the 20% of MBSA candidates will signal G 1% of the time.  Thus, 6.7% of S candidates will signal G when they are SA or below.  The probability that a signal of G actually corresponds to a G or VG candidate equals 2.2/8.9 = 24.72%.

Notice that there is a radical difference here in favor of the S candidate signalling G over the W candidate sending the same signal of G.  To achieve a social objective of treating the two candidates equally, social preferences--or a mix or social preferences and netural preferences--on the part of employers are necessary. 

This example can be used to reinforce the point in the last post about a possible efficiency-based rationale for the stigmatizing of negative social preferences toward a weaker group as racism.  In this case as in the earlier one, negative social preferences toward W do not have the utility that positive social preferences toward W do.

 

 

 

 

An Enlightenment Faith that Engages Business and Politics

Two elements of one such faith:

1.  One believes in the truth/beauty/goodness of competing and cooperating opposites;

2.  One believes in loving/forgiving/embracing one's enemies.

The applicability of these two credo elements to politics is something I've written about before, and won't belabor here.  The applicability to business?...here are some semi-spontaneous ideas...

a) Instead of the substantive/principled opposites of liberalism and conservatism, equality and equity, etc., the process/temperamental opposites of calculation and culture, reason and passion, etc., seem like the applicable yin-yang dichotomies of a faith that engages business...these dichotomies strike me as having at least as much juice as the political ones...

b) Intead of the ideological other, the other in a competing firm or on the other side of a business transaction is one candidate for the enemy to be loved...maybe...that doesn't seem as hard or as inspiring as the ideological other in politics...with that in mind, it seems like the better other to be loved for the business person or the pro-business person would be the taxman (or other government official) or the anti-business person...for the anti-business person, the other to be loved would be business and the business person...

 

For the Moral Equivalence of Business and Politics

There are some major similarities between business and politics in affluent, democratic societies such as the U.S., Germany, Japan, etc.:

1.   Both systems harness the energies of self-seeking, self-promoting entrepreneurial actors to social benefit, both overall and in many, though hardly all, individual cases;

2.   Both systems rely centrally on competition to create social benefit and to restrain the evils that would follow from a single unchecked power center or economic center;

3.   Both systems rely centrally on teams that join together to compete with other teams;

4.   Both systems rely heavily not only on egoistic calculation but also on social emotions such as empathy, competitiveness, shame, and  vengefulness;

5.   A considerable number of people feel imposed upon by one or both systems, and view one or both of them as outside themselves; a comparatively small proportion of the population views themselves as successful entrepreneurs within either system; a very small proportion views themselves as successful entrepreneurs within both systems.

Each one of these major similarities is attended by lesser but interesting differences:

1.  The manner in which individual and social interest are aligned (the invisible hand) and misaligned (market failure) is better understood in business than in politics—economics is substantially better developed than political science; the self-seeking, entrepreneurial political type tends both toward more narcissism and more emotionally-infused idealism than the cooler, more pecuniarily motivated self-seeking, entrepreneurial business type;

2.  Competition in politics compared to competition in business is limited by the underlying fact that government involves a monopoly of force; the basic form of competition in politics between parties and within parties is duopolistic, pitting the center-left against the center-right, while competition in business arrives a much more diverse array of forms--this difference likely stems from the basic fact just noted that politics is a struggle to attain control of the violence monopoly (here again the less developed state of theory in political science compared to economic theory is interesting); political competitors generally differentiate themselves with more universalistic, value-laden appeals than business competitors do;

3.  The competing team institutions in business—notably corporations—are much more clearly structured and better established than political parties and other teams in politics; on the other hand, the overarching or monopoly institutions in government/politics—the courts, legislatures, etc.—are much more clearly structured and better established than trade associations and other overarching, monopoly institutions in business.

4.  Business and the pecuniary motive foster egoistic calculation on behalf of the individual and the firm, and in doing so damp down to some degree on social emotions like competitiveness, vengefulness, empathy, and shame, which are less checked in politics.

5.  Although highly localized political systems like the U.S. are a partial exception, a considerably smaller proportion of the population is engaged as entrepreneurial politicians than as entrepreneurial businesspeople; on the other hand, a fairly large proportion of the population is somewhat detached from business by virtue of working for government or the nonprofit sector, while nearly every adult is a potential voter and potential political participant; successful entrepreneurs in business are considerably more tilted toward the high end in their incomes than successful entrepreneurs in politics are, while successful entrepreneurs in politics are somewhat more tilted toward the high end in their educational backgrounds, and are considerably more tilted toward being highly renowned both positively and negatively, than successful entrepreneurs in business are.

From this array of similarities and matching differences, one can certainly tease out moral distinctions in favor of one domain or the other.  None of them seem especially convincing, though.  Even if one is inclined to give the social utility palm to business over politics if one has to choose—as I would—the two sectors’ deeply intertwined nature, the larger size of the business sector—which has quite a bit to do with its greater utility but does not seem to me a good basis to regard it as worthier--and the greater concentration of the more idealistic, inspiring social emotions as well as the somewhat unpleasant or very unpleasant social emotions in the political sector make the relative moral status of the two sectors a pick ‘em proposition in my view. 

A postscript: Neither of the two sectors, for all the very considerable positive value that both have, feels to me at all like something to center one’s deepest faith on.  The heroic view of business in Ayn Rand and the heroic view of politics in Sheldon Wolin both miss the mark.   It is the case, I think, that a plausible Enlightenment faith needs to engage business and politics sympathetically rather than to detach itself from these central, and in my view basically good, modern social realities.  But a good Enlightenment faith also needs to be apart from both business and its competing corporations and from politics and its warring ideologies.   

The Value of Going Big

Sometimes having two big issues to deal with can lead to healthier outcomes than dealing with just one. The classic example I learned about from reading one of my intellectual heroes, Seymour Martin Lipset, involves Switzerland, which is divided by language and also by religion. Fortunately, those cleavages cut across one another rather than reinforce one another, since many German-speakers are Catholic and many others are Protestant, with the same being true of French speakers. The result is that Switzerland with its two major cross-cutting cleavages is less polarized than societies with one dominant cleavage, such as Belgium with its French-Flemish language cleavage or Nigeria with its Muslim North-Christian South religious divide.

This came home to me in thinking about what I believe are the two most emotionally powerful--if not necessarily the most important--educational issues in my community: academic placement and labor relations between the Board and the teacher's union. The first is a prominent issue in the school board election I'm now running in. The second is not, and I've previously thought that it should stay out of the limelight. But I'm rethinking that position now, guided by the idea that addressing two big hairy issues together can sometimes be healthier and more effective than dealing with just one.

I believe the labor relations issue and the academic placement issue in my school system are good examples of cross-cutting cleavages, in that for many of us one's position on one issue does not readily predict one's position on the other. Accordingly, I'm hopeful that thinking of them together may lead to some unfreezing of polarized positions that is hard to accomplish when considering either issue by itself.

On both issues, I think the way forward is through a more flexible, choice-oriented system that recognizes different values and the limitations of a "one best way" approach. On academic placement going forward, I believe in parents/students in our high school having a choice between a largely deleveled option and an leveled option like the current system, but with effective choice of levels within that system. On labor relations, my thoughts are more tentative--and the issue is much more sensitive for any individual such as myself to express an opinion on, given labor law, the role of the Board on which I serve as management, and the need for all of us to listen rather than to be rooted in our preconceptions--but I am attracted to the idea of a choice system in which teachers in public school districts could opt for something like the current public school standard arrangement or for a different arrangement or arrangements, including one or more arrangements with different hours from the conventional school day and school year.

If the academic placement and labor relations issues are discussed in isolation, I believe the intensity of the emotions on both sides makes it all too easy to view a choice-based approach as simply a way of supporting one side or another in the intense debates on that particular issue. If they are thought about together, my sense is that it is easier to consider a choice-based framework on its merits. More generally, it may make it possible to have a thawing of iced-in, defensive attitudes that can all too readily rule us when a single charged issue is considered in isolation.

 

 

Kahan and Our Town: Thoughts on Making Science Wars Gentler

As one who for whatever reasons gets very bothered by what comes across to me as poor science driven by ideology I'm a big fan of Dan Kahan, whose work--though hardly without its own ideological overtones--strikes as a really excellent effort to (among other things) sympathetically explore motivated reasoning by both conservatives and liberals, as explored in this Chris Mooney post on a recent Kahan study on climate change.

What follow are a few brief Kahan-inspired thoughts on making "science wars" over the use and misuse of scientific analysis less hostile and more constructive.  The context is my own community, in which I've run for the school board in 2006, and will be running again in 2012.  In both cycles, science-related conflicts have been one feature of the local landscape.  One purpose of the reflections is to reflect on my emotions and what has inflamed them and calmed them, with the hope that doing so may be useful at least for myself as I prepare to enter the electoral lists again.

The first thought is directed at those of us who find themselves/ourselves agitated by what they/we perceive as biased, flawed use of science by the other side: If at all possible, do your own independent, separate analysis on the same or a different issue, rather than simply criticizing the other side.  Having done so, you are much less likely, I think, to be locked into a defensive, "the other side is grossly misusing science" mindset.

A story as to how that can work from my past experience: There was an issue in 2005-2006 over the effectiveness of the school district's efforts to detect and remove non-resident students.  I was unhappy about claims that a responsible analysis of data would show there was not a problem of any real magnitude.  In classic "science warrior" fashion, I couched my objection as itself grounded in science: I didn't necessarily believe there was a big problem, but I strongly objected to what I perceived as misuse of science to show there was not one.  What made me less agitated was the following: A town official who wanted to pass an anti-fraud ordinance persuaded me to do my own study suggesting there could be a substantial number of non-resident students in the system.  Through feeling qualms at the leaps, the uncertainties, and the arguable unfairness of my own study, I became less agitated and righteous in my feelings.  Even as I campaigned against him, I found myself respecting the incumbent board member who had carried out the analysis that had originally driven me around the bend.

The second thought is for those of us whose scientific analysis is being emotionally criticized by some for defects and for failing to respect proper boundaries between facts and values: Whether or not the critics come up with their own alternative analyses as suggested above, consider doing your/our own alternative study, either publicly or for oneself and one's team.  Such a study could be highly useful for oneself or members of one's team to the extent we/they are too full of righteous passion tied up in defensiveness about being criticized by the other side. 

The issue I have in mind: There is a current "science wars" stir in my town related to data analyses of test scores before and after a partial deleveling in one middle school grade and to a study of college readiness that used grades and level placements as indicators of readiness.  The study strongly bothered people concerned about the "correlation does not equal causation" point that putting students in higher levels (or deleveling), much less giving them higher grades, is not shown to be good policy by the data. 

I feel myself to be responsible for the controversial studies as an incumbent board member.  I think there is a good case that all of us who, whatever the nuances of our feelings, were not deeply bothered by the work as it was generated internally and then presented publicly--for me, for my board colleagues, and our district administration--not to say it is the responsibility of the other side that was greatly agitated by the work to come up with their own analyses.   Rather, I believe those of us on the inside should strongly consider doing our own independent studies.   That would not necessarily be a corporate project--board member A may feel differently from board member B, who in turn feels differently from administration--which leads to its own tricky problems.  But it does make sense, I believe, for those of us who are insiders to reflect as individuals or with others by coming up with our own alternative analyses of what we did originally.

A final optimistic thought on the science wars writ large and writ small: For all the unpleasantness of the politically-charged passions that may arise, lucky is the country and the town in which people's energies are channeled into doing science and questioning it.   I've spoken with a church friend about her experience on a school board in a nearby community in which value-laden science wars are absent and the everyday reality is one of patronage and perks.  Compared to what she experiences as a board member, I feel extremely lucky to be in a community where civic-minded people with strong moral and political values and a strong commitment to scientific analysis--people like the board member I described running against in 2006, the administrators who did the college readiness and effects of deleveling studies, and a community member who criticized those studies and who is now joining me in my 2012 run for the board--are a major part of the scene.  

One may hope for a more forgiving, gentler way to discuss the ties that bind science, ethics, and politics.   One may also be very grateful to the other side for its passions, its skills, and for being different from oneself and in doing so making oneself better.  

 

 

 

How to Overcome Obstacles to Broader Entrepreneurship: Another Contentious Answer

[The following perspective on what needs to be changed to get us to a better Smith-Hume future matches the one in the previous post, but with an anti-right instead of an anti-left valence...]

"First, we need to open up the possibilities for economic entrepreneurship by decisively blasting out hierarchical conservative practices and values that consign some people and some groups to passive, acted upon status while elevating others to dominant, active, innovating status.

Second, we need to open up the possibilities for cultural entrepreneurship by moving away from a stolid, deadening conservative traditionalism that puts people into boxes, with only a few people seen as artists, scientists, and as creators more generally, and the rest of us classified as mere workers of various kinds.

Finally, we need to open up the possibilities for social entrepreneurship through thrusting aside conservative norms of deference and passivity in the lower orders in favor of feistiness across the social spectrum.  As to the theory that opening up opportunities for political entrepreneurship for those further down will be enhanced by diminished political faith among those at the top: The idea is a dubious one--there is a certain unpleasant, resentment-based quality to it.  But even if its premises were granted and we wanted to reduce elite political faith, it is reasonable to think that elite conservative disdain for liberal hopes and elite conservative market evangelism are bigger problems to be addressed than hopeful elite liberalism is."

Two observations: 1) I take it that the relative merits of the contentious center-left claim as to the way forward and the previous contentious center-right claim are only determinable empirically rather than in some more sweeping fashion; 2) it's interesting (if not surprising) the way the aspiration to take down politics a peg among the elite to give more space to the people has its own competing political interpretations.

 

How to Overcome Obstacles to Broader Entrepreneurship: One Contentious Answer

[The following argumentative answer to what blocks a better future and thus needs to be changed is one that has considerable personal plausibility to me as a 1977 graduate of Harvard University and a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School.  That background conditions me to see the current order of the world as one in which the attitudes of people within my old school and others like it occupy a central position, and a potentially better world as one in which those attitudes have undergone substantial rectification. 

At the same time, I strongly believe that the way the world looks to me, though one hopes not altogether detached from reality, captures only a part of reality of what the world is.  If Smith-Hume for the 21st century is to be a viable vision, it needs to be one that works for people who see blockages to progress in places other than the ones my personal experiences and my personality incline me to see them.  So if you find yourself irritated by the grafs below, fair enough...stay tuned for the next post...]

"First: To encourage econonomc entrepreneurship and accomplishment among more people all across the economic spectrum, a key thing that needs to happen is the blasting out of the antipathy to money-making as a goal that was at the core of Marx and that remains intertwined with the way many left of center people think and feel.  Only if deep-seated left ambivalence about economic entrepreneurship can be firmly consigned to the scrapheap of history as decisively as the old, dead vision of a nationalized, post-capitalist economy has already been can we really move forward. 

Second: To encourage cultural entrepreneurship and accomplishment among more people, a key thing that needs to happen is the blasting out of a unionist, "it's just a job," clock-oriented mentality.  Though that reactionary, resentful state of mind is found among all kinds of people in all kinds of positions, its political home is on the left and its practical base lies in teacher's unions and other groups allied with the left. 

Finally: To open up more room for people lower down in the socio-economic spectrum to be social entrepreneurs, it would be a very good thing if the elite in our society turned their moral fervor away from politics toward some other arena.  Just as the decline in religous faith among the elite empowered ordinary people, so too with an elite decline in political faith.  The heart of elite political fervor lies on the left, and so here as in the other domains it is encrusted left ideology that presents the greatest obstacles to a more open, more entrepreneurial, more successful future."

 Stay tuned for an opposing approach...