From the once-Republican, always thoughtful Andrew Sullivan, who says it better than I ever could.
The question is: how will this all end? How much damage will be inflicted while we wait for resolution–and on whom?
CommentsCategory Archives: Random Blogging
Season’s Greetings
Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice or just the blessing of a couple of days off work: Have a great one!
Or–as my favorite holiday greeting this year put it–Heathen’s Greetings to you and yours!
CommentsExit, 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.
CommentsTruth 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.
CommentsMaybe 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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