LearningsBlog

IdeaLog No. 3 | Experiment as an Antidote to Hubris in Business and in Social Policy | Beyond Liberalism and Conservativism

2009-02-16T21:47:34Z

Back in the 1960s, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss published Le cru et le cruit in which he argued, in the course of analyzing some South American myths, that people map the world in terms of binary oppositions, such as the raw (le cru) on the one hand and the cooked, or done (le cruit), on the other. Reification turns the raw into the natural and the cooked into the transformed, the manmade, the artificial.

Levi-Strauss is generally considered the father of Structuralism, that approach to the human sciences that attempts to reveal and critique the pairs of binary oppositions, and the systems of relations among those pairs, that underlie and inform observable human phenomena. Of course, there is no new thing under the sun, and Levi-Strauss drew upon the work of previous thinkers, including the linguists Roman Jakobson, who identified binary distinctive features in languages, and Ferdinad de Saussure, who drew a broad distinction between language in use (la parole) and language as an abstract system (la langue).

The Structuralist approach and its successor Deconstruction (which was all about beginning from a position that rejects or turns on their heads traditional binary oppositions) led a couple generations of intellectuals down tortuous, increasingly loopy paths that took them further and further from the supposed objects of their study. Nonetheless, Levi-Strauss’s insight remains of value. People do tend to think in terms of inherited, unexamined binaries--male/female; white/black; warm/cold; good/evil; right/wrong; raw/cooked; etc., and identifying these binaries and subjecting them to criticism can be extremely revealing. An illuminating example of such a critique of inherited binary concepts can be found in Joan Roughgarten's Evolution's Rainbow, which demonstrates with abundant examples from the natural world the limitations of the male/female dichotomy. Some of the creatures with which we share the planet have no identifiable sex; many are hermaphroditic; some have more than two sexes; many change sex in response to environmental signals; all have multi-sex characteristics (mammary glands in men and androgens in women are a couple of examples) and so on.

Which thought leads me to my blog subject for the day—the liberal/conservative distinction. Our politics in the United States has suffered terribly, I think, from increasing polarization, since the 1960s, along liberal/conservative lines. It seems grimly laughable now, given the events of the last eight years, to remember George W. Bush’s claims to be a “compassionate conservative,” but despite the let-down there (to put it mildly), I am increasingly convinced that our salvation lies in taking such seeming oxymorons seriously, for the liberal/conservative distinction does our political thought great disservice. It’s the wrong tool for the job, like trying to turn a small Phillips-head screw with a spatula.

So, let me start by attempting to articulate, succinctly and as charitably as I can, what these two poles of our thinking are supposed to stand for.

Conservatives are supposed to stand for limited government, fiscal restraint, conservation of traditional social and moral structures, the rule of law, protection of private property, and reliance on the unfettered invisible hand of free markets to spur innovation and hard work and so increase prosperity, on the theory that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Defining liberalism is a bit more difficult. Traditionally, Liberals stood for maximization of individual liberty and protection of individual rights, and thus for limited government, the rule of law, and free markets. However, in our country and in our time, liberalism has become associated with support for government solutions to social ills and with tolerance for deviation from traditional social and moral structures.

In practice, I think, both these terms, liberalism and conservativism, have become so debased as to have little meaning or relevance anymore except as epithets to be hurled by lords of discord posing as journalists. During the eight years of the Bush Administration, during which conservatives ran all three branches of the U.S. federal government, the national debt DOUBLED, from 5.3 trillion at the start of the first term to 11.6 trillion in October, 2008. And the single piece of domestic legislation that the out-going administration was proudest of, its No Child Left Behind Act, led to an unprecedented role for the federal government in the quotidian operations of our schools. So much for limited government and fiscal restraint. But long before the second Bush Administration, forces were at work in our economy to wring any sense from the meanings of these terms. Astonishing levels of merger and acquisitions activity, fueled by leveraged buyouts; free trade policy; deregulation; and a dramatic decline in the willingness of government to evoke anti-trust law have led to the emergence of massive corporations that are indistinguishable in the centralization of their governance from the Soviet Union during the era of Stalin, and this tendency was as encouraged during the Clinton administration as it was during the supposedly more conservative administrations before and after it. The supposedly liberal Clinton administration balanced the budget, pushed through welfare reform, gave us NAFTA and GATT, and stood aside to allow the consolidation of the financial industry that gave us the handful of failing institutions that we have today. A strong argument can be made that based on what the last few administrations have actually done, the terms liberal and conservative simply aren’t descriptive anymore.

More important, I think, is the fact that our problems are too complex to be solved by programmatic solutions from the left or the right. And, of course, our –isms, as Sherwood Andersen showed long ago in his magnificent Winesburg, Ohio, make us grotesque. If the only tool you have is a hammer, wrote Maslow, you start treating everything as if it were a nail. In practice, today, both neoconservativism and neoliberalism show tendencies toward fascism and this is a terrible irony, for the one commonality, historically, of these two viewpoints was their recognition of the importance of preserving liberty.

I would counsel self-described liberals and conservatives to check their hubris and to recognize the limitations on our abilities to construct optimal solutions to social ills. We all know the dangers of centralization and bureaucratization. However, recognition of these dangers does not mean that we should give up altogether attempts to address social ills by governmental means. Instead, I think, we would be well served to take more tentative, smaller-scale, and varied approaches, on the model of scientific experimentation, with accountability mechanisms that measure these experiments against agreed-upon objectives. One of those agreed-upon objectives would always be the maximization of individual liberty construed broadly to include guaranteed access to fundamental conditions antecedent to the exercise of liberty (access to the mechanisms for exercising freedom of speech and assembly, for example, and access to health care and education).

During the recent election, the Republican Party candidates pretty freely threw the label socialist at Barack Obama, though Obama is certainly no socialist. The term socialism means“ownership of the means of production by the workers doing that production.” So, the term does not mean “having to do with big government programs” or “ownership of the means of production by a distant, oligarchical, all-powerful centralized government" as in the former Soviet Union. Increasingly, in this age of globalization, we’re seeing the means of production controlled by centralized authorities (boards and chief executive officers) who are far, far removed from understanding what happens on the “shop floor”—that is, who cannot possibly know or understand the business or businesses that they are in, and below these authorities in the “adminisphere,” one typically finds layers and layers of bureaucratic units, specialized fiefdoms headed by people whose job it is to coordinate with other fiefdoms and report to their superiors, and the owners of these fiefdoms have has their primary imperative not serving the stakeholders in their companies (the stockholders, the customers, the workers) but preserving and expanding their own fiefdoms. When one is far removed from the actual work being produced by the company, it’s easy enough to start seeing all that work simply as numbers on spreadsheets, to start thinking crazy thoughts like, “Gee, I could outsource this accounting or HR function to Mumbai and save a lot of money in the short term and collect bigger bonuses and retire early to my yacht.” But the long-term consequence of such action in our country has been that workers have lost all commitment to and concern for the companies for which they work. No one says, proudly, anymore, “I’m a GM worker. We make damned good cars.” And so quality and productivity suffer terribly, at the same time that C-level managers are finding astonishing opportunities for short-term looting of their firms.

The smartest upper-level managers, these days, are recognizing that small is beautiful. They are creating small, self-governing, self-sufficient, cross-functional units, often competing ones, within their own companies, and they are empowering these units to act entrepreneurially. It is perfectly consistent with such moves to work toward worker ownership by means of compensation in the form of employee stock ownership plans and employee governance through election of (votes of confidence in) managers. Such a move might sound socialist in the sense that it transfers some ownership to workers, but it would have nothing at all in common with those horrific failed socialist-in-name-only experiments that occurred in the twentieth century in the Communist states. And, such a move would be perfectly consistent with free-markets, encouraging competition and innovation and initiative.

It is instructive to note that of the 500 companies in the Standard and Poors 500 in 1957, only 72 existed fifty years later. Most of them succumbed to radical discontinuities to which they could not adapt. They were too dependent on something in their environments that was changing. So, they went extinct. Extinction of big, successful entities is the rule, not the exception. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Big fails.

What’s true of businesses is also true of schools. The public school system in the United States has done amazing things—it has harnessed the potential of millions of people who otherwise might never have been able to make anything of themselves. It was because of the public school system that I, a boy from a small farm in Southern Kentucky, was able to learn enough to grow up to write books and work for publishers and foundations and management consulting groups and do a lot more than grub in the dirt for subsistence. But, our massive school system is not keeping up with the rate of technological and social change in the world. Look out at the world of work, and you’ll see that we need people who can perform health care services and install computer networks and design websites and so on, but our schools don’t teach kids how to do those things, and though the average worker these days has to retrain and retrain and retrain throughout his or her career, we still think of school as something that is done, once and for all, in the first twelve or sixteen years of life rather than as something that is ongoing. The biggest problem that we have in our educational system—the quality of the education received by our teachers—is barely addressed by so-called reform movements (because really addressing this problem would be really expensive). One could go on and on enumerating the problems. But again, a tentative, experimental, empirical approach would make sense. Let’s create lots and lots of experiments in educational methods and modalities and organizational structures, and let’s see what grows in these Petri dishes, instead of assuming that we have all the answers beforehand.

I am convinced for a lot of reasons that early education should be about grounding in common cultural materials and attention to reading skills and foreign languages, with the addition of a lot of opportunity for play and socialization. I think that instruction should take place within specific, intensely immersive knowledge domains. I think that tutorials should be a key modality of instruction. I think that kids should walk away from a learning experience with new operations that they can carry out. I think that subject-area expertise should be a sine qua non for teacher selection. I also think that a lot of our math instruction should be delayed until young people have the cognitive equipment with which to reason abstractly—that kids would learn a LOT more if they learned it a LITTLE later. But don’t take my word on these matters, even though I can pile up reams of studies in front of you to support my claims. Instead, give me a school, let me try out these crazy ideas, and look at the results. If it works, copy it. If it doesn’t, let it die.

Small is beautiful. Big governments. Big corporations. Big education. These don’t work well. But don’t put me in the neo-conservative camp because I believe these things. The neo-cons ran our government for the last eight years—the executive, both houses, and much of the judiciary—and they have given us the biggest, most intrusive government we’ve ever seen. I also happen to believe that access to education and health care and privacy should be fundamental rights, like our rights to free speech and assembly and due process. But these rights can be secured without creating monoliths in the public or private sectors. We can be pragmatic and take a scientific approach that is neither liberal nor conservative in any traditional sense. Perhaps we should simply stop using these terms because they are no longer useful or descriptive.

Here's an example of possible experimentation in social policy: Unspoken by either candidate during the recent presidential election was the fact that we are facing a coming bill of 75 trillion dollars for promised entitlements (social security and Medicare). What if we gave people the opportunity to forego social security payments in exchange for living in gated, assisted-living communities built and staffed by young people working in a new Vista-like program? It would be cheaper and would meet a lot of need and would give young people something productive to do. And, it would be a terrible shame to reject such a proposal out of hand as "one of those big, socialist, government programs." Let’s not create a big, socialist government program to do this. Let’s try some experiments along these lines (AND OTHERS) and see how they work.

IdeaLog No. 2 | The Galapagos Effect | Incredible Popular Delusions and the Madness of the Web

2009-02-15T05:11:00Z

We’re rugged individualists here in the United States. We’re not about to drink the Kool-Aid. We stand by our guns (literally and figuratively). We’re self-reliant. We think for ourselves. Right?

Not according to a long tradition of psychological research. Consider the classic experiment on conformity designed by Solomon Asch. Asch showed people lines of different lengths and asked them to tell which was longest or shortest. When operating on their own, only one person in 35 chose the incorrect answer. But when Asch enlisted confederates who posed as experimental subjects and asked these confederates to choose, unanimously, the wrong answer, almost 40 percent of the real experimental subjects conformed to the others’ judgment and gave the wrong answer as well. Worse yet, a quarter of the time 75 percent of the people went along with the obviously incorrect answer.

Asch’s experiment has been performed again and again, around the world, with similar results, and it suggests that the desire to conform runs deep in us, which isn’t surprising in a species that grew up in small bands on African savannahs.

One of the glories of the Web is that it creates communities. Whatever your interests or concerns, for good or ill, you can find others who share them. If you are diagnosed with breast cancer, you can readily go to the Web to find survivors who will share stories, advice, and encouragement. Interested in dirigible driving? Ugandan drumming? Macrophotography of insects? There’s an Internet community for you. Chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, RSS and Atom feeds, email distribution lists, Web rings, search engines, community portals, sharepoint servers, virtual worlds, Internet whiteboards, and most other technologies that run on the information superhighway exist for this purpose: facilitating community. That word, community, has a nice feel to it, doesn’t it? Who doesn’t like community?

But wed the ability of the Web to create community with our tendency toward conformity to the group, and you get something not quite so warm and fuzzy. Liberals go to liberal blogs, where they read the comments of other liberals. Conservatives go to conservative blogs, where they read the comments of other conservatives. So, liberals will learn that the top 10 percent of earners in the United States gets 48 percent of the income, and conservatives will learn that the top 10 percent of earners in the United States pays 70 percent of the taxes, and each will receive confirmation and no disconfirmation of his or her leaning. We know that people are terribly prone to a number of cognitive biases—to confirmation bias (the tendency to notice and remember information or ideas that confirm our beliefs), to anchoring bias (the tendency to place too much weight on something recently encountered), to the clustering effect (the tendency to see patterns where none exist), to the availability cascade (the tendency to ascribe plausibility to an idea that one hears repeated), to overgeneralization (the tendency to take particular confirming instances as general confirmation), to outgroup homogeneity bias (the tendency to think that people outside one’s group are more similar than they are). These biases, and many more, are accentuated within isolated groups (those “communities” that sounded so nice a bit ago).

On the Web it’s easy enough to find these sheltered in-groups. There’s a large community on the Web of people convinced that the Federal Reserve is a private corporation owned by foreign bankers with a master plan for enslaving Americans by creating debt. There are thriving communities of Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, jihadists, people who think that vaccinating children causes autism, and folks convinced that the ruling families and financiers of the world are actually aliens from the Pleiades with a spaceport under the Vatican. Each group has its blogs, its websites, its reports and white papers detailing the “facts THEY don’t want you to know,” and continual exposure to these and only these sources of information creates an exponential increase in the group members’ certainty. So extensive are the resources the Net has made available to such groups, and so sheltered are such groups on their virtual islands, that it’s increasingly easy for those who have drunk some group’s Kool Aid to point potential converts to “confirmation.” “Don’t believe me. Look for yourself. Do some research. Check out these sites.”

Darwin’s finches showed such dramatic differences because they were isolated on separate islands where they were exposed to different selection pressures and evolved unique characteristics in response to those pressures. It isn’t difficult to figure out why American politics has become so polarized in recent years. It’s because of people’s increasing isolation within their own electronic worlds, something I call the Galapagos Effect.

IdeaLog No. 1 | Combinatorial Explosion | We Are the World

2009-02-15T03:45:00Z

Years ago a girlfriend dragged me to a psychic in New York City who interviewed me in a room hung with beads and told me I was descended from Genghis Khan. Gee, I could have told her that. Chances are I’m descended from Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, too, and so, illustrious reader, are you. Why this is so has to do with something called combinatorial explosion.

There’s an old story about the guy who invented chess. He took the game to the Shah, who loved games and war. The Shah was so pleased to see his two favorite pastimes combined that he offered the inventor anything he wanted. The inventor replied, “I’m a simple man. Just give me two grains of wheat on the first square and double them on each square after that.”

“Done,” said the Shah, in the decisive way of Shahs, not realizing that he was bankrupting himself, for numbers doubled in each generation get big very quickly. By the time you get to the last square on the board, square 64, the number of grains of wheat tops 18 quadrillion—more than the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world!

Like everyone else on this planet, you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great-great grandparents, and so on. The number doubles with each generation that you go back. Go back 32 generations to AD 1200, when Genghis Khan was slaying or bedding everyone in Asia, and you will find, by this method of counting, that you have 4,294,967,296 direct ancestors! But that isn’t possible. According to the Population Reference Bureau, there were only about 450 million people alive in AD 1200. How can you have more ancestors 32 generations ago than there were people on earth at that time?

The answer is that you had relatives who married relatives. In the distant past, there were fewer people around from whom to choose mates, so cousins often married cousins, meaning that they shared some of the same grandparents. Your family tree, as you go back in time, gets bigger and bigger. Then, as the number of cousin marriages starts increasing, the number of ancestors in a given generation gets smaller, and your ancestral tree starts looking more like a diamond than like a tree or pyramid. So, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you are descended from just about everyone ever alive, including lots and lots of philosophers, scientists, poets, artists, kings, and queens. The bad news is that many of your ancestors were keeping it in the family.

Scientists have recently figured out other ways to show that we are all related. Inside all your body cells are little organelles called mitochondria. These mitochondria have their own DNA, separate from the DNA in your cell nuclei. You get your nucleic DNA from both your mother and father, but your mitrochondrial DNA all comes from your mother. So, theoretically, mitochondrial DNA would pass down, unchanged, from mother to mother, through the generations. But that’s not what happens. Random accidents cause mutations in mitochondrial DNA, and since we know the rate at which these mutations occur, by comparing people’s mitochondrial DNA, we can tell how long ago they had a common female ancestor. By this means scientists have figured out that everyone now alive on planet earth has a common ancestor in a woman who lived in East Africa about 125,000 years ago. Scientists call this woman Mitochondrial Eve. Another line of research, based on differences in Y chromosomes, traces all people back to a single male ancestor who lived in Africa only about 75,000 years ago.

So, not only are you descended from royalty, but you’re also African. Even if you’re not.