I’ve posted a number of recordings of interviews and talks I’ve given on Uniting Mississippi. This talk is on my next project, which is still in progress. The book is titled A Culture of Justice. One of the chapters that is in progress is the subject of the talk I gave at Purdue University. Here’s the video, about 1hr 28 mins:
If you’re looking for a speaker, visit my Speaking and Contact pages.
I had a delightful time in Hattiesburg, MS this January. My first stop while in town was at WDAM TV’s studio for the Midday News on Channel 7. I had the great pleasure of talking with Miranda Beard, who invited me to tell people about Uniting Mississippi and who announced my talk at the University of Southern Mississippi later that day, as well as the book signing afterwards. Miranda is a very impressive news professional and was very kind and welcoming.
The people at WDAM were very kind. The studio was easy to find, and I couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day to drive. I will say that Mississippi’s actually quite a big state. I had to get up at 5 and be on the road at 7 to get to Hattiesburg by shortly after 11 for this interview. It was well worth it. One of the members of the audience at my 2pm talk said that she saw me on WDAM and that she had read my interview in the Clarion Ledger earlier in January.
Here’s the interview:
Thank you to Miranda and to Margaret Ann Morgan, who set this up!
If you’re looking for a speaker for your next event, or know someone who is, visit my Speaking & Contact pages. Also, follow me on Twitter @EricTWeber and “like” my Facebook author page.
I’ve tried my hand at a few new kinds of public engagement efforts that have borne fruit. The latest example for me is in seeking TV interviews to talk about issues in public philosophy, particularly some ideas about how I think Mississippi could benefit from good democratic leadership. I’m headed to Tupelo, MS for an interview on WLOV’s This Morning show, Wednesday, November 18th. Then, on Monday, December 7th November 23rd, (updated), I’ll be heading to Biloxi, MS to give an interview on WLOX’s News at 4 show. After each I’ll be holding a book signing, though only the one in Tupelo has been scheduled at this point.
Scholars or readers curious about higher education may wonder: why do all of this? We certainly have enough work to do teaching classes, researching and writing, applying for grants, and serving our institutions and professional associations (the work of a professor is a lot more than what folks see in the classroom). Why add on to that with “outreach” or public engagement?
In “The Search for the Great Community,” from The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey argues that democracy’s prime difficulty has to do with how a mobile, complex, and many layered community can come to define itself and its interests. He believed that the key to addressing democratic challenges was to make use of democratic means, particularly communication. Democracy can embody wise leadership, but only with widespread, maximally unhindered communication, especially emphasizing the developments of human knowledge — the sciences, broadly speaking. For that reason, it is a clear and crucial extension of his democratic theory to value the public engagement of scholars with their communities.
When Dewey referred to public engagement, however, that did not mean only a one-way street. Communication takes listening too. So, the point isn’t only for scholars to speak to audiences, but for them also to learn from the people. When I write, I draw increasingly often from newspapers and magazines to illustrate my points about what people are saying and experiencing beyond the academy. Scholarly research is vital, but so is the world beyond the academy. Some circles have criticized me for it in peer-reviews, but so far I haven’t let that dissuade me from seeing scholars’ task as needing to draw also on sources and input from beyond the academy. In addition, talking with people around Mississippi and in other states about my work has revealed all kinds of interesting insights. Some people offer me great examples that I can use to strengthen my points. Others highlight challenges for bringing about the kinds of changes that I believe are needed.
My point in this blog post is to give scholars and other writers a little nudge of encouragement to try something unusual: reach out to news stations and outlets. Some folks do this already. A great public philosopher, for example, is John Corvino. Few of us consider trying something that a mentor of mine encouraged me to try, though. John Lachs of Vanderbilt University said to me: “Plenty of people will read your op-eds, but vastly more people watch TV.” He encouraged me to pursue that direction for engagement. So, in addition to writing for newspapers I’ve been working on developing my “platform,” for which this Web site serves as a key tool. Along with that, there are ways to present oneself to news organizations, such as in creating a “press kit.” It was foreign to me too until I read Platform by Michael Hyatt (creator of my Web site’s WordPress theme, GetNoticedTheme).
With the help of a student research assistant, I wrote to a handful of TV news outlets to let them know about my latest book, a work of public philosophy — Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South. In the letter, I explained a little bit about the book, as well as my interest in getting the word out about the issues it covers. I then enclosed a nice brochure about the book that the University Press of Mississippi designed for it. Finally, I included an abbreviated 1-page press kit, as well as a short, 1-page set of “interview resources,” that I learned about from Michael Hyatt’s book. The letters went out in the last two weeks. A little over 10 days later, I got calls and emails from two TV stations inviting me for interviews. It worked.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: The point of public engagement as a scholar is not in itself to get attention, money, or fame. The latter two are highly unlikely anyway. The point is to get our ideas out there and to learn from others through that engagement. If the ideas that we develop in the academy are worthwhile, then they’re worth some effort to spread the word about them. Benefits come from doing these things, but by far the greatest of these are the effects, however small, that we can have on our culture and the relationships we can expand and develop through the effort to speak up about issues that we care about and study.
Tell me on my Facebook page or on Twitter about your public writing and engagement.
“Cow” by Lars Pistaj on Flickr
Like all east coast American liberals, I am required by my contract to like This American Life. Listening to it this week, however, provided some new content for this blog, which is quickly becoming way more focused on where you should give your money to charity than I’d initially planned it to be.
Anyway, this week on TIA, in conjunction with the other show that my New World Order masters use to implant my brain with information, Planet Money, they were talking about a very interesting charity, GiveDirectly. GiveDirectly gives poor people money.
That’s, well, pretty much it.
Now, even though I talk a lot about structural change and the like, there’s a lot to love about this model. In class, for instance, when I talk about trying to help people out, I always tell my students that they should seriously consider whether their plan, whatever it is, is better than just handing out money (my favorite example of this is discussions about how we need to carefully target economic stimulus money instead of just “throwing money in the air” or something similar – of course, there are better and worse ways to stimulate the economy but at the end of the day, yeah, the main point is just to get some money out there, so simply throwing it in the air for anyone to catch is far from the worst idea).
There are two things that the story made me think about, however.
Paternalism vs. Public Goods
Discussions of whether to just hand out money often seem to come down to questions of paternalism. This is basically the mundane, “that panhandler will just spend the money on booze” problem/argument.
In one corner, you have the person who says: poor people wouldn’t be poor if they didn’t make bad choices a lot of the time, and we know pretty well what poor people need to do to un-poor themselves. So, if we put restrictions on the money we give them, like requiring it to be spent on healthy food, or housing, or education, then it’s a win-win. Smart poor people would spend on those things anyway; stupid poor people are being saved from themselves.
In the other corner, you have the person who says: this is all very patronizing. People generally know what is best for them. And anyway, we shouldn’t be so confident that we, those of us who are not and have not been poor, know better. For instance, some decisions that often come in for criticism, like spending on “luxury” goods, make sense when you actually pay attention to the human need for pleasure and dignity in their lives, and criticism is more about us wanting the poor to be properly ascetic to earn our pity than it is about figuring out what’s actually good for them. Yes, sometimes people make bad decisions. But they make fewer bad decisions for themselves than we do for them.
One thing that strikes me as missing from this (very stylized) argument is the role of public goods. This argument makes a lot of sense when you think what the poor are mostly lacking are private goods – things that individuals own, that are only used by one individual, etc. (in the lingo, things that are rival and excludable). And in those terms, you can probably tell that my sympathies are with the “let people do what they think is best” side of things.
But what if what is lacking are public goods? The one that comes to mind for me is public safety. Everyone is better off if there is a pretty non-corrupt, even-handed system of policing (or something like it) that prevents, defuses, and deters violence. Yes, I can have private security, but in the real world that’s usually a poor second – I have to restrict my movement a lot more, I have to worry a lot more, etc. And working on conflict, I’m familiar with the way that lack of security can keep people from getting themselves out of poverty. There are also less dramatic examples, like digging wells.
The problem is that there are well-known coordination problems with creating public goods, which is why the mainstream conventional wisdom (certainly not unanimous) is that they need to be provided by non-market, coercive entities like the state. In a nutshell, why would I pay my share of a police force if I’m going to benefit from it even if I don’t pay? Giving people more money won’t automatically solve this problem – people with lots of money still face the temptation to free ride.
I actually suspect that there may be more of these kinds of goods that poor people need than we sometimes appreciate, but mostly because I’m a Marxist weirdo interested in social structures. Giving people money within the current system will certainly help them, though, so it’s not everything.
Two side notes. First, if you buy this, it would require dramatically changing the focus of most “charity.” If you’re comparing GiveDirectly to, say, Oxfam, then you’re mostly talking about provision of private goods. This kind of concern only applies if you’re comparing giving to GiveDirectly to giving to something like basic-science research or the Communist International.
Second, it shouldn’t be read as “giving to public goods is always a good idea when compared to giving to private goods.” We, you and I, we’re not magic. If I give $1000 to some poor Kenyan, one thing she can do is take the time she’d spend earning $1000 and instead spend it organizing in her community. It’s entirely plausible that she’d do a better job at getting public goods provided. The advantage that relatively wealthy foreign donors have at this sort of thing would primarily be if they’re trying to influence actors in their own society (like lobbying to have pharma let more generic drugs be made) or maybe use pull at the governmental level (though this would apply mostly to very large donors).
What About Markets?
The other question – and this is a totally honest question-question, not “aha! I have a question you cannot possibly answer!” – I had when listening to the discussion of GiveDirectly was, what about markets?
This is related to the above, since a market is a kind of public good. Yes, we buy private goods in a market, but the existence of the market is a public good. If this sounds silly, keep in mind that markets aren’t just “some people show up and sell some stuff,” they require rules about property to be observed/enforced (otherwise “selling” makes no sense), in the modern world someone is taking care of making a currency work, contracts need to happen, somehow rampant theft needs to be prevented, etc. If you don’t like capitalism, fine, I’m with you, but even non-market kinds of exchange of goods and services require a forum for it, which is a public good. (Or, at least, markets are usually public-good-like, you could probably create a fancy one that isn’t quite, but that’s not the main form).
One of the comparisons in the show was between the GiveDirectly model and Heifer International (another org that I’ve given money to, in fact in lieu of favors at my wedding). Heifer gives people high-quality cows and training, not cash.
Initially, it might seem – and this is the way the discussion was set up – that this is a simple contrast. Let’s imagine that the cost for someone to buy the cow and the training would be $1000. It may seem like we either buy paternalism (and maybe we should, though I’m skeptical) or giving $1000 cash is the clear winner. If someone wants the cow and training, she can just go ahead and buy it. But if she prefers something else, she doesn’t need to.
What this leaves out is that I can only buy a cow if someone is selling a cow, and ditto for training. The discussion makes a big deal about how the Heifer cows are much better than the cows available locally. So what if I want the Heifer cow and the training, and would spend $1000 for it, but I can’t buy it at all because GiveDirectly came in and gave me cash, instead of doing something else?
One way to approach this would be to say that I just haven’t counted all the costs in the situation properly. Heifer International isn’t just providing a cow and training, they’re providing cows and training in rural Kenya. If getting all that stuff and getting it to rural Kenya costs $2000, then it’s totally unsurprising that giving someone $1000 instead will not be as good as giving them a thing that costs twice as much. So to fix the contrast, give them $2000, and let them mail order a cow and a trainer.
But I worry that it’s not quite that simple. There are a lot of fixed costs involved in this sort of thing. We don’t have good cow-mailing infrastructure. A trainer can’t go to rural Kenya for an hour and then go home to her family in Sweden. If an individual person wanted the cow and training, trying to cover these sort of costs could in principle be paid for, but it would be prohibitive. Much more than the nominal doubling of the market cost of the cow in an existing market. It’s in this way that a market for cows and trainers in rural Kenya functions as a kind of public good.
Now, Heifer can provide these things without it getting ridiculous because it provides them to a bunch of people at a time. It surely has high costs associated with getting cows and trainers to rural Kenya, but it knows it can spread them out among lots of people, so it’s maybe only costing that $2000 per person when you figure the actual cow and the actual training plus the share of shipping cows and housing trainers, etc.
You could have a situation where beneficiaries of GiveDirectly do something very similar. If, say, 1000 recipients of $1000 each made it clear to the international cow-and-training industry that they wanted to be able to buy cows and trainers in rural Kenya, someone would set up a franchise of Hilde’s Cow and Training Emporium there. But that’s a coordination problem again – I’m not going to save my $1000 until the emporium opens unless I know that lots of people around me are going to as well. Heifer basically solves the coordination problem via giving gifts-in-kind and negotiating as a large collective buyer with Hilde.
So, my question is: how much should this be a worry in the case of groups like GiveDirectly? How can we best deal with lacks of markets and market failures?
On the one hand, this doesn’t seem like a pure philosopher’s worry. We know that the poor pay more for lots of things, often in a nutshell because they don’t have access to the efficient markets and financial systems that the wealthier among us do. And things it’s hard for one person to buy, like irrigation systems and wells, seem like pretty typical things rural poor areas in developing nations are lacking.
On the other hand, again, external donors aren’t magic. If enough of us can agree to donate to a large org like Heifer to make it feasible for them to build an infrastructure that supplies cows to rural Kenya, it’s not like rural Kenyans who get GiveDirectly money couldn’t have a town meeting and decide to chip in on a larger project.
Pictured: INEFFICIENT RESOURCE USE (Photo: “Citizens of Abyei Protest Bashir’s Statement” by ENOUGH Project)
It’s pretty common for sites and such devoted to helping you “give better” to ultimately look for some criterion of efficiency. For instance, the first two criteria that GiveWell uses for assessing charities are “strong evidence of impact” and “highly cost-effective.” Similarly, when Giving what we can declares that some charities are 1000 times more effective than others, they focus almost entirely on cost effectiveness. This leads them into some knots on their assessment of some kinds of interventions – for instance, they start by trying to translate things like education into economic improvement (can we measure how many $ of future income $1 of education spending creates?) and political advocacy into health spending (if $1 of spending advocating for bed nets gets the government to spend $3 on bed nets, it may be worth it). I think it’s unsurprising that trying to force things this way leads them to largely throw up their hands on things like education, political advocacy, and emergency relief, though that might be a conversation for another time. But, for instance, I think they’re actually too easy on emergency aid, by their own lights. Emergencies, by definition, are complex and chaotic environments, and so it’s going to be almost impossible for the cost of a disability-adjusted life year (DALY) in an emergency to be lower than the cost of a DALY in a situation where people are simply poor. So long as there is space for additional funding of things like anti-malarials, by the logic of cost-effectiveness, it will almost never make sense to go with, say, Doctors Without Borders over the Against Malaria Foundation.
I think this focus on a narrowly defined notion of efficiency is problematic. I’m not going to give a knock-down argument in a blog post for that, but I’d like to at least make some notes toward broadening the conversation.
The easy way to do this would be to say, “let’s just not focus on outcomes so much.” If I simply have an obligation to help some people and not others, regardless of how effective my help is, that of course makes this whole approach wrong headed. And, in fact, I tend to think that our obligations to help others might look more like Kantian imperfect duties than utilitarian maximizing, but it’d be dirty pool to start with that. I think there are things even the consequentialists should be keeping in mind.
And also, nothing I say here should be construed as saying that efficiency doesn’t matter at all. It’s certainly a worthwhile consideration. Even if you bought an almost wholly deontological picture of your obligations, if organization A accomplished the exact same goals as organization B, but at half the price, you should probably go with A.
Finally, I don’t think the upshot of these considerations is kumbaya-we-should-all-give-wherever-we-please. I do think it’s weird that people I know spend much more time worrying about the marginal efficiency of the charities they give to than they do to the question of whether the marginal dollar of their income should go to charity or personal consumption. It’s a tough question whether I’m doing more “good” by giving $1 to BRAC than by giving it to Oxfam, but it’s almost certain that giving that dollar to either does more good than spending it on a flavor shot in my coffee.*
It’s hard to measure politics.
It’s currently somewhat trendy to measure political advocacy in terms of leveraging your funds, especially since corporations get so much bang for their buck out of lobbying. And that’s something worth thinking about (though I wish people who make this argument would pay more attention to where the money is coming from – e.g., does it make sense to pay for bed nets out of Ghanaian taxes rather than out of my USian pocket?).
But to think that that’s the whole of it impoverishes our notion of politics. Even if you leave aside the inherent value of political participation, the changes that political change can wreak go far deeper than just the number of bed nets provided. I mean, Marx imagined the communist revolution as increasing the material luxuries available to the proletariat, but if you try to reduce it just to lowering the Gini coefficient of a society, you’re missing the point a bit. Politics isn’t just a way of setting spending priorities, it infuses people’s whole lives.
Lest you think this is an airy philosopher’s concern, keep in mind that there are important policy questions that turn on whether or not we think of the value of political systems primarily in terms of material benefits to the population. The whole history of supporting authoritarian governments on the theory that they can make the hard choices needed for economic growth is based on identifying the two.
Even if you do focus just on material change, the important changes may be missed if you focus just on the kind of thing we have a reasonable hope of measuring in a straightforward fashion. Sen has famously argued that democracies don’t have famines – this is a straight-up material benefit to democracy, but it would be at least fiendishly difficult to use that result to calculate the return on investment for each pound sterling contributed to Gandhi’s IndieGoGo campaign. More recently, Peter Buffett posted a somewhat-fluffy-but-makes-a-good-point column arguing that it’s weird to see the same captains of industry and government who create problems like poverty getting together to decide how to spend money to alleviate it. In other words, even if we focus only on material benefits, there’s the question of how many bed nets $1 of spending on lobbying for more bed nets buys, and then there’s the question of how we got to the place where people can’t afford bed nets in the first place.
There’s more to live than living.
I blame the Rawlsian doctrine of primary goods for this one. What about the inherent goods of education and democratic participation? Why should we care less about them than DALYs and the like?
The quick answer is that, if you’re not alive, you can’t enjoy anything else. But as I’ve argued more formally elsewhere, this is a misleading way to look at things. In a nutshell, if we really put an absolute priority on preserving our own lives, we’d all hang out in underground bunkers wrapped in bubble wrap (if you want the longer version, I have a chapter on it in my vaporware book, or you can just go read Butler and look cooler). We accept risks (which in the language of decision theory, just are reductions to our expected number of DALYs) all the time for things we think are important. The argument that one DALY is more important than, say, a child having access to the means to create art is one that we should be having, not one that we should assume away at the start (I mean, it’s a bit weird to me that almost no discussion of charitable giving seems to even notice the discussion about capabilities in the theory of development).
Issues like the symbolism of giving might live here, too. For instance, if I give to a poverty-alleviation organization based in the global South, that might have a good element of “saying” that I don’t think poor people are just victims whose problems need to be solved by white people like me. It might also have non-symbolic benefits mediated by the symbolism, like building organizational capacity in poor communities (often a criticism of aid agencies that swoop in with ready made programs, even if in the short run those may look more “efficient”) – this overlaps with the importance of politics, above – or just changing a hegemonic mindset that can tend to demoralize poorer people.
There’s a difference between badness and injustice.
One intuitively “punchy” reason to be attracted to groups like MSF that work in war zones and the like is precisely the thing that makes it hard for them to compete on pure efficiency measures: they work in war zones and the like.
This starts to push against the assumption that we’re playing nice with the consequentialists, but I don’t think it entirely breaks the rules. It’s at least plausible that there is something worse about someone dying because they got caught in the crossfire of a war than because they happened to catch malaria.
Now, this may pull against some of the considerations about politics, above. If most poverty is injustice rather than bad luck, the gap between the person who dies from a gunshot and the person who dies from poverty-induced malnutrition narrows. But again, I don’t think we get to ignore the conversation (and if you buy the equivalency, you probably should be working for structural political change more than most discussions of charity imply, since the injustice of poverty remains even if you mitigate its effects by giving someone a bed net. If you steal my money, and then someone gives me the P.O.S album I was going to buy with it, it doesn’t morally sanitize the theft).
We might have other special obligations.
This is dicey territory. The push towards efficiency as the overriding moral criterion for giving comes from the – quite powerful – idea that I should measure my action only by how much good it does, and not by morally arbitrary criteria like how close I happen to live to the recipients of my assistance.
But this flattens out plausibly important distinctions. Again, this bends the rule of being nice to consequentialists, but at least pluralist consequentialists can take it seriously.
I might be required to put my thumb on the scale for people whose poor circumstances are in part my fault. For instance, it seems plausible that, as an American, I might have a greater responsibility to help out victims of the wars in Iraq and DR Congo, where my country had a strong hand, than I do to people in some place like (uh… shit, the US has its fingers almost everywhere…) maybe Mali, which is more on the French’s moral account.
I might have special obligations to do good in my own community. For instance, I spend a lot of time these days on prison teaching and (increasingly) on getting involved with violence-reduction in my home city. That’s time that I could be getting a second job and donating the money to buy bed nets.
Now, the worry here is that allowing this kind of consideration opens the door to all sorts of moral abuse. It’s a very compelling worry that at some point, when I’m giving money to help out with re-greening the golf course in my gated community** I’ve crossed the line into just buying luxuries for myself (if I golf) or being morally self-indulgent (if I don’t) under the guise of “charity.” I agree that there needs to be some line here!
But I think it points to the fact that the distinction between consumption and altruism that seems taken for granted by the conversation about giving is too blunt an analytical instrument. It seems right to question whether the prison teaching work does as much good as donating the salary I could earn in that time to the Anti-Malaria Foundation.*** At the same time, it seems odd to count it as just a fancy kind of self-interested “consumption.”****
One utilitarian way around the weirdness here would be to instrumentalize it. Dollar for dollar, my investment in prison teaching is inefficient and sub-optimal. But human nature being what it is, I am more likely to sustain altruistic activities with a face-to-face component, so it makes sense to do this as a way to maximize the good I do in the teeth of human weakness of will. Basically, I’m much more likely to quit the second job where I send money to a faceless organization helping people buy bed nets than I am to quit the work where people tell me directly that I’ve helped them. It’s not right, it’s just a prediction about my own psychology, which is just another utilitarian datum.
But this strikes me as not quite right. I think we need to de-impoverish our conceptual apparatus for thinking about altruism more. I’m not sure we need to “flatten” things like working in one’s own community into either a category of self-interest (where we make a space for them alongside other forms of permissible consumption) or charity (where they probably compete poorly with bed nets). They can be their own category, at least if we’re willing to go at least as far as value-pluralist consequentialism.
And the moral motivations are at least prima facie different. When I give to BRAC, I do it because I think as a relatively affluent person (I AM THE 17%) I am obliged to help out those less fortunate, in a very generic sense (I also think BRAC scores high on some of the less quantifiable stuff above, but I’ve already written about them). I do the prison teaching because I feel like I have a special obligation to make my own community a better community. It’s not clear why these can’t coexist, or even need to be ranked.
Fuck, maybe it is just Kantian imperfect duties. Sorry, utilitarians.
* Blech.
** Fuck gated communities. They’re necrospaces.
*** This also opens the door to the question of why I work as an academic when I could have gotten a higher-paying job as a lawyer or businessman if I’d followed a different path.
**** I mean, yes, inevitable “there’s no such thing as altruism” assholes, I get warm fuzzies from the work. But I get warm fuzzies from donating to BRAC, too. Go read your Hume, but also that argument doesn’t make the distinction here at least.
“Home Brews” by J. Mark Dodd on Flickr.
Or, “not-necessarily-egalitarian communism,” perhaps. Basically, I hate to say it, but the hipsters making home brews and artisinal pickles and knitting socks and whatnot have a lot of it right.
Let me explain/thoroughly confuse the matter.
Lots of people who comment on communism – both those who criticize and those who praise, in my experience – and its practicability or lack thereof focus, understandably, on the famous slogan from the Critique of the Gotha Programme:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
In a perfect world, it would say “his or her” or “hir,” but, well, it’s not a perfect world.
I can see why there’s a focus on this, but it’s deeply problematic for understanding the communist argument, I think. And especially problematic for understanding what challenge communist and socialist ideas pose in the current US context.
Focusing excessively on this slogan distorts the conversation because it puts our emphasis on consumption. It makes it sound (to many) as if the communist utopia is defined by the second clause, as a world where everyone can have whatever they want. This raises obvious questions about how we secure the first clause – why will I work if I can get everything I want (or at least everything I need) by sitting on my butt all day?
But that concern reflects a concept of human good that is, I think, alien to Marx, and to most who find his ideas attractive. In particular, it assumes that work is essentially onerous, and so to be avoided whenever possible. Marx had a different perspective, attested to by something he says just before the more famous quote. He claims that the slogan can only be implemented “after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.”
In a nutshell, the argument is that each will contribute “according to his/her abilities” not in the hope of some further reward, but just for the sake of making the contribution. In fact, work that one does not see the point of is characteristic of alienated labor, which Marxists hope will disappear in a well-organized society. In other words, we shirk when we don’t see the point of what we’re doing.
Lots of folks will claim evidence of “human nature” on the side of the view that all we want to do is selfishly consume. But the evidence strikes me as sketchy in the extreme.
First, there’s just the anecdotal. What are your hobbies? Me, I’m sitting here writing a blog post when I take breaks from my paid work. I’m not getting paid for it. All I get to “consume” out of it is the satisfaction of creating something that seems halfway worthwhile. I bet you have similar hobbies. Maybe you make model airplanes, or get really good at a sport, or cook, or garden, or prep each year for NaNoWriMo. Even seemingly “passive” activities, like playing video games and whatnot, are often enjoyable because they provide ersatz accomplishment. You’re not playing the guitar, or shooting terrorists, or growing food, but it’s almost like that. I mean, this is the answer to the seeming paradox of games like FarmVille – why would someone spend their free time doing a simulation of repetitive labor? Because at least it’s repetitive labor that gives you a sense of creating something, and so many people seem to be desperate for that in their real lives.
In fact, part of the distortion of the whole consumption-focus might be that it’s not at all clear that there’s a such thing as pleasurable consumption on its own. Rather, I think Aristotle got it right – pleasure is part of an activity which develops or exemplifies a human excellence (1174a15-1176a30/X 4-5). Or, another way to put it, we always take pleasure in production, not consumption – things that seem like consumption (just listening to music, say) are really a kind of production (refinement of our appreciation of music) and treating them as a separate category distorts and degrades them.*
Practical upshot: if we think of consumption as its own thing, we’re going to get human nature very wrong. We’re going to look at the fact that people need certain kinds of material goods to keep their bodies working, and see increasing material goods as a means, rather than an end. We’re going to give people only some kinds of means of production: mp3s and not music education. We’re going to fetishize the product rather than the production: why would anyone want to tell stories around a campfire when the plots are likely to be derivative re-hashes of great works?
It’s not that what we call “consumption” is not production at all – it’s just that it’s a very thin slice of it. But we have a society in which is very easy to mistake that part of pleasure for the whole, and then end up unsatisfied. And it leads to two mistaken ideas about the economy. The first is that people will only produce if you give them the means to consume as an incentive. So, “human nature” means that we have to have gross material inequality. Bzzt. Human nature may well be – probably is – at least moderately self-centered and pleasure-seeking. But it’s a distortion of a world of alienated labor to think that being selfish means seeking only consumption. The pleasures of creating, including creating things that are of value to others because they can build their own creations on them, are very real and powerful.
The second is that, even when we try to help out the less fortunate, we risk conceiving our help very narrowly. Consumption is the slice of production that requires us, the powerful, to cede mostly some food and cheap plastic physical objects, but very little in terms of freedom, control, and respect. It’s a lot easier for me to say, “here’s $10, go buy some mp3s” than it is to say, “let’s democratize this workplace so you get a say in what kinds of things we produce instead of just which products you’re going to buy.”
It’s this misunderstanding that, e.g., leads Yglesias to grossly misunderstand class warfare.** In a nutshell, Yglesias argues that it’s class warfare when Obama wants to redistribute some income towards the poor and the GOP wants to redistribute some income towards the wealthy. Sure, if you’re poor, and those are your only two choices, Team Obama.
But that’s not class war. Maybe it’s an intra-class war, between two factions with different ideas of how to keep control. But the basic power structures remain the same: the means of production are privately owned and subject to more or less unlimited accumulation, concentrating decisions about what kinds of production are to be undertaken in the hands of a relatively small elite. We do call internecine fights among the folks who control those things “class war,” but it’s about as meaningful to do so as if we looked at the African theatre of World War I and called it “decolonization.”
This is where, I think, people tend to get misled by Marx’ slogan. “Communists want to take your hard-earned consumption and give it to the lazy!” That sounds horrible, and that’s how it sounds if you think of a) the point of work to be to gain the means of consumption and b) communism as basically about changing who gets the means of consumption.
But it’s not. In principle, I think, we might have a non-egalitarian communism. What’s central to communism is not the pattern of distribution of consumption, that very narrow kind of human activity going under the name. Rather, what’s central is that decisions about how to deploy the various material necessities for production available to a society are made in a way that involves broad social participation.***
It could be, that if we were all getting together as a society (or a syndicate, or whatever), we would decide to distribute various physical products in an inegalitarian way. Nothing would stop someone from saying, “look, I don’t want any of this stuff, let’s give it to that Bill Gates guy.”
An egalitarian or needs-based (let’s bracket arguments about whether they’re different) way of distributing physical goods isn’t, conceptually speaking, the only way that a social conversation about how to use the means of production might go. But I think Marx is led to his slogan because he thinks we would be stupid to have it go any other way.
If everyone was making the decision together, why would we give someone more power over decisions of what we should produce when he didn’t work any harder than anyone else? If we didn’t see ourselves as in competition for the only kind of production/consumption we were allowed, why would we, as human beings, decide to let someone starve or go without medical attention or dignity, just so we could produce things we don’t even care about very much? I think Marx is optimistic enough to think that we wouldn’t. If we were freed from the antisocial and stunted pursuit of “consumption” by being allowed to be full partners in production, we wouldn’t have to give according to our abilities and take only according to our needs, but we would.****
It’s only a combination of the (maybe true) thought that human nature is eternally somewhat self-centered with the (completely false) thought that self-interest consists in maximum consumption that makes our current way of doing things look free, and something like libertarianism look like an increase in “freedom.” That’s a swindle – the current system employs huge resources on one side in a class war (that’s largely triumphant), securing power in the hands of a pretty small elite and giving them unlimited rights to perpetuate that power. Pretending that more “freedom” lies on the side of your relatively powerless consumption being more determined by your individual worth to those who control the means of production (or, for that matter, lying on the side of your relatively powerless share being a more equal slice and less dependent on that individual worth) and that there’s a big fight over it hides how limited much freedom actually is.
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* This may be related to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “desiring-production,” but I’m not sure I fully understand that, so don’t take my word for it.
** Yglesias, if he gave two shits about what I thought, would probably (sincerely) say something like, “it was kind of a joke, dude.” But I’m not inclined to let him entirely off the hook – he seems to basically have liberal egalitarian intuitions, but be under the impression that you can satisfy them by post hoc redistribution by a welfare state. But Yglesias was a philosophy major, and so he should know that Rawls, father of contemporary liberal egalitarian philosophical thought, realized that laissez-faire capitalism was incompatible with justice, no matter how much redistribution you do after the fact.
*** State vs. non-state communism/socialism arguments, it seems to me, start here. The question is basically whether there could be anything recognizable as a state that reflected broad social participation or not.
**** He’s also maybe sneaky. What’s a need? Some are obvious, but I think he’s smart enough to realize that once everyone’s belly is full and nakedness covered, what you “need” is going to be defined in terms of the social system of value you participate in and help create. The liberties of the ancients and the liberties of the moderns have to be integrated all the way to the base of the system. Or, if that’s impossible, we’ve got a big problem that we need to face head-on instead of pretending it away.
Lauren and me at the final “fancy pants” party, summer 2006. Photo by Lindsay Moore.
Hey, for anyone expecting another combative post, sorry! This is going to be a bit more personal and boosterish.
On 22 January 2011, my friend Lauren Fleming died. I’ve already said about everything I have to say about it to about everyone I know who knew her, so this isn’t really going to be a post about her. It’s just a bit of context.
More context, but less important. 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).
I used to make my charitable donation as a lump sum on or around my birthday (since charitable organizations incur transaction costs on donations, other things equal you’re better off donating in larger amounts to a smaller number of organizations). But since Lauren’s death, I’ve been donating on or about January 22, in memoriam.
“Loan Process” by IFPRI-IMAGES on Flickr.
This is really just context and prologue to what I really wanted to talk about here, though, which is the organization I’ll be making my donation to this year: BRAC.
BRAC was founded as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Commission (though the acronym seems to have floated free of that particular meaning). Apparently it was originally just their founder putting some persons displaced by the cyclone up in his offices at Shell, where he was an accountant.
They have since expanded their operations massively, becoming by some reports the largest NGO in the world, with operations well beyond Bangladesh – it is also believed to be the largest NGO operating in Afghanistan (for most of the empirical claims, see the linked Economist and SSIR articles, by the way), and has operations in Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Haiti.
A big part of BRAC’s core operation is microfinance, but they follow a “microfinance-plus” approach. That is, one of its core businesses is microfinance, but it also provides education services (including a university), some advocacy, community-building, health care, etc.
There are a few key reasons to like BRAC.
First, and in many ways foremost, “it is a [global] Southern organisation from a poor country expanding to other poor Southern countries.” (10) This is important for moral and ideological reasons. It breaks up invidious tendencies to cast poor countries always in the victim, never in the agent role. It has less of a neo-colonial savor, which isn’t nothing. On a more direct, but still moral, level, it means giving money to aid workers who do not enter their work with the social and economic baggage that many Western aid workers do. For instance, BRAC employees are paid wages that are high for locals, and for Bangladeshis, but much more in line with local wages and standards of living. The Southern origin of BRAC is also practically important – it means that many of its workers will have a deeper understanding of the global poor live than even the best-informed and sincerest Westerner.
Second, it ranks high on sustainability. Though BRAC does accept donations (hence this post), about 80% of their operating budget comes from their own activities (like the microfinance and seed banks). Thought I’d throw something in there for my more business-minded readers.
Third, BRAC is very much involved in “frontline” services. They have a small advocacy unit, but the bulk of their work is still service provision, in a time when lots of the big Western NGOs are moving towards policy influence. Your mileage may vary on this – I have some skepticism about the ability to influence policy from the top-down, plus it’s my day job (sort of), so when I give money to aid I like to give it to groups that are largely focused on service provision.
There’s a worry here that I may have more to say about later on this blog – doesn’t direct service provision create dependence or a parallel government (that gets the real government off the hook)? I worry more about the latter than the former – I don’t really worry about the former at all – but at the same time aid conditionality has had a mixed track record at best. Where governments are bad, I don’t see a lot of evidence that starving them of aid makes them much better (not that we shouldn’t care about making them better), especially when the aid is direct service provision rather than support to the government’s own coffers. And direct support loses much of its moral lustre when the government already isn’t accountable to its people.
Fourth, on the other hand, warming the cockles of my policy-analysis heart, BRAC has a strong internal committment to monitoring and evaluation, including having a well-respected in-house research arm. Even groups critical of it – more on that in a sec – note its committment to evaluation. In addition, BRAC is pretty heavily studied – and generally found to have a positive impact on poverty and development – by outside academics.
Fifth, BRAC has, since 2002, been doing innovative work to help the “ultra-poor.” In a nutshell, the problem is that people at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder are often unable to benefit from the traditional development programs to get a leg up – e.g., microfinance or access to education may not help them much because they are too ill and malnourished, or too socially marginalized, to make effective use of them. To my eye, one of the most intriguing components of their approach is the community involvement angle. When BRAC starts up a poverty targeting program, one of the first steps is to engage the community in a participatory process of identifying the community members most in need and strategies to help them. Community involvement in the resources and the progress of those poor is then part of the ongoing strategy for addressing poverty. In part, apparently, this comes from the founder’s sensitivity to the ways in which social stratification in Bangladesh interfered with people coming out of poverty, which shows real insight (or maybe I’m just biased since it fits with the view I articulate in my own book, that social domination is the ur-vulnerability).
BRAC is, of course, not without its critics. In particular, I was a bit surprised and disconcerted to learn that GiveWell, an aid-evaluation org that lots of “let’s give more of our money to the poor” projects (like the two I link above) rely heavily on, does not recommend giving to BRAC.
But I will be honest that I cannot really tell why. The stated reason on their assessment page is that the research arm of BRAC does not provide any public evaluations of their employment or income programs (at the time of the 2009 review). But this seems to be at least partly inaccurate. For instance, BRAC’s research arm has a report on the employment impact of their grants to small and medium enterprises, dated 2005 (GiveWell claims they searched on relevant terms, but I found it with “employment”).
In addition, GiveWell seems to move the goalposts in their assessments. The only one of their top three charities that focuses on poverty alleviation (as opposed to medical research and implementation) is GiveDirectly, an org that transfers money directly to poor people in Kenya. Now, I have no problem with GiveDirectly – and I like their model, too. But GiveWell counts them as effective because there is evidence that they do in fact distribute their money, and there is no strong evidence (they feel) that the presumably good impact of giving poor people money is either not as good as it might seem, or that it is undercut by other bad effects. Meanwhile, their bar for BRAC is higher – not just that they conduct their programs, but that they be able to prove they alleviate poverty.
I’m happy to chat more about aid assessment methodology – it’s not my direct area of expertise, and something I’m still learning myself. But it leaves me pretty comfortable that giving to BRAC is a pretty good use of my money.
Of course, it doesn’t bring Lauren back.