Author Archives: Joshua Miller

Prison Abolition, Reform, and End-State Anxieties

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Recently I’ve been thinking about a book by Erin McKenna which I read as an undergraduate: The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective. I read it then because it promised to bridge the divide between my favorite genre, science-fiction, and my interest in philosophy. But the book profoundly changed me, and I’m always surprised that others haven’t read it; it feels like a classic. Using John Dewey’s work, McKenna articulates what she calls a “process model” for utopias, whereby we distinguish disputes about “end-states” from judgments about the “ends-in-view.” And this has always deeply affected my politics and thinking about political philosophy. I tend to think that far too many theoretical and practical divides are reducible to debates about end-states, such that even though progressives, libertarians, and anarchists all share the same criticism of some aspect of the state, they cannot work together. Usually these disputes are bolstered by philosophical and theoretical apparatus. The divide between prison reformers and abolitionists, for instance, is understood by abolitionists through the lens of Foucault’s critique of the 19th Century reformers, whose reforms, though sometimes well-meaning, only intensified incarceration by making it more exacting and effective while empowering the reformers. Meliorists who merely protests injustices or inequities but do not loudly call for the absolute abolition of prisons are falling into a “carceral logic” by which prisons will inevitably be preserved in all their evils.

New Harmony by F. Bate Where I find McKenna helpful is, first, in her claim that end-state disagreements tend to be associated with masculine utopias, while feminist utopias emphasize ends-in-view (which jives with my readings of the relevant science-fiction utopias, and also of polital theories that have utopian elements), and second, in her Dewyan typology for judging ends-in-view. According to McKenna’s reading of Dewey, there are five criterion (five questions, really) by which we can judge an end-in-view:

  1. Does it promote education and participation? Will the people participate in decision-making and goal formation?
  2. Is it realistic? Does it acknowledge our embeddedness in constraining contexts?
  3. Is it flexible? Can it be modified as new conditions emerge?
  4. Does it aim to develop capacities and abilities, not just states of affairs?
  5. Does it open up possibilities or close them off? Does it promote plurality or isolation? Cooperation or competition? Power or paralysis?

Halden Prison in Norway

This is where I find abolitionism frustrating: the project of prison abolition seems like an end-state rather than an end-in-view. It deliberately ignores (1) the wishes of victims, citizens, and even many of the incarcerated (all of whom are understood to be duped and epistemically blinded by the ideology of carcerality unless they adopt abolitionism.) It doesn’t start with our current carcerality and work away from it, but rather starts with a rejection of the current context and the constraints it creates (2). It’s inflexible (3) in the sense that it does not allow that some limited carcerality (a la Norway?) might still be reasonable. Though there’s the sense that that is the direction that abolitionism must proceed, it does not currently emphasize the development of the skills and abilities (4) that alternatives to incarceration would require. And though it does aim to foreclose carcerality forever, I do think abolitionists are most concerned to promote plurality, cooperation, and empowerment (5) for some of the most dominated people in our world today, which is why I can’t help feeling the pull of abolition even as the other objections I mention raise red flags.

Meliorism, on the other hand, has all the problems that the abolitionists describe. Reformers work with and within the system to resist it, which requires all sorts of rhetorical and practical compromises. By chipping at the edges and living too comfortably with “constraints” and “realism,” (2) meliorists leave the status quo mostly untouched. We adopt democratic projects and processes (1), but leave the fundamental injustices in place. We develop capacities (4) but usually we can’t create the institutions and conditions (5) where those capacities will be actualized. We are, at base, flexible (3) with evil, and thereby compromised by it, while the righteous know that evil requires inflexibility and even sacrifice.

Angela Davis puts it this way at the start of Are Prisons Obsolete?:

“As important as some reforms may be-the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women’s prison, for example-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. Debates about strategies of decarceration, which should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage. The most immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into what prisoners call the ‘free world.'”

No reformer wants to “produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond prison,” but much of the rest of Davis’s book is devoted to the claim that reform is inextricable from that consequence. Ultimately, she equates prison reform with the absurdity of “slavery reform.” America’s prisons are historically and in current practice entangled with the Black Codes, the convict-lease system, Jim Crow, sexism, and antiblack racism; therefore, reformers are merely (hopefully unknowingly) fluffing the pillows while white supremacy and patriarchy is maintained:

If the words “prison reform” so easily slip from our lips, it is because “prison” and “reform” have been inextricably linked since the beginning of the use of imprisonment as the main means of punishing those who violate social norms.

Yet consider: Davis assumes that the majority of the increase in incarceration has been driven by the drug war, and that alternatives to incarceration will foreground drug treatment and decriminalization of drugs. In fact, though the largest group of arrests are tied to drug use, the largest group of prisoners are incarcerated for violence; this reflects sentencing differences and the kinds of treatment diversion programs for which she calls. There’s good evidence that the drug war, poverty, and racist policing produce some of that violence, but not all of it. Plus, prison populations are already shrinking, but at least some of this decline is due to the increase of post-release strategies that export carceral logics into a parolee’s (or even an unindicted suspect’s) everyday life.  The goals of decarceration can fall into the logic of carcerality as easily as the goals of reform. So how much really separates reformers from abolitionists? A reformer might call for the restoration of prison education and voting rights, for the creation of schools that teach rather than prepare students for prison, for decriminalization and treatment of drug abuse, for poverty-reduction and racial justice, while still thinking that certain kinds of violence should lead to coercive detention, that restorative justice has dangerous implications when applied to cases of sexual assault or organized violence.

Corrections-in-the-United-States_0442512_21

And we see similar strands in Davis:

“In thinking specifically about the abolition of prisons using the approach of abolition democracy, we would propose the creation of using an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison, thereby helping to render the prison obsolete. There is a direct connection with slavery: when slavery was abolished black people were set free, but they lacked access to the material resources that would enable them to fashion new, free lives. Prisons have thrived over the last century precisely because of the absence of those resources and the persistence of some of the deep structures of slavery. They cannot, therefore, be eliminated unless new institutions and resources are made available to those communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make up the prison population.”

A reformer sees nothing objectionable in those prescriptions, wants to join with the abolitionists for all their ends-in-view and put off the day when end-states might divide us. When the day comes that prisons truly are obsolete, reformers hope that they will be able to see that, too. But who really thinks that today is that day? Not Davis, who wants to “solve social problems” before throwing open the prison doors. In the meantime, why can we not work together to shrink and ameliorate the torturous institutions we all abhor? Why isn’t the reified distinction between abolition and reform as meaningless, today and for the foreseeable future, as the division between those who want to live in a world where the state withers away (Engels) and the world where the state has become small enough to drown in a bathtub (Norquist)? (Norquist now favors some decarceral strategies: is he an ally or an enemy?) If ends-in-view divide us, we must deliberate, compromise, and fight; so long as we are only divided in our utopias, why not collaborate?

Going Upstream: Prisons and the Social Determinants of Health

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A couple of weeks ago, I joined with hundreds of other students and scholars at Johns Hopkins for a conference on prisons and the social determinants of health. The star of the conference was this story:

One day three men were fishing in the river when they noticed a baby floating towards them. Two of the men jumped out of their boat to save the child, and the third brought the baby and the boat to shore to care for it. As they stood around comforting it, one of the men spotted a second baby floating downstream! As he ran back towards the river, he was shocked to see his friend turn and run upstream. “What are you doing?!?” he cried. “There’s a baby in the water!” His friend shouted back over his shoulder: “I’m going to find the asshole throwing kids into the river!”

It was repeated and referenced throughout the day; it is a story about root causes and priorities, and it’s quite appropriate in a public health context where there’s always a tension between treating the symptoms or identifying the etiology. “Going upstream” means looking for the systematic and institutional causes of the illnesses and deaths public health workers encounter every day. We have to save the babies in the water, but we can’t ignore how they got there.

What we heard time and time again at this conference was a curious mix of ideas and arguments: on the one hand, many of Baltimore’s and America’s worst public health problems could be laid at the feet of the mass incarceration of its least advantaged residents. The nexus of poverty and educational failures were closely correlated with racism and prisons, and these were closely correlated with premature mortality, disease, and lost capacities. Put simply: prisons are one of the primary mediating terms for the creation of disparate health outcomes for whites and blacks.

And yet: we heard from a number of scholars who tried to give us a window onto criminality and delinquency through the neurobiology of adolescent impulsivity or the experience of substance abuse and dependency. These scholars didn’t even mention these racial disparities, and so they seemed to offer us little hope of a connection between the putative objectivity of brain and addiction science and the clear biases in arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and incarcerations. We even heard from one scholar who spent a long time touting his credentials and then accused African-American men of “compensatory narcissism.” (What was *he* compensating for?)

by Flickr user John Watson

Each panel was punctuated by a student poet from Dew More Baltimore, and these sizzling lyrics gradually seemed to impress the speakers that they could not ignore race any more. As the day went on, we heard from Elijah Cummings and Eddie Conway. We heard from a group of formerly incarcerated men who ran non-profits working on reentry and job placement. And we started to hear more talk of solutions: ways to reduce the number of people in jail, divert juveniles from the school-to-prison pipeline, and deal with substance abuse issues. David Kennedy‘s work with SafeStreets is designed to reduce the number of crime victims, and as a side effect reduce the number of people incarcerated: this is certainly laudable work worthy of all the celebration it has received, but it’s not really about abolishing prisons so much as it is about better-managing policing to increase efficacy,  reduce costs, and mitigate harms. In that sense, it’s meliorist rather than abolitionist. It goes upstream, but does it go upstream enough? Or does it tarry there in the water because there are lives to be saved right now?

What I never heard was a response to Vesla Weaver‘s challenge from the beginning of the day: African-Americans who encounter the criminal justice system are increasingly socialized with a dual logic: they are held responsible for the outcomes in their lives, while being actively disenfranchised in the decisions that will affect the conditions that produce those outcomes. The language of personal responsibility is rampant, even in public health; yet we know that demographic and institutional factors will play a major role in shaping outcomes. Disenfranchisement is the ultimate “up stream” moment; building social capital and public health seems to require re-enfranchisement.

Of course, Weaver herself didn’t tell us how to accomplish that. And so I return to Elinor Ostrom: you have to create an alignment between responsibility and the power to act. Ostrom showed that institutions can “crowd-in” responsibility: those who will experience the consequences of an action have to be the ones who control it. Civic capacities are hampered by medical and social incapacities, but at the same time civic capabilities can produce better outcomes in medicine and the economy.

Right now, we seem committed to more expert management of disenfranchised populations, and so we continue to create the mismatched logic of powerless responsibility and unaccountable power. The alternative is to let the Dew More poets take center stage and ask the scholars to wait for the intermission.

Philosophical Tone; or Kissing Strangers

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My old friend Leigh Johnson has a piece cowritten with Ed Karazian up today at New APPS on tone and civility in philosophy. I’ve already had some things to say in the comments there, but I haven’t done a good job of responding to the substance of what they wrote, so I wanted to take a few minutes for that here.

Now, as I understand it, the argument Leigh and Ed make is that we cannot expect philosophy to function like a community; instead, it should function like the ideals of cosmopolitan life identified with Jane Jacobs (and I would also argue, with Iris Marion Young) where a community of strangers mostly fails to make contact and experience a shared togetherness, and as a result the kinds of cloying closeness of some communities is avoided. Diversity and pluralism flourish in such cities, where neighborhoods create opportunities for community if it is wanted, but always with alternatives, with exit options, and with a mass of co-citizens who we can safely ignore. In cities, we do not feel that we must be friends with everyone we meet; in communities we feel that we are already joined by friendship even with people we have yet to meet (and soon there are no new people at all, we’ve met them all.)

What Leigh and Ed argue is that civility codes (and to a lesser extent professional codes of ethics) are attempts to recapture the communal life by enforcing chumminess and friendship, or worse, naked attempts to maintain exclusions at the cost of those who fail to live up those codes:

What is or is not permitted as acceptable speech or behavior, what is or is not viewed as “anti-social,” “un-professional” or “un-collegial”—that is to say, what strikes the ears of community members as resonating with an inappropriate “tone”—will always be defined and policed according to the norms of that group’s social interchange, norms that are determined by those to whom such norms are the most advantageous.

They go on to assure us that the worst offences and assaults on the dignity of colleagues and students already are legislated, and then to suggest that to go further, to require friendship, is a mistake:

Hearts and minds, on the other hand, ought not and cannot be legislated. It is at the level of hearts and minds that our (professional philosophers’) real problem lies.  Before we sign on to any program that mandates certain attitudinal dispositions, we ought to think seriously about the extent to which those initiatives in fact work to further discredit and marginalize the very voices they are intended to protect.

Norms of collegiality can be used to exclude those who don’t fit and haven’t fit into the community, so anything that smacks of legislating away the rough edges should be a non-starter. But there is nonetheless a challenge here in our polis, the challenge of our need to co-habitate in a profession where we are not friends, to engage in a project called philosophy without the collaborations and shared projects that it would seem to require. While I think we should preserve a place for snark and rough and tumble dialogue, I don’t think that means we have to give up on the idea that we’re all in this together.

My issue with tone arguments in philosophy is just that I like disagreements a lot. I take it that one of the real privileges and pleasures of doing philosophy as a profession is ferreting out those people with whom one disagrees on substantive issues and going to work exploring and articulating and perhaps even resolving those disagreements.

In this, the rough-and-tumble of the philosophical world is a good thing: it’s an opportunity to spar a bit with interested others and Others (and there is no doubt that I learn that most from those who I find the most Other.)

So here is my purely selfish suggestion for a civility code: let’s find a way to have boisterous disagreements about matters of shared concern that control the amount of damage done so that, at the end of the day, we can shake it off and wake up again tomorrow to fight again. I understand that we do have to embrace the idea that there are diverse and plural communities of philosophy, and that not everyone wants to make themselves available to spar with everyone else. I should say that I understand that conceptually, but I haven’t yet met those philosophers. No matter who they are, no matter what group they belong to, I’ve always found philosophers to be the type who want to talk it out, fight it out, and so on, even (or especially) with those who they think are the most deeply wrong or wrong-headed.

Any code of ethics for this group would certainly enforce a kind of “fitting in,” because what norms do not have insiders and outsiders? But like the art world, I want to believe that this community of philosophers is, at its best, a community where one fits only by not fitting, by being an irritant and irritated by each other. What Rawlsian doesn’t glory in the critiques of Rawls from Mills and Pateman? What dualist doesn’t crave a good argument with a passionate naturalist? What skeptic doesn’t like a nice tussle with a naive realist?

I think we need each other too much to alienate each other for good. Who else can put up with us than our fellow philosophers? Who else cares about the arguments and ideas enough to go line-by-line and tear them apart?

One objection I envision is that this is too unserious an approach. When we’re talking about prisons or torture or death we can’t afford to just spar; we need to fight, and win, because if we don’t the opposing ideas could contribute to injustice or damnation. In that sense, doing philosophy for joy is maybe a bit privileged, when there are folks doing it for survival. But I can’t help thinking that we could use the joy, all of us and especially those who do philosophy out of necessity, too.

Can’t we, even as strangers, even with our history of alienation and able white male cisgendered supremacy, find something worth sharing? Aren’t we all émigrés from elsewhere, rootless and stateless and clutching at this profession for something more than a nine-to-five?

Strangers don’t have to ignore each other, and they don’t have to fight. Sometimes, they can kiss. Consider this video my proposal:

What are the ruling ideas today? Is “College For All” among them? (Doubts-that-don’t-change-our-practices edition)

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by flickr user ChrisM70

by flickr user ChrisM70

I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the reviewer is googling phrases maybe she’ll find this, so I want to say up front: I believe in what I wrote there. But I also have doubts about the progressive push towards education for all, the idea that through education we can all shed the demands of material labor, or that the value (and cost!) of an education should be totally disconnected from its role is securing a job.

Automation v. Education

The Economist recently gave voice to this particular error in its article on how technology will increasingly be automating office workers out of their jobs, which will widen the already broad inequality between those who must compete with machines and computers, and those whose jobs cannot (yet) be reduced to an algorithm. Here’s how they put it:

The main way in which governments can help their people through this dislocation is through education systems. One of the reasons for the improvement in workers’ fortunes in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution was because schools were built to educate them—a dramatic change at the time. Now those schools themselves need to be changed, to foster the creativity that humans will need to set them apart from computers. There should be less rote-learning and more critical thinking.

Technology itself will help, whether through MOOCs (massive open online courses) or even video games that simulate the skills needed for work. The definition of “a state education” may also change. Far more money should be spent on pre-schooling, since the cognitive abilities and social skills that children learn in their first few years define much of their future potential. And adults will need continuous education. State education may well involve a year of study to be taken later in life, perhaps in stages.

Yet however well people are taught, their abilities will remain unequal, and in a world which is increasingly polarised economically, many will find their job prospects dimmed and wages squeezed.

What value, then, is an education, if it won’t prevent the technological obsolescence of our skills? Put simply: if there are going to be ditches (which are required for plumbing, among other things) then there are going to be ditch diggers, or ditch-digging-machine-operators, or ditch-digging-machine-programmers. The move to automation replaces many operators with a few programmers, enriching the educated programmer at the expense of the uneducated operator, and that’s the move that should concern us, since it violates a basic rule of maximin: the people hurt are both more numerous and more needy than the people helped.

The standard economic argument is that lower prices help the poorest the most, and that freedom from unskilled labor allows workers to do something more rewarding, something that requires an education but cannot be imagined under the current political economy that requires so many to dig ditches. It’s like the old joke:

An industrialist is visiting a construction site and watching a newly-invented steamshovel in its first job. The union foreman complains that its job could be done by a dozen men with shovels, each earning a decent wage. The industrialist retorts it could be done by a hundred men with spoons.

Usually I prefer state-level redistribution through a basic income guarantee, but sometimes I think it makes more sense to fight for higher wages for the folks doing the digging than it does to hope that everyone will be able to escape that life if they could only get a Bachelor’s degree or a PhD. That hope in education has an ideological function that exceeds its aspirational and inspirational effects.

Who is the Ruling Class?

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas…”

So wrote Karl Marx in the The German Ideology. I’m not entirely sure that there is a single ruling class in American politics, in the sense Marx articulated it, but if there is one, it’s the folks with Bachelor’s degrees, the modern bourgeoisie. We are often-enough regaled by politicians with solicitations to the “middle-class” or “working Americans” that we might be tempted to identify these groups as the ruling class, but about 60% of the population participates in the workforce, and exactly 60% of the population are in the middle three quintiles of income sometimes identified as the middle class. I would argue that these groups are too large to have conjoined interests or ideas.

On the other hand, we are sometimes assured that the very rich and very few (for instance, the top 1%) are in fact governing the US, and that the masses don’t perceive the truth of this dominance because of ideology. If I’m right about the college educated, then it’s much too convenient to limit the ruling class to bankers and stock brokers and identify neoliberalism as the ruling idea; if the traditional bourgeoisie still exercises a great deal of control, then even the very rich must still win over that larger group in order to maintain their wealth. Arguably the 99% v. 1% language of Occupy was a clever rhetorical strategy for enlisting the support of the larger ruling class with the interests of the proletariat. It may be that billionaires manipulate the agenda, but the baseline agenda the wealthy are trying to steer is set by the merely well-off.

Another possibility is that that larger class really does share class interests with the 1%, so Occupy was unsuccessful because the ruling class’s ideas can’t be moved by rhetoric if its interests are at stake. (As I understand it, this is Marx’s point: ideology is believing that ideas matter more than practices.)

Bourgeois Ideology

So what does that class (to which I and my readers probably belong) have in common?

  • We are college educated.
  • We work in offices, with computers.
  • We are employed, and if we are in relationships we probably cohabitate with our partners who are also employed.
  • We live in cities or “suburbs” which have been adopted by some metropolitan area.
  • We own our own home (though this may be changing.)
  • We often don’t live near where we were born, or in the same city as our families.
  • We are likely to work in education, health-care, technology, management, or the public sector.
  • Our careers tend to benefit from globalization.
  • We are predominantly white.
  • We have very little contact with police, prisons, or the criminal justice system unless we are employed by those institutions (which many of us are.)

If what I’ve described above is correct, then perhaps these would be the ruling ideas:

  • Education is for everyone, and more equal educational access will create a more equal society.
  • Office-work is difficult and valuable, and education ought to prepare us for it.
  • Jobs and workplace regulations are the primary mode by which the state ought to see to the public’s good.
  • Marriage is good for everyone; even homosexuals should marry.
  • Urban life is better than rural life.
  • The American Dream should require (and subsidize) home ownership even if that punishes renters and those too poor to afford a home.
  • Family ties matter less than economic success.
  • Education, health-case, technology, and the public sector are the “best” jobs and ought to be subsidized.
  • Globablization is good.
  • Race is irrelevant.
  • The criminal justice system should supply entertaining plot lines for movies and television, but it is not otherwise relevant. Probably most people in prison belong there.

To be clear, while I’m not advocating these ideas, I believe (or act as if I believe) many of them. If those ideas are fundamentally aligned with my class-interest, it would be more surprising if I didn’t believe them. It’s not simply a coincidence that those with the most power and influence in society never have their fundamental interests questioned in our politics. That’s what makes them ideological, that these aren’t partisan issues: no one contests the value of education or marriage, and very rarely do they contest the important of home ownership.

Another possibility is that the top 20%-30% of Americans are not members of some ruling class, that the class is either much smaller than that or that there really isn’t such a thing as as single ruling class any longer, just a number of different social groups that align themselves in ways that they can succeed and govern on some topics and not others. For instance, none of the possible ruling ideas I mentioned included things that are quite clearly also governing American culture and politics, like support for the elderly through Medicare and Social Security (unless you think the elderly are the true ruling class), or America’s military role in the world (unless you think the military is the ruling class). Ideas like meritocracy and personal responsibility, patriotism and faith are frequently rejected by the richest two quartiles, precisely because they conflict with the values instilled by higher education and urban life.

If those ideas are also “ruling” in some way, then we would expect that those who hold them would be the true ruling class if all ruling ideas must belong to the ruling class. Perhaps instead, ruling ideas come from all the classes. Indeed, other ideas aren’t even “ruling ideas” so much as deeply felt constitutional claims, like the important of markets and prices for mediating our economic interactions, the idea that personal property and capital property should be governed by similar rules, or the assumption that inequality can ever be justified by increased productivity or merit. These ideas no longer have their source in a single class, even if they once did, just as in some sense American’s deep commitment to the idea of democracy and one-person-one-vote is a classless idea, at least in the US.

(It should be pointed out that what I have just written in the last paragraph is almost precisely the position being lampooned by Marx in The German Ideology. Ironic, eh?)

At What Cost?

I worry that the cultural promotion of the value of education is ideological, often, because I both benefit from it and yet also regularly watch how “College For All” seems to be disadvantaging a lot of my students. My fellow progressives who rail against the false equality of opportunity that makes the poor think they will someday be millionaires ought to understand why college can’t be an exit from the working class for everyone. Sure, anyone can be a millionaire or good at college, but everyone can’t. It’s a meritocratic institution, not an equalizer, and very little of the so-called college wage premium goes to those who graduate from community colleges and unselective four year universities. The inequality is built into our political economy!

I mean no disrepect to my students, either. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to appreciate the priorities of those who are actually choosing between homework and subsistence labor, for instance, or attendance and childcare. I’ve only been working at an unselective institution for three years, after seven years at selective universities, and the difference is palpable. I watched one student’s children so she could take exams without leaving them accessible to her abusive ex. She barely passed, and we both called that a victory: she hadn’t had much time to study, and had to read her notes through a hell of a black eye. Was education really the most important thing to do for her? What did she learn that she’ll remember later?

What about the student who I have cried with because she is dying from cancer: her husband just left her because the chemo makes her not want to have sex, and all she wants to do is graduate before she dies? Or the student who discovered she was pregnant and came to me because she didn’t know what to do? Or my student whose brother was shot and broke down in class? Or my student who was followed into class and physically threatened? Or my student who thought she had to be a nursing major until she realized she was really good at philosophy, but is still majoring in nursing to be practical? Or my student who asked me to help him figure out how to transfer when he realized that the only way he’d get a good education in computer science was if he left us? Or my students who are also incarcerated?

Rights and Privileges

I’m not saying that they don’t deserve an education: they do! Those are almost all people who will have college diplomas or already have them. Most of them are women. They won’t dig ditches, but they will work in jobs that only require a college degree nominally, where the skills they’ve often failed to learn are irrelevant. The diploma will prove that they have grit and conscientiousness, and give them a leg up in a job market where signaling such things are necessary, but they, like most people, will not remember what Modus Ponens is or how the the Rawlsian original position is supposed to help us think about justice.

There’s a difference between saying, “Right now, you have more important things to do than your logic homework, and that’s okay,” and saying, “Because you are poor, you don’t deserve a college education.” My students in prison are much better academically than the ones who are free, just because they have the time to focus on their studies, and I think there is a lot of value in the work that we do together. But no Pell Grants means no credit, and a felony record means that the skills they learn may never be put to work.

Maybe there’s a difference between “deserving” and “needing” an education. Most people don’t need a college diploma, certainly not to do their jobs, and probably not to be good citizens. They need a union or a basic income guarantee or a social minimum or a citizen capital grant or workplace democracy. But increasingly the only people who still have unions and political power are the people who also have college degrees, and those of us in that group like to pretend that increasing subsidies for bourgeois students (our kids) will help the ditch-diggers, too. That’s a bit too convenient, isn’t it?

I have some questions about violence

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11736It looks like I’ll be co-teaching a course on violence with Daniel Levine in the spring, and I have some questions:

  1. Is it just me, or do philosophers rarely talk about violence? We talk a lot about killing, and war, and punishment, and even torture. We talk about peace and non-violence. But “violence” doesn’t come up often, and when it does it’s often (as in the Frankfurt School) mythologized or dealt with through a kind of negative theology. Am I right about that?
  2. Clearly there are some related concepts, like cruelty, domination, coercion, etc. But what do they tell us about violence? Is violence the worst thing that humans can do? Compare violence to cruelty, domination, destruction, and harm; are these the components of violence, or its frequent companions?
  3. Where does sexual violence fit? Is it an intensification, a different kind, or a mixture of violence and other things like domination and cruelty?
  4. More basically: is violence a natural kind? Is there a specific phenomenality attached to it, i.e. is there something all instances of violence are “like”? Or is it a family resemblance term? (Or is it worse than a family resemblance term, we don’t even know what it means in all the contexts where we’re using it?)
  5. Who is more violent: a sniper or boxer?
  6. Who is more violent: a drone operator or a torturer?
  7. Which is more violent: a bomb or a prison cell extraction?
  8. Is an explosion always violent? Are fireworks “controlled violence” or are firebombs “violent and destructive fireworks”?
  9. Why do we continue to speak as if peace is passive and violence active, even after generations of non-violent activists have shown us how active peace can be? What’s the bias, there?
  10. Can words and arguments be violent, or is it just that some words are backed by institutions of violence? Like, can philosophy be violent, or does it only get a little violence rubbed off on it when it’s justifying war or torture or the actual embodied violence of the state? Put another way, is an argument or aa discourse violent only insofar as it is an implicit but authentic *threat* of physical violence?
  11. Contrariwise: can violence be expressive?
  12. War is way more violent than most people  even give it credit for being, I think. There is a lot of peripheral violence, destroyed communities, and lost capacities, even in “just” wars. So is interstate and civil war more violent than totalitarianism? Is “legitimate” state violence better or worse than “illegitimate” non-state violence? Are they equal, i.e. violence is violence is violence?

A Tuesday morning twelve years ago…

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I generally hate the hyper-patriotic memorialization of this day, as I’d prefer to forget. But today saw many on social media sharing their stories, so I thought I’d share mine, too.

I was in the subway, headed to work at the Civilian Complaint Review Board a couple blocks south of the towers, in the financial district. The train stopped, as it often did for track work or obstructions. But it stayed in the same place. We didn’t get out for what seemed like forever: the car filled with smoke and dust as (I now know) the towers collapsed. We were finally released onto the subway tracks, and guided back to a platform. When I emerged, I headed to work (closed, obviously) and then walked towards the collapsed towers until I couldn’t breath, not really comprehending what had happened. I needed to get to Harlem, but the way north was blocked. The sky was black, and everything was covered in ashes, including me.

by Flickr user hankplank

by Flickr user hankplank

The streets were full of expensive women’s shoes, discarded as they ran. I took brief refuge in an office building, borrowed a phone, and called my partner. Then, I joined the other survivors trudging home: the subways were working, slowly, above Union Square, so I stopped at the Target there, drank some water and got on a train. I arrived home sometime in the late afternoon, and then I slept.

I don’t remember much over the next few weeks: our building was inside the “crime scene” so we couldn’t go back to work for a while. I think I played video games for days at a time, and I know I took the GREs, fearing that the city would have to lay me off. (There was a bomb threat in the middle, so we filed out to the street, then returned to finish when the building was cleared. I’ve always wondered if someone used the bomb threat to get the answers or switch test-takers.)

The truth is that I was pretty lucky: our train wasn’t right under the towers when they collapsed, so we were just inconvenienced (and scared.) One guy from my office died: Hernando Salas. I try to think about him, today, and also to take Judith Butler’s advice not to obsess on narratives that start Tuesday morning, but instead to think about the stories that go back decades that led us all there.

Varieties of Inequality

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I can think of at least six kinds of inequality:

Clothes are seen hanging outside a bus which has been converted into a dwelling for Lu Changshan and his wife near newly-constructed residential buildings in Hefei, Anhui province in China on November 12, 2012 (Jianan Lu/Courtesy Reuters).

Hefei, Anhui province in China  (Photo by Jianan Lu.)

  1. Inequality of income: different people receive different wages, either for different jobs or for the same job, as profits from capital investments, or as government subsidies, transfer payments, or private charity.
  2. Inequality of consumption: different people consume different products (i.e. the generic widget) in differing amounts and of varying quality. Some people have cell phones, computers, and tablet computers; some have just a cell phone; some people own no electronics. Some people have two homes, some are homeless, etc.
  3. Inequality of liberty: some people are subjected to more threats and interference than others. Some people can break the law, for instance by using illegal drugs, without consequence, while others are imprisoned and subjected to the whims and demands of institutional forces and individuals with strength or authority.
  4. Inequality of security: some people live more precarious lives than others. Some people are systematically subject to more frequent risks of loss, or have less assistance or fewer resources to fall back on should things go badly.
  5. Inequality of status: some people get more respect than others. Some people are treated with disdain and denied the prerequisites of basic human dignity. Some people are ignored and invisible, while others get more attention than they want from paparazzi and news media.
  6. Inequality of capabilities: some people have more beings and doings than others. Rather than more widgets and gadgets, some people have better access to the things that make a life go well: work, play, love, health, safety, an opportunity to be heard and make a difference, etc.

Now, potentially all of these inequalities might be troublesome, but when I think about political economy, I tend to think that inequalities grow in importance (and injustice) as they move away from nominal measures like “income” and towards real measures like liberty, security, status, and ultimately capabilities. Of course, the varieties of inequality are interrelated, but not always in a clear way. For instance, some people have high incomes but low security, like military contractors, some fishermen, and oil rig roughnecks who can all make six figure salaries by taking on inordinate risk of death or crippling injury. A wealthy person suffering from crippling depression might be consumption-rich but capability-poor. And we’ve probably all met or worked with angry low-level bureaucrats whose low status is combined with high liberty and security, which allows them to act capriciously and lazily without consequences.

In the famous aphorism of the “rising tide which lifts all boats,” John F. Kennedy suggested that it was possible that as the US progresses, the rich, middle-class, and poor states might all be better off in absolute terms even if they maintained their respective places. Subsequent use of the aphorism has generally added “even if they do not improve equally.” In the “rising tide” case championed by Kennedy, “relative” inequality would increase as the gap between rich and poor increased, while “absolute” inequality (i.e. poverty) decreased, as the poor became wealthier. But this suggests a seventh kind of inequality:

7. Inequality of growth: when a company or a country grows, some people get a larger share of the growth than others, either as a share of income, consumption, status, liberty, capabilities, or security.

Americans currently confront a situation domestically where the rich have made disproportionate gains in income and consumption compared to other classes, while the very poor experience severe losses in every category due to absurdly high rates of incarceration, lost life expectancy, increaased labor contingency, loss of meaningful participation in the political process, and many other factors. Yet while this inequality grows domestically, other inequalities are shrinking: Africa is growing again, and the the number of children who die each day from easily-treated poverty-related diseases has shrunk to half what it was a decade earlier. Some of the same factors that increased relative domestic inequality have reduced absolute global poverty. So this suggests that there are (at least) three different ways to measure inequality:

  1. The scope of the inequality: there is a difference between local inequalities and global inequalities, and on some measures and inequalities (for instance, status) the local matters more than the global, while sometimes it’s the domination or colonization of one place or group  by another that creates the problematic element in inequality.
  2. Inequality over time: for most of the world, each generation has been able to boast improved lives over the generation before. But there are times and places when this is not the case, and it may well not be the case in the future.
  3. Relative Inequality v. Absolute Poverty: Another important issue is that inequalities can be measured in relative or absolute terms: the “relative” measure is based on the difference between the most-advantaged and least-advantaged, or in some metrics between the extremes and the median. The “absolute” measure focuses on the actual levels of income, consumption, security, liberty, etc. which can rise independently or orthogonally to the difference between the best and worst.

In the literature, the last kind of inequality is often just referred to as “relative v. absolute inequality” but what really ought to concern us is when folks at the bottom face profound and multiple disadvantages. So when I think in terms of absolutes, here, I think we generally share the Rawlsian maximin intuition that we should confront and work to raise whatever the lowest-level of experience is, the floor or “bottom” that has become known as the situation of the “least-advantaged group.”

Civil-rights-leaders-want-Obama-to-talk-more-about-racial-inequalityAs for temporal and spatial inequalities, these are difficult issues indeed. Certainly there are Chinese cities where the environmental degradation is so bad that previous eras of lower consumption were actually better off; much the same may be true of European and American cities during our industrial growth spurts. We can think of the the inequality of growth as a problem that is primarily measured in terms of differences over time, but we also have to confront the profound differences between the growth levels in the US, Europe, and Japan, and the growth levels in Africa, South America, and Asia. There is growing confidence that these differences must be laid at the feet of poor institutional designs (hampered by colonial meddling) and cannot simply be explained by some form of exploitative expropriation of the developing world by the developed world.

There are broad measurement and aggregation problems with the more important kinds of inequality: it’s much harder to figure out how capabilities increase and decrease over time and populations than it is to measure income and consumption, even though measuring those is a very hard problem all on its own. Still, some theme have emerged. While there are some theorists who would not be ready to agree to the hierarchy of inequalities I’ve listed above, many justifications for libertarianism and classical liberalism rest on the assumption that the policies they advocate are best-able to achieve the maximization of the most important capabilities, securities, and liberties that I mention. After the work of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, there may well be disagreements about measurements and priorities, but there really are fewer folks who doggedly hold to the view that consumption alone is the key to the good life and ought to be maximized. Strangely, even as more people pay lip service to pluralism, there is more and more agreement on matters of fundamental metaethical goals. I take that to be a good sign.

But various versions of the problem of inequality that circulate strike me as potentially mistaken. For instance, it’s true that, in terms of wealth and income, the very rich lost more in absolute terms than the very poor: individual investors lost billions of dollars. But they did not lose a corresponding amount of consumption, security, status, or capability. Those losses play an important role in suggesting that the very rich were as surprised as the middle-class and poor by the structural problems in the shadow banking system and mortgage-market, however: after all, you expect a fraud or a crook to have enriched himself, not immiserated himself. On the other hand, differential inequalities of growth and security suggest that a very rich investor might be willing to make a bet that will double or halve her income even if it will do the same thing the very poor for simply because of the way one calculates gains and losses when you are very rich. (This goes back to Charles Karelis’s work on the differential rationality of wealth and poverty.)

Giving Well: Oxfam versus BRAC

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"A Hindu Woman Giving Alms," by Raja Ravi Varma

“A Hindu Woman Giving Alms,” by Raja Ravi Varma

Daniel Levine has an interesting discussion of giving and giving well up today on whyiamwrongabouteverything:

When I got a “real” job at USIP, back in 2007, I resolved that I was going to donate 10 percent of the portion of my take-home pay that I kept for personal use (as opposed to what I contribute to the joint account I share with my wife). This is less than the Giving What We Can pledge, but more than the The Life You Can Save pledge, so I figure it’s at least a good start. (My wife and I also give 5% of the after-tax income we contribute to our joint account).

Some may think it impolite, but I actually really appreciate that Daniel laid out his giving budget. 5% of joint household funds and 10% of personal funds dominates my giving budget quite a bit: last year we gave about 3% of our total pre-tax income to Oxfam (which is similarly ignored by GiveWell) so his commitments and reasons are particularly impressive. My family will likely scale back this year to make room in the budget for my wife’s unpaid maternity leave, but now social competition will give us an incentive to increase it!

He also highlights his preferred charity, the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Commission. Despite the name, BRAC actually works in eleven different countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Because they are primarily funded by micro-finance, they are able to fund 80% of their own charity work. Donors pay for the rest. Yet the charity rating service GiveWell refuses to rate it. Before I met Daniel, I’d never heard of BRAC, and since then I’ve been trying to do my homework. Two potential objections have emerged:

  • Microfinance often involves usurious interest rates. Should we worry that this charity is largely funded by some of the people who most need charity? Hugh Sinclair reports that BRAC charges women in South Sudan 88% interest! If this isn’t as much of a problem as it seems, then why shouldn’t we see the self-funding model as sufficient, and direct our donations to organizations that cannot self-fund?
  • Is there any reason beyond symbolism to prefer a South-South charity to a North-South charity? And is the symbolism worth potential inefficiencies or less-than-optimal life-saving?

All of my objections boil down to a simple concern: is BRAC better than Oxfam? Perhaps Wrongzo’s nom de plume is a misnomer or humblebrag, but perhaps he and I have a disagreement, after all.

Academics like to distinguish between two questions: whether we can know the right answer, and whether there can *be* a right answer. William Easterly rejected this kind of mythology of metrics when he told Peter Singer that “it is not at all clear that you (or anyone else) knows exactly what to do to save the lives of poor children or how to get them out of extreme poverty.”Perhaps Easterly is right to answer the first question with skepticism, but I believe we can answer the second question affirmatively: there is a “best” use for my money, some single expenditure that reduces suffering the most, even if we do not know what it is. People who criticize measurement efforts effectively admit that there’s such a thing as a right answer to the question of how to give, because they believe that Peter Singer and the metricians have the wrong answer!

If there’s a right answer, why not take a shot at figuring it out? So: is Wyclef Jean’s charity effective? A little research suggests not. The key here is that there may be many good answers, but there are certainly some bad answers, too. For instance: donating money to a church or to a museum doesn’t save lives, so those are demonstrably inferior kinds of charity. Even worse, sometimes our helpful efforts are actually harmful, as when we learned that some arsenic mitigation efforts may actually increase infant mortality! Whether microfinance at 88% interest is good or bad for a community is a matter that can be evaluated independently. And what’s more, it may be helpful even though it seems, to me, to be exploitative!

Yet it’s also possible that this is such a really hard problem that we’re better off with no information rather than some information. In donating to large charities with expansive internal research arms, we are essentially using part of our dollar to buy evidence about where the rest of the dollar should go. This seems wasteful! At some point, you reach diminishing returns in terms of the evidence-costs versus the marginal utility gains. Perhaps there really is no reason to believe that Oxfam’s or GiveWell’s internal metrics will help me direct my money better than traveling to a poor country and handing out twenty dollar bills! You may think I’m joking, yet I’ve actually seen this proposed by the economist Tyler Cowen. Perhaps we should skip airfare [overhead!] and simply mail the money to a random person!

That’s one reason I prefer larger institutional charities as informal indexers, in the portfolio sense: administrative/information costs are higher, but smaller as a percentage of total expenditures, while new money is always redirected to the best-informed current needs. Today’s best charities may not be tomorrow’s best charities. We know that, for instance, only about 50% of the population needs to be mosquito-netted to get almost all of the health effects. So at that point, it’s time to redirect the resources to a new cause, from malaria to diarrhea, say, or else new dollars could have no utility at all.

If we’re constantly analyzing the productivity of a charity, like GiveWell and Oxfam do, we’re likely to catch it. But if we’re sitting back and receiving the reassuring development letters from the charities’ staff, we’re likely to irrationally remain committed to the “less-than-best charity” for long after our donations have stopped having the optimal utility. That’s something Oxfam can do but VillageReach can’t. From the research I’ve done, I can’t tell whether BRAC is doing so or not; this was GiveWell’s problem in 2009 when they last evaluated BRAC.

You may well wonder: why even argue about charity? Shouldn’t we just give quietly and privately?

The various academics associated with Giving What We Can are engaging in a conscious effort to change the norms and standards of charitable giving. It’s true that donors mostly give for reasons of self-satisfaction, which is why consequentialists of various stripes are engaged in a quiet effort to change the conditions under which donors can successfully congratulate themselves. By working on the codes of honor and merit, they hope to have an outsized impact on the behavior of major givers and institutions. Academics recognize that we’re not rich and powerful, but we like to think that words and arguments can sometimes give us a bit of a multiplier effect.

To some extent, they’ve already succeeded, such that you see major criticisms of goals within global health and humanitarian aid communities for ineffective models, like the work of William Easterly, Dambisa Moyo, and David Rieff. More recently, some in the aid community have questioned the cost-benefit efficacy of the Gates Foundations’ attempts to eradicate polio.

But this requires a pretty strict consequentialism (though not utilitarianism) to which many retail donors object. Beyond the overall skepticism about knowledge and metrics, there’s an underlying fear that consequentialism levels the playing field between giving and consuming, and that this will become far too demanding for the average donor. Once you get started down this path, giving well goes from an analytic tool to a duty. It starts to sound overly demanding, and maybe even a bit melodramatic, like we’re all in the same position as Oskar Schindler:

This car. Goeth would have bought this car. Why did I keep the car? Ten people right there. Ten people. Ten more people. This pin. Two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would have given me two for it, at least one. One more person. A person, Stern. For this. I could have gotten one more person… and I didn’t! And I… I didn’t!

In the film, you’re supposed to think he’s being too hard on himself. But isn’t he right? Ten people died so some rich industrialist could drive around in luxury. How many died so that I could sit up late typing this post on my computer? How can that possibly be just?

It’s a common intuition: whenever we see a rich person spending lavishly on a boat or a sports car, don’t we sort of feel that they’re wasting their money, that there are folks in need who could use it better? Am I really a philistine for not appreciating the craftsmanship in a Porsche or the softness of 600-count Egyptian cotton? I like lots of luxury items, too: I’m not an ascetic. Right now, I’m lusting after the new suit, an expensive rowing machine, and lots of electronics that are totally unnecessary. I may even buy some of that stuff. But I think we should admit that it’s not particularly praiseworthy to spend my money on luxury goods while there are children dying from diarrhea and women living with obstetric fistulas. We could treat an obstetric fistula for $450 dollars. That’s less than an iPad! It seems like an easy choice, yet I’ve already spent more time dithering on the minute differences between BRAC and Oxfam than I do wondering whether to spend the next $450 I make on consumption or charity.

Why Daniel Levine is Wrong About Everything

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war is overWell, he’s not. But that’s the title of his new blog. (Apparently he is challenging me for the title of “Most Contrite Fallibilist.” He’s even taken the nom de plume of “Wrongzo.” Bastard.)

For his first substantive post, “What should we mock about when we mock about guns?” he parodies my attempts to articulate a boring solution to the gun debates. He, rightly, turns the attention away from guns and towards inequality and precarity. Here’s the money quote:

“So, guns, whatever. Take away the fear and hatred that drives the hierarchical-individualist worldview (and its purity norms, on which a future discussion) and probably we have guns that police occasionally use against sociopaths and hunters use to get game meat, and boltcutters I only use on my back gate. The fight is with hierarchy, not guns.”

I can’t help but agree. (The wrongest thing about that blog is its title.) Some things that Wrongzo suggests but doesn’t say:

1. Wrongzo believes that value assessments and risk profiles are malleable. So, if we win the right political battles or transform our economy in appropriate ways, we might someday render individualists or hierarchists extinct. Even though I’ve spent a long time trying to work out and defend this thesis, I don’t know that I’m convinced it’s true. What if we’re just built differently, if not in the genetic and cogntive pluralism way, then in a way that leads to diverse cognitive styles being cultivated within any community? (For instance, a functioning community is always going to have some contrarians.)

But my suspicions and hopes here largely reflect a prejudice in favor of pluralism. As I say in my second post, “it’s important to acknowledge that they do see some facts more clearly we do.” And it’s true that the individualist notices different elements of the problem than the solidaridist: that’s why Radley Balko is such a boon to American political punditry. I’ve not yet figured out what hierarchists are good for, but I do worry that hierarchy and tradition are intrinsic to any account of solidarity, but we only notice the hierarchical and irrationally traditional elements when we see them in others with whom we disagree. But that’s what I do: worry.

2. Wrongzo believes that outsider derision can change things, citing Appiah. I was highly critical of this element of Appiah’s thought when I reviewed his book:

Here, then, is the problem that Appiah’s project must suppress in order to succeed: honor codes work best when they are unacknowledged, and they are best changed when they are not the object of direct study or overt deliberate manipulation by outsiders. Moral revolutions that are predicated on honor code changes are most likely to succeed when the transition does not appear to be the work of self-conscious elites, even if it probably is. This would probably help explain some other details suppressed in Appiah’s account, like why debates about slavery and racism did not end with the Atlantic slave trade or the American Civil War.

Again, I want to be wrong, but ultimately, you can only maintain the claim that “we mock because we love” so long as a reasonable person would see “hick-shaming” as a loving remonstration and not othering. Our chosen subalterns are the urban poor; conservatives pretend to represent the rural and suburban poor. Given the discourses and practices of coastal elites, I don’t see much evidence that hick-shaming will do anything other than tweak the subalterns of our competitor elites. In contrast, the evidence suggests that what Braman and Kahan call “identity vouching” is better able to get things done. That’s why “only Nixon can go to China” and why President Obama receives harsher criticism from African-Americans like Cornel West than he does from white progressives. What we need to engineer is a collaboration with gun owners.

There’s another serious core to the argument: what do we give up when we take up the cultural cognition attempt to negotiate a détente between gun owners and gun haters? I want to say more about this is a future post more critical of the “cultural cognition” perspective, but for now, go read Levine’s blog!

Update: Wrongzo responds:

But when we laugh with someone, we importantly laugh at our shared frailty and vulnerability and failure. We are saying that we are unwilling to give a charade of honor and weight to the human stupidity they have shown, but that ultimately that stupidity connects us, rather than dividing us.

…I am laughing because I ultimately want social reconciliation, for all the romance of class war. The hierarchs are hurting. So, for all the mean-ness of the last post, ultimately, laughter is the proposed weapon because it holds the hope of everyone saying, “wow, that was a fucked way of setting things up, let us do something different now.

Amen.