Category Archives: Random Blogging

Exit, Voice and Reform

Albert Hirschman, an eminent economist and political thinker, has died. He was a towering figure, an economist who refused to reduce human interactions to commercial transactions, and who understood that human behavior is motivated by more than a desire for comparative advantage.

The book for which Hirschman is best known is his classic  Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. The Economist gives a good summary of its basic argument:

Mr Hirschman argued that people have two different ways of responding to disappointment. They can vote with their feet (exit) or stay put and complain (voice). Exit has always been the default position in the United States: Americans are known as being quick to up sticks and move. It is also the default position in the economics profession. Indeed, when his book appeared, Milton Friedman and his colleagues in the Chicago School were busy extending the empire of exit to new areas. If public schools or public housing were rotten, they argued, people should be encouraged to escape them.

Mr Hirschman raised some problems with the cult of exit. Sometimes, it entrenches the status quo. Dictators may rule longer if their bravest critics flee abroad (indeed, Cuba uses emigration as a safety valve). Monopolies may have an easier life if their stroppiest customers find an alternative. Mr Hirschman got the idea for his book during a ghastly train journey in Nigeria: he concluded that the country’s railways were getting worse because the most vocal customers were shifting to the roads.

Exit may also reinforce the cycle of decline. State schools may get worse if the pushiest parents take their custom elsewhere. Mr Hirschman worried that a moderate amount of exit might produce the worst of all worlds: “an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy which is the more durable and stifling as it is both unambitious and escapable.”…

But Mr Hirschman’s overall point was not that exit is bad but that exit and “voice” work best together. Reformers are more likely to be able to fix an organisation if there is a danger that their clients will leave. The problem with Friedman et al was that they focused only on exit and not on how exit and voice could be used to reinforce each other.

I’ve quoted a rather long segment of the Economist’s piece, because Hirschman’s point is critically important, and all too frequently ignored.

Without the right to exit, there can be no freedom. But if our only choice is between shutting up and leaving, there can be no progress, no institutional improvement. That’s the great virtue of dissent, of voice–something the  “love it or leave it” folks seem unable to grasp.

Sometimes, we want to remain in a situation–a marriage, a job, a country–because we care enough to want to improve it.

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Truth in Numbers

Harper’s Magazine has a long-running feature called Harper’s Index, where they provide survey results without commentary. The subject-matter of those surveys varies widely, but they are generally thought-provoking, and these recent numbers provided the usual food for thought:

• Rank of “attire” among the leading reasons “millennials” are unsuccessful in job interviews: 1

• Rank of their posting inappropriate pictures on social media: 2

• Average salary earned by a full-time-employed male college graduate one year after graduation: $42,918

• By a full-time-employed female graduate: $35,296

• Percentage of Canadians who believe in global warming: 98

• Of Americans who do: 70

• Of Republicans: 48

The numbers prompt a number of observations.

To my older grandchildren, I will simply reiterate my warnings about posting those pictures of partying on Facebook. Your friends may think that goofy drunk face is funny, but future employers will not appreciate the humor. Nor will they conclude that you really can use the English language if you persist in sharing incomprehensible “street language” sentiments. Listen to your grandmother–and pull up those pants!

To my friends of the female gender, I know that confirmation of the persistence of the wage gap doesn’t really surprise us, but it should at least give us a wake-up call. After years of work agitating for women’s rights and w0rking for equity and equal pay for equal work, we still have a long way to go. Let’s gird those loins, ladies, and get back to it!

To the fearful ostrich-like, head-in-the-sand science and climate-change deniers, I have nothing to say. They don’t listen to experts and they reject both scientific research and the evidence of their own experience. They aren’t going to listen to me. They aren’t going to accept the reality of climate change until they’re sitting on an oceanside beach in Indiana. Thanks to them, however, the rest of us are going to have to work harder and smarter in order to overcome their resistance and enact policies that will address global climate change and–hopefully–avert accelerating disasters.

Happy holidays.

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Maybe the Mayans Were On To Something

We’re fast approaching the date that the ancient Mayans predicted would be the last. The End of the World.

I think they were right, albeit a bit arbitrary in their choice of a specific date. Of course, if you think about it, “the world as we know it” is always ending. Not as dramatically as the public imagination seems to believe–with cataclysmic events that wipe humanity from the face of the planet–but in the time-honored way that worlds have always ended, through cycles of paradigm change.

Paradigm change was most famously identified by Thomas Kuhn, a gifted graduate physics student who picked up a book by Aristotle (who was no intellectual slouch either) and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Kuhn recognized that human culture and worldview goes through periodic changes–changes in the very “paradigm” that we inhabit, that irrevocably alter the way we see reality and experience “the way things are.”

Changes of that magnitude can disorient those who live through them.

Most social change is incremental, evolutionary. Even then, it can be hard for people to navigate. But there are signs that human society is at one of those junctures where the shift is both relatively sudden and massive, and negotiating a dramatically changing worldview is a huge challenge. We are developing a much more global perspective, recognizing that issues like the environment and terrorism require global responses. At the same time, we are seeing an increased emphasis on localism. Previously marginalized populations are demanding their due, and long-held belief systems–religious and secular–are being called into question.

The people who can’t deal with the pace and scope of this change are understandably terrified . Think how you’d feel if you awoke one morning in an unfamiliar environment–surrounded by people speaking a language you didn’t understand except for tantalizing bits and pieces, with customs that were both alien and familiar, and expectations you couldn’t fulfill. No wonder their actions seem irrational to those who inhabit that new environment.

I once read a treatise on paradigm shifts. The author suggested, reasonably enough, that there is chaos during the transition, because folks on either side of thae shift lose their ability to communicate with each other. Little by little, those embedded in the old paradigm die off, and relative calm returns.

As hard as it sometimes is to be sympathetic, we need to realize that for inhabitants of the “old” reality, the world really is ending.

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Engage!

There’s no dearth of discussion about the effect of social media on culture and politics. Facebook and Twitter, especially, are credited (if that’s the word) with facilitating everything from the Arab Spring to the surprise victory of Glenda Ritz here in Indiana. Political observers tell us that sophisticated use of social media was a major factor in Obama’s successful GOTV effort, and that bungled use of that same media hampered that of the Romney campaign.

During a discussion about the Media and Policy class we’ve been team teaching this semester, John Mutz wondered aloud whether these forms of communication might be destabilizing government, making it much more difficult to engage in the sort of negotiation and deliberation that democratic theory prizes.  I think he’s right, and I think this is an unfortunate and under-appreciated consequence of our current, frenetic media environment.

It’s not just the speed with which information, innuendo, rumor and half-backed conspiracy theories circle the globe. It’s the partial nature of that information.

The goal of democratic societies is informed participation. Not just voting, not just agitating for this or that change, but thoughtful engagement in self-government. Today’s communication technologies facilitate immediate engagement: Sign the petition to XYZ, telling them to vote for ABC! Join the protest against so-and-so! Don’t let ‘them’ change this program–it’s all that protects grandmas and kittens! We are given tools with which to send a message, but all too often, the message is not based upon a full explanation of the issues involved.

I know there have been several instances where I’ve gotten such a “call to action” that initially seemed appropriate to me, but upon further research into the policies involved, turned out to be promoting a result that was neither practical nor possible. (The federal budget really isn’t like our household budgets–it’s a lot more complicated. Sometimes, well-intentioned programs that are meant to help one population or another have negative unintended consequences that really do need to be addressed. It’s usually more complicated than that email blast would suggest.)

Despite their considerable merits, Facebook and Twitter and all the other methods of rapid communication at our disposal too often get us to fire before we aim.

It’s important to be engaged. It’s important to communicate quickly with our elected representatives when we think they are about to act in ways that will damage important institutions, or harm vulnerable constituencies. Social media allows involved citizens to mobilize others, and to have a much louder and more effective voice than was previously possible. The downside is that the folks most likely to be involved are the partisans, both left and right, who tend to be more ideological than informed.

It’s so easy to click that link and sign your name. Who has time to read up on the arguments, pro and con?

As Captain Picard might say, “Engage!”

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A Meditation on Snark

A regular reader of this blog posted a reasonable–albeit uncomfortable–question the other day. How can someone (me) who regularly inveighs against incivility and ad hominem argumentation routinely “disparage” (his word) others? Is there not an inconsistency–even hypocrisy–there?

Fair question. And if I’m honest, I do go over the line–a line I set–every so often. Sometimes, the urge to engage in snarky characterizations is just too tempting.

The question made me think about what’s fair and what isn’t. Where is “the line”? Certainly, criticism itself is not only inescapable, but often appropriate–as I tell my classes at the start of each semester, reasoned argumentation is expected. Debate and deliberation is a tool that–properly deployed–moves us toward truth.

So how do we distinguish “reasoned argumentation” from the sort of incivility that moves us not toward truth, but further into our warring factions?

I think the first rule is that criticism must be grounded in specifics. There is a difference between saying “this person/these people are wrong because” and simple name-calling. It is perfectly acceptable, in my view, to say “I think Obama has been a lousy leader because he didn’t accomplish XYZ.” I may disagree with you about the desirability of XYZ, or whether Obama was responsible for its failure, but I understand the grounds of your disagreement. It is not acceptable–again, in my opinion–to say “I hate Obama because he’s a socialist/Muslim/gangster.” Not only are these accusations demonstrably untrue, they give those who disagree no clue to what the speaker actually dislikes about the President. They encourage listeners to draw our own conclusions, and those conclusions are likely to be unkind.

Similarly, if criticisms of particular groups are based upon behaviors–living in the suburbs, voting for particular candidates, whatever–they may be intemperate, or may be over-generalizations, but they are specific enough to be countered with logical or factual objections. When groups are disparaged because of their identity–gay, Christian, African-American, etc.–there’s not much room for discussion or nuance.

Readers may be able to flesh out these “rules of the road,” but that’s my first effort. What do you all think?

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