If only all non-profits and donors cared first and foremost about the impact of their work and money. Unfortunately, they don't. Instead, considerations like legacy and prestige and power all influence decision-making. What results is a rush of money to the cause of the day, whether it's AIDS in Africa or micro-lending. New catastrophes as well as new solutions tend to receive vast attention and resources from donors, while persistent problems and tried-and-true approaches drift off the radar. When it comes to resource allocation, it seems the discount rate of many in the non-profit sphere is much higher than it ought to be, resulting in an emphasis on the near-term rather than the long.
I'm painting in broad strokes. But these tendencies do exist and they have real consequences, like spending on preventing and treating AIDS in Africa while access to water and nutrition improvement go underfunded. It is definitely a good thing that we don't need to spend vastly larger amounts of money on certain causes. But now that I have this $5 billion to spend, I need to consider where my dollars will have the greatest social return. As such, I'll be (anonymously) donating my $5 billion to prenatal and early childhood nutrition programs in developing countries.
What of that old proverb, "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime?" The proverb makes intuitive sense and it tickles all of our moral pleasure centers—hard work's important, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps, etc. But, depending on how hungry our aspiring fisherman is, he may find it very difficult to learn how to fish. Just like education early in life can create a stock of skills that generate higher returns over an entire lifetime, getting the sufficient caloric intake early in development helps to determine future health and lifetime capacity for learning and work. Well-fed pregnant mothers will give birth to healthy children who, if they get the nutrients they need, will have a greater capacity to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way—like learning how to fish. Just like profits reinvested by the firm will promote growth, calories invested by the body will increase a person’s productive capacity significantly.
Not only this, but even if our friend learns how to fish, he will need a fish or two to get him started. Without sufficient caloric intake, the body’s ability to sustain work is severely strained. Fixing this shortage can pay huge dividends. By one estimate made by Nobel prize winner Robert W. Fogel, 50% of the economic growth in Britain from 1800 through 1980 can be attributed to increases in the availability of calories, which both brought more people into the labor force and allowed those already in it to work more strenuously. And that is likely to be an underestimation, since it overlooks the interactions between nutrition and education I sketched. Such astounding results are hard to overlook.
Social innovation like micro-lending ought to be funded, and we should cheer for the good work done in much of Africa to contain the spread of AIDS. But I'll be giving my $5 billion to a cause that could pay dividends for decades—full bellies.
-- Nathan Huttner
On Thursday, my mother will force us all to say what we're thankful for ahead of our meal. But, like fasting before a feast, I am going to complain before Thanksgiving. This year, here are a few things I am not thankful for, from pointless gripes to deep concerns:
1. My fantasy football team. It’s horrible, and it's my own fault for not knowing anything about football. Also, my league is filled with bankers. The amount of time they spend managing their teams and trash-talking suggests they should be part of any root-cause analysis undertaken by the Obama administration as they investigate the financial crisis.
In truth, fantasy football and investing are not so different. Fantasy football, like investing, rewards intense information-gathering. I think this season definitively proves that watching every football game in a week is a far superior method of managing a fantasy football team (banker’s method) than using ESPN's weekly stat projections (my cable TV-less method). Furthermore, I think future generations of bankers would do well to consider this lesson as applied to financial markets. The "watch-every-game-of-the-week" method is like studying a balance sheet, or asking tough questions about the mortgages that make up a mortgage-backed security. The "follow-ESPN-stat-projections" method is like listening uncritically to the AAA ratings that the rating agencies were flinging around, and neither of those tactics works well.
2. What the financial crisis will mean for everyone graduating this year. I, thankfully, have a couple of job offers. Many, however, could spend the next year or two unemployed, or employed in a job they wouldn't have even thought about in most other years. (The exception being anyone going into government, where this administration will be a boon for serious-thinking, ambitious policy wonks.)
Unfortunately, the result could be much more than a one- or two-year reduction in earnings. In a few years, when the economy begins growing at a normal pace, class of ‘09ers won’t be that much better positioned than those future graduates to take advantage of growth. They will have spent two years in the wrong industry, or in the wrong field. While the academic evidence is somewhat mixed, there is good reason to believe that this will reduce people's lifetime earnings by a few percent. Talk about poor timing.
Not only that, but those worst affected will be those already on the edge. As competition for jobs grows more intense, people will find themselves working below their pay-grade, and those people with fewer skills will find it hard to get work at all. Those already struggling will only see it become harder to get ahead. Education is one of those areas where early advantages tend to translate into big differences over the course of a career, which is why education is so valuable for individuals and society.
3. That more evangelical Christians don’t think like Jim Wallis. Last week, Ottavio pointed out that hating gays wasn't one of Jesus' priorities. Evangelicals like Wallis look at the Bible and see a call to action, to raise up the poor and achieve justice at the expense of the powerful. Cholera in Zimbabwe and violence in the Congo should be on everyone’s mind, and be everyone’s priority -- not fantasy football, not job prospects, not keeping the gays from marrying. Never last, and never least, even if it makes for a life lived in broken places, or a hypocritical blog post.
Over the weekend I saw the new Bond flick. My girlfriend and I enjoyed New Haven Restaurant Week with a delicious meal at Central Steakhouse. One thing that has made five-and-a-half years in New Haven bearable is the number and variety of good restaurants here -- far better than in Rochester, where you're hard-pressed to find a restaurant worth frequenting that doesn't have garbage plates on the menu.
In any case, most of the movie was fine, though the director, Marc Forster, has decided to follow the developing common wisdom that a good action scene should be (mostly) unintelligible. Fist, face, shin, crazy shadows, what was that?, fist, is Bond winning?, oh he stabbed that guy in the genitals with a shard of glass. Funny, then, that one of the longest takes in a fast-paced action scene was also one of the most disgusting eroticizations of rape I've ever seen.
One of the villains is a dastardly general of a South American country who has his eyes on become a dastardly dictator. He enjoys to sexually assault women. At the end of the movie, he is celebrating a deal that will make his despotic dreams a reality by assaulting a waitress. This is heard, but not seen. But then he is interrupted by Bond's romantic interest, and the camera cuts to the waitress struggling to get off the bed with her hands bound behind her back, her skirt sliding up her legs to reveal her ... well, you can read the over-excited fanboys for stomach-turning speculation about what exactly the shot reveals.
Regardless, the shot, which cuts off the waitress's face, sexually objectifies a victim of sexual assault and eroticizes the assault for the audience of the film. The director knows that the Bond film audience enjoys violence, and has a stomach for sexual objectification. Unfortunately, he decides the mix the two, rather than keeping them apart. (Bond audiences like their sex and violence shaken, not stirred.) And not only that, by eroticizing the violent act, he aligns the audience with the villain.
There are other instances in the Bond canon of sexualized violence, like the naked woman encased in gold in Goldfinger. But the recent Bond films have tried to situate Bond in a more realistic world, with real people and emotional gravity. (The newest Batman movies have done this far more effectively.) Unfortunately, Quantum of Solace walks up to the border between cartoon and reality and decides to wobble back and forth across the line. What results is a jumble of tongue-in-cheek excess and horror. In the case of the sexually assaulted waitress, the result is nausea and regret. Not how I wanted to end my night out.
The New York Times has decided that Mormons tipped the balance in favor of Proposition 8. The Economist has (lamely) proclaimed that the Mormon work ethic has insulated Utah from the economic storm. What should we, proponents of equal marriage rights, do to counter the homophobic economic engine running in the mountains? Organize, march, sue, convince. Make a ton of money.
Economists argue that bias is irrational -- not a great way to make money. A company that makes hiring decisions for reasons other than competence and talent is going to be punished by competitors who take advantage of that talent for their own gain. Now, proponents of same-sex marriage have an opportunity to punish states that deny marriage rights, and reward those that do. Move to Connecticut and Massachusetts! Revel in our New English autumns. Bring your entrepreneurial spirits and wallets. Fill state coffers with income and sales tax receipts. At least vacation here!
Of course this will happen on its own, as same-sex couples come to live in a place that will recognize their unions. And a mass exodus from California would cripple efforts to turn this year’s Proposition 8 near-loss into next year’s victory. However, as we we attend political rallies and speeches, we can and should make decisions about where to live and work and what we buy with an eye towards punishing bias.
In response to pro-gay marriage boycotts in California -- some more sensible than others -- Prop 8 supporters have called the efforts "intolerable," and "mob justice." I don't understand this. The free market’s definitional quality is right there in the title -- it’s free! If I’m free to make a purchasing decision based on something as insubstantial and unrelated to underlying quality as a celebrity endorsement or witty advertising campaign, then I am damned well free to make a purchasing decision based on whether my money's going to keep my friends from getting married.
Respond to fear-mongering and bias by moving to (or vacationing in) Connecticut and Massachusetts. Earn a ton of money. Spend it on businesses that support equal rights. Make the Economist write an article marveling at the economic benefits of justice.
Yes, I joined Model United Nations because the UN reminded me of the United Federation of Planets. And I read The Physics of Star Trek. Thus, talk, via Ezra Klein and the Economist, of plane-mounted lasers and the like has me thinking of phasers and warp drives.
On a different note, the idea that the government will soon be running around with truck-, and plane-, and satellite-mounted beam weapons is frightening. Maybe it's purely an illusion that a dedicated group of citizens could mount an effective resistance, even if it's deep in the wilderness of Montana, to a fascist, authoritarian regime. But it's an illusion threatened to the core by the dramatic asymmetry made possible by complex beam weapon systems. These systems require incredible technology and infrastructure, and sources of vast energy. In the quickly vanishing days of gunpowder warfare, you didn't need all that -- just guns and ammo, both stockpile-able and poach-able.
I am not a gun-toting, militia-loving nutjob. But I think it's worth noting that the more effective high fixed-cost military and industrial systems become, the more power can be concentrated in fewer hands, and the higher the returns to creating giant conglomerates and the lower the cost of creating and maintaining Big Brother governments.
Happily, I think the nature of technology is to concentrate power first, and disperse it second. Take computers. In the '50s, only academic institutions and the government could afford electronic computing systems. In the '80s, only military researchers had access to the power of the internets, in the form of ARPANET. As the costs of computing power came down, and firms entered to provide it to the masses, we are now speculating on lasers with laptops and the web. So, if we can just survive the development of satellite-mounted lasers without the rise of human or robotic overlords, we'll one day have ray guns of our own. Of course, by that point, there might be anti-gravity platforms and uber-powerful gamma lasers.
But then the Vulcans will arrive, provide us warp technology, and open our eyes to interstellar civilization.
Michelle Rhee has proposed a two-tiered pay system for the Washington, DC school system. Basically, if you want tenure, you make less. If you're willing to give up tenure, you make a lot more. This seems like a great way to get highly qualified people into public schools without bankrupting the system. By paying people more for giving up tenure, you can provide more money to people who care about money (presumably a lot of people who would work in teaching but aren't now) -- you incentivize them more stongly with an incentive they respond best to (money).
It should come as no surprise that most teachers in the district oppose the plan. They are exactly the people who don't care much about money -- the people who have been attracted to the typical tenured teaching gig. Of course a majority of them will not want to trade tenure for salary. That said, tenure's a nice thing, and worth a lot of money to a lot of people who would not hide behind tenure to shirk or do a lousy job. It's also worth noting that tenure is not such a crazy thing for teachers to ask for, especially when you consider places like Kansas where teachers could face punishment for teaching evolution. I think Rhee overstates her case when she says: "Tenure ... has no educational value for kids." When tenure protects a teacher from the anti-evolution agenda of an administrator, her students benefit.
So tenure has a purpose, but offering higher pay to some could attract a new class of people to the profession. But can tenure be protected once the choice of high pay and financial incenctives has been introduced? Will it be possible to choose a tenure compensation track without signalling insecurity about one's abilities? Is establishing a choice between tenure and compensation providing a choice at all?
UPDATE: In a sign that Whyroots is now driving the agenda of the progressive blogosphere, Ezra Klein has a new post about Michelle Rhee. He focuses on the issue of evaluation and the lack of a good method for evaluating teacher performance. It really is a critical point, and one I wish he wouldn't be quite so flip about (though who am I to criticize, since I didn't even cover it).
Basically, really strong incentives work best when they incentivize things people actually have control over. Part of the problem with evaluating teacher performance via standardized testing is that teachers don't have all that much control over performance. Parents matter, peers matter, the amount of sleep the night before matters, etc. Teachers definitely matter, but do they matter enough that the marginal impact of anything other than an amazing teacher or a terrible teacher will actually be picked up by the test? I doubt it (though I'll try to find some data on the topic). And if that's the case, then you're going to have a lot of pissed off teachers whose pay swings drastically because of issues they can't control.
It's like rewarding managers solely on stock performance. Maybe for the CEO that makes sense, but for Joe the Line Manager, he will, if he's doing a competent job, have about as much impact on stock performance as on the price of tea in China.
When former students talk about great teachers, we describe the transformative impact they have had on our lives, changing the way we think about the world and our careers. How in the world do you evaluate that?
Last spring, one of the consultants at my management consulting firm won an election for part-time office in a south western state. He was elected on a progressive platform. During one of his first post-election meetings back at the firm, a senior executive and one of our clients joked with him that he wasn't sure how he felt about having someone so liberal and "pro-union" consulting for him. Meanwhile, over the course of the election, which included a primary contest, this consultant was criticized for his corporate ties by an opponent on the left. Seems as though no one is comfortable with a progressive in the corporate world.
Naturally so, you might say, given the amount of time prominent progressives spend railing against corporate power, and the huge sums of money corporations have spent lobbying against progressive government reforms. But many self-described progressives have collected a corporate paycheck, or had a parent's corporate paycheck pay their way through school, or at the very least spent money on corporate products. (Your outfit might be head-to-toe American Apparel, but your Converse kicks are as corporate as it gets.) So many progressive Dr. Jekyls with a lurking, corporate Mr. Hyde, eh?
I don't think it can really be any other way. There are bills to be paid, and there are only so many plum non-profit jobs to go around. Besides, someone has to donate something to make those NGOs run. Like it or not, corporations are extremely efficient engines of economic growth (financial meltdown or no meltdown, this point stands). Progressives have every reason to be wary of corporate ambitions to twist public servants to serve their self-interest at the expense of the public good. But corporate self-interest is very often aligned with the public good, not opposed.
Progressives need to avoid dogmatic opposition to corporations and businesses more generally. Society has too much to gain from efficient, well-run firms of all sizes, small and big alike. Progress demands pragmatism, not tribalism. So when considering the meaning of progressivism, let us define it by its successes, not its conflicts, by its ideals, and not by its caricatured enemies.
My bio on the right says a bit about where I grew up and what I've studied. It says nothing at all about why I'd join this Whyroots adventure. Here are a few of my reasons:
1. There are a lot of crazies in these here nets, and they hog a lot of bandwidth and eyeballs. I am not that crazy, and I think my fellow Whyrooters are even less crazy than I. At the same time, I think we can write some things worth reading.
2. The progressive movement, whatever that is, is not much more than the sum of its parts. I have been passionate about progressive causes for as long as I have been thinking deeply about what constitutes right and wrong. I'd like to contribute to the movement and be part of the equation.
3. I think ideas are deeply important to any movement. Organizing is important, volunteering is important, effectiveness is required -- but all that doesn't mean much if it's not directed towards worthwhile ends in efficient ways.
Now, here are a few things I'll be reminding myself as we move forward:
1. I am not at all representative of most people in the world. I am instead a well-educated, upper-middle class professional. That point of view has many advantages, but I don't have a lived experience of poverty, powerlessness or disenfranchisement. Whenever I discuss these issues, I will necessarily be discussing them at a step removed.
2. I am not right all of the time. The people I tend to argue with are not wrong all of the time. No ideology has a sole claim on truth or the good, and there is a profound blessing in synthesis and compromise.
3. Writing on this blog will not: save any babies, end world hunger, prevent the destruction of natural resources, or cure AIDS. All the good that I will ever be able to claim credit for will happen someday; they are not happening as I write these words.
Okay! Let's get to it.
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