October 13, 2011
The Thing Itself
By DAVID BROOKS
The rebuilding of ground zero offers a lesson in how to marry monumental vision with pragmatic know-how.
Ground zero in Lower Manhattan is a mass grave. So when it came time to rebuild the World Trade Center, the whole enterprise was enshrouded with passion and symbolism. The developers wanted a project that would proudly assert the American spirit. They wanted to send a message that the terrorist damage would not last. They wanted it to commemorate the tragedy and celebrate the revival. Everything, therefore, had to be big: the country’s tallest building, the most expensive commuter rail station, the costliest memorial.
Born in grief and passion, the whole enterprise was soon plagued by furious discord. Personalities clashed. Practicalities were ignored. Building budgets didn’t mesh with the deadlines. There were arguments about the memorial and the proper definition of the word “patriot.” There was a lot of planning but not much execution. Symbolism eclipsed reality.
During his brief tenure, Gov. David Paterson hired Chris Ward, formerly Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s environmental protection commissioner, to take over the Port Authority and rescue the shambolic ground zero project. Ward quickly understood his mission: to take a sacred cause and turn it into a building project. That is to say, to demystify it, to see it as it really is and not through the gauze of everybody’s emotions surrounding 9/11.
Ward set prosaic priorities — what would be built first, which parts of the project could wait. He cut costs by doing things like putting columns in the design of the transportation hall. He changed the name of Freedom Tower to One World Trade Center. He divided the construction deals into manageable chunks.
Ward gave me a tour of the site this week, and what I liked best was that it wasn’t all that moving. It was mostly about infrastructure, not pathos. Ward spoke as much about the internal guts of the project as the outer meaning. He praised the memorial fountains, which occupy the land of the original towers, for their dignity and restraint. They don’t tell future generations what to think.
It’s still an enormous project, but Ward distinguishes between “myopic monumentalism” and monumental projects done right. Myopic projects are designed in a rush. They are simple and brutal and single-purposed. They lack the cross tensions and quiet paradoxes that accrete on a project when it evolves patiently and over time. Robert Moses’s dream of building an expressway through the heart of Manhattan was myopic monumentalism. Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park, with its complex blend of neighborhoods, was not.
Ward (who is inexplicably being replaced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo) rescued the ground zero project by disenchanting it, by seeing it as it is, not through shrouds of symbols — by attending closely to all the practical complexity. American politics in general could use that sort of disenchantment.
Many issues that were once concrete and practical are distorted because they have become symbolic and spiritual. Tax policy isn’t just about how to raise revenue anymore. Liberals see it as a way to punish the greedy and redress the iniquities of capitalism. Conservatives see tax increases as an assault on the enterprising class perpetrated by arrogant central planners. A tax rate could be seen as just a number signifying an expense, but now it’s a marker in a culture war.
Gun policy isn’t about what specific weaponry should be in private hands. It’s seen as an assault on or defense of the whole rural lifestyle, so to compromise on any front is to court dishonor.
President Obama’s Green Tech initiative has become a policy disaster — not only at Solyndra but at one program after another — because its champions ignored basic practical considerations. They were befogged by their own visions of purity and virtue.
Maybe it’s part of living in a postmaterialist economy, but nearly every practical question becomes a values question. You get politicians and commentators whose views are entirely predictable because they don’t care about the specifics of any particular issue. They just care about the status war against their social enemies and the way each issue functions as a symbol in that great fight.
It would be nice if there were more leaders like Ward inclined to disenchant problems and stare directly at specific contexts. Sometimes circumstances compel you to raise taxes, sometimes circumstances allow you to cut them. Sometimes government can promote innovation; in most cases it can’t.
Walker Percy once wrote, “God writes straight with crooked lines.” Translated into policy terms, that means it takes a lot of little zigs and zags over the terrain to get where you want to go. Mayors, governors and local officials do this all the time as they respond practically to circumstances. At the national level anybody who tries to zig and zag gets regarded as weak and traitorous by the economic values groups. There are rewards for those who fight over symbols, few for those who see the thing itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/opini ... emc=tha212
FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
November 5, 2011
Wanted: Worldly Philosophers
By ROGER E. BACKHOUSE and BRADLEY W. BATEMAN
When economists tackle small problems, they lose any vision about what the economic system should look like.
IT’S become commonplace to criticize the “Occupy” movement for failing to offer an alternative vision. But the thousands of activists in the streets of New York and London aren’t the only ones lacking perspective: economists, to whom we might expect to turn for such vision, have long since given up thinking in terms of economic systems — and we are all the worse for it.
This wasn’t always the case. Course lists from economics departments used to be filled with offerings in “comparative economic systems,” contrasting capitalism and socialism or comparing the French, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon models of capitalism.
Such courses arose in the context of the cold war, when the battle with the Soviet Union was about showing that our system was better than theirs. But with the demise of the Soviet Union, that motivation disappeared. Globalization, so it is claimed, has created a single system of capitalism driven by international competition (ignoring the very real differences between, say, China and the United States). We now have an economics profession that hardly ever discusses its fundamental subject, “capitalism.”
Many economists say that what matters are questions like whether markets are competitive or monopolistic, or how monetary policy works. Using broad, ill-defined notions like capitalism invites ideological grandstanding and distracts from the hard technical problems.
There is a lot in that argument. Economists do much better when they tackle small, well-defined problems. As John Maynard Keynes put it, economists should become more like dentists: modest people who look at a small part of the body but remove a lot of pain.
However, there are also downsides to approaching economics as a dentist would: above all, the loss of any vision about what the economic system should look like. Even Keynes himself was driven by a powerful vision of capitalism. He believed it was the only system that could create prosperity, but it was also inherently unstable and so in need of constant reform. This vision caught the imagination of a generation that had experienced the Great Depression and World War II and helped drive policy for nearly half a century. He was, as the economist Robert Heilbroner claimed, a “worldly philosopher,” alongside such economic visionaries as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx.
In the 20th century, the main challenge to Keynes’s vision came from economists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who envisioned an ideal economy involving isolated individuals bargaining with one another in free markets. Government, they contended, usually messes things up. Overtaking a Keynesianism that many found inadequate to the task of tackling the stagflation of the 1970s, this vision fueled neoliberal and free-market conservative agendas of governments around the world.
THAT vision has in turn been undermined by the current crisis. It took extensive government action to prevent another Great Depression, while the enormous rewards received by bankers at the heart of the meltdown have led many to ask whether unfettered capitalism produced an equitable distribution of wealth. We clearly need a new, alternative vision of capitalism. But thanks to decades of academic training in the “dentistry” approach to economics, today’s Keynes or Friedman is nowhere to be found.
Another downside to the “dentistry” approach to economics is that important pieces of human experience can easily fall from sight. The government does not cut an abstract entity called “government spending” but numerous spending programs, from veterans’ benefits and homeland security to Medicare and Medicaid. To refuse to discuss ideas such as types of capitalism deprives us of language with which to think about these problems. It makes it easier to stop thinking about what the economic system is for and in whose interests it is working.
Perhaps the protesters occupying Wall Street are not so misguided after all. The questions they raise — how do we deal with the local costs of global downturns? Is it fair that those who suffer the most from such downturns have their safety net cut, while those who generate the volatility are bailed out by the government? — are the same ones that a big-picture economic vision should address. If economists want to help create a better world, they first have to ask, and try to answer, the hard questions that can shape a new vision of capitalism’s potential.
Roger E. Backhouse, a professor of economic history at the University of Birmingham, and Bradley W. Bateman, a professor of economics at Denison University, are the authors of “Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opini ... emc=tha212
*****
November 5, 2011
Our Reckless Meritocracy
By ROSS DOUTHAT
HERE is a story about the promise of America. A boy grows up in rural Illinois, the grandson of a farmer who lost everything in the Great Depression. He goes to his small-town high school and then attends his state university, where he walks onto the basketball team and graduates Phi Beta Kappa. He does a stint in the Marine Corps Reserves, gets his M.B.A. and then goes to work for one of the Midwest’s regional banks.
In a different era, he might have stayed there for the rest of his career. But he’s lucky enough to be coming up in the 1960s and ’70s, just as the WASP elite is fading and the big East Coast institutions are opening their doors to strivers from all over. So our Illinois farm boy climbs and keeps on climbing.
He moves to New Jersey and goes to work for Goldman Sachs. He rises to become the company’s C.E.O., and a millionaire many times over. He goes into politics, winning a term in the United States Senate and then getting elected governor of New Jersey. When Barack Obama wins the White House, he’s discussed as a candidate for Treasury secretary. And when he loses his re-election bid, he returns to Wall Street as the head of a financial services company.
By now you may have guessed that I’m talking about Jon Corzine. If so, you probably know that his inspiring story has an unhappy ending — for New Jersey, which faced an enormous budgetary mess when Corzine left office; for his latest Wall Street firm, MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy last week after somehow mislaying some $600 million in customer money; and for the former farm boy himself, who resigned on Friday in disgrace.
But this sudden fall from grace doesn’t make Corzine’s life story any less emblematic of our meritocratic era. Indeed, his rise, recklessness and ruin are all of a piece. For decades, the United States has been opening paths to privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history.
And for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good.
In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Somme. In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania: think of China’s Great Leap Forward, or Stalin’s experiment with “Lysenkoist” agriculture.
In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)
Inevitably, pride goeth before a fall. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science. Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin thought that they had done the same to global economics. The architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the Middle East from the toils of history; the architects of the European Union thought that a common currency could do the same for Europe. And Jon Corzine thought that his investment acumen equipped him to turn a second-tier brokerage firm into the next Goldman Sachs, by leveraging big, betting big and waiting for the payoff.
What you see in today’s Republican primary campaign is a reaction to exactly these kinds of follies — a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner résumés but better instincts.
But from Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain, the outsiders haven’t risen to the challenge. It will do America no good to replace the arrogant with the ignorant, the overconfident with the incompetent.
In place of reckless meritocrats, we don’t need feckless know-nothings. We need intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opini ... emc=tha212
Wanted: Worldly Philosophers
By ROGER E. BACKHOUSE and BRADLEY W. BATEMAN
When economists tackle small problems, they lose any vision about what the economic system should look like.
IT’S become commonplace to criticize the “Occupy” movement for failing to offer an alternative vision. But the thousands of activists in the streets of New York and London aren’t the only ones lacking perspective: economists, to whom we might expect to turn for such vision, have long since given up thinking in terms of economic systems — and we are all the worse for it.
This wasn’t always the case. Course lists from economics departments used to be filled with offerings in “comparative economic systems,” contrasting capitalism and socialism or comparing the French, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon models of capitalism.
Such courses arose in the context of the cold war, when the battle with the Soviet Union was about showing that our system was better than theirs. But with the demise of the Soviet Union, that motivation disappeared. Globalization, so it is claimed, has created a single system of capitalism driven by international competition (ignoring the very real differences between, say, China and the United States). We now have an economics profession that hardly ever discusses its fundamental subject, “capitalism.”
Many economists say that what matters are questions like whether markets are competitive or monopolistic, or how monetary policy works. Using broad, ill-defined notions like capitalism invites ideological grandstanding and distracts from the hard technical problems.
There is a lot in that argument. Economists do much better when they tackle small, well-defined problems. As John Maynard Keynes put it, economists should become more like dentists: modest people who look at a small part of the body but remove a lot of pain.
However, there are also downsides to approaching economics as a dentist would: above all, the loss of any vision about what the economic system should look like. Even Keynes himself was driven by a powerful vision of capitalism. He believed it was the only system that could create prosperity, but it was also inherently unstable and so in need of constant reform. This vision caught the imagination of a generation that had experienced the Great Depression and World War II and helped drive policy for nearly half a century. He was, as the economist Robert Heilbroner claimed, a “worldly philosopher,” alongside such economic visionaries as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx.
In the 20th century, the main challenge to Keynes’s vision came from economists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who envisioned an ideal economy involving isolated individuals bargaining with one another in free markets. Government, they contended, usually messes things up. Overtaking a Keynesianism that many found inadequate to the task of tackling the stagflation of the 1970s, this vision fueled neoliberal and free-market conservative agendas of governments around the world.
THAT vision has in turn been undermined by the current crisis. It took extensive government action to prevent another Great Depression, while the enormous rewards received by bankers at the heart of the meltdown have led many to ask whether unfettered capitalism produced an equitable distribution of wealth. We clearly need a new, alternative vision of capitalism. But thanks to decades of academic training in the “dentistry” approach to economics, today’s Keynes or Friedman is nowhere to be found.
Another downside to the “dentistry” approach to economics is that important pieces of human experience can easily fall from sight. The government does not cut an abstract entity called “government spending” but numerous spending programs, from veterans’ benefits and homeland security to Medicare and Medicaid. To refuse to discuss ideas such as types of capitalism deprives us of language with which to think about these problems. It makes it easier to stop thinking about what the economic system is for and in whose interests it is working.
Perhaps the protesters occupying Wall Street are not so misguided after all. The questions they raise — how do we deal with the local costs of global downturns? Is it fair that those who suffer the most from such downturns have their safety net cut, while those who generate the volatility are bailed out by the government? — are the same ones that a big-picture economic vision should address. If economists want to help create a better world, they first have to ask, and try to answer, the hard questions that can shape a new vision of capitalism’s potential.
Roger E. Backhouse, a professor of economic history at the University of Birmingham, and Bradley W. Bateman, a professor of economics at Denison University, are the authors of “Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opini ... emc=tha212
*****
November 5, 2011
Our Reckless Meritocracy
By ROSS DOUTHAT
HERE is a story about the promise of America. A boy grows up in rural Illinois, the grandson of a farmer who lost everything in the Great Depression. He goes to his small-town high school and then attends his state university, where he walks onto the basketball team and graduates Phi Beta Kappa. He does a stint in the Marine Corps Reserves, gets his M.B.A. and then goes to work for one of the Midwest’s regional banks.
In a different era, he might have stayed there for the rest of his career. But he’s lucky enough to be coming up in the 1960s and ’70s, just as the WASP elite is fading and the big East Coast institutions are opening their doors to strivers from all over. So our Illinois farm boy climbs and keeps on climbing.
He moves to New Jersey and goes to work for Goldman Sachs. He rises to become the company’s C.E.O., and a millionaire many times over. He goes into politics, winning a term in the United States Senate and then getting elected governor of New Jersey. When Barack Obama wins the White House, he’s discussed as a candidate for Treasury secretary. And when he loses his re-election bid, he returns to Wall Street as the head of a financial services company.
By now you may have guessed that I’m talking about Jon Corzine. If so, you probably know that his inspiring story has an unhappy ending — for New Jersey, which faced an enormous budgetary mess when Corzine left office; for his latest Wall Street firm, MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy last week after somehow mislaying some $600 million in customer money; and for the former farm boy himself, who resigned on Friday in disgrace.
But this sudden fall from grace doesn’t make Corzine’s life story any less emblematic of our meritocratic era. Indeed, his rise, recklessness and ruin are all of a piece. For decades, the United States has been opening paths to privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history.
And for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good.
In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Somme. In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania: think of China’s Great Leap Forward, or Stalin’s experiment with “Lysenkoist” agriculture.
In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)
Inevitably, pride goeth before a fall. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science. Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin thought that they had done the same to global economics. The architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the Middle East from the toils of history; the architects of the European Union thought that a common currency could do the same for Europe. And Jon Corzine thought that his investment acumen equipped him to turn a second-tier brokerage firm into the next Goldman Sachs, by leveraging big, betting big and waiting for the payoff.
What you see in today’s Republican primary campaign is a reaction to exactly these kinds of follies — a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner résumés but better instincts.
But from Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain, the outsiders haven’t risen to the challenge. It will do America no good to replace the arrogant with the ignorant, the overconfident with the incompetent.
In place of reckless meritocrats, we don’t need feckless know-nothings. We need intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opini ... emc=tha212
November 15, 2011
Who’s the Decider?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Driving to the covered bazaar in the exotic western Indian town of Jodhpur last week, our Indian guide stopped to point out a modern landmark. “Do you see that stoplight?” he asked, pointing to a standard green-yellow-red stoplight in the busy intersection. “It’s the only stoplight in Jodhpur. There are 1.2 million people living here.”
The more you travel around India, the more you notice just how lightly the hand of government rests on this country. Somehow, it all sort of works. The traffic does move, but, for the first time in all my years visiting India, I’ve started to wonder whether India’s “good enough” approach to government will really be good enough much longer. Huge corruption scandals have stripped the government of billions of dollars of needed resources, and, as much as I’m impressed by the innovative prowess of India’s young technologists, without a government to enable them with the roads, ports, bandwidth, electricity, airports and smart regulations they need to thrive, they will never realize their full potential.
This isn’t just a theoretical matter. The air in India’s biggest cities is unhealthy. You rarely see a body of water here — a river, lake or pond — that is not polluted. The sheer crush of people — India will soon have more than China — on an unprotected environment really seems to be taking its toll. Without better governance, how will India avoid becoming an ecological disaster area in 10 years? Eventually the law of large numbers — 1.2 billion people — just starts to devour every minimalist step forward that India makes. India doesn’t need to become China, and isn’t going to. But it still needs to prove that its democracy can make and implement big decisions with the same focus, authority and stick-to-itiveness as China’s autocracy.
Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, one of India’s premier technology companies, did not mince words about the future when he announced his company’s earnings two weeks ago: “There is a complete absence of decision-making among leaders in the government. If prompt action is not taken, the country will face a setback. You must appreciate how serious it is.”
Sound familiar? Premji could have been speaking about the European Union or the United States. No leaders want to take hard decisions anymore, except when forced to. Everyone — even China’s leaders — seems more afraid of their own people than ever. One wonders whether the Internet, blogging, Twitter, texting and micro-blogging, as in China’s case, has made participatory democracy and autocracy so participatory, and leaders so finely attuned to every nuance of public opinion, that they find it hard to make any big decision that requires sacrifice. They have too many voices in their heads other than their own.
Here we are in America again on the eve of a major budgetary decision by yet another bipartisan “supercommittee,” and does anyone know what President Obama’s preferred outcome is? Exactly which taxes does he want raised, and which spending does he want cut? The president’s politics on this issue seems to be a bowl of poll-tested mush.
At a time when, from India to America, democracies have never had more big decisions to make, if they want to deliver better living standards for their people, this epidemic of not deciding is a troubling trend. It means that we are abdicating more and more leadership to technocrats or supercommittees — or just letting the market and Mother Nature impose on us decisions that we cannot make ourselves. The latter rarely yields optimal outcomes.
The European Union has a particularly acute version of leaders-who-will-not-lead, which is why both Greece and Italy have now turned to unelected technocrats to run their governments. Writing in The Financial Times on Saturday, Tony Barber noted, “In effect, eurozone policy makers have decided to suspend politics as normal in two countries because they judge it to be a mortal threat to Europe’s monetary union. They have ruled that European unity, a project more than 50 years in the making, is of such overriding importance that politicians accountable to the people must give way to unelected experts who can keep the show on the road. If so far there is little public outrage in Athens and Rome, it is surely because millions of Greeks and Italians hold their political classes in such contempt.”
Yes, it’s true that in the hyperconnected world, in the age of Facebook and Twitter, the people are more empowered and a lot more innovation and ideas will come from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s a good thing — in theory. But at the end of the day — whether you are a president, senator, mayor or on the steering committee of your local Occupy Wall Street — someone needs to meld those ideas into a vision of how to move forward, sculpt them into policies that can make a difference in peoples’ lives and then build a majority to deliver on them. Those are called leaders. Leaders shape polls. They don’t just read polls. And, today, across the globe and across all political systems, leaders are in dangerously short supply.
Maureen Dowd is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/opini ... emc=tha212
Who’s the Decider?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Driving to the covered bazaar in the exotic western Indian town of Jodhpur last week, our Indian guide stopped to point out a modern landmark. “Do you see that stoplight?” he asked, pointing to a standard green-yellow-red stoplight in the busy intersection. “It’s the only stoplight in Jodhpur. There are 1.2 million people living here.”
The more you travel around India, the more you notice just how lightly the hand of government rests on this country. Somehow, it all sort of works. The traffic does move, but, for the first time in all my years visiting India, I’ve started to wonder whether India’s “good enough” approach to government will really be good enough much longer. Huge corruption scandals have stripped the government of billions of dollars of needed resources, and, as much as I’m impressed by the innovative prowess of India’s young technologists, without a government to enable them with the roads, ports, bandwidth, electricity, airports and smart regulations they need to thrive, they will never realize their full potential.
This isn’t just a theoretical matter. The air in India’s biggest cities is unhealthy. You rarely see a body of water here — a river, lake or pond — that is not polluted. The sheer crush of people — India will soon have more than China — on an unprotected environment really seems to be taking its toll. Without better governance, how will India avoid becoming an ecological disaster area in 10 years? Eventually the law of large numbers — 1.2 billion people — just starts to devour every minimalist step forward that India makes. India doesn’t need to become China, and isn’t going to. But it still needs to prove that its democracy can make and implement big decisions with the same focus, authority and stick-to-itiveness as China’s autocracy.
Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, one of India’s premier technology companies, did not mince words about the future when he announced his company’s earnings two weeks ago: “There is a complete absence of decision-making among leaders in the government. If prompt action is not taken, the country will face a setback. You must appreciate how serious it is.”
Sound familiar? Premji could have been speaking about the European Union or the United States. No leaders want to take hard decisions anymore, except when forced to. Everyone — even China’s leaders — seems more afraid of their own people than ever. One wonders whether the Internet, blogging, Twitter, texting and micro-blogging, as in China’s case, has made participatory democracy and autocracy so participatory, and leaders so finely attuned to every nuance of public opinion, that they find it hard to make any big decision that requires sacrifice. They have too many voices in their heads other than their own.
Here we are in America again on the eve of a major budgetary decision by yet another bipartisan “supercommittee,” and does anyone know what President Obama’s preferred outcome is? Exactly which taxes does he want raised, and which spending does he want cut? The president’s politics on this issue seems to be a bowl of poll-tested mush.
At a time when, from India to America, democracies have never had more big decisions to make, if they want to deliver better living standards for their people, this epidemic of not deciding is a troubling trend. It means that we are abdicating more and more leadership to technocrats or supercommittees — or just letting the market and Mother Nature impose on us decisions that we cannot make ourselves. The latter rarely yields optimal outcomes.
The European Union has a particularly acute version of leaders-who-will-not-lead, which is why both Greece and Italy have now turned to unelected technocrats to run their governments. Writing in The Financial Times on Saturday, Tony Barber noted, “In effect, eurozone policy makers have decided to suspend politics as normal in two countries because they judge it to be a mortal threat to Europe’s monetary union. They have ruled that European unity, a project more than 50 years in the making, is of such overriding importance that politicians accountable to the people must give way to unelected experts who can keep the show on the road. If so far there is little public outrage in Athens and Rome, it is surely because millions of Greeks and Italians hold their political classes in such contempt.”
Yes, it’s true that in the hyperconnected world, in the age of Facebook and Twitter, the people are more empowered and a lot more innovation and ideas will come from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s a good thing — in theory. But at the end of the day — whether you are a president, senator, mayor or on the steering committee of your local Occupy Wall Street — someone needs to meld those ideas into a vision of how to move forward, sculpt them into policies that can make a difference in peoples’ lives and then build a majority to deliver on them. Those are called leaders. Leaders shape polls. They don’t just read polls. And, today, across the globe and across all political systems, leaders are in dangerously short supply.
Maureen Dowd is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/opini ... emc=tha212
Op-Ed Columnist
The Technocratic Nightmare
By DAVID BROOKS
The European Union is an attempt to build an economic and legal superstructure without a linguistic, cultural, historic and civic base. No wonder it's in crisis.
November 17, 2011
The Technocratic Nightmare
By DAVID BROOKS
During the first half of the 1990s, I lived in Brussels and wrote about the European Union, among other subjects, for The Wall Street Journal. This was the heyday of European integration. Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors were in power, negotiating the Maastricht Treaty and organizing the common currency.
There was a lot of excitement among the civil servants who saw themselves as the architects of a new Europe. But there were some oddities.
The European leaders would come together for a summit and issue a joint communiqué. But then if you sampled the coverage in each of the national medias, you felt as though you were reading about 12 entirely different events.
Europe was unifying legalistically and economically, but there was no common language or common conversation. At one meeting, leaders embraced “federalism,” but that word meant one thing in Britain and another thing in Germany.
Then there was the elitism. Off the record, Europe’s technocrats would say the most blatantly condescending things: History had taught them that Europe’s peoples were not to be trusted and government should be run from the top by people like themselves.
As a consequence, European integration was opaque, and consisted of a long series of complicated fudges. When the European Union leaders were compelled to seek popular approval to get the Maastricht Treaty ratified, they sponsored a forlorn rally in a Brussels park. There were E.U. flags and booths and speakers. But the crowd was bored and sparse. At one point, everyone was asked to sing the new European national anthem to the tune of “Ode to Joy.” Dead silence. No one knew the new words that had been written to go with that masterpiece.
The European Union is an attempt to build an economic and legal superstructure without a linguistic, cultural, historic and civic base. It was the final of the post-World War II efforts — the United Nations was among the first — to build governments that were transnational, passionless and safe.
Over the 17 years since I left Brussels, I’ve been impressed and surprised that they could keep the E.U. together. The desire for a unified Europe is strong, at least among the leadership class and those over 60.
But now the inherent flaws are undermining the project. The nations of Europe have been running different kinds of economies and different kinds of democracies, reflecting their diverse histories, values and cultures. If you jam diverse economic cultures into a single currency, you’re bound to get an explosion.
At this moment of crisis, it is obvious how little moral solidarity undergirds the European pseudostate. Americans in Oregon are barely aware when their tax dollars go to Americans in Arizona. We are one people with one shared destiny. West Germans were willing to pay enormous subsidies to build the former East Germany. They, too, are one people.
But that shared identity doesn’t exist between Germans and Greeks, or even between French and Germans. It was easy to be European when it didn’t cost anything. When sacrifices are necessary, the European identity dissolves away.
The mess threatens to bring down the European project and European economies. It threatens to send the world into another global recession. (At this point, Chancellor Angela Merkel has more influence over President Obama’s re-election chances than Obama himself does.)
On a superficial level, the fault lies with the current European leadership, their addiction to inadequate patches and fudges. But the real problems emerge from the technocratic mind-set, from the arrogant gray men who believe they can engineer society, oblivious to history, language, culture, values and place.
And the final curse is that while building Europe in this way was a mistake, Europeans cannot now simply reverse course. If the euro was immediately dissolved, the Deutschmark would surge, nearly every other currency would plummet and the imbalances would create a global catastrophe.
In the short term, the European Central Bank, the stable European nations and even the U.S. will have to take extremely big and painful action to stabilize the situation. But, after that, it’ll be a time for chastening. It’ll be time to discard the technocratic mind-set that created this inherently flawed architecture and build a Europe that reflects the organic realities of those diverse societies.
Thinking back on all the complacent conversations I used to have in Brussels, I was struck by a quotation I read this week in The Economist. A European central banker said he had always wondered how Europe’s leaders could have stumbled into World War I. “From the middle of a crisis,” he said recently, “you can see how easy it is to make mistakes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/opini ... emc=tha212
The Technocratic Nightmare
By DAVID BROOKS
The European Union is an attempt to build an economic and legal superstructure without a linguistic, cultural, historic and civic base. No wonder it's in crisis.
November 17, 2011
The Technocratic Nightmare
By DAVID BROOKS
During the first half of the 1990s, I lived in Brussels and wrote about the European Union, among other subjects, for The Wall Street Journal. This was the heyday of European integration. Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors were in power, negotiating the Maastricht Treaty and organizing the common currency.
There was a lot of excitement among the civil servants who saw themselves as the architects of a new Europe. But there were some oddities.
The European leaders would come together for a summit and issue a joint communiqué. But then if you sampled the coverage in each of the national medias, you felt as though you were reading about 12 entirely different events.
Europe was unifying legalistically and economically, but there was no common language or common conversation. At one meeting, leaders embraced “federalism,” but that word meant one thing in Britain and another thing in Germany.
Then there was the elitism. Off the record, Europe’s technocrats would say the most blatantly condescending things: History had taught them that Europe’s peoples were not to be trusted and government should be run from the top by people like themselves.
As a consequence, European integration was opaque, and consisted of a long series of complicated fudges. When the European Union leaders were compelled to seek popular approval to get the Maastricht Treaty ratified, they sponsored a forlorn rally in a Brussels park. There were E.U. flags and booths and speakers. But the crowd was bored and sparse. At one point, everyone was asked to sing the new European national anthem to the tune of “Ode to Joy.” Dead silence. No one knew the new words that had been written to go with that masterpiece.
The European Union is an attempt to build an economic and legal superstructure without a linguistic, cultural, historic and civic base. It was the final of the post-World War II efforts — the United Nations was among the first — to build governments that were transnational, passionless and safe.
Over the 17 years since I left Brussels, I’ve been impressed and surprised that they could keep the E.U. together. The desire for a unified Europe is strong, at least among the leadership class and those over 60.
But now the inherent flaws are undermining the project. The nations of Europe have been running different kinds of economies and different kinds of democracies, reflecting their diverse histories, values and cultures. If you jam diverse economic cultures into a single currency, you’re bound to get an explosion.
At this moment of crisis, it is obvious how little moral solidarity undergirds the European pseudostate. Americans in Oregon are barely aware when their tax dollars go to Americans in Arizona. We are one people with one shared destiny. West Germans were willing to pay enormous subsidies to build the former East Germany. They, too, are one people.
But that shared identity doesn’t exist between Germans and Greeks, or even between French and Germans. It was easy to be European when it didn’t cost anything. When sacrifices are necessary, the European identity dissolves away.
The mess threatens to bring down the European project and European economies. It threatens to send the world into another global recession. (At this point, Chancellor Angela Merkel has more influence over President Obama’s re-election chances than Obama himself does.)
On a superficial level, the fault lies with the current European leadership, their addiction to inadequate patches and fudges. But the real problems emerge from the technocratic mind-set, from the arrogant gray men who believe they can engineer society, oblivious to history, language, culture, values and place.
And the final curse is that while building Europe in this way was a mistake, Europeans cannot now simply reverse course. If the euro was immediately dissolved, the Deutschmark would surge, nearly every other currency would plummet and the imbalances would create a global catastrophe.
In the short term, the European Central Bank, the stable European nations and even the U.S. will have to take extremely big and painful action to stabilize the situation. But, after that, it’ll be a time for chastening. It’ll be time to discard the technocratic mind-set that created this inherently flawed architecture and build a Europe that reflects the organic realities of those diverse societies.
Thinking back on all the complacent conversations I used to have in Brussels, I was struck by a quotation I read this week in The Economist. A European central banker said he had always wondered how Europe’s leaders could have stumbled into World War I. “From the middle of a crisis,” he said recently, “you can see how easy it is to make mistakes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/opini ... emc=tha212
December 1, 2011
The Spirit of Enterprise
By DAVID BROOKS
Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources — many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital.
It’s because many people in these countries, as Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.
People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.
This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and degraded.
Right now, this ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists diverting money on the basis of connections; they see traders making millions off of short-term manipulations; they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.
The result is a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. Social trust shrivels. Effort is no longer worth it. The prosperity machine winds down.
Yet the assault on these values continues, especially in Europe.
Over the past few decades, several European nations, like Germany and the Netherlands, have played by the rules and practiced good governance. They have lived within their means, undertaken painful reforms, enhanced their competitiveness and reinforced good values. Now they are being brutally browbeaten for not wanting to bail out nations like Greece, Italy and Spain, which did not do these things, which instead borrowed huge amounts of money that they are choosing not to repay.
The estimated costs of these bailouts vary enormously and may end up being greater than the cost of German reparations after World War I. Germans are being browbeaten for not wanting to bail out Greece, where even today many people are still not willing to pay their taxes. They are being browbeaten for not wanting to bail out Italy, where future growth prospects are uncertain.
They are being asked to bail out nations with vast public sectors and horrible demographics. They are being asked to paper over fundamental economic problems with a mountain of currency.
It’s true that Germans benefited enormously from the euro zone and the southern European bubble, and that German and French banks are far from blameless. It’s true that the consequences for the world would be calamitous if the euro zone cracked up. It’s true that, in a crisis, you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do; you do things that violate your everyday values.
But our sympathy should be with the German people. They are not behaving selfishly by insisting on structural reforms in exchange for bailouts. They are not imprisoned by some rigid ideology. They are not besotted with some semi-senile Weimar superstition about rampant inflation. They are defending the values, habits and social contract upon which the entire prosperity of the West is based.
The scariest thing is that many of the people browbeating the Germans seem to have very little commitment to the effort-reward formula that undergirds capitalism. On the one hand, there are the technicians who are oblivious to values. For them anything that can’t be counted and modeled is a primitive irrelevancy. On the other hand, there are people who see the European crisis through the prism of some cosmic class war. What matters is not how people conduct themselves, but whether they are a have or a have-not. The burden of proof is against the haves. The benefit of the doubt is with the have-nots. Any resistance to redistribution is greeted with outrage.
The real lesson from financial crises is that, at the pit of the crisis, you do what you have to do. You bail out the banks. You bail out the weak European governments. But, at the same time, you lock in policies that reinforce the fundamental link between effort and reward. And, as soon as the crisis passes, you move to repair the legitimacy of the system.
That didn’t happen after the American financial crisis of 2008. The people who caused the crisis were never held responsible. There never was an exit strategy to unwind the gigantic debt buildup. The structural problems plaguing the economy remain unaddressed. As a result, the United States suffers from a horrible crisis of trust that is slowing growth, restricting government action and sending our politics off in strange directions.
Europe’s challenge is not only to avert a financial meltdown but to do it in a way that doesn’t poison the seedbed of prosperity. Which values will be rewarded and reinforced? Will it be effort, productivity and self-discipline? Or will it be bad governance, now and forever?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/opini ... emc=tha212
The Spirit of Enterprise
By DAVID BROOKS
Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources — many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital.
It’s because many people in these countries, as Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.
People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.
This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and degraded.
Right now, this ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists diverting money on the basis of connections; they see traders making millions off of short-term manipulations; they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.
The result is a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. Social trust shrivels. Effort is no longer worth it. The prosperity machine winds down.
Yet the assault on these values continues, especially in Europe.
Over the past few decades, several European nations, like Germany and the Netherlands, have played by the rules and practiced good governance. They have lived within their means, undertaken painful reforms, enhanced their competitiveness and reinforced good values. Now they are being brutally browbeaten for not wanting to bail out nations like Greece, Italy and Spain, which did not do these things, which instead borrowed huge amounts of money that they are choosing not to repay.
The estimated costs of these bailouts vary enormously and may end up being greater than the cost of German reparations after World War I. Germans are being browbeaten for not wanting to bail out Greece, where even today many people are still not willing to pay their taxes. They are being browbeaten for not wanting to bail out Italy, where future growth prospects are uncertain.
They are being asked to bail out nations with vast public sectors and horrible demographics. They are being asked to paper over fundamental economic problems with a mountain of currency.
It’s true that Germans benefited enormously from the euro zone and the southern European bubble, and that German and French banks are far from blameless. It’s true that the consequences for the world would be calamitous if the euro zone cracked up. It’s true that, in a crisis, you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do; you do things that violate your everyday values.
But our sympathy should be with the German people. They are not behaving selfishly by insisting on structural reforms in exchange for bailouts. They are not imprisoned by some rigid ideology. They are not besotted with some semi-senile Weimar superstition about rampant inflation. They are defending the values, habits and social contract upon which the entire prosperity of the West is based.
The scariest thing is that many of the people browbeating the Germans seem to have very little commitment to the effort-reward formula that undergirds capitalism. On the one hand, there are the technicians who are oblivious to values. For them anything that can’t be counted and modeled is a primitive irrelevancy. On the other hand, there are people who see the European crisis through the prism of some cosmic class war. What matters is not how people conduct themselves, but whether they are a have or a have-not. The burden of proof is against the haves. The benefit of the doubt is with the have-nots. Any resistance to redistribution is greeted with outrage.
The real lesson from financial crises is that, at the pit of the crisis, you do what you have to do. You bail out the banks. You bail out the weak European governments. But, at the same time, you lock in policies that reinforce the fundamental link between effort and reward. And, as soon as the crisis passes, you move to repair the legitimacy of the system.
That didn’t happen after the American financial crisis of 2008. The people who caused the crisis were never held responsible. There never was an exit strategy to unwind the gigantic debt buildup. The structural problems plaguing the economy remain unaddressed. As a result, the United States suffers from a horrible crisis of trust that is slowing growth, restricting government action and sending our politics off in strange directions.
Europe’s challenge is not only to avert a financial meltdown but to do it in a way that doesn’t poison the seedbed of prosperity. Which values will be rewarded and reinforced? Will it be effort, productivity and self-discipline? Or will it be bad governance, now and forever?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/opini ... emc=tha212
Op-Ed Contributor
Worker-Owners of America, Unite!
By GAR ALPEROVITZ
Published: December 14, 2011
College Park, Md.
THE Occupy Wall Street protests have come and mostly gone, and whether they continue to have an impact or not, they have brought an astounding fact to the public’s attention: a mere 1 percent of Americans own just under half of the country’s financial assets and other investments. America, it would seem, is less equitable than ever, thanks to our no-holds-barred capitalist system.
But at another level, something different has been quietly brewing in recent decades: more and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to the traditional capitalist model. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/opini ... n&emc=tya3
Worker-Owners of America, Unite!
By GAR ALPEROVITZ
Published: December 14, 2011
College Park, Md.
THE Occupy Wall Street protests have come and mostly gone, and whether they continue to have an impact or not, they have brought an astounding fact to the public’s attention: a mere 1 percent of Americans own just under half of the country’s financial assets and other investments. America, it would seem, is less equitable than ever, thanks to our no-holds-barred capitalist system.
But at another level, something different has been quietly brewing in recent decades: more and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to the traditional capitalist model. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/opini ... n&emc=tya3
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Ceremony Conferring the Honorary Doctorate at the University of Ottawa
13 January 2012
Please also see: Press Release, Photographs
Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim
Chancellor Labelle
President Rock
Excellencies
Distinguished Guests
Excerpt:
There are many topics of mutual interest that I could talk about today. But I have picked just one. In my eyes it is important - and I understand that it is also high among your priorities. I refer to the field of governance and public policy, and, specifically, to the difficulty of establishing workable constitutional systems - especially in countries with less experience in democratic governance.
As you know, my own interests in the last 50 years as Imam of the Ismaili community, have been primarily focused on Africa, South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle-East - and on improving the quality of life for the people who live there. The more I think about this matter, the more I am persuaded that one of the critical barriers to progress is the way in which governing processes occur.
The University of Ottawa has a long tradition of sharing internationally in the hard work of intellectual inquiry. Canada’s Governor General recently referred to this process as “the Diplomacy of Knowledge.” And it seems to me that questions of constitutional governance in the developing world deserve a particularly high place on that agenda.
The so-called Arab Spring has brought special attention to this challenge - illustrating that it is easier to rally people in opposition to a particular government than to forge agreement about new governing processes. But, while this pattern has recently been more dramatically evident, it has been a reality for a very, very long time.
In my life, the two moments which contributed most dramatically to this condition were the fall of the British and French colonial empires after World War II - and then the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire two decades ago. The process continues today, as developing nations re-examine - sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently - the structures under which they are governed.
In some cases and I think here of Kenya’s very new constitution - power has been diffused - in response no doubt to pressures from ethnic, economic, religious and other centrifugal forces. One risk of decentralization is that it can place more decision-making power into the hands of communities that have had less access to education and governing experience, and less exposure to national and global issues.
Perhaps this is why, in some cases, the trend has been to consolidate governing authority - such as in Afghanistan, with the aim of overcoming inertia and inefficiency - as well as - fragmented and provincial outlooks.
The history of constitutions can be seen, as an oscillation between the two poles of centralization and diffusion - with new concentrations of power often amplifying the temptation to abuse, while new dispersions of power are often associated with stagnation, paralysis and even more opportunities for corruption. Arrangements that effectively balance power - through a federalist approach, for example, are elusive. What is critical is that constitutional arrangements should respect inherited traditions, ensure fairness to minority communities, respond to rural as well as urban concerns and underwrite equitable opportunity for a better life. Reconciling the global and the local, the urban and the rural, the regional and the national, is a formidable challenge - one that calls for the best of our intellectual energies and consistent fine-tuning over time.
There is a second question related to the experience of fledgling - and often failing – democracies. In much of the developed world, we have seen the emergence, over time, of two-pronged political structures - where one party forms a government and the other constitutes the opposition. This arrangement can foster greater accountability and even a certain stability. But I have to say, I am increasingly sceptical about the emergence of such constructs in many developing countries. To the contrary, I suspect that a continuing multiplicity of widely differentiated parties will mean that some form of coalition government will become the norm. This will especially be the case, of course, in societies that are - multi-cultural, multi-religious, or struggling to accommodate secular and religious political forces.
The difficulty is, however, that multi-party coalitions can be intrinsically undisciplined, with their differing agendas, and often unstable. In such situations, the threat of defection can be highly destabilizing, while accountability is often blurred and transparency is discouraged. Yet, coalition governance is now becoming a familiar form of government in many countries of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The broader the array of parties, the greater the risk that they will be based on personalities or narrow parochial identities, rather than a broadly-recognized, predictable point of view.
There is certainly no straightforward, universal formula to apply in such situations. We must not naively assume that what has worked in some parts of the western world, for example, will also work the same way in less developed contexts. Different places, different histories require quite different approaches.
The questions raised by coalition governance are not easy ones – either in the developing world or the developed world. What should be the rules under which parties and other governing entities are put together? How can we best find the glue that will hold them together - such as joint commitments to issues of clear national interest – and to a spirit of pluralism which values conciliation among diversified viewpoints?
Let me emphasize that I am not opposed to the concept of coalition government. Indeed it may be an inevitable response to the intrinsic pluralism of many of the countries in which I work. But the high level of political instability and failure around the world illustrates the need for creative new thinking about this particularly demanding form of democracy.
What constitutional options and best practices will give coalition government the greatest chance of stability and consistent, high quality performance?
The alternative is a world widely characterized by significant numbers of unstable states. It is a scenario to be avoided.
Again, the discussion of comparative political systems is just one of many conversations in which the great universities of the world should be vital participants. Our own Aga Khan University is now planning a new Graduate School of Government, Public Policy and Civil Society to help address these issues. And surely this is a discussion in which the University of Ottawa can make a special contribution - given the commitment you have articulated to research, the topic of “Canada and the World” - your focus on international intellectual engagement - including 140 bilateral university agreements - your emphasis on fostering democracy, and, indeed, the creation of a new premier Centre for Governance and Public Policy Research.
I know, too, that this University’s global effectiveness is reinforced by the high regard in which Canada is held as a valued international partner. In my experience, a country’s standing in our contemporary world is no longer recognised by what it can achieve for itself, but by what it can do for others. In this context, Canada has truly become a great, world power.
Thank you
http://www.akdn.org/Content/1110/Speech ... -of-Ottawa
13 January 2012
Please also see: Press Release, Photographs
Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim
Chancellor Labelle
President Rock
Excellencies
Distinguished Guests
Excerpt:
There are many topics of mutual interest that I could talk about today. But I have picked just one. In my eyes it is important - and I understand that it is also high among your priorities. I refer to the field of governance and public policy, and, specifically, to the difficulty of establishing workable constitutional systems - especially in countries with less experience in democratic governance.
As you know, my own interests in the last 50 years as Imam of the Ismaili community, have been primarily focused on Africa, South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle-East - and on improving the quality of life for the people who live there. The more I think about this matter, the more I am persuaded that one of the critical barriers to progress is the way in which governing processes occur.
The University of Ottawa has a long tradition of sharing internationally in the hard work of intellectual inquiry. Canada’s Governor General recently referred to this process as “the Diplomacy of Knowledge.” And it seems to me that questions of constitutional governance in the developing world deserve a particularly high place on that agenda.
The so-called Arab Spring has brought special attention to this challenge - illustrating that it is easier to rally people in opposition to a particular government than to forge agreement about new governing processes. But, while this pattern has recently been more dramatically evident, it has been a reality for a very, very long time.
In my life, the two moments which contributed most dramatically to this condition were the fall of the British and French colonial empires after World War II - and then the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire two decades ago. The process continues today, as developing nations re-examine - sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently - the structures under which they are governed.
In some cases and I think here of Kenya’s very new constitution - power has been diffused - in response no doubt to pressures from ethnic, economic, religious and other centrifugal forces. One risk of decentralization is that it can place more decision-making power into the hands of communities that have had less access to education and governing experience, and less exposure to national and global issues.
Perhaps this is why, in some cases, the trend has been to consolidate governing authority - such as in Afghanistan, with the aim of overcoming inertia and inefficiency - as well as - fragmented and provincial outlooks.
The history of constitutions can be seen, as an oscillation between the two poles of centralization and diffusion - with new concentrations of power often amplifying the temptation to abuse, while new dispersions of power are often associated with stagnation, paralysis and even more opportunities for corruption. Arrangements that effectively balance power - through a federalist approach, for example, are elusive. What is critical is that constitutional arrangements should respect inherited traditions, ensure fairness to minority communities, respond to rural as well as urban concerns and underwrite equitable opportunity for a better life. Reconciling the global and the local, the urban and the rural, the regional and the national, is a formidable challenge - one that calls for the best of our intellectual energies and consistent fine-tuning over time.
There is a second question related to the experience of fledgling - and often failing – democracies. In much of the developed world, we have seen the emergence, over time, of two-pronged political structures - where one party forms a government and the other constitutes the opposition. This arrangement can foster greater accountability and even a certain stability. But I have to say, I am increasingly sceptical about the emergence of such constructs in many developing countries. To the contrary, I suspect that a continuing multiplicity of widely differentiated parties will mean that some form of coalition government will become the norm. This will especially be the case, of course, in societies that are - multi-cultural, multi-religious, or struggling to accommodate secular and religious political forces.
The difficulty is, however, that multi-party coalitions can be intrinsically undisciplined, with their differing agendas, and often unstable. In such situations, the threat of defection can be highly destabilizing, while accountability is often blurred and transparency is discouraged. Yet, coalition governance is now becoming a familiar form of government in many countries of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The broader the array of parties, the greater the risk that they will be based on personalities or narrow parochial identities, rather than a broadly-recognized, predictable point of view.
There is certainly no straightforward, universal formula to apply in such situations. We must not naively assume that what has worked in some parts of the western world, for example, will also work the same way in less developed contexts. Different places, different histories require quite different approaches.
The questions raised by coalition governance are not easy ones – either in the developing world or the developed world. What should be the rules under which parties and other governing entities are put together? How can we best find the glue that will hold them together - such as joint commitments to issues of clear national interest – and to a spirit of pluralism which values conciliation among diversified viewpoints?
Let me emphasize that I am not opposed to the concept of coalition government. Indeed it may be an inevitable response to the intrinsic pluralism of many of the countries in which I work. But the high level of political instability and failure around the world illustrates the need for creative new thinking about this particularly demanding form of democracy.
What constitutional options and best practices will give coalition government the greatest chance of stability and consistent, high quality performance?
The alternative is a world widely characterized by significant numbers of unstable states. It is a scenario to be avoided.
Again, the discussion of comparative political systems is just one of many conversations in which the great universities of the world should be vital participants. Our own Aga Khan University is now planning a new Graduate School of Government, Public Policy and Civil Society to help address these issues. And surely this is a discussion in which the University of Ottawa can make a special contribution - given the commitment you have articulated to research, the topic of “Canada and the World” - your focus on international intellectual engagement - including 140 bilateral university agreements - your emphasis on fostering democracy, and, indeed, the creation of a new premier Centre for Governance and Public Policy Research.
I know, too, that this University’s global effectiveness is reinforced by the high regard in which Canada is held as a valued international partner. In my experience, a country’s standing in our contemporary world is no longer recognised by what it can achieve for itself, but by what it can do for others. In this context, Canada has truly become a great, world power.
Thank you
http://www.akdn.org/Content/1110/Speech ... -of-Ottawa
January 23, 2012
Free-Market Socialism
By DAVID BROOKS
I hope President Obama read about Maddie Parlier as he was working on his State of the Union address. Parlier is the subject of Adam Davidson’s illuminating article in the current issue of The Atlantic.
Parlier’s father abandoned her when she was young and crashed his car while driving drunk, killing himself and a family of four. Maddie is smart and hard-working. She did reasonably well in high school but got pregnant her senior year.
She and the father of her child split up, which put the kibosh on her college dreams because she couldn’t afford day care. She temped for a while. Her work ethic got her noticed, and she got a job as an unskilled laborer at Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors.
Parlier earns about $13 an hour. She’d like to become one of the better-paid workers in the plant, but, in today’s factories, that requires an enormous leap in skills. It feels cruel, Davidson writes, to mention all the things Parlier would have to learn to move up. She doesn’t know the computer language that runs the machines. “She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.”
A good attitude and hustle have taken Parlier as far as they can. It’s hard, given her situation, to acquire the skills she needs to realize the American dream.
Davidson’s article is important because it shows the interplay between economic forces (globalization and technology) and social forces (single parenthood and the breakdown of community support). Globalization and technological change increase the demands on workers; social decay makes it harder for them to meet those demands.
Across America, millions of mothers can’t rise because they don’t have adequate support systems as they try to improve their skills. Tens of millions of children have poor life chances because they grow up in disorganized environments that make it hard to acquire the social, organizational and educational skills they will need to become productive workers.
Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.
Over the past 40 years, women’s wages have risen sharply but, as Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project point out, median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent. Next time somebody talks to you about wage stagnation, have them break it down by sex. It’s not only globalization and technological change causing this stagnation. It’s the deterioration of the moral and social landscape, especially for men.
The idiocy of our current political debate is that neither side seems capable of talking about the interplay of economic and social forces. Most of the Republican candidates talk as if all that is needed is more capitalism. But lighter regulation and lower taxes won’t, on their own, help the Maddie Parliers of the world get the skills they need to compete.
Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.
This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change.
If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.
As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.
To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.
This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector. Don’t triangulate meekly toward the center; select bold policies from both ends. That’s what would help Maddie Parlier and millions like her.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/opini ... emc=tha212
Free-Market Socialism
By DAVID BROOKS
I hope President Obama read about Maddie Parlier as he was working on his State of the Union address. Parlier is the subject of Adam Davidson’s illuminating article in the current issue of The Atlantic.
Parlier’s father abandoned her when she was young and crashed his car while driving drunk, killing himself and a family of four. Maddie is smart and hard-working. She did reasonably well in high school but got pregnant her senior year.
She and the father of her child split up, which put the kibosh on her college dreams because she couldn’t afford day care. She temped for a while. Her work ethic got her noticed, and she got a job as an unskilled laborer at Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors.
Parlier earns about $13 an hour. She’d like to become one of the better-paid workers in the plant, but, in today’s factories, that requires an enormous leap in skills. It feels cruel, Davidson writes, to mention all the things Parlier would have to learn to move up. She doesn’t know the computer language that runs the machines. “She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.”
A good attitude and hustle have taken Parlier as far as they can. It’s hard, given her situation, to acquire the skills she needs to realize the American dream.
Davidson’s article is important because it shows the interplay between economic forces (globalization and technology) and social forces (single parenthood and the breakdown of community support). Globalization and technological change increase the demands on workers; social decay makes it harder for them to meet those demands.
Across America, millions of mothers can’t rise because they don’t have adequate support systems as they try to improve their skills. Tens of millions of children have poor life chances because they grow up in disorganized environments that make it hard to acquire the social, organizational and educational skills they will need to become productive workers.
Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.
Over the past 40 years, women’s wages have risen sharply but, as Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project point out, median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent. Next time somebody talks to you about wage stagnation, have them break it down by sex. It’s not only globalization and technological change causing this stagnation. It’s the deterioration of the moral and social landscape, especially for men.
The idiocy of our current political debate is that neither side seems capable of talking about the interplay of economic and social forces. Most of the Republican candidates talk as if all that is needed is more capitalism. But lighter regulation and lower taxes won’t, on their own, help the Maddie Parliers of the world get the skills they need to compete.
Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.
This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change.
If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.
As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.
To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.
This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector. Don’t triangulate meekly toward the center; select bold policies from both ends. That’s what would help Maddie Parlier and millions like her.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/opini ... emc=tha212
January 26, 2012
At Davos, Debating Capitalism’s Future
By ED MILIBAND
Davos, Switzerland
IS 20th-century capitalism failing 21st-century society? Members of the global elite debated that unusual question on Wednesday at the annual World Economic Forum.
There was a time, not long ago, when such a debate would have been held only among the protesters who annually shelter in igloos farther down the Alpine slopes. So it is encouraging that more than three years since the global financial crisis, a belated process of soul-searching has begun in search of the right lessons to learn from it.
In Britain, members of the Conservative-led government — not least the prime minister, David Cameron — have echoed the Labour Party’s call for a more responsible capitalism.
There is a great difference, however, between being willing to talk about an issue and being ready to act.
It is a difference between those who still believe that all governments can do is get out of the way and those who believe there is a real role for governments in first reviving our economies, and then setting the right rules for future success. The challenge therefore is not just to capitalism but also to politics.
At the Group of 20 summit in London three years ago, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Obama led concerted action to guide the world economy from the brink. Three years later, some governments are engaging in a short-sighted fiscal protectionism that can only lead to stunted growth.
If we learned anything from the 1930s, it was that governments cannot shrug their shoulders and watch as their own people are consigned to unemployment. I find it tragic and astonishing that some governments need to learn this lesson again.
Nor should we forget the causes of the current growth and debt crisis as we seek to put our economies on a more sustainable footing.
Both the United States and Britain suffered because their economies were overly reliant on the financial sector’s artificial profits; living standards for the many worsened while the economic rewards skewed to the top 1 percent; a capitalist model encouraged short-term decision-making oriented toward quarterly profits rather than long-term health; and vested interests — from giant banks to media moguls —were deemed too big to fail or too powerful to challenge.
We need to recognize that the trickle-down promise of conservative theorists has turned into a gravity-defying reality in which wealth has flowed upward disproportionately and, too often, undeservedly. To address properly the squeeze in middle-class incomes on both sides of the Atlantic requires fresh thinking from governments about how people train for their working lives and what a living wage should be.
Governments can set better — not necessarily more — rules to encourage productive businesses that invest, invent, train, make and sell real products and services. We need rules that discourage the predatory behavior of those seeking the fast buck through hostile takeovers and asset-stripping that do not have the interests of the shareholders, the employees or the economy at heart. In Britain, the Labour Party is considering how we can raise the bar for corporate takeovers so that companies’ futures are not determined by just a handful of speculators.
And governments must remember they are elected to serve the people, not the powerful lobbies who can pay for access or influence. Too often the real enemies of market capitalism are some of the leading beneficiaries of the current model, which favors price-gouging cartels and consumer exploitation. In Britain, airlines need to be more upfront about the true cost of their fares, and pension firms cannot continue to sign up customers for products that can chip away at their retirement income through exorbitant management fees.
As President Obama noted in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, it is neither socially nor economically sustainable for the wealthiest and most powerful to avoid paying their fair share. I support proposals for a financial transactions tax levied equally on the major trading centers from Hong Kong and Singapore to Wall Street and the City of London. The British government needs to show more leadership on this issue in Europe — and all members of G-20 need to help make it happen.
Britain loses billions of pounds in revenues because of outdated rules that allow our richest citizens to keep their money in off-shore tax havens. Tax authorities need to know about income and wealth hidden behind front companies, trusts and other complex financial products. If these rules cannot be changed by international agreement, progressive governments should go ahead and do it themselves.
As President Obama said in his State of the Union address this week, it is “common sense” to ask a billionaire to pay, proportionally, at least as much as his secretary in taxes. Indeed, in Davos this week, I will look around the room and ask myself who pays taxes at a higher rate — those eating the soup or those serving it?
In my country, I believe that changing the rules of capitalism will mean a change of government. But more generally, it will require a change in what citizens expect and ask of politics. The question is not so much whether 20th-century capitalism is failing 21st-century society but whether politics can rise to the challenge of changing a flawed economic model.
Ed Miliband is a member of the British Parliament and the leader of the Labour Party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/opini ... n&emc=tya1
At Davos, Debating Capitalism’s Future
By ED MILIBAND
Davos, Switzerland
IS 20th-century capitalism failing 21st-century society? Members of the global elite debated that unusual question on Wednesday at the annual World Economic Forum.
There was a time, not long ago, when such a debate would have been held only among the protesters who annually shelter in igloos farther down the Alpine slopes. So it is encouraging that more than three years since the global financial crisis, a belated process of soul-searching has begun in search of the right lessons to learn from it.
In Britain, members of the Conservative-led government — not least the prime minister, David Cameron — have echoed the Labour Party’s call for a more responsible capitalism.
There is a great difference, however, between being willing to talk about an issue and being ready to act.
It is a difference between those who still believe that all governments can do is get out of the way and those who believe there is a real role for governments in first reviving our economies, and then setting the right rules for future success. The challenge therefore is not just to capitalism but also to politics.
At the Group of 20 summit in London three years ago, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Obama led concerted action to guide the world economy from the brink. Three years later, some governments are engaging in a short-sighted fiscal protectionism that can only lead to stunted growth.
If we learned anything from the 1930s, it was that governments cannot shrug their shoulders and watch as their own people are consigned to unemployment. I find it tragic and astonishing that some governments need to learn this lesson again.
Nor should we forget the causes of the current growth and debt crisis as we seek to put our economies on a more sustainable footing.
Both the United States and Britain suffered because their economies were overly reliant on the financial sector’s artificial profits; living standards for the many worsened while the economic rewards skewed to the top 1 percent; a capitalist model encouraged short-term decision-making oriented toward quarterly profits rather than long-term health; and vested interests — from giant banks to media moguls —were deemed too big to fail or too powerful to challenge.
We need to recognize that the trickle-down promise of conservative theorists has turned into a gravity-defying reality in which wealth has flowed upward disproportionately and, too often, undeservedly. To address properly the squeeze in middle-class incomes on both sides of the Atlantic requires fresh thinking from governments about how people train for their working lives and what a living wage should be.
Governments can set better — not necessarily more — rules to encourage productive businesses that invest, invent, train, make and sell real products and services. We need rules that discourage the predatory behavior of those seeking the fast buck through hostile takeovers and asset-stripping that do not have the interests of the shareholders, the employees or the economy at heart. In Britain, the Labour Party is considering how we can raise the bar for corporate takeovers so that companies’ futures are not determined by just a handful of speculators.
And governments must remember they are elected to serve the people, not the powerful lobbies who can pay for access or influence. Too often the real enemies of market capitalism are some of the leading beneficiaries of the current model, which favors price-gouging cartels and consumer exploitation. In Britain, airlines need to be more upfront about the true cost of their fares, and pension firms cannot continue to sign up customers for products that can chip away at their retirement income through exorbitant management fees.
As President Obama noted in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, it is neither socially nor economically sustainable for the wealthiest and most powerful to avoid paying their fair share. I support proposals for a financial transactions tax levied equally on the major trading centers from Hong Kong and Singapore to Wall Street and the City of London. The British government needs to show more leadership on this issue in Europe — and all members of G-20 need to help make it happen.
Britain loses billions of pounds in revenues because of outdated rules that allow our richest citizens to keep their money in off-shore tax havens. Tax authorities need to know about income and wealth hidden behind front companies, trusts and other complex financial products. If these rules cannot be changed by international agreement, progressive governments should go ahead and do it themselves.
As President Obama said in his State of the Union address this week, it is “common sense” to ask a billionaire to pay, proportionally, at least as much as his secretary in taxes. Indeed, in Davos this week, I will look around the room and ask myself who pays taxes at a higher rate — those eating the soup or those serving it?
In my country, I believe that changing the rules of capitalism will mean a change of government. But more generally, it will require a change in what citizens expect and ask of politics. The question is not so much whether 20th-century capitalism is failing 21st-century society but whether politics can rise to the challenge of changing a flawed economic model.
Ed Miliband is a member of the British Parliament and the leader of the Labour Party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/opini ... n&emc=tya1
February 16, 2012
Why China’s Political Model Is Superior
By ERIC X. LI
Shanghai
THIS week the Obama administration is playing host to Xi Jinping, China’s vice president and heir apparent. The world’s most powerful electoral democracy and its largest one-party state are meeting at a time of political transition for both.
Many have characterized the competition between these two giants as a clash between democracy and authoritarianism. But this is false. America and China view their political systems in fundamentally different ways: whereas America sees democratic government as an end in itself, China sees its current form of government, or any political system for that matter, merely as a means to achieving larger national ends.
In the history of human governance, spanning thousands of years, there have been two major experiments in democracy. The first was Athens, which lasted a century and a half; the second is the modern West. If one defines democracy as one citizen one vote, American democracy is only 92 years old. In practice it is only 47 years old, if one begins counting after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — far more ephemeral than all but a handful of China’s dynasties.
Why, then, do so many boldly claim they have discovered the ideal political system for all mankind and that its success is forever assured?
The answer lies in the source of the current democratic experiment. It began with the European Enlightenment. Two fundamental ideas were at its core: the individual is rational, and the individual is endowed with inalienable rights. These two beliefs formed the basis of a secular faith in modernity, of which the ultimate political manifestation is democracy.
In its early days, democratic ideas in political governance facilitated the industrial revolution and ushered in a period of unprecedented economic prosperity and military power in the Western world. Yet at the very beginning, some of those who led this drive were aware of the fatal flaw embedded in this experiment and sought to contain it.
The American Federalists made it clear they were establishing a republic, not a democracy, and designed myriad means to constrain the popular will. But as in any religion, faith would prove stronger than rules.
The political franchise expanded, resulting in a greater number of people participating in more and more decisions. As they say in America, “California is the future.” And the future means endless referendums, paralysis and insolvency.
In Athens, ever-increasing popular participation in politics led to rule by demagogy. And in today’s America, money is now the great enabler of demagogy. As the Nobel-winning economist A. Michael Spence has put it, America has gone from “one propertied man, one vote; to one man, one vote; to one person, one vote; trending to one dollar, one vote.” By any measure, the United States is a constitutional republic in name only. Elected representatives have no minds of their own and respond only to the whims of public opinion as they seek re-election; special interests manipulate the people into voting for ever-lower taxes and higher government spending, sometimes even supporting self-destructive wars.
The West’s current competition with China is therefore not a face-off between democracy and authoritarianism, but rather the clash of two fundamentally different political outlooks. The modern West sees democracy and human rights as the pinnacle of human development. It is a belief premised on an absolute faith.
China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests, as they have done in the past 10 years.
However, China’s leaders would not hesitate to curtail those freedoms if the conditions and the needs of the nation changed. The 1980s were a time of expanding popular participation in the country’s politics that helped loosen the ideological shackles of the destructive Cultural Revolution. But it went too far and led to a vast rebellion at Tiananmen Square.
That uprising was decisively put down on June 4, 1989. The Chinese nation paid a heavy price for that violent event, but the alternatives would have been far worse.
The resulting stability ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity that propelled China’s economy to its position as the second largest in the world.
The fundamental difference between Washington’s view and Beijing’s is whether political rights are considered God-given and therefore absolute or whether they should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.
The West seems incapable of becoming less democratic even when its survival may depend on such a shift. In this sense, America today is similar to the old Soviet Union, which also viewed its political system as the ultimate end.
History does not bode well for the American way. Indeed, faith-based ideological hubris may soon drive democracy over the cliff.
Eric X. Li is a venture capitalist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/opini ... n&emc=tya1
Why China’s Political Model Is Superior
By ERIC X. LI
Shanghai
THIS week the Obama administration is playing host to Xi Jinping, China’s vice president and heir apparent. The world’s most powerful electoral democracy and its largest one-party state are meeting at a time of political transition for both.
Many have characterized the competition between these two giants as a clash between democracy and authoritarianism. But this is false. America and China view their political systems in fundamentally different ways: whereas America sees democratic government as an end in itself, China sees its current form of government, or any political system for that matter, merely as a means to achieving larger national ends.
In the history of human governance, spanning thousands of years, there have been two major experiments in democracy. The first was Athens, which lasted a century and a half; the second is the modern West. If one defines democracy as one citizen one vote, American democracy is only 92 years old. In practice it is only 47 years old, if one begins counting after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — far more ephemeral than all but a handful of China’s dynasties.
Why, then, do so many boldly claim they have discovered the ideal political system for all mankind and that its success is forever assured?
The answer lies in the source of the current democratic experiment. It began with the European Enlightenment. Two fundamental ideas were at its core: the individual is rational, and the individual is endowed with inalienable rights. These two beliefs formed the basis of a secular faith in modernity, of which the ultimate political manifestation is democracy.
In its early days, democratic ideas in political governance facilitated the industrial revolution and ushered in a period of unprecedented economic prosperity and military power in the Western world. Yet at the very beginning, some of those who led this drive were aware of the fatal flaw embedded in this experiment and sought to contain it.
The American Federalists made it clear they were establishing a republic, not a democracy, and designed myriad means to constrain the popular will. But as in any religion, faith would prove stronger than rules.
The political franchise expanded, resulting in a greater number of people participating in more and more decisions. As they say in America, “California is the future.” And the future means endless referendums, paralysis and insolvency.
In Athens, ever-increasing popular participation in politics led to rule by demagogy. And in today’s America, money is now the great enabler of demagogy. As the Nobel-winning economist A. Michael Spence has put it, America has gone from “one propertied man, one vote; to one man, one vote; to one person, one vote; trending to one dollar, one vote.” By any measure, the United States is a constitutional republic in name only. Elected representatives have no minds of their own and respond only to the whims of public opinion as they seek re-election; special interests manipulate the people into voting for ever-lower taxes and higher government spending, sometimes even supporting self-destructive wars.
The West’s current competition with China is therefore not a face-off between democracy and authoritarianism, but rather the clash of two fundamentally different political outlooks. The modern West sees democracy and human rights as the pinnacle of human development. It is a belief premised on an absolute faith.
China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests, as they have done in the past 10 years.
However, China’s leaders would not hesitate to curtail those freedoms if the conditions and the needs of the nation changed. The 1980s were a time of expanding popular participation in the country’s politics that helped loosen the ideological shackles of the destructive Cultural Revolution. But it went too far and led to a vast rebellion at Tiananmen Square.
That uprising was decisively put down on June 4, 1989. The Chinese nation paid a heavy price for that violent event, but the alternatives would have been far worse.
The resulting stability ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity that propelled China’s economy to its position as the second largest in the world.
The fundamental difference between Washington’s view and Beijing’s is whether political rights are considered God-given and therefore absolute or whether they should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.
The West seems incapable of becoming less democratic even when its survival may depend on such a shift. In this sense, America today is similar to the old Soviet Union, which also viewed its political system as the ultimate end.
History does not bode well for the American way. Indeed, faith-based ideological hubris may soon drive democracy over the cliff.
Eric X. Li is a venture capitalist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/opini ... n&emc=tya1
March 31, 2012
Why Nations Fail
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I’M reading a fascinating new book called “Why Nations Fail.” The more you read it, the more you appreciate what a fool’s errand we’re on in Afghanistan and how much we need to totally revamp our whole foreign aid strategy. But most intriguing are the warning flares the authors put up about both America and China.
Co-authored by the M.I.T. economist Daron Acemoglu and the Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson, “Why Nations Fail” argues that the key differentiator between countries is “institutions.” Nations thrive when they develop “inclusive” political and economic institutions, and they fail when those institutions become “extractive” and concentrate power and opportunity in the hands of only a few.
“Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few,” they write.
“Inclusive economic institutions, are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions,” which “distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to achieve some amount of political centralization so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure property rights, and an inclusive market economy.” Conversely, extractive political institutions that concentrate power in the hands of a few reinforce extractive economic institutions to hold power.
Acemoglu explained in an interview that their core point is that countries thrive when they build political and economic institutions that “unleash,” empower and protect the full potential of each citizen to innovate, invest and develop. Compare how well Eastern Europe has done since the fall of communism with post-Soviet states like Georgia or Uzbekistan, or Israel versus the Arab states, or Kurdistan versus the rest of Iraq. It’s all in the institutions.
The lesson of history, the authors argue, is that you can’t get your economics right if you don’t get your politics right, which is why they don’t buy the notion that China has found the magic formula for combining political control and economic growth.
“Our analysis,” says Acemoglu, “is that China is experiencing growth under extractive institutions — under the authoritarian grip of the Communist Party, which has been able to monopolize power and mobilize resources at a scale that has allowed for a burst of economic growth starting from a very low base,” but it’s not sustainable because it doesn’t foster the degree of “creative destruction” that is so vital for innovation and higher incomes.
“Sustained economic growth requires innovation,” the authors write, “and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics.”
“Unless China makes the transition to an economy based on creative destruction, its growth will not last,” argues Acemoglu. But can you imagine a 20-year-old college dropout in China being allowed to start a company that challenges a whole sector of state-owned Chinese companies funded by state-owned banks? he asks.
The post-9/11 view that what ailed the Arab world and Afghanistan was a lack of democracy was not wrong, said Acemoglu. What was wrong was thinking that we could easily export it. Democratic change, to be sustainable, has to emerge from grassroots movements, “but that does not mean there is nothing we can do,” he adds.
For instance, we should be transitioning away from military aid to regimes like Egypt and focusing instead on enabling more sectors of that society to have a say in politics. Right now, I’d argue, our foreign aid to Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan is really a ransom we pay their elites not to engage in bad behavior. We need to turn it into bait.
Acemoglu suggests that instead of giving Cairo another $1.3 billion in military aid that only reinforces part of the elite, we should insist that Egypt establish a committee representing all sectors of its society that would tell us which institutions — schools, hospitals — they want foreign aid to go to, and have to develop appropriate proposals.
If we’re going to give money, “let’s use it to force them to open up the table and to strengthen the grass-roots,” says Acemoglu.
We can only be a force multiplier. Where you have grass-roots movements that want to build inclusive institutions, we can enhance them. But we can’t create or substitute for them. Worse, in Afghanistan and many Arab states, our policies have often discouraged grass-roots from emerging by our siding with convenient strongmen. So there’s nothing to multiply. If you multiply zero by 100, you still get zero.
And America? Acemoglu worries that our huge growth in economic inequality is undermining the inclusiveness of America’s institutions, too. “The real problem is that economic inequality, when it becomes this large, translates into political inequality.” When one person can write a check to finance your whole campaign, how inclusive will you be as an elected official to listen to competing voices?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opini ... il.html?hp
Why Nations Fail
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I’M reading a fascinating new book called “Why Nations Fail.” The more you read it, the more you appreciate what a fool’s errand we’re on in Afghanistan and how much we need to totally revamp our whole foreign aid strategy. But most intriguing are the warning flares the authors put up about both America and China.
Co-authored by the M.I.T. economist Daron Acemoglu and the Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson, “Why Nations Fail” argues that the key differentiator between countries is “institutions.” Nations thrive when they develop “inclusive” political and economic institutions, and they fail when those institutions become “extractive” and concentrate power and opportunity in the hands of only a few.
“Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few,” they write.
“Inclusive economic institutions, are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions,” which “distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to achieve some amount of political centralization so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure property rights, and an inclusive market economy.” Conversely, extractive political institutions that concentrate power in the hands of a few reinforce extractive economic institutions to hold power.
Acemoglu explained in an interview that their core point is that countries thrive when they build political and economic institutions that “unleash,” empower and protect the full potential of each citizen to innovate, invest and develop. Compare how well Eastern Europe has done since the fall of communism with post-Soviet states like Georgia or Uzbekistan, or Israel versus the Arab states, or Kurdistan versus the rest of Iraq. It’s all in the institutions.
The lesson of history, the authors argue, is that you can’t get your economics right if you don’t get your politics right, which is why they don’t buy the notion that China has found the magic formula for combining political control and economic growth.
“Our analysis,” says Acemoglu, “is that China is experiencing growth under extractive institutions — under the authoritarian grip of the Communist Party, which has been able to monopolize power and mobilize resources at a scale that has allowed for a burst of economic growth starting from a very low base,” but it’s not sustainable because it doesn’t foster the degree of “creative destruction” that is so vital for innovation and higher incomes.
“Sustained economic growth requires innovation,” the authors write, “and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics.”
“Unless China makes the transition to an economy based on creative destruction, its growth will not last,” argues Acemoglu. But can you imagine a 20-year-old college dropout in China being allowed to start a company that challenges a whole sector of state-owned Chinese companies funded by state-owned banks? he asks.
The post-9/11 view that what ailed the Arab world and Afghanistan was a lack of democracy was not wrong, said Acemoglu. What was wrong was thinking that we could easily export it. Democratic change, to be sustainable, has to emerge from grassroots movements, “but that does not mean there is nothing we can do,” he adds.
For instance, we should be transitioning away from military aid to regimes like Egypt and focusing instead on enabling more sectors of that society to have a say in politics. Right now, I’d argue, our foreign aid to Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan is really a ransom we pay their elites not to engage in bad behavior. We need to turn it into bait.
Acemoglu suggests that instead of giving Cairo another $1.3 billion in military aid that only reinforces part of the elite, we should insist that Egypt establish a committee representing all sectors of its society that would tell us which institutions — schools, hospitals — they want foreign aid to go to, and have to develop appropriate proposals.
If we’re going to give money, “let’s use it to force them to open up the table and to strengthen the grass-roots,” says Acemoglu.
We can only be a force multiplier. Where you have grass-roots movements that want to build inclusive institutions, we can enhance them. But we can’t create or substitute for them. Worse, in Afghanistan and many Arab states, our policies have often discouraged grass-roots from emerging by our siding with convenient strongmen. So there’s nothing to multiply. If you multiply zero by 100, you still get zero.
And America? Acemoglu worries that our huge growth in economic inequality is undermining the inclusiveness of America’s institutions, too. “The real problem is that economic inequality, when it becomes this large, translates into political inequality.” When one person can write a check to finance your whole campaign, how inclusive will you be as an elected official to listen to competing voices?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opini ... il.html?hp
Down With Everything
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Has America gone from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can get enough power to do anything?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opini ... thing.html
April 21, 2012
Down With Everything
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
DOES America need an Arab Spring? That was the question on my mind when I called Frank Fukuyama, the Stanford professor and author of “The End of History and the Last Man.” Fukuyama has been working on a two-volume opus called “The Origins of Political Order,” and I could detect from his recent writings that his research was leading him to ask a very radical question about America’s political order today, namely: has American gone from a democracy to a “vetocracy” — from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all?
“There is a crisis of authority, and we’re not prepared to think about it in these terms,” said Fukuyama. “When Americans think about the problem of government, it is always about constraining the government and limiting its scope.” That dates back to our founding political culture. The rule of law, regular democratic rotations in power and human rights protections were all put in place to create obstacles to overbearing, overly centralized government. “But we forget,” Fukuyama added, “that government was also created to act and make decisions.”
That is being lost at the federal level. A system with as many checks and balances built into it as ours assumes — indeed requires — a certain minimum level of cooperation on major issues between the two parties, despite ideological differences. Unfortunately, since the end of the cold war, which was a hugely powerful force compelling compromise between the parties, several factors are combining to paralyze our whole system.
For starters, we’ve added more checks and balances to make decision-making even more difficult — such as senatorial holds now being used to block any appointments by the executive branch or the Senate filibuster rule, effectively requiring a 60-vote majority to pass any major piece of legislation, rather than 51 votes. Also, our political divisions have become more venomous than ever. As Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator, once remarked to me: At the rate that polarization is proceeding, partisans will soon be demanding that consumer products reflect their politics: “We’re going to have Republican and Democrat toothpaste.”
In addition, the Internet, the blogosphere and C-Span’s coverage of the workings of the House and Senate have made every lawmaker more transparent — making back-room deals by lawmakers less possible and public posturing the 24/7 norm. And, finally, the huge expansion of the federal government, and the increasing importance of money in politics, have hugely expanded the number of special-interest lobbies and their ability to influence and clog decision-making.
Indeed, America today increasingly looks like the society that the political scientist Mancur Olson wrote about in his 1982 classic “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” He warned that when a country amasses too many highly focused special-interest lobbies — which have an inherent advantage over the broad majority, which is fixated on the well-being of the country as a whole — they can, like a multilimbed octopus, choke the life out of a political system, unless the majority truly mobilizes against them.
To put it another way, says Fukuyama, America’s collection of minority special-interest groups is now bigger, more mobilized and richer than ever, while all the mechanisms to enforce the will of the majority are weaker than ever. The effect of this is either legislative paralysis or suboptimal, Rube Goldberg-esque, patched-together-compromises, often made in response to crises with no due diligence. That is our vetocracy.
The Financial Times columnist Ed Luce, the author of the new book “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent,” notes that if you believe the fantasy that America’s economic success derives from having had a government that stayed out of the way, then gridlock and vetocracy are just fine with you. But if you have a proper understanding of American history — so you know that government played a vital role in generating growth by maintaining the rule of law, promulgating regulations that incentivize risk-taking and prevent recklessness, educating the work force, building infrastructure and funding scientific research — then a vetocracy becomes a very dangerous thing.
It undermines the secret of our success: a balanced public-private partnership.
“If we are to get out of our present paralysis, we need not only strong leadership, but changes in institutional rules,” argues Fukuyama. These would include eliminating senatorial holds and the filibuster for routine legislation and having budgets drawn up by a much smaller supercommittee of legislators — like those that handle military base closings — with “heavy technocratic input from a nonpartisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office,” insulated from interest-group pressures and put before Congress in a single, unamendable, up-or-down vote.
I know what you’re thinking: “That will never happen.” And do you know what I’m thinking? “Then we will never be a great country again, no matter who is elected.” We can’t be great as long as we remain a vetocracy rather than a democracy. Our deformed political system — with a Congress that’s become a forum for legalized bribery — is now truly holding us back.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Has America gone from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can get enough power to do anything?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opini ... thing.html
April 21, 2012
Down With Everything
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
DOES America need an Arab Spring? That was the question on my mind when I called Frank Fukuyama, the Stanford professor and author of “The End of History and the Last Man.” Fukuyama has been working on a two-volume opus called “The Origins of Political Order,” and I could detect from his recent writings that his research was leading him to ask a very radical question about America’s political order today, namely: has American gone from a democracy to a “vetocracy” — from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all?
“There is a crisis of authority, and we’re not prepared to think about it in these terms,” said Fukuyama. “When Americans think about the problem of government, it is always about constraining the government and limiting its scope.” That dates back to our founding political culture. The rule of law, regular democratic rotations in power and human rights protections were all put in place to create obstacles to overbearing, overly centralized government. “But we forget,” Fukuyama added, “that government was also created to act and make decisions.”
That is being lost at the federal level. A system with as many checks and balances built into it as ours assumes — indeed requires — a certain minimum level of cooperation on major issues between the two parties, despite ideological differences. Unfortunately, since the end of the cold war, which was a hugely powerful force compelling compromise between the parties, several factors are combining to paralyze our whole system.
For starters, we’ve added more checks and balances to make decision-making even more difficult — such as senatorial holds now being used to block any appointments by the executive branch or the Senate filibuster rule, effectively requiring a 60-vote majority to pass any major piece of legislation, rather than 51 votes. Also, our political divisions have become more venomous than ever. As Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator, once remarked to me: At the rate that polarization is proceeding, partisans will soon be demanding that consumer products reflect their politics: “We’re going to have Republican and Democrat toothpaste.”
In addition, the Internet, the blogosphere and C-Span’s coverage of the workings of the House and Senate have made every lawmaker more transparent — making back-room deals by lawmakers less possible and public posturing the 24/7 norm. And, finally, the huge expansion of the federal government, and the increasing importance of money in politics, have hugely expanded the number of special-interest lobbies and their ability to influence and clog decision-making.
Indeed, America today increasingly looks like the society that the political scientist Mancur Olson wrote about in his 1982 classic “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” He warned that when a country amasses too many highly focused special-interest lobbies — which have an inherent advantage over the broad majority, which is fixated on the well-being of the country as a whole — they can, like a multilimbed octopus, choke the life out of a political system, unless the majority truly mobilizes against them.
To put it another way, says Fukuyama, America’s collection of minority special-interest groups is now bigger, more mobilized and richer than ever, while all the mechanisms to enforce the will of the majority are weaker than ever. The effect of this is either legislative paralysis or suboptimal, Rube Goldberg-esque, patched-together-compromises, often made in response to crises with no due diligence. That is our vetocracy.
The Financial Times columnist Ed Luce, the author of the new book “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent,” notes that if you believe the fantasy that America’s economic success derives from having had a government that stayed out of the way, then gridlock and vetocracy are just fine with you. But if you have a proper understanding of American history — so you know that government played a vital role in generating growth by maintaining the rule of law, promulgating regulations that incentivize risk-taking and prevent recklessness, educating the work force, building infrastructure and funding scientific research — then a vetocracy becomes a very dangerous thing.
It undermines the secret of our success: a balanced public-private partnership.
“If we are to get out of our present paralysis, we need not only strong leadership, but changes in institutional rules,” argues Fukuyama. These would include eliminating senatorial holds and the filibuster for routine legislation and having budgets drawn up by a much smaller supercommittee of legislators — like those that handle military base closings — with “heavy technocratic input from a nonpartisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office,” insulated from interest-group pressures and put before Congress in a single, unamendable, up-or-down vote.
I know what you’re thinking: “That will never happen.” And do you know what I’m thinking? “Then we will never be a great country again, no matter who is elected.” We can’t be great as long as we remain a vetocracy rather than a democracy. Our deformed political system — with a Congress that’s become a forum for legalized bribery — is now truly holding us back.
Last edited by kmaherali on Wed Apr 25, 2012 11:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
April 23, 2012
The Creative Monopoly
A competitive mind-set is productive only to a point. It's important not to lose sight of value defined by other metrics. Peter Thiel's argument for monopoly may provide an alternative framework.
By DAVID BROOKS
As a young man, Peter Thiel competed to get into Stanford. Then he competed to get into Stanford Law School. Then he competed to become a clerk for a federal judge. Thiel won all those competitions. But then he competed to get a Supreme Court clerkship.
Thiel lost that one. So instead of being a clerk, he went out and founded PayPal. Then he became an early investor in Facebook and many other celebrated technology firms. Somebody later asked him. “So, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that Supreme Court clerkship?”
The question got Thiel thinking. His thoughts are now incorporated into a course he is teaching in the Stanford Computer Science Department. (A student named Blake Masters posted outstanding notes online, and Thiel has confirmed their accuracy.)
One of his core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.
In fact, Thiel argues, we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.
Now to be clear: When Thiel is talking about a “monopoly,” he isn’t talking about the illegal eliminate-your-rivals kind. He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. You’ve established a creative monopoly and everybody has to come to you if they want that service, at least for a time.
His lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.
Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.
Now think about the competitive environment that confronts the most fortunate people today and how it undermines those mind-sets.
First, students have to jump through ever-more demanding, preassigned academic hoops. Instead of developing a passion for one subject, they’re rewarded for becoming professional students, getting great grades across all subjects, regardless of their intrinsic interests. Instead of wandering across strange domains, they have to prudentially apportion their time, making productive use of each hour.
Then they move into a ranking system in which the most competitive college, program and employment opportunity is deemed to be the best. There is a status funnel pointing to the most competitive colleges and banks and companies, regardless of their appropriateness.
Then they move into businesses in which the main point is to beat the competition, in which the competitive juices take control and gradually obliterate other goals. I see this in politics all the time. Candidates enter politics wanting to be authentic and change things. But once the candidates enter the campaign, they stop focusing on how to be change-agents. They and their staff spend all their time focusing on beating the other guy. They hone the skills of one-upsmanship. They get engulfed in a tit-for-tat competition to win the news cycle. Instead of being new and authentic, they become artificial mirror opposites of their opponents. Instead of providing the value voters want — change — they become canned tacticians, hoping to eke out a slight win over the other side.
Competition has trumped value-creation. In this and other ways, the competitive arena undermines innovation.
You know somebody has been sucked into the competitive myopia when they start using sports or war metaphors. Sports and war are competitive enterprises. If somebody hits three home runs against you in the top of the inning, your job is to go hit four home runs in the bottom of the inning.
But business, politics, intellectual life and most other realms are not like that. In most realms, if somebody hits three home runs against you in one inning, you have the option of picking up your equipment and inventing a different game. You don’t have to compete; you can invent.
We live in a culture that nurtures competitive skills. And they are necessary: discipline, rigor and reliability. But it’s probably a good idea to try to supplement them with the skills of the creative monopolist: alertness, independence and the ability to reclaim forgotten traditions.
Everybody worries about American competitiveness. That may be the wrong problem. The future of the country will probably be determined by how well Americans can succeed at being monopolists.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/opini ... h_20120424
The Creative Monopoly
A competitive mind-set is productive only to a point. It's important not to lose sight of value defined by other metrics. Peter Thiel's argument for monopoly may provide an alternative framework.
By DAVID BROOKS
As a young man, Peter Thiel competed to get into Stanford. Then he competed to get into Stanford Law School. Then he competed to become a clerk for a federal judge. Thiel won all those competitions. But then he competed to get a Supreme Court clerkship.
Thiel lost that one. So instead of being a clerk, he went out and founded PayPal. Then he became an early investor in Facebook and many other celebrated technology firms. Somebody later asked him. “So, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that Supreme Court clerkship?”
The question got Thiel thinking. His thoughts are now incorporated into a course he is teaching in the Stanford Computer Science Department. (A student named Blake Masters posted outstanding notes online, and Thiel has confirmed their accuracy.)
One of his core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.
In fact, Thiel argues, we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.
Now to be clear: When Thiel is talking about a “monopoly,” he isn’t talking about the illegal eliminate-your-rivals kind. He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. You’ve established a creative monopoly and everybody has to come to you if they want that service, at least for a time.
His lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.
Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.
Now think about the competitive environment that confronts the most fortunate people today and how it undermines those mind-sets.
First, students have to jump through ever-more demanding, preassigned academic hoops. Instead of developing a passion for one subject, they’re rewarded for becoming professional students, getting great grades across all subjects, regardless of their intrinsic interests. Instead of wandering across strange domains, they have to prudentially apportion their time, making productive use of each hour.
Then they move into a ranking system in which the most competitive college, program and employment opportunity is deemed to be the best. There is a status funnel pointing to the most competitive colleges and banks and companies, regardless of their appropriateness.
Then they move into businesses in which the main point is to beat the competition, in which the competitive juices take control and gradually obliterate other goals. I see this in politics all the time. Candidates enter politics wanting to be authentic and change things. But once the candidates enter the campaign, they stop focusing on how to be change-agents. They and their staff spend all their time focusing on beating the other guy. They hone the skills of one-upsmanship. They get engulfed in a tit-for-tat competition to win the news cycle. Instead of being new and authentic, they become artificial mirror opposites of their opponents. Instead of providing the value voters want — change — they become canned tacticians, hoping to eke out a slight win over the other side.
Competition has trumped value-creation. In this and other ways, the competitive arena undermines innovation.
You know somebody has been sucked into the competitive myopia when they start using sports or war metaphors. Sports and war are competitive enterprises. If somebody hits three home runs against you in the top of the inning, your job is to go hit four home runs in the bottom of the inning.
But business, politics, intellectual life and most other realms are not like that. In most realms, if somebody hits three home runs against you in one inning, you have the option of picking up your equipment and inventing a different game. You don’t have to compete; you can invent.
We live in a culture that nurtures competitive skills. And they are necessary: discipline, rigor and reliability. But it’s probably a good idea to try to supplement them with the skills of the creative monopolist: alertness, independence and the ability to reclaim forgotten traditions.
Everybody worries about American competitiveness. That may be the wrong problem. The future of the country will probably be determined by how well Americans can succeed at being monopolists.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/opini ... h_20120424
May 17, 2012
The Age of Innocence
By DAVID BROOKS
The people who pioneered democracy in Europe and the United States had a low but pretty accurate view of human nature. They knew that if we get the chance, most of us will try to get something for nothing. They knew that people generally prize short-term goodies over long-term prosperity. So, in centuries past, the democratic pioneers built a series of checks to make sure their nations wouldn’t be ruined by their own frailties.
The American founders did this by decentralizing power. They built checks and balances to frustrate and detain the popular will. They also dispersed power to encourage active citizenship, hoping that as people became more involved in local government, they would develop a sense of restraint and responsibility.
In Europe, by contrast, authority was centralized. Power was held by small coteries of administrators and statesmen, many of whom had attended the same elite academies where they were supposed to learn the art and responsibilities of stewardship. Under the parliamentary system, voters didn’t even get to elect their leaders directly. They voted for parties, and party elders selected the ones who would actually form the government, often through secret means.
Though the forms were different, the democracies in Europe and the United States were based on a similar carefully balanced view of human nature: People are naturally selfish and need watching. But democratic self-government is possible because we’re smart enough to design structures to police that selfishness.
James Madison put it well: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind, which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
But, over the years, this balanced wisdom was lost. Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will. Their job is to flatter and satisfy it. A gigantic polling apparatus has developed to help leaders anticipate and respond to popular whims. Democratic politicians adopt the mind-set of marketing executives. Give the customer what he wants. The customer is always right.
Having lost a sense of their own frailty, many voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements. They become incensed when their leaders are not responsive to their needs. Like any normal set of human beings, they command their politicians to give them benefits without asking them to pay.
The consequences of this shift are now obvious. In Europe and America, governments have made promises they can’t afford to fulfill. At the same time, the decision-making machinery is breaking down. American and European capitals still have the structures inherited from the past, but without the self-restraining ethos that made them function.
The American decentralized system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self-restraint.
The Obama campaign issues its famous “Julia” ad, which perfectly embodies the vision of government as a national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle. The Citizens United case gives well-financed interests tremendous power to preserve or acquire tax breaks and regulatory deals. American senior citizens receive health benefits that cost many times more than the contributions they put into the system.
In Europe, workers across the Continent want great lifestyles without long work hours. They want dynamic capitalism but also personal security. European welfare states go broke trying to deliver these impossibilities.
The European ruling classes once had their power checked through daily contact with the tumble of national politics. But now those ruling classes have built a technocratic apparatus, the European Union, operating far above popular scrutiny. Decisions that reshape the destinies of families and nations are being made at some mysterious, transnational level. Few Europeans can tell who is making decisions or who is to blame if they go wrong, so, of course, they feel powerless and distrustful.
Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves. Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the self-doubt went away and the chastening structures were overwhelmed. It became madness to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder would not be restraining theirs.
This is one of the reasons why Europe and the United States are facing debt crises and political dysfunction at the same time. People used to believe that human depravity was self-evident and democratic self-government was fragile. Now they think depravity is nonexistent and they take self-government for granted.
Neither the United States nor the European model will work again until we rediscover and acknowledge our own natural weaknesses and learn to police rather than lionize our impulses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/opini ... h_20120518
The Age of Innocence
By DAVID BROOKS
The people who pioneered democracy in Europe and the United States had a low but pretty accurate view of human nature. They knew that if we get the chance, most of us will try to get something for nothing. They knew that people generally prize short-term goodies over long-term prosperity. So, in centuries past, the democratic pioneers built a series of checks to make sure their nations wouldn’t be ruined by their own frailties.
The American founders did this by decentralizing power. They built checks and balances to frustrate and detain the popular will. They also dispersed power to encourage active citizenship, hoping that as people became more involved in local government, they would develop a sense of restraint and responsibility.
In Europe, by contrast, authority was centralized. Power was held by small coteries of administrators and statesmen, many of whom had attended the same elite academies where they were supposed to learn the art and responsibilities of stewardship. Under the parliamentary system, voters didn’t even get to elect their leaders directly. They voted for parties, and party elders selected the ones who would actually form the government, often through secret means.
Though the forms were different, the democracies in Europe and the United States were based on a similar carefully balanced view of human nature: People are naturally selfish and need watching. But democratic self-government is possible because we’re smart enough to design structures to police that selfishness.
James Madison put it well: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind, which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
But, over the years, this balanced wisdom was lost. Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will. Their job is to flatter and satisfy it. A gigantic polling apparatus has developed to help leaders anticipate and respond to popular whims. Democratic politicians adopt the mind-set of marketing executives. Give the customer what he wants. The customer is always right.
Having lost a sense of their own frailty, many voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements. They become incensed when their leaders are not responsive to their needs. Like any normal set of human beings, they command their politicians to give them benefits without asking them to pay.
The consequences of this shift are now obvious. In Europe and America, governments have made promises they can’t afford to fulfill. At the same time, the decision-making machinery is breaking down. American and European capitals still have the structures inherited from the past, but without the self-restraining ethos that made them function.
The American decentralized system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self-restraint.
The Obama campaign issues its famous “Julia” ad, which perfectly embodies the vision of government as a national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle. The Citizens United case gives well-financed interests tremendous power to preserve or acquire tax breaks and regulatory deals. American senior citizens receive health benefits that cost many times more than the contributions they put into the system.
In Europe, workers across the Continent want great lifestyles without long work hours. They want dynamic capitalism but also personal security. European welfare states go broke trying to deliver these impossibilities.
The European ruling classes once had their power checked through daily contact with the tumble of national politics. But now those ruling classes have built a technocratic apparatus, the European Union, operating far above popular scrutiny. Decisions that reshape the destinies of families and nations are being made at some mysterious, transnational level. Few Europeans can tell who is making decisions or who is to blame if they go wrong, so, of course, they feel powerless and distrustful.
Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves. Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the self-doubt went away and the chastening structures were overwhelmed. It became madness to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder would not be restraining theirs.
This is one of the reasons why Europe and the United States are facing debt crises and political dysfunction at the same time. People used to believe that human depravity was self-evident and democratic self-government was fragile. Now they think depravity is nonexistent and they take self-government for granted.
Neither the United States nor the European model will work again until we rediscover and acknowledge our own natural weaknesses and learn to police rather than lionize our impulses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/opini ... h_20120518
July 10, 2012
A Confucian Constitution for China
By JIANG QING and DANIEL A. BELL
ON Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a speech in Mongolia denouncing Asian governments that seek “to restrict people’s access to ideas and information, to imprison them for expressing their views, to usurp the rights of citizens to choose their leaders.” It was a swipe at China’s authoritarian political system. The view that China should become more democratic is widely held in the West. But framing the debate in terms of democracy versus authoritarianism overlooks better possibilities.
The political future of China is far likelier to be determined by the longstanding Confucian tradition of “humane authority” than by Western-style multiparty elections. After all, democracy is flawed as an ideal. Political legitimacy is based solely on the sovereignty of the people — more specifically, a government that grants power to democratically elected representatives. But there is no compelling reason for a government to have only one source of legitimacy.
Democracy is also flawed in practice. Political choices come down to the desires and interests of the electorate. This leads to two problems. First, the will of the majority may not be moral: it may favor racism, imperialism or fascism. Second, when there is a clash between the short-term interests of the populace and the long-term interests of mankind, as is the case with global warming, the people’s short-term interests become the political priority. As a result, democratically elected governments in America and elsewhere are finding it nearly impossible to implement policies that curb energy usage in the interests of humanity and of future generations.
In China, political Confucians defend an alternative approach: the Way of the Humane Authority. The question of political legitimacy is central to their constitutional thought. Legitimacy is not simply what people think of their rulers; it is the deciding factor in determining whether a ruler has the right to rule. And unlike Western-style democracy, there is more than one source of legitimacy.
According to the Gongyang Zhuan, a commentary on a Confucian classic, political power can be justified through three sources: the legitimacy of heaven (a sacred, transcendent sense of natural morality), the legitimacy of earth (wisdom from history and culture), and the legitimacy of the human (political obedience through popular will).
In ancient times, Humane Authority was implemented by early Chinese monarchs. But changes in historical circumstances now necessitate changes in the form of rule. Today, the will of the people must be given an institutional form that was lacking in the past, though it should be constrained and balanced by institutional arrangements reflecting the other two forms of legitimacy.
In modern China, Humane Authority should be exercised by a tricameral legislature: a House of Exemplary Persons that represents sacred legitimacy; a House of the Nation that represents historical and cultural legitimacy; and a House of the People that represents popular legitimacy.
The leader of the House of Exemplary Persons should be a great scholar. Candidates for membership should be nominated by scholars and examined on their knowledge of the Confucian classics and then assessed through trial periods of progressively greater administrative responsibilities — similar to the examination and recommendation systems used to select scholar-officials in the imperial past. The leader of the House of the Nation should be a direct descendant of Confucius; other members would be selected from descendants of great sages and rulers, along with representatives of China’s major religions. Finally, members of the House of the People should be elected either by popular vote or as heads of occupational groups.
This system would have checks and balances. Each house would deliberate in its own way and not interfere in the affairs of the others. To avoid political gridlock arising from conflicts among the three houses, a bill would be required to pass at least two houses to become law. To protect the primacy of sacred legitimacy in Confucian tradition the House of Exemplary Persons would have a final, exclusive veto, but its power would be constrained by that of the other two houses: for example, if they propose a bill restricting religious freedom, the People and the Nation could oppose it, stopping it from becoming law.
Instead of judging political progress simply by asking whether China is becoming more democratic, Humane Authority provides a more comprehensive and culturally sensitive way of judging its political progress.
Jiang Qing is the founder of the Yangming Confucian Academy in Guiyang, China. He is the author, and Daniel A. Bell is an editor, of the forthcoming book “A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/opini ... y_20120711
A Confucian Constitution for China
By JIANG QING and DANIEL A. BELL
ON Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a speech in Mongolia denouncing Asian governments that seek “to restrict people’s access to ideas and information, to imprison them for expressing their views, to usurp the rights of citizens to choose their leaders.” It was a swipe at China’s authoritarian political system. The view that China should become more democratic is widely held in the West. But framing the debate in terms of democracy versus authoritarianism overlooks better possibilities.
The political future of China is far likelier to be determined by the longstanding Confucian tradition of “humane authority” than by Western-style multiparty elections. After all, democracy is flawed as an ideal. Political legitimacy is based solely on the sovereignty of the people — more specifically, a government that grants power to democratically elected representatives. But there is no compelling reason for a government to have only one source of legitimacy.
Democracy is also flawed in practice. Political choices come down to the desires and interests of the electorate. This leads to two problems. First, the will of the majority may not be moral: it may favor racism, imperialism or fascism. Second, when there is a clash between the short-term interests of the populace and the long-term interests of mankind, as is the case with global warming, the people’s short-term interests become the political priority. As a result, democratically elected governments in America and elsewhere are finding it nearly impossible to implement policies that curb energy usage in the interests of humanity and of future generations.
In China, political Confucians defend an alternative approach: the Way of the Humane Authority. The question of political legitimacy is central to their constitutional thought. Legitimacy is not simply what people think of their rulers; it is the deciding factor in determining whether a ruler has the right to rule. And unlike Western-style democracy, there is more than one source of legitimacy.
According to the Gongyang Zhuan, a commentary on a Confucian classic, political power can be justified through three sources: the legitimacy of heaven (a sacred, transcendent sense of natural morality), the legitimacy of earth (wisdom from history and culture), and the legitimacy of the human (political obedience through popular will).
In ancient times, Humane Authority was implemented by early Chinese monarchs. But changes in historical circumstances now necessitate changes in the form of rule. Today, the will of the people must be given an institutional form that was lacking in the past, though it should be constrained and balanced by institutional arrangements reflecting the other two forms of legitimacy.
In modern China, Humane Authority should be exercised by a tricameral legislature: a House of Exemplary Persons that represents sacred legitimacy; a House of the Nation that represents historical and cultural legitimacy; and a House of the People that represents popular legitimacy.
The leader of the House of Exemplary Persons should be a great scholar. Candidates for membership should be nominated by scholars and examined on their knowledge of the Confucian classics and then assessed through trial periods of progressively greater administrative responsibilities — similar to the examination and recommendation systems used to select scholar-officials in the imperial past. The leader of the House of the Nation should be a direct descendant of Confucius; other members would be selected from descendants of great sages and rulers, along with representatives of China’s major religions. Finally, members of the House of the People should be elected either by popular vote or as heads of occupational groups.
This system would have checks and balances. Each house would deliberate in its own way and not interfere in the affairs of the others. To avoid political gridlock arising from conflicts among the three houses, a bill would be required to pass at least two houses to become law. To protect the primacy of sacred legitimacy in Confucian tradition the House of Exemplary Persons would have a final, exclusive veto, but its power would be constrained by that of the other two houses: for example, if they propose a bill restricting religious freedom, the People and the Nation could oppose it, stopping it from becoming law.
Instead of judging political progress simply by asking whether China is becoming more democratic, Humane Authority provides a more comprehensive and culturally sensitive way of judging its political progress.
Jiang Qing is the founder of the Yangming Confucian Academy in Guiyang, China. He is the author, and Daniel A. Bell is an editor, of the forthcoming book “A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/opini ... y_20120711
Temerity at the Top
By DAVID BROOKS
If we want to encourage more economic growth, we could start by not bashing the few super-ambitious people at the top.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/opini ... emityn.www
I guess we’re all supposed to be talking about how to build the middle class these days and look askance at the top 1 percent. But would you mind if I interrupted this cultural moment to point out that capitalism is an inherently elitist enterprise?
Prosperity is often driven by small enclaves of extraordinary individuals that build new industries and amass large fortunes. These driven, manic individuals are frequently unpleasant to be around. But, if your country is not attracting and nurturing them, you’re cooked.
Let’s take a contemporary example, Elon Musk, who was just beautifully profiled by Ashlee Vance in Bloomberg Businessweek.
For those who don’t read the financial press or the gossip blogs, Musk is a 41-year-old entrepreneur who grew up in South Africa. At 15, he migrated to Canada, worked on farms and at a lumber mill and then got into Queen’s University in Ontario.
After two years, he transferred to Penn, earning degrees in economics and physics. While there, as he recently told Jon Stewart, he concluded that the three areas that would most transform humanity were the Internet, sustainable energy and space exploration.
He dropped out of a graduate physics program at Stanford to help start an Internet map and directory company called Zip2, which was sold to Compaq for more than $300 million.
He took his share of that money and helped create PayPal, serving for a time as its chief executive. When that was sold, he poured his share of his money into SpaceX, a space exploration company; Tesla, an electric car company; SolarCity, a solar power company; and Everdream, a data-center software firm.
SpaceX is the first private company to send a rocket into space. Already profitable, it has a long line of orders to take things into space. Tesla is selling its second model for about $55,000 each. Musk decided to revolutionize three industries all at once and is sort of doing it. His net worth is estimated to be about $2 billion.
Musk also told Businessweek about two other project designs he is working on. The first is something called the Hyperloop, a tube capable of taking people from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in 30 minutes. The second is a vertical lift-off supersonic passenger jet that would surpass Boeing. He also hopes to open up a space colony on Mars within 10 or 15 years.
“Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of [America’s] rapid progress, its strength and its greatness,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote nearly a couple of centuries ago. Musk is a fountain of bold enterprises, though, of course, he also has the vices of his virtues.
Many employees love him, but there has been at least one blog set up to catalog his mistreatment of those he deems mediocre. He’s run through two marriages already, and his first ex-wife wrote a brutal but not necessarily persuasive takedown of him in Marie Claire. He’s taken a grand total of one vacation in four years, and his romantic life has faltered. As he told Vance, “I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need a girlfriend. How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours?”
Musk is grandiose: a grand lifestyle, grand riches, grand vision and grand verbiage. Playing a computer game with a writer from ForbesLife, he let loose a characteristic burst of vast if vaporous ideas: “You can look at modern history where its not so much genetics going into battle as a battle of meme structures.”
Today, grandiosity is out of style. We’ve just been through a financial crisis fueled by people who got too big for their britches. We’ve got an online and media culture that specializes in ridiculing grand people.
Caution rules. The number of jobs created by business start-ups under President Obama is much lower than under the three previous presidents. The World Economic Forum ranks the competitiveness of nations, and the U.S. has lost ground in each of the last four years.
But, if growth is ever going to rebound, the U.S. will need a grandiosity rebound and the policies that encourage rich people with brass: immigration policies that attract people like Musk, tax rates that encourage risk and government policies that boost them along (SpaceX has benefited greatly from NASA, and Tesla received a big government loan).
Most of all, there has to be a culture that gives two cheers to grandiosity. Government can influence growth, but it’s people like Musk who create it. Stories like his are worth repeating because maybe some reader will think: What grand transformational process do I want to be a part of? If Musk pinioned his life to the Internet, electric cars and interplanetary travel, what are my projects?
A few ridiculously ambitious people can change an economy more than any president.
By DAVID BROOKS
If we want to encourage more economic growth, we could start by not bashing the few super-ambitious people at the top.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/opini ... emityn.www
I guess we’re all supposed to be talking about how to build the middle class these days and look askance at the top 1 percent. But would you mind if I interrupted this cultural moment to point out that capitalism is an inherently elitist enterprise?
Prosperity is often driven by small enclaves of extraordinary individuals that build new industries and amass large fortunes. These driven, manic individuals are frequently unpleasant to be around. But, if your country is not attracting and nurturing them, you’re cooked.
Let’s take a contemporary example, Elon Musk, who was just beautifully profiled by Ashlee Vance in Bloomberg Businessweek.
For those who don’t read the financial press or the gossip blogs, Musk is a 41-year-old entrepreneur who grew up in South Africa. At 15, he migrated to Canada, worked on farms and at a lumber mill and then got into Queen’s University in Ontario.
After two years, he transferred to Penn, earning degrees in economics and physics. While there, as he recently told Jon Stewart, he concluded that the three areas that would most transform humanity were the Internet, sustainable energy and space exploration.
He dropped out of a graduate physics program at Stanford to help start an Internet map and directory company called Zip2, which was sold to Compaq for more than $300 million.
He took his share of that money and helped create PayPal, serving for a time as its chief executive. When that was sold, he poured his share of his money into SpaceX, a space exploration company; Tesla, an electric car company; SolarCity, a solar power company; and Everdream, a data-center software firm.
SpaceX is the first private company to send a rocket into space. Already profitable, it has a long line of orders to take things into space. Tesla is selling its second model for about $55,000 each. Musk decided to revolutionize three industries all at once and is sort of doing it. His net worth is estimated to be about $2 billion.
Musk also told Businessweek about two other project designs he is working on. The first is something called the Hyperloop, a tube capable of taking people from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in 30 minutes. The second is a vertical lift-off supersonic passenger jet that would surpass Boeing. He also hopes to open up a space colony on Mars within 10 or 15 years.
“Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of [America’s] rapid progress, its strength and its greatness,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote nearly a couple of centuries ago. Musk is a fountain of bold enterprises, though, of course, he also has the vices of his virtues.
Many employees love him, but there has been at least one blog set up to catalog his mistreatment of those he deems mediocre. He’s run through two marriages already, and his first ex-wife wrote a brutal but not necessarily persuasive takedown of him in Marie Claire. He’s taken a grand total of one vacation in four years, and his romantic life has faltered. As he told Vance, “I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need a girlfriend. How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours?”
Musk is grandiose: a grand lifestyle, grand riches, grand vision and grand verbiage. Playing a computer game with a writer from ForbesLife, he let loose a characteristic burst of vast if vaporous ideas: “You can look at modern history where its not so much genetics going into battle as a battle of meme structures.”
Today, grandiosity is out of style. We’ve just been through a financial crisis fueled by people who got too big for their britches. We’ve got an online and media culture that specializes in ridiculing grand people.
Caution rules. The number of jobs created by business start-ups under President Obama is much lower than under the three previous presidents. The World Economic Forum ranks the competitiveness of nations, and the U.S. has lost ground in each of the last four years.
But, if growth is ever going to rebound, the U.S. will need a grandiosity rebound and the policies that encourage rich people with brass: immigration policies that attract people like Musk, tax rates that encourage risk and government policies that boost them along (SpaceX has benefited greatly from NASA, and Tesla received a big government loan).
Most of all, there has to be a culture that gives two cheers to grandiosity. Government can influence growth, but it’s people like Musk who create it. Stories like his are worth repeating because maybe some reader will think: What grand transformational process do I want to be a part of? If Musk pinioned his life to the Internet, electric cars and interplanetary travel, what are my projects?
A few ridiculously ambitious people can change an economy more than any president.
Is Islam an Obstacle to Democracy?
As Arab populations “pursue values like freedom, justice, equality, autonomy and pluralism, and new models of democracy and of international relations,” the scholar Tariq Ramadan wrote in The New York Times this week, “they need to draw on Islamic traditions.” But what would that look like? Does Islam encourage or discourage democratic government?
Discussion...
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/20 ... y_20121005
As Arab populations “pursue values like freedom, justice, equality, autonomy and pluralism, and new models of democracy and of international relations,” the scholar Tariq Ramadan wrote in The New York Times this week, “they need to draw on Islamic traditions.” But what would that look like? Does Islam encourage or discourage democratic government?
Discussion...
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/20 ... y_20121005
Is Democracy Dead?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opini ... 05309&_r=0
Tony Blair: For True Democracy, the Right to Vote Is Not Enough
By TONY BLAIRDEC. 4, 2014
"We have become complacent about democracy. It remains the system of choice. It remains what free people freely choose. But it has what I would call an “efficacy” challenge: Its values are right, but it is too often failing to deliver. In a world of change, where countries, communities and corporations must constantly adapt to keep up, democracy seems slow, bureaucratic and weak. In this sense it is failing its citizens. Why has this happened and what should we do about it?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opini ... 05309&_r=0
Tony Blair: For True Democracy, the Right to Vote Is Not Enough
By TONY BLAIRDEC. 4, 2014
"We have become complacent about democracy. It remains the system of choice. It remains what free people freely choose. But it has what I would call an “efficacy” challenge: Its values are right, but it is too often failing to deliver. In a world of change, where countries, communities and corporations must constantly adapt to keep up, democracy seems slow, bureaucratic and weak. In this sense it is failing its citizens. Why has this happened and what should we do about it?"
Wheat People vs. Rice People
By T. M. LUHRMANN
Some cultures are more individualistic, and others more interdependent. Agriculture may explain why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opini ... 05309&_r=0
By T. M. LUHRMANN
Some cultures are more individualistic, and others more interdependent. Agriculture may explain why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opini ... 05309&_r=0
In Praise of Small Miracles
Behavioral economics has given us amazing new policy options to solve local and international problems.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/opini ... d=45305309
Behavioral economics has given us amazing new policy options to solve local and international problems.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/opini ... d=45305309
Democracy Is in Recession
Every month now we get treated to another anti-Semitic blast from Turkey’s leadership, which seems to be running some kind of slur-of-the-month club. Who knew that Jews all over the world were busy trying to take down President Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Last week, it was Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s turn to declare that Turkey would not “succumb to the Jewish lobby” — among others supposedly trying to topple Erdogan, the Hurriyet Daily News reported. This was after Erdogan had suggested that domestic opponents to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., were “cooperating with the Mossad,” Israel’s intelligence arm. So few Jews, so many governments to topple.
Davutoglu’s and Erdogan’s cheap, crude anti-Semitic tropes, which Erdogan now relies on regularly to energize his base, are disgusting. For the great nation of Turkey, though, they’re part of a wider tragedy. It is really hard to say anymore that Erdogan’s Turkey is a democracy. Even worse, it is necessary to say that Turkey’s drift away from democracy is part of a much larger global trend today: Democracy is in recession.
As the Stanford University democracy expert Larry Diamond argues in an essay entitled “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession” in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy: “Around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world came to a prolonged halt. Since 2006, there has been no net expansion in the number of electoral democracies, which has oscillated between 114 and 119 (about 60 percent of the world’s states). ... The number of both electoral and liberal democracies began to decline after 2006 and then flattened out. Since 2006 the average level of freedom in the world has also deteriorated slightly.”
Since 2000, added Diamond, “I count 25 breakdowns of democracy in the world — not only through blatant military or executive coups, but also through subtle and incremental degradations of democratic rights and procedure. ... Some of these breakdowns occurred in quite low-quality democracies; yet in each case, a system of reasonably free and fair multiparty electoral competition was either displaced or degraded to a point well below the minimal standards of democracy.”
Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey are the poster children for this trend, along with Venezuela, Thailand, Botswana, Bangladesh and Kenya. In Turkey, Diamond writes, the A.K.P. has steadily extended “partisan control over the judiciary and the bureaucracy, arresting journalists and intimidating dissenters in the press and academia, threatening businesses with retaliation if they fund opposition parties, and using arrests and prosecutions in cases connected to alleged coup plots to jail and remove from public life an implausibly large number of accused plotters. This has coincided with a stunning and increasingly audacious concentration of personal power by ... Erdogan.” Rule of law in Turkey is being seriously eroded.
Meanwhile, Freedom House, a watchdog group, found that, from 2006-14, many more countries declined in freedom than improved. This trend has been particularly pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa, where declining transparency, crumbling rule of law and rising corruption are becoming the norm.
Why this trend? One reason, says Diamond, is today’s autocrats are fast learners and adapters. They have developed and shared “new technologies of censorship and legal strategies to restrict civil society [groups] and ban international assistance to them,” and we haven’t responded with new strategies of our own. Also, old habits of corruption and abuse of power went into hiding during the 1990s and 2000s, when post-Cold War democracy was ascendant, “but now corrupt autocrats feel the heat is off and they can rule as nastily and greedily as they want.”
Continue reading the main storyWrite A Comment
Moreover, China, which has no democracy standards or problems with corruption abroad, has displaced the U.S. as the most valued foreign aid provider in much of Africa, while Russia has become more aggressive in undermining virtually every democratic tendency on its borders. Finally, post-9/11, we let the “war on terror” supplant democracy promotion as our top foreign policy priority, so any autocrat who collared terrorists won a get-out-of-jail-free-card from America.
But, Diamond adds, “perhaps the most worrisome dimension of the democratic recession has been the decline of democratic efficacy, energy, and self-confidence” in America and the West at large. After years of hyperpolarization, deadlock and corruption through campaign financing, the world’s leading democracy is increasingly dysfunctional, with government shutdowns and the inability to pass something as basic as a budget. “The world takes note of all this,” says Diamond. “Authoritarian state media gleefully publicize these travails of American democracy in order to discredit democracy in general and immunize authoritarian rule against U.S. pressure.”
Diamond urges democrats not to lose faith. Democracy, as Churchill noted, is still the worst form of government — except for all the others. And it still fires the imagination of people like no other system. But that will only stay true if the big democracies maintain a model worth following. I wish that were not so much in question today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/opini ... d=45305309
Every month now we get treated to another anti-Semitic blast from Turkey’s leadership, which seems to be running some kind of slur-of-the-month club. Who knew that Jews all over the world were busy trying to take down President Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Last week, it was Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s turn to declare that Turkey would not “succumb to the Jewish lobby” — among others supposedly trying to topple Erdogan, the Hurriyet Daily News reported. This was after Erdogan had suggested that domestic opponents to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., were “cooperating with the Mossad,” Israel’s intelligence arm. So few Jews, so many governments to topple.
Davutoglu’s and Erdogan’s cheap, crude anti-Semitic tropes, which Erdogan now relies on regularly to energize his base, are disgusting. For the great nation of Turkey, though, they’re part of a wider tragedy. It is really hard to say anymore that Erdogan’s Turkey is a democracy. Even worse, it is necessary to say that Turkey’s drift away from democracy is part of a much larger global trend today: Democracy is in recession.
As the Stanford University democracy expert Larry Diamond argues in an essay entitled “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession” in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy: “Around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world came to a prolonged halt. Since 2006, there has been no net expansion in the number of electoral democracies, which has oscillated between 114 and 119 (about 60 percent of the world’s states). ... The number of both electoral and liberal democracies began to decline after 2006 and then flattened out. Since 2006 the average level of freedom in the world has also deteriorated slightly.”
Since 2000, added Diamond, “I count 25 breakdowns of democracy in the world — not only through blatant military or executive coups, but also through subtle and incremental degradations of democratic rights and procedure. ... Some of these breakdowns occurred in quite low-quality democracies; yet in each case, a system of reasonably free and fair multiparty electoral competition was either displaced or degraded to a point well below the minimal standards of democracy.”
Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey are the poster children for this trend, along with Venezuela, Thailand, Botswana, Bangladesh and Kenya. In Turkey, Diamond writes, the A.K.P. has steadily extended “partisan control over the judiciary and the bureaucracy, arresting journalists and intimidating dissenters in the press and academia, threatening businesses with retaliation if they fund opposition parties, and using arrests and prosecutions in cases connected to alleged coup plots to jail and remove from public life an implausibly large number of accused plotters. This has coincided with a stunning and increasingly audacious concentration of personal power by ... Erdogan.” Rule of law in Turkey is being seriously eroded.
Meanwhile, Freedom House, a watchdog group, found that, from 2006-14, many more countries declined in freedom than improved. This trend has been particularly pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa, where declining transparency, crumbling rule of law and rising corruption are becoming the norm.
Why this trend? One reason, says Diamond, is today’s autocrats are fast learners and adapters. They have developed and shared “new technologies of censorship and legal strategies to restrict civil society [groups] and ban international assistance to them,” and we haven’t responded with new strategies of our own. Also, old habits of corruption and abuse of power went into hiding during the 1990s and 2000s, when post-Cold War democracy was ascendant, “but now corrupt autocrats feel the heat is off and they can rule as nastily and greedily as they want.”
Continue reading the main storyWrite A Comment
Moreover, China, which has no democracy standards or problems with corruption abroad, has displaced the U.S. as the most valued foreign aid provider in much of Africa, while Russia has become more aggressive in undermining virtually every democratic tendency on its borders. Finally, post-9/11, we let the “war on terror” supplant democracy promotion as our top foreign policy priority, so any autocrat who collared terrorists won a get-out-of-jail-free-card from America.
But, Diamond adds, “perhaps the most worrisome dimension of the democratic recession has been the decline of democratic efficacy, energy, and self-confidence” in America and the West at large. After years of hyperpolarization, deadlock and corruption through campaign financing, the world’s leading democracy is increasingly dysfunctional, with government shutdowns and the inability to pass something as basic as a budget. “The world takes note of all this,” says Diamond. “Authoritarian state media gleefully publicize these travails of American democracy in order to discredit democracy in general and immunize authoritarian rule against U.S. pressure.”
Diamond urges democrats not to lose faith. Democracy, as Churchill noted, is still the worst form of government — except for all the others. And it still fires the imagination of people like no other system. But that will only stay true if the big democracies maintain a model worth following. I wish that were not so much in question today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/opini ... d=45305309
Do Assassins Really Change History?
DAYS after John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford’s Theater and shot Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, declared that “assassination has never changed the history of the world.” Was Disraeli right?
One view, the “great man” theory, claims that individual leaders play defining roles, so that assassinating one could lead to very different national or global outcomes. In contrast, historical determinism sees leaders as the proverbial ant riding the elephant’s back. Broader social, economic and political forces drive history, so that assassinations may not have meaningful effects.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opini ... d=45305309
DAYS after John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford’s Theater and shot Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, declared that “assassination has never changed the history of the world.” Was Disraeli right?
One view, the “great man” theory, claims that individual leaders play defining roles, so that assassinating one could lead to very different national or global outcomes. In contrast, historical determinism sees leaders as the proverbial ant riding the elephant’s back. Broader social, economic and political forces drive history, so that assassinations may not have meaningful effects.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opini ... d=45305309
Goodness and Power
There was an interesting poll result about Hillary Clinton last week. According to a Quinnipiac poll, 60 percent of independent voters believe that she has strong leadership qualities. But when these same voters were asked if she is honest and trustworthy, the evaluations flipped. Sixty-one percent said she is not honest and trustworthy. Apparently there are a lot of Americans who believe that Hillary Clinton is dishonest and untrustworthy but also a strong leader.
Let’s set aside her specific case for a second. These poll results raise a larger question: Can you be a bad person but a strong leader?
The case for that proposition is reasonably straightforward. Politics is a tough, brutal arena. People play by the rules of the jungle. Sometimes to get anything done, a leader has to push, bully, intimidate, elide the truth. The qualities that make you a good person in private life — kindness, humility and a capacity for introspection — can be drawbacks on the public stage. Electing a president is different than finding a friend or lover. It’s better to hire a ruthless person to do a hard job.
I get that argument, but outside the make-believe world of “House of Cards,” it’s usually wrong. Voting for someone with bad private morals is like setting off on a battleship with awesome guns and a rotting hull. There’s a good chance you’re going to sink before the voyage is over.
People who are dishonest, unkind and inconsiderate have trouble attracting and retaining good people to their team. They tend to have sleazy friends. They may be personally canny, but they are almost always surrounded by sycophants and second-raters who kick up scandal and undermine the leader’s effectiveness.
Leaders who lack humility are fragile. Their pride is bloated and sensitive. People are never treating them as respectfully as they think they deserve. They become consumed with resentments. They treat politics as battle, armor up and wall themselves off to information and feedback.
You may think they are championing your cause or agenda, but when the fur is flying, they are really only interested in defending themselves. They keep an enemies list and life becomes a matter of settling scores and imagining conspiracies. They jettison any policy that might hurt their standing.
It is a paradox of politics that the people who set out obsessively to succeed in it usually end up sabotaging themselves. They treat each relationship as a transaction and don’t generate loyalty. They lose any honest internal voice. After a while they can’t accurately perceive themselves or their situation. Sooner or later their Watergate will come.
Maybe once upon a time there was an environment in which ruthless Machiavellians had room to work their dark arts, but we don’t live in Renaissance Italy. We live in a world of universal media attention. Once there is a hint of scandal of any kind, the political world goes into maximum frenzy and everything stops.
We live in a world in which power is dispersed. You can’t intimidate people by chopping your enemies to bits in the town square. Even the presidency isn’t a powerful enough office to allow a leader to rule by fear. You have to build coalitions by appealing to people’s self-interest and by luring them voluntarily to your side.
Modern politics, like private morality, is about building trust and enduring personal relationships. That means being fair, empathetic, honest and trustworthy. If you stink at establishing trust, you stink at politics.
People with good private morality are better at navigating for the long term. They genuinely love causes beyond themselves. When the news cycle distracts and the short-term passions surge, they can still steer by that distant star. They’re less likely to overreact and do something stupid.
People with astute moral sentiments have an early warning system. They don’t have to think through the dangers of tit-for-tat favor-exchanges with billionaires. They have an aesthetic revulsion against people who seem icky and situations that are distasteful, which heads off a lot of trouble.
Of course, private morality is not enough. You have to know how to react to unprincipled people who want to destroy you.
But, historically, most effective leaders — like, say, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill — had a dual consciousness. They had an earnest, inner moral voice capable of radical self-awareness, rectitude and great compassion. They also had a pragmatic, canny outer voice. These two voices were in constant conversation, checking each other, probing for synthesis, wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.
I don’t know if Hillary Clinton possesses this double-mindedness. But I do know that if candidates don’t acquire a moral compass outside of politics, they’re not going to get it in the White House, and they won’t be effective there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/opini ... inion&_r=0
There was an interesting poll result about Hillary Clinton last week. According to a Quinnipiac poll, 60 percent of independent voters believe that she has strong leadership qualities. But when these same voters were asked if she is honest and trustworthy, the evaluations flipped. Sixty-one percent said she is not honest and trustworthy. Apparently there are a lot of Americans who believe that Hillary Clinton is dishonest and untrustworthy but also a strong leader.
Let’s set aside her specific case for a second. These poll results raise a larger question: Can you be a bad person but a strong leader?
The case for that proposition is reasonably straightforward. Politics is a tough, brutal arena. People play by the rules of the jungle. Sometimes to get anything done, a leader has to push, bully, intimidate, elide the truth. The qualities that make you a good person in private life — kindness, humility and a capacity for introspection — can be drawbacks on the public stage. Electing a president is different than finding a friend or lover. It’s better to hire a ruthless person to do a hard job.
I get that argument, but outside the make-believe world of “House of Cards,” it’s usually wrong. Voting for someone with bad private morals is like setting off on a battleship with awesome guns and a rotting hull. There’s a good chance you’re going to sink before the voyage is over.
People who are dishonest, unkind and inconsiderate have trouble attracting and retaining good people to their team. They tend to have sleazy friends. They may be personally canny, but they are almost always surrounded by sycophants and second-raters who kick up scandal and undermine the leader’s effectiveness.
Leaders who lack humility are fragile. Their pride is bloated and sensitive. People are never treating them as respectfully as they think they deserve. They become consumed with resentments. They treat politics as battle, armor up and wall themselves off to information and feedback.
You may think they are championing your cause or agenda, but when the fur is flying, they are really only interested in defending themselves. They keep an enemies list and life becomes a matter of settling scores and imagining conspiracies. They jettison any policy that might hurt their standing.
It is a paradox of politics that the people who set out obsessively to succeed in it usually end up sabotaging themselves. They treat each relationship as a transaction and don’t generate loyalty. They lose any honest internal voice. After a while they can’t accurately perceive themselves or their situation. Sooner or later their Watergate will come.
Maybe once upon a time there was an environment in which ruthless Machiavellians had room to work their dark arts, but we don’t live in Renaissance Italy. We live in a world of universal media attention. Once there is a hint of scandal of any kind, the political world goes into maximum frenzy and everything stops.
We live in a world in which power is dispersed. You can’t intimidate people by chopping your enemies to bits in the town square. Even the presidency isn’t a powerful enough office to allow a leader to rule by fear. You have to build coalitions by appealing to people’s self-interest and by luring them voluntarily to your side.
Modern politics, like private morality, is about building trust and enduring personal relationships. That means being fair, empathetic, honest and trustworthy. If you stink at establishing trust, you stink at politics.
People with good private morality are better at navigating for the long term. They genuinely love causes beyond themselves. When the news cycle distracts and the short-term passions surge, they can still steer by that distant star. They’re less likely to overreact and do something stupid.
People with astute moral sentiments have an early warning system. They don’t have to think through the dangers of tit-for-tat favor-exchanges with billionaires. They have an aesthetic revulsion against people who seem icky and situations that are distasteful, which heads off a lot of trouble.
Of course, private morality is not enough. You have to know how to react to unprincipled people who want to destroy you.
But, historically, most effective leaders — like, say, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill — had a dual consciousness. They had an earnest, inner moral voice capable of radical self-awareness, rectitude and great compassion. They also had a pragmatic, canny outer voice. These two voices were in constant conversation, checking each other, probing for synthesis, wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.
I don’t know if Hillary Clinton possesses this double-mindedness. But I do know that if candidates don’t acquire a moral compass outside of politics, they’re not going to get it in the White House, and they won’t be effective there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/opini ... inion&_r=0
Mothers and Presidents
Americans are embarrassed. Over the last 35 years there have only been two elections without a Bush or Clinton on the national ticket. Next year both names could rest atop the ballot. In one poll voters saw this as a bad thing by a ratio of 8 to 1.
Some of the people who are upset have a false view of how life works. Since Thomas Hobbes, many people have embraced the illusory notion that society is made up of individuals. According to this view the only fair competition is between individuals, without undue benefit from family connections.
But no society has ever been this way. Individuals don’t come fully formed. They emerge out of families and groups. The family and the group are the essential social unit. These collectives have always shaped public life.
According to some surveys, 90 percent of businesses around the world are family-operated businesses. Much research suggests that in the U.S., family-run businesses outperform non-family-run businesses, especially while the founder is still alive.
Politics, too, has always been a dynastic affair. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, then 10 of the 45 presidents will have had a family member precede or follow them in the White House. According to my colleagues at The Upshot, among boomers, the son of a senator was 8,500 times more likely to become a senator than the average American male.
Things look the same on the state level. In New York there are Cuomos. In California, Browns. Out West the joke is that voters should just vote for the closest Udall.
If you look around the globe, these pseudo-monarchical tendencies seem to be on the increase, not on the decrease. There are Aquinos in the Philippines, Nehru-Gandhis in India, even Le Pens in France. Now that women are more empowered, each dominant clan has essentially doubled the size of its talent pool, so family influence is increased.
Why do the members of dynastic families do so well? Some of the reasons are obvious and unfair: brand names and fund-raising networks. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton get the benefit of their family members’ fame. Their donor networks are already in place. These advantages will not necessarily make them better presidents.
But in other ways we should be grateful that in each field of endeavor there are certain families that are breeding grounds for achievement. We should be grateful that there are Bachs in music, Griffeys and Molinas in baseball, Brontes and Amises in novel writing and Kennedys, Roosevelts, Clintons and Bushes in politics. These families make life more unfair for the rest of us (because it’s harder for others to compete against them), but they also make society as a whole more accomplished.
Powerhouse families nurture achievement in many ways. First, there’s identity formation. If you grow up in a musical family you’re more likely to think of yourself as a musician at a young age. You can get your 10,000 hours of practice in early, which is a huge leg up.
Second, there is the realm of practical knowledge. Very little of the knowledge you need to succeed in a trade can be taught in the classroom or read about in a book. It can only be imparted by example. If you’re a Nancy Kassebaum and you grow up around your dad, Alf Landon, as he conducts a meeting, works a room or reacts to victory or defeat, you’re more likely to have an intuitive feel for how the craft of politics is done.
Third, there is the level of skills. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once observed that it takes three generations to make a career. That is, the skills that going into, say, a teacher — verbal fluency, empathy, endurance — take a long time to develop. They emerge in grandparents and great-grandparents and are passed down magnified through the generations. I bet you can trace ways your grandparents helped shape your career.
Fourth, there is audacity. It is very odd to think you should be president of the United States. But if you grow up in the Kennedy or Bush families it is apparently less odd.
Fifth, there is the time horizon. There are many reasons family businesses do better, for a time, than nonfamily businesses. The senior people are connected by intense and sometimes altruistic bonds of trust. But one reason is that families often run the business for the long term, to pass it down as a legacy to those not yet born.
Sunday is Mother’s Day, when we celebrate the powerful ways mothers shape their children. Families are unequal. Some mothers — and some fathers, husbands and wives — shape their kin with extraordinary power, and in certain directions. We should fight unfair advantages like legacy admissions, but we wouldn’t want to live in a society in which family influence didn’t happen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/opini ... type=Blogs
Americans are embarrassed. Over the last 35 years there have only been two elections without a Bush or Clinton on the national ticket. Next year both names could rest atop the ballot. In one poll voters saw this as a bad thing by a ratio of 8 to 1.
Some of the people who are upset have a false view of how life works. Since Thomas Hobbes, many people have embraced the illusory notion that society is made up of individuals. According to this view the only fair competition is between individuals, without undue benefit from family connections.
But no society has ever been this way. Individuals don’t come fully formed. They emerge out of families and groups. The family and the group are the essential social unit. These collectives have always shaped public life.
According to some surveys, 90 percent of businesses around the world are family-operated businesses. Much research suggests that in the U.S., family-run businesses outperform non-family-run businesses, especially while the founder is still alive.
Politics, too, has always been a dynastic affair. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, then 10 of the 45 presidents will have had a family member precede or follow them in the White House. According to my colleagues at The Upshot, among boomers, the son of a senator was 8,500 times more likely to become a senator than the average American male.
Things look the same on the state level. In New York there are Cuomos. In California, Browns. Out West the joke is that voters should just vote for the closest Udall.
If you look around the globe, these pseudo-monarchical tendencies seem to be on the increase, not on the decrease. There are Aquinos in the Philippines, Nehru-Gandhis in India, even Le Pens in France. Now that women are more empowered, each dominant clan has essentially doubled the size of its talent pool, so family influence is increased.
Why do the members of dynastic families do so well? Some of the reasons are obvious and unfair: brand names and fund-raising networks. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton get the benefit of their family members’ fame. Their donor networks are already in place. These advantages will not necessarily make them better presidents.
But in other ways we should be grateful that in each field of endeavor there are certain families that are breeding grounds for achievement. We should be grateful that there are Bachs in music, Griffeys and Molinas in baseball, Brontes and Amises in novel writing and Kennedys, Roosevelts, Clintons and Bushes in politics. These families make life more unfair for the rest of us (because it’s harder for others to compete against them), but they also make society as a whole more accomplished.
Powerhouse families nurture achievement in many ways. First, there’s identity formation. If you grow up in a musical family you’re more likely to think of yourself as a musician at a young age. You can get your 10,000 hours of practice in early, which is a huge leg up.
Second, there is the realm of practical knowledge. Very little of the knowledge you need to succeed in a trade can be taught in the classroom or read about in a book. It can only be imparted by example. If you’re a Nancy Kassebaum and you grow up around your dad, Alf Landon, as he conducts a meeting, works a room or reacts to victory or defeat, you’re more likely to have an intuitive feel for how the craft of politics is done.
Third, there is the level of skills. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once observed that it takes three generations to make a career. That is, the skills that going into, say, a teacher — verbal fluency, empathy, endurance — take a long time to develop. They emerge in grandparents and great-grandparents and are passed down magnified through the generations. I bet you can trace ways your grandparents helped shape your career.
Fourth, there is audacity. It is very odd to think you should be president of the United States. But if you grow up in the Kennedy or Bush families it is apparently less odd.
Fifth, there is the time horizon. There are many reasons family businesses do better, for a time, than nonfamily businesses. The senior people are connected by intense and sometimes altruistic bonds of trust. But one reason is that families often run the business for the long term, to pass it down as a legacy to those not yet born.
Sunday is Mother’s Day, when we celebrate the powerful ways mothers shape their children. Families are unequal. Some mothers — and some fathers, husbands and wives — shape their kin with extraordinary power, and in certain directions. We should fight unfair advantages like legacy admissions, but we wouldn’t want to live in a society in which family influence didn’t happen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/opini ... type=Blogs
Learning From Mistakes
If you could go back to 1889 and strangle Adolf Hitler in his crib, would you do it? At one level, the answer is obvious. Of course, you should. If there had been no Hitler, presumably the Nazi Party would have lacked the charismatic leader it needed to rise to power. Presumably, there would have been no World War II, no Holocaust, no millions dead on the Eastern and Western fronts.
But, on the other hand, if there were no World War II, you wouldn’t have had the infusion of women into the work force. You wouldn’t have had the G.I. Bill and the rapid expansion of higher education. You wouldn’t have had the pacification of Europe, Pax-Americana, which led to decades of peace and prosperity, or the end of the British and other empires.
History is an infinitely complex web of causations. To erase mistakes from the past is to obliterate your world now. You can’t go back and know then what you know now. You can’t step in the same river twice.
So it’s really hard to give simple sound-bite answers about past mistakes. The question, would you go back and undo your errors is unanswerable. It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?
Which brings us to Iraq. From the current vantage point, the decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment, made by President George W. Bush and supported by 72 percent of the American public who were polled at the time. I supported it, too.
What can be learned?
The first obvious lesson is that we should look at intelligence products with a more skeptical eye. There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.
That doesn’t gibe with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found “a major intelligence failure”: “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers.”
The Iraq war error reminds us of the need for epistemological modesty. We don’t know much about the world, and much of our information is wrong. A successful president has to make decisions while radiating hesitancy, staying open-minded in the face of new evidence, not falling into the traps that afflict those who possess excessive self-confidence.
The second lesson of Iraq concerns this question: How much can we really change other nations? Every foreign policy dilemma involves a calibration. Should we lean forward to try to influence this or that region? Or should we hang back figuring we’ll just end up making everything worse.
After the 1990s, many of us were leaning in the interventionist direction. We’d seen the fall of the apartheid regime, which made South Africa better. We’d seen the fall of communist regimes, which made the Eastern bloc nations better. Many of us thought that, by taking down Saddam Hussein, we could end another evil empire, and gradually open up human development in Iraq and the Arab world.
Has that happened? In 2004, I would have said yes. In 2006, I would have said no. In 2015, I say yes and no, but mostly no.
The outcome, so far, in Iraq should remind us that we don’t really know much about how other cultures will evolve. We can exert only clumsy and indirect influence on how other nations govern themselves. When you take away basic order, people respond with sectarian savagery.
If the victory in the Cold War taught us to lean forward and be interventionist, the legacy of the 2003 Iraq decision should cause us to pull back from the excesses of that mentality, to have less faith in America’s ability to understand other places and effect change.
These are all data points in a larger education — along with the surge and the recent withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. I wind up in a place with less interventionist instincts than where George W. Bush was in 2003, but significantly more interventionist instincts than where President Obama is inclined to be today.
Finally, Iraq teaches us to be suspicious of leaders who try to force revolutionary, transformational change. It teaches us to have respect for trimmers, leaders who pay minute attention to context, who try to lead gradual but constant change. It teaches us to honor those who respect the unfathomable complexity of history and who are humble in the face of consequences to their actions that they cannot fully predict or understand
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opini ... pe=article
*********
The Presence of the Past
As we grow older, the past looms larger. There’s more of it. The past is full of possibility.
It is ever-changing, an eddying tide, subject to the gusts — and lacunas — of memory.
The future may seem wan by comparison and, for each of us, we know more or less where it ends. With a bang or a whimper, Henry James’s “distinguished thing” awaits us.
Who, a friend asked me the other day, would ever want to be 90? The answer is somebody aged 89.
Old age is not for sissies, my grandmother liked to comment. Nor, however, is the other option.
So on we go, accumulating past with reckless abandon, like children guzzling candies.
Yet as Faulkner observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Or as a disillusioned Yugoslav Communist once put it, “The most dangerous thing for a Communist is to predict the past.”
The past is potent, subject to manipulation. Wars nearly always involve memory trafficked into inflammatory myth.
I am a newspaperman. I try to understand, evoke and make vivid the present. That is not possible without understanding the past. We are the sum of our lived moments. It is worth turning time’s arrow backward.
I had always wanted to tell stories, the inner within the outer, the intimate secreting the universal. I liked to be the outsider looking in.
Often the stories were about lives swept away in the gale of history: the children of Beirut in 1983 who could not sleep without the familiar and so reassuring sound of gunfire; a Polish priest who discovered in middle age that he was a Jew entrusted by his Nazi-murdered parents to a Catholic family; Argentine twins stolen at birth from their murdered student mother by a childless junta army officer; mixed Bosnian families broken asunder by the boozy Serb killers who injected the virus of sectarian hatred into Sarajevo; a German woman loath to contemplate her beautiful blue eyes because they reminded her of a former Nazi concentration camp commander — her father.
Mirages, shadows, specters: the stuff of memory. How we remember, as nations and as individuals, is critical.
I first began to think seriously about the ferocious force of the past as a war correspondent covering Yugoslavia’s destruction. The Serbs who threw hundreds of thousands of Muslims out of their homes had been whipped into a nationalist frenzy. They had been convinced by a cynical leader that these secular Bosnian Muslims, so recently part of the same country called Yugoslavia, indistinguishable in fact, were a reincarnation of the Turks of old, latter-day Ottomans determined to affix the crescent moon of Islam to the church spires of Christian Europe.
When the past is suppressed, memory becomes explosive. Bosnians, Serbs and Croats re-enacted, in the 1990’s, the civil-war horrors of the 1940’s whose mention had become taboo under the clamp of Tito’s postwar Communist dictatorship.
When the past is cultivated at the expense of the present, memory becomes a blind alley. Those keys to long-lost Palestinian olive groves are now open-sesames only to further violence.
When the past overwhelms, it can turn victim into oppressor behind a shield called “Never Again.”
History illuminates. It can also blind.
The world may broadly be divided into areas that are captive of their pasts — the Balkans, the Middle East for example — and areas that are hard-wired to their futures — the United States and most of Asia. Europe, I think, lies somewhere in between.
One of my sons lives in Vietnam. Whenever I am there I marvel at the graves among the rice paddies. It is a powerful symbol of the living and the dead mingling, present and past. It is an image of acceptance. Nobody wants to talk about the war in Vietnam that ended 40 years ago.
How different from the dead of the Middle East, venerated as martyrs, martyrs of Islam demanding further sacrifice of life. Those celestial virgins have a lot to answer for.
I love the lines of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai about peace only coming to the Holy Land when a Jerusalem guide tells his tour group: “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important. But next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”
Fruit and vegetables, unlike that ancient arch, nourish a future.
The past is there. We must understand it, our own, our community’s and our nation’s. Suppressing it will only be achieved at a price. That price is often bloodshed. But nor can we be consumed by the past, re-fight its battles or succumb to the sterility of vengeance.
Not to remember, or to be overwhelmed by memory, are equally dangerous.
Only through a balanced view of the past, conscientious but not obsessive, may we shun victimhood, accept divergent national narratives, embrace decency, meet our daily obligations, and look forward.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opini ... pe=article
If you could go back to 1889 and strangle Adolf Hitler in his crib, would you do it? At one level, the answer is obvious. Of course, you should. If there had been no Hitler, presumably the Nazi Party would have lacked the charismatic leader it needed to rise to power. Presumably, there would have been no World War II, no Holocaust, no millions dead on the Eastern and Western fronts.
But, on the other hand, if there were no World War II, you wouldn’t have had the infusion of women into the work force. You wouldn’t have had the G.I. Bill and the rapid expansion of higher education. You wouldn’t have had the pacification of Europe, Pax-Americana, which led to decades of peace and prosperity, or the end of the British and other empires.
History is an infinitely complex web of causations. To erase mistakes from the past is to obliterate your world now. You can’t go back and know then what you know now. You can’t step in the same river twice.
So it’s really hard to give simple sound-bite answers about past mistakes. The question, would you go back and undo your errors is unanswerable. It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?
Which brings us to Iraq. From the current vantage point, the decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment, made by President George W. Bush and supported by 72 percent of the American public who were polled at the time. I supported it, too.
What can be learned?
The first obvious lesson is that we should look at intelligence products with a more skeptical eye. There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.
That doesn’t gibe with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found “a major intelligence failure”: “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers.”
The Iraq war error reminds us of the need for epistemological modesty. We don’t know much about the world, and much of our information is wrong. A successful president has to make decisions while radiating hesitancy, staying open-minded in the face of new evidence, not falling into the traps that afflict those who possess excessive self-confidence.
The second lesson of Iraq concerns this question: How much can we really change other nations? Every foreign policy dilemma involves a calibration. Should we lean forward to try to influence this or that region? Or should we hang back figuring we’ll just end up making everything worse.
After the 1990s, many of us were leaning in the interventionist direction. We’d seen the fall of the apartheid regime, which made South Africa better. We’d seen the fall of communist regimes, which made the Eastern bloc nations better. Many of us thought that, by taking down Saddam Hussein, we could end another evil empire, and gradually open up human development in Iraq and the Arab world.
Has that happened? In 2004, I would have said yes. In 2006, I would have said no. In 2015, I say yes and no, but mostly no.
The outcome, so far, in Iraq should remind us that we don’t really know much about how other cultures will evolve. We can exert only clumsy and indirect influence on how other nations govern themselves. When you take away basic order, people respond with sectarian savagery.
If the victory in the Cold War taught us to lean forward and be interventionist, the legacy of the 2003 Iraq decision should cause us to pull back from the excesses of that mentality, to have less faith in America’s ability to understand other places and effect change.
These are all data points in a larger education — along with the surge and the recent withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. I wind up in a place with less interventionist instincts than where George W. Bush was in 2003, but significantly more interventionist instincts than where President Obama is inclined to be today.
Finally, Iraq teaches us to be suspicious of leaders who try to force revolutionary, transformational change. It teaches us to have respect for trimmers, leaders who pay minute attention to context, who try to lead gradual but constant change. It teaches us to honor those who respect the unfathomable complexity of history and who are humble in the face of consequences to their actions that they cannot fully predict or understand
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opini ... pe=article
*********
The Presence of the Past
As we grow older, the past looms larger. There’s more of it. The past is full of possibility.
It is ever-changing, an eddying tide, subject to the gusts — and lacunas — of memory.
The future may seem wan by comparison and, for each of us, we know more or less where it ends. With a bang or a whimper, Henry James’s “distinguished thing” awaits us.
Who, a friend asked me the other day, would ever want to be 90? The answer is somebody aged 89.
Old age is not for sissies, my grandmother liked to comment. Nor, however, is the other option.
So on we go, accumulating past with reckless abandon, like children guzzling candies.
Yet as Faulkner observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Or as a disillusioned Yugoslav Communist once put it, “The most dangerous thing for a Communist is to predict the past.”
The past is potent, subject to manipulation. Wars nearly always involve memory trafficked into inflammatory myth.
I am a newspaperman. I try to understand, evoke and make vivid the present. That is not possible without understanding the past. We are the sum of our lived moments. It is worth turning time’s arrow backward.
I had always wanted to tell stories, the inner within the outer, the intimate secreting the universal. I liked to be the outsider looking in.
Often the stories were about lives swept away in the gale of history: the children of Beirut in 1983 who could not sleep without the familiar and so reassuring sound of gunfire; a Polish priest who discovered in middle age that he was a Jew entrusted by his Nazi-murdered parents to a Catholic family; Argentine twins stolen at birth from their murdered student mother by a childless junta army officer; mixed Bosnian families broken asunder by the boozy Serb killers who injected the virus of sectarian hatred into Sarajevo; a German woman loath to contemplate her beautiful blue eyes because they reminded her of a former Nazi concentration camp commander — her father.
Mirages, shadows, specters: the stuff of memory. How we remember, as nations and as individuals, is critical.
I first began to think seriously about the ferocious force of the past as a war correspondent covering Yugoslavia’s destruction. The Serbs who threw hundreds of thousands of Muslims out of their homes had been whipped into a nationalist frenzy. They had been convinced by a cynical leader that these secular Bosnian Muslims, so recently part of the same country called Yugoslavia, indistinguishable in fact, were a reincarnation of the Turks of old, latter-day Ottomans determined to affix the crescent moon of Islam to the church spires of Christian Europe.
When the past is suppressed, memory becomes explosive. Bosnians, Serbs and Croats re-enacted, in the 1990’s, the civil-war horrors of the 1940’s whose mention had become taboo under the clamp of Tito’s postwar Communist dictatorship.
When the past is cultivated at the expense of the present, memory becomes a blind alley. Those keys to long-lost Palestinian olive groves are now open-sesames only to further violence.
When the past overwhelms, it can turn victim into oppressor behind a shield called “Never Again.”
History illuminates. It can also blind.
The world may broadly be divided into areas that are captive of their pasts — the Balkans, the Middle East for example — and areas that are hard-wired to their futures — the United States and most of Asia. Europe, I think, lies somewhere in between.
One of my sons lives in Vietnam. Whenever I am there I marvel at the graves among the rice paddies. It is a powerful symbol of the living and the dead mingling, present and past. It is an image of acceptance. Nobody wants to talk about the war in Vietnam that ended 40 years ago.
How different from the dead of the Middle East, venerated as martyrs, martyrs of Islam demanding further sacrifice of life. Those celestial virgins have a lot to answer for.
I love the lines of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai about peace only coming to the Holy Land when a Jerusalem guide tells his tour group: “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important. But next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”
Fruit and vegetables, unlike that ancient arch, nourish a future.
The past is there. We must understand it, our own, our community’s and our nation’s. Suppressing it will only be achieved at a price. That price is often bloodshed. But nor can we be consumed by the past, re-fight its battles or succumb to the sterility of vengeance.
Not to remember, or to be overwhelmed by memory, are equally dangerous.
Only through a balanced view of the past, conscientious but not obsessive, may we shun victimhood, accept divergent national narratives, embrace decency, meet our daily obligations, and look forward.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opini ... pe=article
Wellness Trumps Politics
"Most Westerners today are no longer driven by politics. By that I mean that they are no longer possessed by political ideas that they feel can change society. There is no great clash of ideologies. Politics in the 21st century has largely lost its capacity to inspire, or if there is a gust of inspiration (as with early Barack Obama) it proves illusory.
People are focused on other matters: personal health, spiritual health, wellness, diet, living longer, and the vast related matter of the health of the planet. Zen, yoga and the soul have trumped the means of production. Of course, wellness in turn raises the issues of climate change and energy consumption, questions that have considerable political content but are not political at their core. The political century has given way to the personal century."
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/opini ... ticle&_r=0
"Most Westerners today are no longer driven by politics. By that I mean that they are no longer possessed by political ideas that they feel can change society. There is no great clash of ideologies. Politics in the 21st century has largely lost its capacity to inspire, or if there is a gust of inspiration (as with early Barack Obama) it proves illusory.
People are focused on other matters: personal health, spiritual health, wellness, diet, living longer, and the vast related matter of the health of the planet. Zen, yoga and the soul have trumped the means of production. Of course, wellness in turn raises the issues of climate change and energy consumption, questions that have considerable political content but are not political at their core. The political century has given way to the personal century."
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/opini ... ticle&_r=0
Imagining the Lives of Others
What could be more exhilarating than experiencing the world through the perspective of another person? In “Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust’s narrator says that the only true voyage of discovery is not to visit other lands but “to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.” This is one of the central projects of the humanities; it’s certainly part of the pleasure we get from art and literature.
Many believe that this psychological connection is also essential for political change. They may argue, for instance, that in order for white Americans to adequately respond to the events in Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere, they need to put themselves in the shoes of those in minority communities. After the death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police officers, Hillary Rodham Clinton called for changing police tactics, and then added: “The most important thing each of us can do is to try even harder to see the world through our neighbors’ eyes, to imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes, to share their pain and their hopes and their dreams.”
This is a moral claim, but it raises a psychological question. Can we do what Mrs. Clinton asks of us? Just how successful are we at seeing the world as others see it?
Apparently, we are nowhere near as good as we think we are. In his book “Mindwise,” the psychologist Nicholas Epley discusses experiments in which people were asked to judge the thoughts of strangers. These included asking speed daters to identify others who wanted to date them, asking job candidates how impressed their interviewers were with them and asking a range of people whether or not someone was lying to them.
People are often highly confident in their ability to see things as others do, but their attempts are typically barely better than chance. Other studies find that people who are instructed to take the perspectives of others tend to do worse, not better, at judging their thoughts and emotions.
So we are often bad at the project Clinton recommends. But a fan of perspective-taking would say that we just have to get better at it; we should try harder.
There are certain limits, however, to how far we can go. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book “Transformative Experience,” argues that it’s impossible to actually imagine what it would be like to have certain deeply significant experiences, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. The same lack of access applies to our understanding of others. If I can’t know what it would be like for me to fight in a war, how can I expect to understand what it was like for someone else to have fought in a war? If I can’t understand what it would be like to become poor, how can I know what it’s like for someone else to be poor?
One approach is to go ahead and actually have the experience. Some have chronicled their attempts to take on other identities, like Norah Vincent in her 2006 book “Self-Made Man,” a memoir of a woman posing as a man, or John Howard Griffin in “Black Like Me,” which recounts his experience living disguised as a black man.
These acts of immersion are fascinating, but they have their limits. In the aftermath of torture revelations during the Iraq war, some journalists, like Christopher Hitchens, decided to get themselves waterboarded so that they would know what it was like. I don’t doubt that they learned something from the experience, but what they didn’t experience — what they couldn’t experience — was the lack of control. Surely part of the terror of waterboarding is that it is done to you when you don’t want it and you have no way to make it stop.
This point was missed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, who, when told that prisoners had to stand for many hours a day, responded that he himself had a standing desk and was also standing for many hours a day. But of course he could sit down whenever he wanted.
There is also the issue of duration. I can imagine what it’s like to deal with a crying baby for a few minutes, or spend time by myself in a small room, or have a stranger recognize me on the street. But it’s much harder to imagine — impossible, I think — what it would be like to be a single parent, suffer a year of solitary confinement or become a famous movie star.
These failures should motivate a certain humility when it comes to dealing with the lives of others. Instead of assuming that we can know what it is like to be them, we should focus more on listening to what they have to say. This isn’t perfect — people sometimes lie, or are confused, or deluded — but it’s by far the best method of figuring out the needs, desires and histories of people who are different from us. It also shows more respect than a clumsy attempt to get into their skins; I agree with the essayist Leslie Jamison, who describes empathy as “perched precariously between gift and invasion.”
Also, Mrs. Clinton might be mistaken in her claims about the moral importance of perspective-taking. Scholars ranging from Adam Smith to the contemporary literary critic Elaine Scarry have pointed out that when we try to act morally toward strangers based on empathic projection, we typically fail. This is in part because we’re not good at it, and in part because, when we allow ourselves to be guided by our feelings, our emotional investment in ourselves and those we love is overwhelming relative to our weak attachment to strangers. We become better people and better policy makers if we rely instead on more abstract principles of justice and fairness, along with a more diffuse compassion.
None of this is to say that the project of experiencing the lives of others should be abandoned. Under the right circumstances, we might have some limited success — I’d like to believe that novels and memoirs have given me some appreciation of what it’s like to be an autistic teenager, a geisha or a black boy growing up in the South. And even if they haven’t, most of us are still intensely curious about the lives of other people, and find the act of trying to simulate these lives to be an engaging and transformative endeavor. We’re not going to stop.
But we’re not good at it, particularly when the stakes are high, and empathic engagement is far too fragile a foundation to ground public policy. To make the world better, we shouldn’t try to put ourselves in the shoes of Eric Garner or anyone else. Our efforts should instead be put toward cultivating the ability to step back and apply an objective and fair morality.
Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale and the author of “Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... type=Blogs
What could be more exhilarating than experiencing the world through the perspective of another person? In “Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust’s narrator says that the only true voyage of discovery is not to visit other lands but “to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.” This is one of the central projects of the humanities; it’s certainly part of the pleasure we get from art and literature.
Many believe that this psychological connection is also essential for political change. They may argue, for instance, that in order for white Americans to adequately respond to the events in Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere, they need to put themselves in the shoes of those in minority communities. After the death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police officers, Hillary Rodham Clinton called for changing police tactics, and then added: “The most important thing each of us can do is to try even harder to see the world through our neighbors’ eyes, to imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes, to share their pain and their hopes and their dreams.”
This is a moral claim, but it raises a psychological question. Can we do what Mrs. Clinton asks of us? Just how successful are we at seeing the world as others see it?
Apparently, we are nowhere near as good as we think we are. In his book “Mindwise,” the psychologist Nicholas Epley discusses experiments in which people were asked to judge the thoughts of strangers. These included asking speed daters to identify others who wanted to date them, asking job candidates how impressed their interviewers were with them and asking a range of people whether or not someone was lying to them.
People are often highly confident in their ability to see things as others do, but their attempts are typically barely better than chance. Other studies find that people who are instructed to take the perspectives of others tend to do worse, not better, at judging their thoughts and emotions.
So we are often bad at the project Clinton recommends. But a fan of perspective-taking would say that we just have to get better at it; we should try harder.
There are certain limits, however, to how far we can go. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book “Transformative Experience,” argues that it’s impossible to actually imagine what it would be like to have certain deeply significant experiences, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. The same lack of access applies to our understanding of others. If I can’t know what it would be like for me to fight in a war, how can I expect to understand what it was like for someone else to have fought in a war? If I can’t understand what it would be like to become poor, how can I know what it’s like for someone else to be poor?
One approach is to go ahead and actually have the experience. Some have chronicled their attempts to take on other identities, like Norah Vincent in her 2006 book “Self-Made Man,” a memoir of a woman posing as a man, or John Howard Griffin in “Black Like Me,” which recounts his experience living disguised as a black man.
These acts of immersion are fascinating, but they have their limits. In the aftermath of torture revelations during the Iraq war, some journalists, like Christopher Hitchens, decided to get themselves waterboarded so that they would know what it was like. I don’t doubt that they learned something from the experience, but what they didn’t experience — what they couldn’t experience — was the lack of control. Surely part of the terror of waterboarding is that it is done to you when you don’t want it and you have no way to make it stop.
This point was missed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, who, when told that prisoners had to stand for many hours a day, responded that he himself had a standing desk and was also standing for many hours a day. But of course he could sit down whenever he wanted.
There is also the issue of duration. I can imagine what it’s like to deal with a crying baby for a few minutes, or spend time by myself in a small room, or have a stranger recognize me on the street. But it’s much harder to imagine — impossible, I think — what it would be like to be a single parent, suffer a year of solitary confinement or become a famous movie star.
These failures should motivate a certain humility when it comes to dealing with the lives of others. Instead of assuming that we can know what it is like to be them, we should focus more on listening to what they have to say. This isn’t perfect — people sometimes lie, or are confused, or deluded — but it’s by far the best method of figuring out the needs, desires and histories of people who are different from us. It also shows more respect than a clumsy attempt to get into their skins; I agree with the essayist Leslie Jamison, who describes empathy as “perched precariously between gift and invasion.”
Also, Mrs. Clinton might be mistaken in her claims about the moral importance of perspective-taking. Scholars ranging from Adam Smith to the contemporary literary critic Elaine Scarry have pointed out that when we try to act morally toward strangers based on empathic projection, we typically fail. This is in part because we’re not good at it, and in part because, when we allow ourselves to be guided by our feelings, our emotional investment in ourselves and those we love is overwhelming relative to our weak attachment to strangers. We become better people and better policy makers if we rely instead on more abstract principles of justice and fairness, along with a more diffuse compassion.
None of this is to say that the project of experiencing the lives of others should be abandoned. Under the right circumstances, we might have some limited success — I’d like to believe that novels and memoirs have given me some appreciation of what it’s like to be an autistic teenager, a geisha or a black boy growing up in the South. And even if they haven’t, most of us are still intensely curious about the lives of other people, and find the act of trying to simulate these lives to be an engaging and transformative endeavor. We’re not going to stop.
But we’re not good at it, particularly when the stakes are high, and empathic engagement is far too fragile a foundation to ground public policy. To make the world better, we shouldn’t try to put ourselves in the shoes of Eric Garner or anyone else. Our efforts should instead be put toward cultivating the ability to step back and apply an objective and fair morality.
Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale and the author of “Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... type=Blogs
STRENGTH IN DIVERSITY
The Virtues of Political Disagreement
This interview, the fifth in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning political disagreement. My interviewee is Jerry Gaus, professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. He is the author of “The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World.” — Gary Gutting
Gary Gutting: Many people think the greatest obstacle to solving our national problems is the large ideological gap between the right and the left. They think that to make any significant progress, we need a shared vision of what sort of society we want. Your work on the diversity of values underlying political debates seems to challenge this view. Could you give our readers a basic sketch of your position?
Jerry Gaus: You’re quite right: There’s a common assumption that diversity of values and ideological perspectives gets in the way of solving our problems. Let’s suppose we agree that there are certain national problems we need to solve and that, at least approximately, we agree what the contours of a solution would look like. Now there is some very impressive work, for example by Scott E. Page, which rigorously shows how those who see the world in the same way — say they all share a secular worldview or a religious perspective — tend to get caught at the same places in searching for solutions.
In seeking to solve problems, homogeneous groups look at things in the same way and agree on the way forward; that works nicely until they get caught at some difficult part of the problem, in which case often no one can see the next step. Seeing the problem in the same way, they hit the same wall. In contrast, in diverse groups people understand, and so approach, problems in different ways, so they get stuck at different points. In this case where one perspective gets stuck, another is apt to see a way forward.
G.G.: But in politics our diverse perspectives typically lead to very different views about what our problems are, as well as about how to solve them.
J.G.: Agreed, yet it remains true that very different perspectives and ideologies, pursuing their own agendas, have often provided fundamental insights for their rivals. A striking example is the way social democrats supporting a secular welfare state have learned from both free-market economists and from religious organizations how to improve the delivery of social services. Similarly, feminist insights have helped conservatives rethink their views of the family.
G.G.: These seem to be examples of how politicians adjust their views to win over voters, not examples of ideologically opposed groups coming together to solve shared problems. Isn’t the latter what we would need to break the gridlock in Congress we’ve seen in recent years? How, if at all, does Page’s account apply to recent congressional politics?
J.G.: “Learning from others” and “coming together” are distinct. The standoff in current U.S. politics is not because we disagree; every contemporary democracy is characterized by deep disagreements. I am skeptical about the value of any single-cause explanation of current American political life, but I do think one factor is the common belief among many Democrats and Republicans that the other side is stupid, corrupt and, indeed, evil. Many on the left see themselves as supporting enlightenment and justice against the superstitious and plutocratic Republicans; many conservatives see themselves as being on the side of freedom and self-reliance against the snobby political correctness of the cultural and political elites who, deep down, are repelled by their own market society. If that is the way we view others, then a political war is all we can expect. Each marches forth in the righteous belief they are protecting the truth from the enemy.
G.G.: What’s the alternative? Shouldn’t we fight for what we think are the best policies?
J.G.: That’s the critical question: how do we “fight” for what we think is right under modern conditions, where the free use of reason leads to opposed convictions about the place of humans in the universe, the nature of a just society and the good life? The first step is to realize that we contest and fight in many ways. I can contest ideals and convince others that I really do have the sound basis for my claims about what is best. I also might contest and learn from others in ways that improve my understanding about what is the best. We all might contest and learn from each other, and come to better conclusions about what is best from all our perspectives. All these forms of “fighting” are the engines of a dynamic diverse society.
G.G.: But in the end, isn’t it likely that we will still disagree?
J.G.: Of course. We will then be faced with the sort of fights inherent in healthy democratic politics, voting to resolve our differences about which of a number of reasonable policies we all can live with, we shall adopt. But there is another sort of democratic fight — what might be called a political war — a fight over whose ideals are to shape the life of all. This is a struggle for the power to impose one’s ideals on others. Whoever wins that fight, many will be forced to live under laws and policies that they view as deeply wrong and, perhaps, in violation of their most fundamental commitments.
As we see today, those who have lost can become hostile and alienated from political life. The key problem is this: Can we forge a basic framework of laws and policies that diverse perspectives can live with and support? If that can be achieved, we can freely contest our views of the ideal, while living together in a moral and political framework of cooperation that, at least in its broad contours, all endorse — perhaps not as their ideal, but as worthy of their allegiance.
G.G.: Are political philosophers part of the problem here? From Plato on they seem to have been interested in describing ideal societies much more than formulating a range of acceptable but nonideal societies.
J.G.: Thinking about ideal ways of living can be valuable; in painting these pictures of utopia one comes to better understand one’s own values and principles, and the sort of social order that would express them. And different theorists can learn from the ideal pictures of others. The worry arises when, having painted these pictures that we find so beautiful and pleasing — at least to us and some like-minded others — we embark on the grand project of remaking our society in their image, or we condemn our societies as unjust because they fall short of them. One would have thought that after the 20th century, and its ideal-based political disasters, political theorists would have embraced the diversity and inherent imperfections of the open society. Yet, today one of the most important strains in contemporary political philosophy is “ideal theory.” Followers of John Rawls seek to construct “realistic utopias” while yet others reject the “realistic” constraint as too accommodative of human nature! Genuine justice might simply lie outside the bounds of humanity’s capability.
G.G.: Could you give some examples of how two groups with sharply opposed ideals have found (or could plausibly find) a political framework acceptable to both?
J.G.: At the end of the 19th century a great political conflict occurred between parties of socialism and liberalism — particularly, between the Labour and Liberal parties in Britain. The result of this conflict was not the victory of one ideal but, as, L. T. Hobhouse, one of the chief political philosophers of the era put it, a “liberal socialism,” which eventually led to the Anglo-American version of a modern democratic welfare state, which provided the commonly accepted framework for societies in the last half of the 20th century. Today we see this is just part of the background of public life: a consensus on democratic institutions, markets, the primacy of individual civil liberties and a system of social insurance, which includes aid to the aged, the unemployed and the poor. But all that arose out of a struggle between the Labour Party, devoted to equality and doing away with capitalism, and the Liberal Party program of individual responsibility, free trade and private enterprise.
G.G.: Is it still true that in the United States a “modern democratic welfare state” is “the commonly accepted framework” of our politics. Don’t our recent political disagreements show that there’s no longer a consensus about, in particular, the importance of civil liberties and government aid to the needy?
J.G.: Democratic politics is centrally about disagreements at the margins; should we press on in a certain direction or pull back? I think you are right to point out that in contemporary America many either want to pull back a lot, or press on much further. The margin of dispute has become larger on some issues, and so more of the framework is subject to contestation. We remain divided on the core question that goes back to the original dispute between the socialists and liberals: what is the relation between, and proper spheres of, government assistance and individual responsibility?
Pew Research Center survey data indicates Americans are split down the middle about whether government aid to the poor is really beneficial and whether the state can or should do more for the poor. Yet much of the basic framework is very widely endorsed. Programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and public education, for instance, aren’t really contested. And compared to, say, the ’50s to the ’70s, there is wider and deeper support for an expanded set of civil and political rights, especially concerning minorities and women. Recent evidence indicates something close to an astounding change in favor of marriage rights for gays and lesbians as part of the new political framework.
G.G.: Many use Page’s work to argue for diversity in another context: to show the value of increasing the number of minorities and women in fields where they are underrepresented (relative to their proportion of the population). Do you think this approach can develop a good case for affirmative action and similar programs?
J.G.: As Page himself points out, there is a gap between identity or ethnic diversity and diversities of perspectives. They no doubt are correlated; empirical studies do show that when women are added to problem-solving teams that were formerly all male, problem-solving ability increases. But a narrow focus on identity, race or gender diversity blinds us to the importance of other forms of diversity — such as ideological, cultural and theoretical, including the religious. American philosophy departments, for example, are now consciously and resolutely pursing gender diversity. This is to the good, but to add a number of women who have similar ideological, religious and scientific perspectives to each other, and to many of their male colleagues, is not going to greatly enhance diverse thinking.
G.G.: To be clear, we’re not discussing whether justice requires some sort of affirmative action in areas where women and minorities are underrepresented. Your point is that increasing gender and racial diversity may of itself not do much to increase diversity of thinking.
J.G.: As I have said, I believe that our political framework has indeed evolved in the direction of far more robust rights for women and minorities. But now we are focusing on a different point, which is not about justice but about how diversity helps generate improvements in our moral and political views and collective problem solving. The relation between this case for diversity and affirmative action is more obscure. To say that diversity is a source of dynamic change and improvement is a long way from endorsing a government policy that will valorize some types of diversity while inevitably sidelining others.
G.G.: Just how much diversity should we tolerate? You’ve said elsewhere that “minding your own business” is an important virtue in a free society. Does that apply to people whose views we think are radically misguided or even morally repugnant?
J.G.: Minding one’s own business isn’t easy. Most people prefer to live among like-minded others, and most are interested in limiting how different their neighbors are. But life in a free and open society requires living on publicly equal terms with strangers one may well loathe. Perhaps they engage in homosexual acts, or perhaps they wear a burqa. Indeed, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen demonstrated in his famous essay on “The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal,” a system of liberty rights is inherently inconsistent with giving rein to people’s “nosy” values as to how others should live — or, we may say, what they deem “radically misguided or even morally repugnant.”
But you are entirely right that toleration has limits. As we saw in the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris earlier this year, and many times before and since, a free society cannot tolerate those who would disregard the liberty of others to live as they see fit. One cannot harm others in the pursuit of one’s own ideals, or because one feels deeply insulted by their lives and opinions. The critical question is not whether I judge a person to be radically misguided, or judge her way of life to be morally repugnant, but whether she is a danger to the life and liberty of others.
This interview was conducted by email and edited. Other installments in this series can be read here.
Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and on Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... pe=article
The Virtues of Political Disagreement
This interview, the fifth in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning political disagreement. My interviewee is Jerry Gaus, professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. He is the author of “The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World.” — Gary Gutting
Gary Gutting: Many people think the greatest obstacle to solving our national problems is the large ideological gap between the right and the left. They think that to make any significant progress, we need a shared vision of what sort of society we want. Your work on the diversity of values underlying political debates seems to challenge this view. Could you give our readers a basic sketch of your position?
Jerry Gaus: You’re quite right: There’s a common assumption that diversity of values and ideological perspectives gets in the way of solving our problems. Let’s suppose we agree that there are certain national problems we need to solve and that, at least approximately, we agree what the contours of a solution would look like. Now there is some very impressive work, for example by Scott E. Page, which rigorously shows how those who see the world in the same way — say they all share a secular worldview or a religious perspective — tend to get caught at the same places in searching for solutions.
In seeking to solve problems, homogeneous groups look at things in the same way and agree on the way forward; that works nicely until they get caught at some difficult part of the problem, in which case often no one can see the next step. Seeing the problem in the same way, they hit the same wall. In contrast, in diverse groups people understand, and so approach, problems in different ways, so they get stuck at different points. In this case where one perspective gets stuck, another is apt to see a way forward.
G.G.: But in politics our diverse perspectives typically lead to very different views about what our problems are, as well as about how to solve them.
J.G.: Agreed, yet it remains true that very different perspectives and ideologies, pursuing their own agendas, have often provided fundamental insights for their rivals. A striking example is the way social democrats supporting a secular welfare state have learned from both free-market economists and from religious organizations how to improve the delivery of social services. Similarly, feminist insights have helped conservatives rethink their views of the family.
G.G.: These seem to be examples of how politicians adjust their views to win over voters, not examples of ideologically opposed groups coming together to solve shared problems. Isn’t the latter what we would need to break the gridlock in Congress we’ve seen in recent years? How, if at all, does Page’s account apply to recent congressional politics?
J.G.: “Learning from others” and “coming together” are distinct. The standoff in current U.S. politics is not because we disagree; every contemporary democracy is characterized by deep disagreements. I am skeptical about the value of any single-cause explanation of current American political life, but I do think one factor is the common belief among many Democrats and Republicans that the other side is stupid, corrupt and, indeed, evil. Many on the left see themselves as supporting enlightenment and justice against the superstitious and plutocratic Republicans; many conservatives see themselves as being on the side of freedom and self-reliance against the snobby political correctness of the cultural and political elites who, deep down, are repelled by their own market society. If that is the way we view others, then a political war is all we can expect. Each marches forth in the righteous belief they are protecting the truth from the enemy.
G.G.: What’s the alternative? Shouldn’t we fight for what we think are the best policies?
J.G.: That’s the critical question: how do we “fight” for what we think is right under modern conditions, where the free use of reason leads to opposed convictions about the place of humans in the universe, the nature of a just society and the good life? The first step is to realize that we contest and fight in many ways. I can contest ideals and convince others that I really do have the sound basis for my claims about what is best. I also might contest and learn from others in ways that improve my understanding about what is the best. We all might contest and learn from each other, and come to better conclusions about what is best from all our perspectives. All these forms of “fighting” are the engines of a dynamic diverse society.
G.G.: But in the end, isn’t it likely that we will still disagree?
J.G.: Of course. We will then be faced with the sort of fights inherent in healthy democratic politics, voting to resolve our differences about which of a number of reasonable policies we all can live with, we shall adopt. But there is another sort of democratic fight — what might be called a political war — a fight over whose ideals are to shape the life of all. This is a struggle for the power to impose one’s ideals on others. Whoever wins that fight, many will be forced to live under laws and policies that they view as deeply wrong and, perhaps, in violation of their most fundamental commitments.
As we see today, those who have lost can become hostile and alienated from political life. The key problem is this: Can we forge a basic framework of laws and policies that diverse perspectives can live with and support? If that can be achieved, we can freely contest our views of the ideal, while living together in a moral and political framework of cooperation that, at least in its broad contours, all endorse — perhaps not as their ideal, but as worthy of their allegiance.
G.G.: Are political philosophers part of the problem here? From Plato on they seem to have been interested in describing ideal societies much more than formulating a range of acceptable but nonideal societies.
J.G.: Thinking about ideal ways of living can be valuable; in painting these pictures of utopia one comes to better understand one’s own values and principles, and the sort of social order that would express them. And different theorists can learn from the ideal pictures of others. The worry arises when, having painted these pictures that we find so beautiful and pleasing — at least to us and some like-minded others — we embark on the grand project of remaking our society in their image, or we condemn our societies as unjust because they fall short of them. One would have thought that after the 20th century, and its ideal-based political disasters, political theorists would have embraced the diversity and inherent imperfections of the open society. Yet, today one of the most important strains in contemporary political philosophy is “ideal theory.” Followers of John Rawls seek to construct “realistic utopias” while yet others reject the “realistic” constraint as too accommodative of human nature! Genuine justice might simply lie outside the bounds of humanity’s capability.
G.G.: Could you give some examples of how two groups with sharply opposed ideals have found (or could plausibly find) a political framework acceptable to both?
J.G.: At the end of the 19th century a great political conflict occurred between parties of socialism and liberalism — particularly, between the Labour and Liberal parties in Britain. The result of this conflict was not the victory of one ideal but, as, L. T. Hobhouse, one of the chief political philosophers of the era put it, a “liberal socialism,” which eventually led to the Anglo-American version of a modern democratic welfare state, which provided the commonly accepted framework for societies in the last half of the 20th century. Today we see this is just part of the background of public life: a consensus on democratic institutions, markets, the primacy of individual civil liberties and a system of social insurance, which includes aid to the aged, the unemployed and the poor. But all that arose out of a struggle between the Labour Party, devoted to equality and doing away with capitalism, and the Liberal Party program of individual responsibility, free trade and private enterprise.
G.G.: Is it still true that in the United States a “modern democratic welfare state” is “the commonly accepted framework” of our politics. Don’t our recent political disagreements show that there’s no longer a consensus about, in particular, the importance of civil liberties and government aid to the needy?
J.G.: Democratic politics is centrally about disagreements at the margins; should we press on in a certain direction or pull back? I think you are right to point out that in contemporary America many either want to pull back a lot, or press on much further. The margin of dispute has become larger on some issues, and so more of the framework is subject to contestation. We remain divided on the core question that goes back to the original dispute between the socialists and liberals: what is the relation between, and proper spheres of, government assistance and individual responsibility?
Pew Research Center survey data indicates Americans are split down the middle about whether government aid to the poor is really beneficial and whether the state can or should do more for the poor. Yet much of the basic framework is very widely endorsed. Programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and public education, for instance, aren’t really contested. And compared to, say, the ’50s to the ’70s, there is wider and deeper support for an expanded set of civil and political rights, especially concerning minorities and women. Recent evidence indicates something close to an astounding change in favor of marriage rights for gays and lesbians as part of the new political framework.
G.G.: Many use Page’s work to argue for diversity in another context: to show the value of increasing the number of minorities and women in fields where they are underrepresented (relative to their proportion of the population). Do you think this approach can develop a good case for affirmative action and similar programs?
J.G.: As Page himself points out, there is a gap between identity or ethnic diversity and diversities of perspectives. They no doubt are correlated; empirical studies do show that when women are added to problem-solving teams that were formerly all male, problem-solving ability increases. But a narrow focus on identity, race or gender diversity blinds us to the importance of other forms of diversity — such as ideological, cultural and theoretical, including the religious. American philosophy departments, for example, are now consciously and resolutely pursing gender diversity. This is to the good, but to add a number of women who have similar ideological, religious and scientific perspectives to each other, and to many of their male colleagues, is not going to greatly enhance diverse thinking.
G.G.: To be clear, we’re not discussing whether justice requires some sort of affirmative action in areas where women and minorities are underrepresented. Your point is that increasing gender and racial diversity may of itself not do much to increase diversity of thinking.
J.G.: As I have said, I believe that our political framework has indeed evolved in the direction of far more robust rights for women and minorities. But now we are focusing on a different point, which is not about justice but about how diversity helps generate improvements in our moral and political views and collective problem solving. The relation between this case for diversity and affirmative action is more obscure. To say that diversity is a source of dynamic change and improvement is a long way from endorsing a government policy that will valorize some types of diversity while inevitably sidelining others.
G.G.: Just how much diversity should we tolerate? You’ve said elsewhere that “minding your own business” is an important virtue in a free society. Does that apply to people whose views we think are radically misguided or even morally repugnant?
J.G.: Minding one’s own business isn’t easy. Most people prefer to live among like-minded others, and most are interested in limiting how different their neighbors are. But life in a free and open society requires living on publicly equal terms with strangers one may well loathe. Perhaps they engage in homosexual acts, or perhaps they wear a burqa. Indeed, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen demonstrated in his famous essay on “The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal,” a system of liberty rights is inherently inconsistent with giving rein to people’s “nosy” values as to how others should live — or, we may say, what they deem “radically misguided or even morally repugnant.”
But you are entirely right that toleration has limits. As we saw in the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris earlier this year, and many times before and since, a free society cannot tolerate those who would disregard the liberty of others to live as they see fit. One cannot harm others in the pursuit of one’s own ideals, or because one feels deeply insulted by their lives and opinions. The critical question is not whether I judge a person to be radically misguided, or judge her way of life to be morally repugnant, but whether she is a danger to the life and liberty of others.
This interview was conducted by email and edited. Other installments in this series can be read here.
Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and on Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... pe=article
If World Leaders Can Skip Deadlines, Why Can’t I?
THE other day I missed the deadline to renew my parking permit and was slapped with a hefty fine.
My first thought: Serves me right for dragging my feet.
My second thought: This isn’t fair! Why should I pay up when global statesmen are missing deadline after deadline with apparent impunity?
I cannot be the only person wondering that right now. When it comes to meeting deadlines, the world’s power brokers are hardly setting a shining example. Whether negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, an economic bailout for Greece or a cap on carbon emissions, they seem trapped in the same pantomime of procrastination.
Granted, a final deal eventually was reached with Iran, but only after years of talks punctuated by missed deadlines. Which is why we are all so familiar with the deadline-buster’s version of the perp walk: bleary-eyed and short-tempered, suits rumpled and creased, male jaws darkened with stubble, the negotiators shuffle out of the final session in Vienna or Geneva or Brussels or Washington, vowing to soldier on and hinting that the next deadline will be the last.
After a setback in the talks earlier this month, Secretary of State John Kerry said he was striving to hammer out the best deal possible but would not negotiate “forever.”
Diplomats have a long tradition of flirting with the clock. The winding road to peace in Northern Ireland was paved with so many missed deadlines that I heard one veteran observer recently note: “I’ve been right (down) to the wire more times than an electrician.”
What has changed is that deadline-busting now feels like the norm, which may be a blessing in disguise.
I am an advocate of what has come to be known as the Slow Movement. I travel the world speaking on the benefits of slowing down, taking time and unplugging, often in venues full of people itching to check their phones. To me, the spectacle of world leaders blowing deadlines like teenage slackers feels like a strike against the tyranny of the clock. But it also invites a deeper question: If deadlines can be missed so easily, what is the point of having them at all?
Long ago, honoring a deadline was genuinely a matter of life and death. Most scholars agree that the word was coined to describe the boundary past which inmates were forbidden to venture in Civil War prison camps. Guards fired on those who stepped over the so-called dead line.
In the early 20th century, the term made its way into the newspaper world, where it retained its make-or-break menace. But then the word went mainstream, and deadlines became more of a movable feast.
That is certainly the case in our private lives. Just look at how often we disregard “deadlines” by arriving late to social engagements. One reason: smartphones have made it easy to shrug off tardiness with a stream of cheery updates: “Sorry, bad traffic, running late!” “Just a few minutes now!” “Almost there!”
Even in the workplace, not all deadlines are set in stone. This is true in professions where you might least expect it, such as publishing. Most book contracts fix a delivery date but everyone knows it’s elastic. Some authors even take a perverse pleasure in submitting their manuscripts late. Douglas Adams, the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” once quipped: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
I am cut from different cloth than Mr. Adams, who once had to be locked in a hotel room until he finished a book. Unlike many writers I know, my style has always been to deliver the goods in a calm and timely fashion. Once my deadline is set, I map out what needs to be done and do it.
Nevertheless, I am not above coveting the adrenaline rush and bragging rights generated by a last-minute dash to the finish line. That’s why, in college, I once engineered a deadline panic by leaving a history paper about the Cuban missile crisis unwritten until the night before it was due. As everyone else went to bed, I brewed the first of several pots of coffee and the words started flowing. I enjoyed the buzz of the final sprint and boasting over breakfast with my friends, but the result was a second-rate paper.
The truth is that deadlines are useful. They signal that something is important enough to deserve our immediate attention; they can also focus minds and spur us to action. But too much deadlining can backfire.
Setting do-or-die deadlines and then routinely missing them is like crying wolf: People lose interest and the deadlines lose their bite. What’s more, study after study has shown that too much time pressure, whether in the office, the college dorm or the global summit meeting, makes us less creative and more sloppy. Teresa Amabile, professor and director of research at the Harvard Business School, has spent decades studying the workplace, and her conclusion is loud and clear: “Extreme time pressure can stifle creativity.”
Think about it: In the mountain range of human achievement, how many of the highest peaks have been scaled because someone stuck to an all-or-nothing deadline?
No one bullied Albert Einstein to crack the theory of relativity by a fixed date. And the same is true in more recent times: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web without anyone really breathing down his neck with a stopwatch.
Which brings us to the essential paradox of deadlines. We need them as a cattle prod, but we also need to be able to miss them, and missing them means they’re not really deadlines.
Maybe the time has come to reconsider deadlines altogether. To stop falling into a mind-narrowing panic when they approach. To start using them as a lever not for getting stuff done by a fixed time but for getting it done right.
Mr. Kerry seems to have grasped this. When a breakthrough with Iran finally began to seem possible, he refused to play Deadline Dash: “We will not rush,” he said. “And we will not be rushed.”
It’s a good reminder that the clock does not always have the final word, and that missing a deadline is not just for deadbeats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/opini ... pe=article
THE other day I missed the deadline to renew my parking permit and was slapped with a hefty fine.
My first thought: Serves me right for dragging my feet.
My second thought: This isn’t fair! Why should I pay up when global statesmen are missing deadline after deadline with apparent impunity?
I cannot be the only person wondering that right now. When it comes to meeting deadlines, the world’s power brokers are hardly setting a shining example. Whether negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, an economic bailout for Greece or a cap on carbon emissions, they seem trapped in the same pantomime of procrastination.
Granted, a final deal eventually was reached with Iran, but only after years of talks punctuated by missed deadlines. Which is why we are all so familiar with the deadline-buster’s version of the perp walk: bleary-eyed and short-tempered, suits rumpled and creased, male jaws darkened with stubble, the negotiators shuffle out of the final session in Vienna or Geneva or Brussels or Washington, vowing to soldier on and hinting that the next deadline will be the last.
After a setback in the talks earlier this month, Secretary of State John Kerry said he was striving to hammer out the best deal possible but would not negotiate “forever.”
Diplomats have a long tradition of flirting with the clock. The winding road to peace in Northern Ireland was paved with so many missed deadlines that I heard one veteran observer recently note: “I’ve been right (down) to the wire more times than an electrician.”
What has changed is that deadline-busting now feels like the norm, which may be a blessing in disguise.
I am an advocate of what has come to be known as the Slow Movement. I travel the world speaking on the benefits of slowing down, taking time and unplugging, often in venues full of people itching to check their phones. To me, the spectacle of world leaders blowing deadlines like teenage slackers feels like a strike against the tyranny of the clock. But it also invites a deeper question: If deadlines can be missed so easily, what is the point of having them at all?
Long ago, honoring a deadline was genuinely a matter of life and death. Most scholars agree that the word was coined to describe the boundary past which inmates were forbidden to venture in Civil War prison camps. Guards fired on those who stepped over the so-called dead line.
In the early 20th century, the term made its way into the newspaper world, where it retained its make-or-break menace. But then the word went mainstream, and deadlines became more of a movable feast.
That is certainly the case in our private lives. Just look at how often we disregard “deadlines” by arriving late to social engagements. One reason: smartphones have made it easy to shrug off tardiness with a stream of cheery updates: “Sorry, bad traffic, running late!” “Just a few minutes now!” “Almost there!”
Even in the workplace, not all deadlines are set in stone. This is true in professions where you might least expect it, such as publishing. Most book contracts fix a delivery date but everyone knows it’s elastic. Some authors even take a perverse pleasure in submitting their manuscripts late. Douglas Adams, the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” once quipped: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
I am cut from different cloth than Mr. Adams, who once had to be locked in a hotel room until he finished a book. Unlike many writers I know, my style has always been to deliver the goods in a calm and timely fashion. Once my deadline is set, I map out what needs to be done and do it.
Nevertheless, I am not above coveting the adrenaline rush and bragging rights generated by a last-minute dash to the finish line. That’s why, in college, I once engineered a deadline panic by leaving a history paper about the Cuban missile crisis unwritten until the night before it was due. As everyone else went to bed, I brewed the first of several pots of coffee and the words started flowing. I enjoyed the buzz of the final sprint and boasting over breakfast with my friends, but the result was a second-rate paper.
The truth is that deadlines are useful. They signal that something is important enough to deserve our immediate attention; they can also focus minds and spur us to action. But too much deadlining can backfire.
Setting do-or-die deadlines and then routinely missing them is like crying wolf: People lose interest and the deadlines lose their bite. What’s more, study after study has shown that too much time pressure, whether in the office, the college dorm or the global summit meeting, makes us less creative and more sloppy. Teresa Amabile, professor and director of research at the Harvard Business School, has spent decades studying the workplace, and her conclusion is loud and clear: “Extreme time pressure can stifle creativity.”
Think about it: In the mountain range of human achievement, how many of the highest peaks have been scaled because someone stuck to an all-or-nothing deadline?
No one bullied Albert Einstein to crack the theory of relativity by a fixed date. And the same is true in more recent times: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web without anyone really breathing down his neck with a stopwatch.
Which brings us to the essential paradox of deadlines. We need them as a cattle prod, but we also need to be able to miss them, and missing them means they’re not really deadlines.
Maybe the time has come to reconsider deadlines altogether. To stop falling into a mind-narrowing panic when they approach. To start using them as a lever not for getting stuff done by a fixed time but for getting it done right.
Mr. Kerry seems to have grasped this. When a breakthrough with Iran finally began to seem possible, he refused to play Deadline Dash: “We will not rush,” he said. “And we will not be rushed.”
It’s a good reminder that the clock does not always have the final word, and that missing a deadline is not just for deadbeats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/opini ... pe=article
The Structure of Gratitude
I’m sometimes grumpier when I stay at a nice hotel. I have certain expectations about the service that’s going to be provided. I get impatient if I have to crawl around looking for a power outlet, if the shower controls are unfathomable, if the place considers itself too fancy to put a coffee machine in each room. I’m sometimes happier at a budget motel, where my expectations are lower, and where a functioning iron is a bonus and the waffle maker in the breakfast area is a treat.
This little phenomenon shows how powerfully expectations structure our moods and emotions, none more so than the beautiful emotion of gratitude.
Gratitude happens when some kindness exceeds expectations, when it is undeserved. Gratitude is a sort of laughter of the heart that comes about after some surprising kindness.
Most people feel grateful some of the time — after someone saves you from a mistake or brings you food during an illness. But some people seem grateful dispositionally. They seem thankful practically all of the time.
These people may have big ambitions, but they have preserved small anticipations. As most people get on in life and earn more status, they often get used to more respect and nicer treatment. But people with dispositional gratitude take nothing for granted. They take a beginner’s thrill at a word of praise, at another’s good performance or at each sunny day. These people are present-minded and hyperresponsive.
This kind of dispositional gratitude is worth dissecting because it induces a mentality that stands in counterbalance to the mainstream threads of our culture.
We live in a capitalist meritocracy. This meritocracy encourages people to be self-sufficient — masters of their own fate. But people with dispositional gratitude are hyperaware of their continual dependence on others. They treasure the way they have been fashioned by parents, friends and ancestors who were in some ways their superiors. They’re glad the ideal of individual autonomy is an illusion because if they were relying on themselves they’d be much worse off.
The basic logic of the capitalist meritocracy is that you get what you pay for, that you earn what you deserve. But people with dispositional gratitude are continually struck by the fact that they are given far more than they pay for — and are much richer than they deserve. Their families, schools and summer camps put far more into them than they give back. There’s a lot of surplus goodness in daily life that can’t be explained by the logic of equal exchange.
Capitalism encourages us to see human beings as self-interested, utility-maximizing creatures. But people with grateful dispositions are attuned to the gift economy where people are motivated by sympathy as well as self-interest. In the gift economy intention matters. We’re grateful to people who tried to do us favors even when those favors didn’t work out. In the gift economy imaginative empathy matters. We’re grateful because some people showed they care about us more than we thought they did. We’re grateful when others took an imaginative leap and put themselves in our mind, even with no benefit to themselves.
Gratitude is also a form of social glue. In the capitalist economy, debt is to be repaid to the lender. But a debt of gratitude is repaid forward, to another person who also doesn’t deserve it. In this way each gift ripples outward and yokes circles of people in bonds of affection. It reminds us that a society isn’t just a contract based on mutual benefit, but an organic connection based on natural sympathy — connections that are nurtured not by self-interest but by loyalty and service.
If you think that human nature is good and powerful, then you go around frustrated because the perfect society has not yet been achieved. But if you go through life believing that our reason is not that great, our individual skills are not that impressive, and our goodness is severely mottled, then you’re sort of amazed life has managed to be as sweet as it is. You’re grateful for all the institutions our ancestors gave us, like the Constitution and our customs, which shape us to be better than we’d otherwise be. Appreciation becomes the first political virtue and the need to perfect the gifts of others is the first political task.
We live in a capitalist meritocracy that encourages individualism and utilitarianism, ambition and pride. But this society would fall apart if not for another economy, one in which gifts surpass expectations, in which insufficiency is acknowledged and dependence celebrated.
Gratitude is the ability to see and appreciate this other almost magical economy. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
People with grateful dispositions see their efforts grandly but not themselves. Life doesn’t surpass their dreams but it nicely surpasses their expectations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/opini ... 05309&_r=0
I’m sometimes grumpier when I stay at a nice hotel. I have certain expectations about the service that’s going to be provided. I get impatient if I have to crawl around looking for a power outlet, if the shower controls are unfathomable, if the place considers itself too fancy to put a coffee machine in each room. I’m sometimes happier at a budget motel, where my expectations are lower, and where a functioning iron is a bonus and the waffle maker in the breakfast area is a treat.
This little phenomenon shows how powerfully expectations structure our moods and emotions, none more so than the beautiful emotion of gratitude.
Gratitude happens when some kindness exceeds expectations, when it is undeserved. Gratitude is a sort of laughter of the heart that comes about after some surprising kindness.
Most people feel grateful some of the time — after someone saves you from a mistake or brings you food during an illness. But some people seem grateful dispositionally. They seem thankful practically all of the time.
These people may have big ambitions, but they have preserved small anticipations. As most people get on in life and earn more status, they often get used to more respect and nicer treatment. But people with dispositional gratitude take nothing for granted. They take a beginner’s thrill at a word of praise, at another’s good performance or at each sunny day. These people are present-minded and hyperresponsive.
This kind of dispositional gratitude is worth dissecting because it induces a mentality that stands in counterbalance to the mainstream threads of our culture.
We live in a capitalist meritocracy. This meritocracy encourages people to be self-sufficient — masters of their own fate. But people with dispositional gratitude are hyperaware of their continual dependence on others. They treasure the way they have been fashioned by parents, friends and ancestors who were in some ways their superiors. They’re glad the ideal of individual autonomy is an illusion because if they were relying on themselves they’d be much worse off.
The basic logic of the capitalist meritocracy is that you get what you pay for, that you earn what you deserve. But people with dispositional gratitude are continually struck by the fact that they are given far more than they pay for — and are much richer than they deserve. Their families, schools and summer camps put far more into them than they give back. There’s a lot of surplus goodness in daily life that can’t be explained by the logic of equal exchange.
Capitalism encourages us to see human beings as self-interested, utility-maximizing creatures. But people with grateful dispositions are attuned to the gift economy where people are motivated by sympathy as well as self-interest. In the gift economy intention matters. We’re grateful to people who tried to do us favors even when those favors didn’t work out. In the gift economy imaginative empathy matters. We’re grateful because some people showed they care about us more than we thought they did. We’re grateful when others took an imaginative leap and put themselves in our mind, even with no benefit to themselves.
Gratitude is also a form of social glue. In the capitalist economy, debt is to be repaid to the lender. But a debt of gratitude is repaid forward, to another person who also doesn’t deserve it. In this way each gift ripples outward and yokes circles of people in bonds of affection. It reminds us that a society isn’t just a contract based on mutual benefit, but an organic connection based on natural sympathy — connections that are nurtured not by self-interest but by loyalty and service.
If you think that human nature is good and powerful, then you go around frustrated because the perfect society has not yet been achieved. But if you go through life believing that our reason is not that great, our individual skills are not that impressive, and our goodness is severely mottled, then you’re sort of amazed life has managed to be as sweet as it is. You’re grateful for all the institutions our ancestors gave us, like the Constitution and our customs, which shape us to be better than we’d otherwise be. Appreciation becomes the first political virtue and the need to perfect the gifts of others is the first political task.
We live in a capitalist meritocracy that encourages individualism and utilitarianism, ambition and pride. But this society would fall apart if not for another economy, one in which gifts surpass expectations, in which insufficiency is acknowledged and dependence celebrated.
Gratitude is the ability to see and appreciate this other almost magical economy. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
People with grateful dispositions see their efforts grandly but not themselves. Life doesn’t surpass their dreams but it nicely surpasses their expectations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/opini ... 05309&_r=0