Steve Harris - Condemned to Repeat It

De-merit

6/11/2021

On the face of it, a meritocracy sounds sufficiently laudable to rank right up there with mom and apple pie. So, how to explain the current turmoil over the idea that the “best” should rise to positions of power and leadership? As usual there are both historical, semantic, and implementation aspects of this issue.

In a premodern world, power (governmental positions/largesse, mercantile advantage) was typically distributed to those who were related to (or at least part of the same social set as) royal families, aristocracy and nobility. Kings’ younger brothers were made admirals and generals willy-nilly. Land was granted to the favorites of Queens (or mistresses). One of the most famous examples from late 19C Britain was the Cabinet appointment of Arthur Balfour by his uncle/Prime Minister Robert Cecil, Marquis of Salisbury. This elevation of his nephew gave rise to the term “nepotism,” (and also, the catch-all explanation of mysterious developments: “Bob’s your uncle”).

Increased professionalization of the military and the civilian bureaucracy in 18/19C Europe (and, e.g., the first US Civil Service Reform Act was in 1883), marked the shift to more professional management (of course, for centuries, China’s famous imperial service was based on a rigorous examination for wanna-be mandarins). As corporations increased in size and distance from their investors (late 19C-mid 20C) they, too, responded to competitive pressures by professionalizing their management. Standardized testing for academic admissions (the SATs began in 1926) expanded the scope of “merit”-based advancement in society.

From this perspective, it’s hard to see “meritocracy” as any sort of bad thing. As a marker of social progress, a manifestation of modern organized and rationally-based decision-making, both public and private sectors seemed poised to benefit from moving away from “who do you know?” as the standard of hiring/promotion in increasingly large and complex activities.

Still, there is no progress without downsides. Here, the idea that “merit” could be measured set up several problems. First was the conflation of the measurable with ability or value. People like simple answers and formal, statistically-based, well-organized decision-making structures fill the bill, regardless of whatever edges of judgment and insight are carved off in the process. The other was the other frequent human response of “gaming the system,” most famously manifest in test-cramming courses in several East Asian countries. If objective criteria are established, they can be targeted for success. This fosters an environment in which the selection process is more important than the underlying values for which the selection is made. Individuality is suppressed in favor of conformance. Resources are applied to secure success at the earliest possible logical step in the selection process (e.g., competition for private kindergarten schools in Manhattan) and carried to pathetic extremes (e.g., the recent college admissions scandals, perpetrated by very privileged/rich families).

The most insidious problem, however, was that people started to believe that the “merit” system was definitive (instead of a rough bureaucratic approximation). In other words, “merit” for purposes of selection/advancement was conflated with moral worth from a social perspective. This has had all sorts of pernicious effects. For example, most people would think that someone who scored well on academic tests or met thoughtfully-designed hiring/promotion criteria was better than someone who’s interests and values were not susceptible to the measurability/bureaucratic mentality. (why is it, exactly, that a being a lawyer is better than being a carpenter?) This is particularly true of those with “merit,” who tend to believe their own version of the “chosen people/elect of God” self-justifying worldview. Such an approach profoundly distorts society, government, business, employment, and personal life choices. [You can get a more detailed exploration of this issue from Michael Sandel, a pretty-insightful Harvard professor, here.]

Then, there is a rather large question of whether “merit,” even if it were an accurate assessment of moral value or individual capability, is fairly determined in our society. The standards for “merit” have been determined by a society with a long history of domination by white males from wealthy families and extraordinary opportunities. It can’t be surprising that their standards of “merit” reflect their own criteria of quality. But other people have other perspectives and it is possible (likely?) that the embedded structures are highly discriminatory.

Moreover, it seems pretty clear that “merit” is more a result of nurture than nature. Growing up in a stable, supportive family, access to attentive, challenging, and enriching educational and cultural experiences, physical and environmental health all are highly causative of “merit,” but they are not equally distributed in society. So, it’s no wonder that prototypical elite college freshmen have most of these advantages. We have to ask whether their “merit” is really theirs? [Full disclosure: I had all of these and a lot of them.]

Does that mean that those with “merit” aren’t relatively smart/capable? No. But it does undercut, in terms of both salaries and societal esteem, the idea that they “earned” it. It does undercut the idea that our society really believes in equality of opportunity as we often proclaim. It does undercut the idea that our standards for value and “merit” are really as objective as we might like to seem.

I’ve consistently put “merit” in quotes throughout this essay as a reminder of how easy it is to forget that it is a social construct. If we really believe in the quality of the individual matters, then we are losing out of a lot of talent. If we insist that “merit” is moral value, we are losing out on reframing our society to reflect a broader sense of value and ethics. We are not just harming those with less “merit,” we are harming ourselves.

____--Americans

6/4/2021

The language we use says a lot about us individually and the terms embedded in our cultural discourse, phrases we use without a second thought, say a lot about our society; in terms both of the various heritages present here in the US and of the way we see ourselves in the world. In my recent course on globalization, I have emphasized that the late 20C and early 21C have been characterized by a dramatic increase in global awareness/epistemology, especially among people in the US. As a big and dominant country, it’s been easy for centuries to ignore most of the rest of the world or at least push it to the back corners of our brains. That’s been changing and I’ve been thinking about how this development has shown up in my own life.

I was struck the other day while reading an article about political trends and the surprising failure of the Democrats to garner the bulk of the newly-expanded Hispanic-American voting population. The article noted that Cuban-Americans, especially in South Florida, tended to vote more Republican than Hispanic-Americans elsewhere and that certain groups of Hispanic-Americans in South Texas were more amenable to socially conservative stances. In other words, they didn’t fit their stereotypes as promoted by the political commentariat in which (all words in individual quotes—poor, striving, brown—immigrants were committed to social justice and the removal of “racist”/”reactionary” republicans.

The electoral implications of these revelations are significant, but my concern is how this incessant ethnic categorization is more broadly facile and socially destructive. In other words, using “Hispanic” to describe all people who have come to the US from Central and South America is coarse. Using it defines them principally as not quite American (as with other hyphenated categories) and makes that difference more important than their particular cultures or self-identities.

We use the term “Hispanic” about twenty times more frequently than we do “Mexican-American” even though those of Mexican heritage in the US comprise more than 60% of those of some Latin American origin. One need not go very much farther down Central America to realize that phrases such as “Salvadorean-American,” “Panamanian-American,” or “Paraguayan-American” are no real part of our language (or our thinking).

We can see the same phenomenon with regard to the recent concern about anti-“Asian-American” discrimination and hate crimes. Outside the question of “what kind of food shall we have tonight?,” there is little time for distinction between those of Chinese, Korean, Thai, or Philippine extraction. Have we, as a society, advanced only microscopically beyond “they all look alike”? The phrasing of “anti-Asian” hate crimes might at least be accurate insofar as it reflects the same coarseness of thinking and over-grouping of people from Asia by those who attack/discriminate hate. But using this term doesn’t reflect/respect the individuals attacked who have recently come from places whose cultures are at least as diverse as Europeans.

The language used with regard to those of European descent is clearly different. How often have you referred to/thought of someone as a “European-American”? The cultural dominance of Europe is so strong that our emphasis on national difference ensures we talk of “Italian-Americans” or “German-Americans” distinctly. Does anyone even use “Anglo-American” or “British-American” as a significant domestic ethnic identifier?

This practice pre-dates the rise of “identity politics” in the late 20C. Americans—mostly mongrel—seem sufficiently insecure of their “melted pot” identities to avoid insisting on ‘othering’ everyone else in sight. And we’ve not been troubled to be particularly precise about it at that.

I’ve noticed that the regular use of such phrases seems to far outweigh any possible benefit from whatever identification benefit might come from their use. In other words, when talking to a colleague about a student’s performance, why do I say “this Black woman wrote a great paper” or a “this Japanese guy didn’t know how to do use the Library”? There might be some benefit if my colleague was going to meet them (an identification benefit); but generally, that’s rare. More likely, we’re just talking about them as an example of student behavior. I suspect that I’m using this language more as a memory aid, with the unfortunate side-effect of gratuitously classifying the student in an irrelevant context. So, I’ve undertaken a conscious effort to drop the ethnic (& gender) adjectives unless there’s a specific benefit I can think of in the moment.

What this comes down to is being more mindful in my language (and thought). Most of us are well past the stage of using the classic ethnic slurs, despite what we might have seen/heard as we were growing up. I hope I am ready for another step forward.

As to the second aspect of this question, I have noticed that the default term of reference for US citizens (both how we use it and how others refer to us) is: “American.” Whether as a noun or an adjective, it’s everywhere. Of course, I’m not urging the mouthful of “United States of America” in everyday conversation; but I know there are a whole bunch of other countries in this hemisphere; all which are filled with “Americans.” Other than the fact that the US has been the most powerful country in the hemisphere for two hundred years, I can’t think why we should claim exclusive rights to the adjective “American.”

In my writing and academic speaking, I have tried to shift to “US” or “U.S.” instead. I know that there are other “United States” in the world (including the “United Mexican States”, and other historical references), but I think it’s a clear improvement, even if it’s awkward not to have a good casual substitute for “American.”

As a white male from the US, I have been deeply immersed in systemic “othering” for my whole life. I have some work to do to dig out.

Three-State Solution

5/28/2021

The latest round of violence in Israel and Gaza has revived debate about the feasibility of peace processes in the Middle East; that perennial epitome of futility. Jesus’ admonition has not prevented the casting of stones (much less rockets and smart bombs); despite the robust accumulation of sin on all sides.

Among the many distinctive attributes of this dispute is its reliance on history as a justification for claims of territory as well as of self-righteousness; much of which is nonsense. Not factually nonsense, of course. Jews have been in the neighborhood for thousands of years, although not particularly so in the five hundred years leading up to the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948 (and they haven’t been a majority since the 4C). As late as the start of WWI, they comprised just over 5% of the region’s population. Muslims arrived in the 7C and dominated the population since the 12C.

The larger question is what this might mean. What do the actions of my ancestors some generations back entitle me to? They moved (under a variety of circumstances and degrees of choice). Have Jews (or Hispanics, for that matter) established a right of permanent interest in various neighborhoods of Manhattan just because their ancestors lived there thirty or 130 years ago? Most Anglo-American legal systems have a concept called “adverse possession,” under which, if someone lives on “your” land for 30 or so years, they extinguish your claim. But law is one thing, and culture is another.

Historical resonance certainly was essential to the Zionist movement of the late 19/early 20C. European Jews, continually excluded/discriminated against felt that they, too, were entitled to their piece of the nationalist pie that led to the creation of Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, etc. What better place to send them than where they had “come from” (even if it had been a while)? Thus, the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which the British (by then having taken over the region from the Ottomans) accelerated a process of recognition, if not of right. European guilt over the Holocaust locked things in and a branch of Europe was set up to spread liberal democracy amid the benighted heathens.

Jewish claims are, therefore, a bit patchy, to put it kindly. On the other hand, the so-called “Palestinians” have comparably-sized holes in their own historical claims, even if based on a stronger record of continuous residence. The biggest one is that there is no “Palestine,” at least not in any meaningful sense until the local Muslims fled/were pushed out in the middle of the 20C when Israel was created. The Ottomans controlled the areas, using various configurations of administrative districts from their conquest in the 16C, until their empire collapsed in WWI. Claims of the locals to any sort of ethnic coherence (the usual starting point for any “national” status) below the level of “Arab” seem pretty much post-hoc, especially since many nearby folks happily became “Jordanian,” “Egyptian,” or “Lebanese” as borders shuffled around.

So, who are “Palestinians”? The ~700k people who were ousted/fled the territory occupied by Israel in 1947-8? Some went east (to the “West Bank”) others to the south-west (to “Gaza”). How about their 4.5M descendants today (only about 75K actual refugees are still alive)? Do they have anything in common otherwise (other than being abused by Israel and their own Arab confreres)?

To say that there is no “Palestinian” nation is, however, not to say anything about the fact that these people have been oppressed and abused. And that they are as entitled to peace, justice, security, and opportunity as anyone else. Israel has thrown away much of its moral stature in its treatment of Arabs both within in boundaries and those in the West Bank and Gaza. The record of Arab countries is (only marginally) better. People without power have been cruelly used by established elites on both sides. It’s no wonder that their anger boils over. It’s no wonder that they seek the status and apparent security of their own state.

The resort to history on all sides is a result of their status and behavior in the current environment and recent (since WWII) past. But it is, as we have seen, no panacea; it’s just a distraction.

We live in a world of nation-states and, despite the historical dubiousness of the concept or its lack of utility in the future, such statehood seems a necessary attribute of societal organization/growth in the early 21C. Israeli Jews have a (not unreasonable) fear that they would be ‘drowned in a sea of Arabs’ if all the refugee/descendants were combined into a larger Israel (the “one-state” solution). Israel, itself isn’t going away. As Secretary of State Kerry said a few years ago to Israel: “You can have a democratic state, or you can have a Jewish state; you can’t have both.” Thus, more-or-less officially on all sides since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the hopes for peace have rested on a “two-state” (Israel + Palestine) solution.

It won’t fly. I doubt it would have worked even before the Fatah/Hamas split of the past 30 years has embedded an animosity in some ways deeper than that between Arabs and Jews. Once Hamas took over the government of Gaza in 2007 and Fatah continued to govern in the West Bank, the chances of reconciliation have dimmed. Nor is there any particular reason (other than this dubious claim of commonality), why there should be one “Palestinian” state. All their connections would find Israel in the middle; Arab-oriented cultural and economic ties would push them outward, towards Jordan and Egypt, respectively. It is reminiscent of the creation of Pakistan in 1947, two Muslim-dominated regions on the flanks of India. That fell apart in a messy war in 1971.

So, why not a three-state solution? Assuming both groups of Arabs could agree on who got to use the term “Palestine,” it might work. Hamas and Fatah could go their own separate ways (no different than Jordan and Syria). People could look to the future and build some peace and prosperity. All that would be lost is the chance to argue over history (best left to academic conferences) and the myth of a coherent “Palestine” which has fed so much hate, anger, and pain for the past 75 years.

Representing the People

5/21/2021

As part of my intermittent series on constitutional changes, today’s topic is rethinking the nature of representation in the US House of Representatives. My idea is a bit radical, but it would bring many benefits, along with some risks inherent in changing a long-standing institution. I have been noodling on this idea for some time, but the rise of remote work during the past year has increased the feasibility of my concept.

Modern representative democracy was invented in Philadelphia in 1787. The premise was that competent people with a stake in society (i.e. males, white, not slaves, usually with some degree of wealth) should be in charge. However, unlike the model democracy of ancient Athens (also limited to males, not slaves) there were too many of them and they were spread out over too big an area to get together in one place to sort things out on a regular basis. Over the following two hundred years, the number of such males increased, Blacks and women were included and wide-spread education enhanced the capabilities of voters to understand the issues which they charged their representatives to resolve. We have now come to the point where we accept that every adult has a recognizable stake that needs to be represented.

The Founding Fathers believed that a close connection between the people and their representatives was essential. Debates at the Constitutional Convention looked to ratios of one representative to 30,000-50,000 people. With the growth of the population, the average congressional district (2020 census) now has over 760,000 people. By contrast, only California and Texas have larger state legislative districts (State Senate districts are almost a million people and over 800k, respectively), but most have a lower house members representing fewer than 50,000 people. Similarly, on a world-wide basis, only India has larger districts (2.2M/seat) than the US House.

Among the many problems with our current system is that representatives hardly know anybody (other than wealthy donors) in their districts. Another problem is that with the demands of being “on-site” in Washington, they can’t spend all that much time in their districts (yes, even Congresspeople should get vacations (other than to Cancun)). Finally, with the size of districts, it costs a lot of money to run, so members have to spend a disproportionate amount of time fundraising for re-election.

The idea of representation is important. I’m not great fan of plebiscitary democracy on any sort of on-going basis. Issues are complex and need more focused attention than almost all folks have the time/education for. Still, in one essential way, I’d like to go back to where we were in the 18C. One representative for every 40,000 people. A House of Representatives of just over 8,000 members. And, most of the time, they would live and work in their districts; conducting most votes and hearings and meetings remotely.

The main benefit of this model is that representatives would actually be in touch with their constituents. Since most of their “Washington work” would be done remotely (just proved-in via the Pandemic), they would be in the neighborhood a lot. People could actually be in touch with their representatives and might have a little more connection with the political process.

In addition, Small districts wouldn’t require much money for elections, so there wouldn’t be a need to focus on fundraising. Communities would be represented, reducing both the demand for and feasibility of gerrymandering. Corporate and other big-moneyed interests still couldn’t afford to overwhelm members, reducing the impact of lobbyists and generally breaking out of the “inside-the-Beltway” mentality that distorts much of US policy-making.

Occasionally mooted incremental increases in the size of the House don’t really solve any problems other than slightly reducing district size. Even doubling the House (a thousand House districts each with 331,000 people would take us back to the ratios of the 1940s) would still require doubling the House infrastructure in the middle of Washington DC, not to mention finding a room for them all to meet. Still not much chance of knowing your Congressperson (or vice-versa).

There are several risks/problems associated with this idea (besides the inertial thinking of incumbents). Committee staffs would likely gain sway in the legislative process (how about creating 10 regional centers around the country where committees would be based, further dispersing DC power?). Ditto for the federal bureaucracy. The sociology or organizational dynamics of this new House are hard to predict. A variety of new means of communications and negotiation methods and technologies would need to be explored. Party structures and the House “leadership’s” management of the flow of business would need to be rethought.

More fundamentally, our political structure has become like the weather: “everybody talks about it, but no one does anything about it.” We need a radical shift to ‘shake up’ the system: the sclerosis , the alienation, the inundation of money.

House districts of 40,000 people would mean that San Francisco would have 22 representatives (twice the number of the Board of Supervisors) and an average district would be a bit over two square miles: this is what community representation would look like. Oakland County, Michigan, where I grew up, filled with suburbs of various socio-economic mixes, would have 32 representatives. Even Wyoming, the epitome of rural America (49th in density) would have 15 seats, each about twice the size of a state Senate district. With so much local community representation, what would be the point of gerrymandering? Would it even be feasible?

Local representation would mean that the locus of representation would return to the relationship between citizens and their representative, away from the political/media/money hothouse of Washington, D.C. It would be a bold step towards a new mode of democracy in America.

Forever Wars

5/14/2021

The recent announcement that US troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 has brought forth the predictable spate of hand-wringing about military futility and “sending American boys [and, now, girls] to die in far-off, foreign lands.” Without entering the debate about the specific opportunities and costs faced by the US in this decision, it struck me as indicative of the common fallacy faced by military strategists and planners for centuries, i.e., fighting (or, in this case, not fighting) the “last war.” Curiously, this over-sensitivity to history is paired with the US’ usual lack of awareness of military history generally and our sense of entitlement as to what kind of wars we should be engaged with.

The nature of war has changed pretty dramatically over the years, often driven by new technologies (e.g., stirrups, rifling, motors, computers), tactics, logistics, and national cultures (e.g., the levee en masse during the French Revolution brought about the era of mass armies and total national participation in the war effort). In (some of) our own lifetimes, we have seen the rise of highly mobile and mechanized forces and planes and missiles projecting force at distance: the stretch from WWII to Vietnam to Desert Storm.

How well military thinkers have adapted to these changes in the 21C is a topic for another day. My concern here is with how the general population perceives and understands how wars work and their resulting expectations. Taking down Saddam Hussein (2003-2010) was, from a military perspective, pretty comparable to prior actions. The war in Afghanistan was another kettle of fish entirely. No lines, no fronts, embedded guerilla opponents, weakly maintained government in “controlled” areas; all a la Vietnam, only more so. The difference with Vietnam is that the earlier conflict was all about territorial control and stabilizing our local proxy government. In Afghanistan, the goal was global terrorism suppression: eliminating one country as a hub of radical Islamic terrorism. It’s not clear, even if we had “won” in Afghanistan, that we would have accomplished our goal.

It’s really hard for an organized state army to defeat motivated and well-supported guerillas. In Vietnam we finally realized that we couldn’t and quit (as did the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the British in the 19C). As we found lately in Iraq (and Libya) nation-building is also really hard and requires at least a couple of generations. It’s taken us much longer to come to terms with this in Afghanistan, but to the same result, because nation building was only a means to a global end.

From a domestic perspective, the US left Vietnam because of military frustration and difficult PR undermined popular support for the massive number of troops necessary to fight and even have a shot at winning. The war in Afghanistan avoided that problem by keeping US troop levels (under 30K, except for the Obama “surge” from 2009-13, and only briefly hitting 100k) and casualties (under 2500 deaths) relatively small. But this was not sufficient to withstand the rising weariness with the war (even if domestic protests were proportional to the US casualties, compared to Vietnam).

So, what was the problem? I think we just got bored with the “Global War on Terrorism.” Any war that we couldn’t win reasonably quickly wasn’t worth fighting. This attitude comes from our 20C experience of wars (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm) in which victory parameters were clear and—win-or-lose—resolvable at some sort of peace conference. 21C war against non-state actors, principally anti-terrorist/guerilla in nature, requires changing (as they said in Vietnam) “hearts-and-minds.” Its slow and arduous work. It also requires thinking non-spatially. Maps (at least at the strategic level) aren’t much use; it’s not about controlling territory, but changing people. It’s a different kind of war and we don’t have the patience for it.

US attitudes are also colored by the fact that most of us don’t know what war is actually like. There hasn’t been a sustained war on US territory in over 150 years (and the only one in the last 200 was a domestic war). The last “all-in” mobilization was over 75 years ago (16 M served, over 10% of the total population; for Vietnam, it was 2.7M or only 1.3%, Afghanistan, even if twice as long, is even less). Vietnam was unique visible because of TV coverage, but the war in Afghanistan gets only a tiny fraction of media attention compared to Vietnam.

As a result, we face the political issue of maintaining a war that is unwinnable in the short-to-medium term, without the support of people who aren’t so much opposed to it as bored or mystified by it. The esprit de corps which might have animated us if the war were on our territory, visible or clear-cut is lacking. The (potentially dire) consequences of giving the Taliban a breather seem too distant as a motivation either. Domino theory rationalizations for sending US troops half-way around the world went out of style fifty years ago.

Nonetheless, established states and societies remain at risk from asymmetric disruptive forces which take advantage of our complacency and our unwillingness to deal with a mode of warfare in which don’t fit into neat military tactics and John Wayne-style denouements. The story of military technology over the past 500 years has been the dispersal of power, not its concentration in formal state organizations. This has not only heightened the risk from biological/cyber/nuclear attacks but enabled a wider range of those dissatisfied with the existing global political order to support disruption for longer and for less money than ever before.

The era of relatively short, well-defined wars is not over, but it’s no longer the only game in town. If those—on both the left and the right—don’t have the attention span to recognize that a much more determined, strategic, stance is necessary to fight a quasi-permanent form of warfare, then things will get messier, sooner.

Flunking out of the Electoral College

5/7/2021

As part of my intermittent series on US Constitutional issues, today I am taking on the venerable Electoral College component of the US election system. In prior discussions, I have touched on the undemocratic distortions in the US Senate (10/09/20), the need for a fourth branch of government (12/11/20), reforming federalism (02/19/21), and the general need for a wholesale rewrite of the Constitution (02/05/21). In an upcoming posting, I will take on the composition of the US House of Representatives. Compared to these, the Electoral College seems like easy pickings.

Recent discussions of the Electoral College have pointed out that the Democrats have won the popular vote for President seven times in the last eight elections, only to be “robbed” by the anachronistic electoral college on two of those occasions. Most then jump to a call for moving to a national election by total popular vote. In so doing, they combine their critiques of several aspects of the Electoral College and thus skip over an intermediate solution (which, given our deep propensity for incremental change) may well be more likely.

To be specific, there are three problems with the current structure.
1. Voting by states – Our current (since 1787) system is based on a union of independent states, each casting its own votes on its own terms.
2. Small states bonus – Since the Electoral College provides that each state have a number of votes equal to the sum of its House and Senate seats, small states have a disproportionate share of the vote. This is comparable to the problem with the Senate’s democratic deficit.
3. Winner-take-all – Each state casts all its votes for the candidate who won a plurality of the popular vote in its election.

There are other issues, such as the problem of “faithless” electors, but, as with fraudulent popular voting, this is talked about far more than the actual practice.

One could design a revised approach that solves one, two, or all three of these concerns (in several combinations).

Before getting to potential solutions, it is worth noting that very few (none?) other countries have similar problems. Many use a parliamentary system (even if they have a ceremonial President) which, by definition depend on multiple parties/individuals having a share of power, unlike a Presidential system in which there is only one person at the top. Prime ministers usually must win their own seats and then are elected to head up the government by the collective vote of the other parliamentarians. Countries with the presidential system (e.g. France, Russia, and many of the countries established in the 20C) are unitary, not federal, systems; so there are no sub-units whose representatives would choose a national president. Finally, the vast majority of countries were established in the 20C or sufficiently late in the 19C so that their democracy assumes an informed, widespread popular electorate; unlike our system which was created in the 18C when literacy was low and most ordinary citizens (e.g. a farmer in Pennsylvania) had little means of knowing anything about a Governor/Senator from other state who might be a contender for national leadership.
The “winner-takes-all” mode seems to be the biggest problem. It has pernicious effects, particularly the effective disregarding of ‘minority’ voters in states with a substantial party majority (e.g. California or Wyoming). Of course, since it is likely that a fair number of Californians or Wyomingites know how their state will vote in any presidential election; they don’t think it’s worth their time to vote and we can only guess how close a vote would be if all votes counted. The other problem is that all media and campaign attention gets focused on the “battleground” states which distorts coverage, understanding, and political positions. (The benefit is that those of us in those states are spared unceasing advertising and get-out-the-vote phonebanks/robocalls).

However, the “winner-take-all” mode is NOT a constitutional issue. It’s up to each state to determine how to allocate their electoral college votes. Many have joined together to enact conditional laws shifting to some form of allocation based on majority national popular vote, once other states with a majority of electoral college votes do so (currently states representing 193 votes out of the necessary 270 are signed up).

This effort, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, is not a bad patch on a broken system, but it’s definitely a ‘work-around’ for the absence of more basic constitutional change. It is a voluntary surrender of state sovereignty in favor of a national political coherence. It would likely address much of the general popular concern with the current electoral college system. However, for die-hard originalists, any change risks opening the flood-gates of constitutional modernization and is to be resisted, even if to no substantive purpose (analyses show no long-term partisan effect of getting rid of the “winner-take-all” mode or other aspects of the current system).

Still, a constitutional amendment would be preferable as part of a more comprehensive solution; particularly one that addressed the other two failings.

As I argued previously, we should remove federalism from all aspects of the national electoral process and reserve it to questions of governmental jurisdiction and operations. We are no longer a country made up of states; we have a national political culture and state boundaries play no role in how we should address questions of national policy.

Similarly, the small state bonus—a remnant of the 1787 compromise to protect small states and southern states (and their slavery laws)—should go by the board. I could even see small states agreeing to give up their rights here in return for preserving some extra clout in the Senate; should it come to that.

The downside is the need to go through the arduous amendment process; which is difficult in ordinary circumstances (38 states required), and much more challenging in our fraught political environment. Of course that same set of atmospherics makes the Compact route almost as difficult. So, the Electoral College in its current form is likely to be with us for a while until there is a sea change in our political culture.

Avocational Education

4/30/2021

Among the many challenges facing higher education in the US (even pre-COVID) is coming to terms with the changing nature of college students and figuring out how to be effective institutions in our society. (I should emphasize that the points made here are quite generalized and not tied to any individual or particular groups.)

Most colleges, for all their reputation as hotbeds of political liberalism are, in terms of institutional culture, quite conservative. There are many causes of this (perhaps the subject of another post), but the effect is that changing their educational mission/philosophy/approach is extremely difficult.

Back in ‘the day,’ colleges were seen as sites for adolescent socialization and for what I might call “avocational” education. There was no straight line from studying the liberal arts to a job on Wall Street or main street. As with many cultural artifacts, the popular, embedded image of college is tied to the “liberal arts.” Many of us had a background and outlook that encompassed this approach. So, too, did most of those in college faculties and administrations.

In the 21C, many things have changed: much broader enrollment, much more diverse faculty and student body, and an expansive public culture around the correlation between a college degree and lifetime earnings/American Dream. This campaign has generally been successful in increasing percentages of young adults going to college, but that very success has contributed to the dilution of the economic benefit of a college education itself.

Simultaneously (causal relationships are not clear), educational demands on the workforce have increased and the percentage of high-end jobs (previously the implicit right of a college graduate) has gone down. The result is that college is becoming principally a matter of educating a middle-to-lower middle sector of the work force, as well as training “better” students for the post-graduate education which is increasingly required for the top-level jobs.

The “flip-side” of this has been the oft-noted “hollowing-out” of the “middle class” in the US.

The upshot is that all jobs require more education; at least a “college education,” even if the resulting status and average earnings of college graduates is not what it used to be. However, most colleges (by which I focus on large public universities and smaller, non-elite private schools) haven’t re-thought their purpose and offerings. Student demand for job-focused courses, often egged on by anxious parents, has increased. Demand for apparently “irrelevant” liberal arts/humanities courses has been steadily dropping. Well-rounded education to foster new generations of adults/citizens is giving way to vocational education for a relatively less-well-off sector of the rising generation.

Even more troubling are the relatively weak educational foundations the average college student brings upon matriculation, both in terms of substantive knowledge and, more importantly, basic writing and analytic skills. This pressures colleges to back-fill for high school education, making it even more difficult to move students towards knowledge and skill levels previously expected.

At one level, traditional elites can easily bemoan the decline of the humanities and the breadth of education as a dilution of the way college “should be.” At another level, however, while the percentages of college students taking such courses are down, it’s not clear that the percentage of 25-year-olds in general who ever took more than a couple of college liberal arts courses is declining. It’s just that a significant number of them are now taking vocationally-oriented courses in college, whereas before they either went into the workforce after high school, community college, or some other training.

This presents a host of problems around rethinking the nature of college education (still run by administrators and faculty with a liberal arts bias) as well as a challenge to how we think about the education of citizens. National governments are ill-equipped to deal with the increased integration of the global labor market and rise of automation; leading to anti-democratic (Trumpian?) pressures. We may soon learn the degree to which democracy is a long-term human teleology supported by principle and rational, thoughtful citizens or just a phenomenon that is historically contingent upon the presence of a middle-class (educated, reasonably well-off economically).

Beyond the civic aspects, it also seems that parental pressures and other short-term thinking (unsurprising for young people) is leading them astray by pushing them away from liberal arts and educational breadth. The labor market will only get more dynamic over the coming decades (both within and across “careers”), at least in those sectors to which college graduates aspire. There is little chance of colleges providing adequate long-term vocational education, so such graduates will be on their own. A vocational focus in college also limits their exposure to critical thinking and communications skills which are already sought by employers and will be essential to adapt to the long-term labor market.

There are no “magic wands” to resolve these concerns. Institutional sclerosis is widespread both at the collegiate level and more broadly in the educational system. Our society has underfunded education for decades, and the cultural infrastructure of family/community support for study necessary to ensure social and substantive foundations for well-educated adults will take a couple of generations to repair, even if we start promptly.

Of course, it may well be that replicating the past is impossible and foolish; even focusing on “correcting” for past deficits may be just “fighting the last war.” We need some broad and radical rethinking here; precisely the kind of thinking for which our graduates are increasingly ill-prepared.

Global Democracy

4/23/2021

While Americans are agitated by debates over voting rights/suppression and global surveys bemoan democratic decline in a widening group of countries; now may not seem like an opportune moment to consider whether and how we might move towards a fully-integrated global democracy. Domestic democracy is a global norm and the nominal form of virtual every government. International organizations have proliferated in recognition of the trans-national nature of many routine governmental functions and upcoming challenges (e.g. pandemics or climate). Is there a route to either a fully proportional world government or even a direct democracy (one-global person=one vote)? I think we’re a long way off, but not for reasons tied to recent developments.

In 2016, while criticizing Israel’s intransigence in dealing with local Muslims, then-Secretary of State John Kerry said: “Israel can either be Jewish or democratic — it cannot be both.” It was an acute observation that neatly captured the security dilemma of a state that combines a staunchly-defended identity with liberal/cosmopolitan aspirations. The same concern, writ large, also faces the incumbent Western dominated global power structure and explains why global democracy is a (very) long term prospect. In other words, the world can be Western/liberal/progressive/ Enlightened or it can be democratic—it cannot be both.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, where the “Concert” of (European) Great Powers agreed to work together and, along the way, kept the dozens of smaller fry out in the anteroom while they sorted out what we would call “geopolitical” issues. This was the first effort at on-going international cooperation which spawned, in the 20C and on a now-global stage, the League of Nations and, later, the UN. In both cases, the “Great Powers” preserved a distinctive status and power, the better to protect themselves against the mass of smaller states who might out-vote them if everything was a ‘one-state, one-vote’ system.

We can see similar concerns in the structure of both the US government and the European Union, where balances were struck between the “equality of states” claims of smaller members and heft of the potentially dominant larger states. In the US, we have a Senate with equal representation of the states and a House where California has 50+ times the weight of Wyoming. In the EU, a more complex, weighted-voting system was adopted.

On a global scale, the “Western” countries total well less than 1B people, a bit over 10% of the total world population, even while their share of global GDP is about 50% and their share of military power (as measured by spending) is over 2/3. While long-term development trends will ameliorate these discrepancies, the mis-match over the next fifty years is clear. Territorially-organized nations states will remain the fundamental mode of global political organization, both on a domestic basis and in terms of international organizations. Barring the arrival of extra-terrestrials or a global climate or pandemic cataclysm, the chances of the moving towards global democracy—i.e. population-weighted voting at the international level (much less direct democracy based on the model of one global person=one vote)—will remain a distant idealistic dream.

As I noted in my piece on Sci-Fi governments, the only other models on offer depend on the elimination of the nation-state as the central premise of global political organization. Current political leaders (whether of the Trump/Bolsonaro/Orban/Xi variety or of a more liberal bent) are unlikely to crack this essential epistemological component of the modern world.

Still, it will be interesting to see if and how India and China, as the two largest (by far) countries in terms of population start making noises about “majoritarian” mind-sets. We might also see some movement in that direction from countries whose population is set to put them in the top group over the next few decades (e.g. Indonesia (currently #4) , Brazil, Nigeria (perhaps overtaking the US for #3 in 25 years), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Congo, Tanzania, Ethiopia). This trend will be exacerbated by the long-term decline in Western birthrates, of which Japan is the leading example.

How the “democratic” countries of the West react to being hoist on the petard of their own liberal, one-person, one-vote rhetoric and domestic structures will be fascinating. Certainly there will be carping about the democratic defects of these parvenues (or at least those defects to which non-Western states uniquely susceptible). Shortcomings in the US (Georgia voting rules and electoral college), the EU (toothless parliament), UK (monarchy and House of Lords) will be bandied about in return.

Even disregarding these democratic defects, the working assumption of the liberal/progressive/Enlightened/cosmopolitan elites has been comparable to the standard of “civilization” which European empires applied in the 19/20C to determine who was worthy of recognition and inclusion in the “family of nations.” The current version, there is a belief (hope?) that the laggards will catch up (India has been key here) and join the club of already “enlightened/civilized” societies, thereby enabling and justifying a semi-utopian world government in which the global management of democratic norms could be safely entrusted to the now-adult countries who had emerged from their tutelage (with a nod to the echoes of Greece-->Rome and Britain-->US). But just as Rome and the US went their own (respective) ways, so, too the shape of global governance in the 21/22C will be determined more by India/China/Nigeria/Indonesia/Brazil than Europe (and perhaps even than the US). Indeed, it must if the one-person: one-vote standard is to be achieved.

So, the incumbent powers face a dilemma: whether to honor their own mythologies and rhetoric or to retain power (UN vetoes, IMF appointments) until they are confident that the late-comers are sufficiently aligned (co-opted/indoctrinated?) so that things can be safely handed-off to them to preserve these aspirations. Recent developments (nationalistic/nativistic governments, repression of democratic mechanisms, apathy) make this more difficult; but the fundamental issue is that global power (economic/military) will trump democracy and demographics for a long time to come.

Pop. Culture

4/16/2021

Concerns with the pace of global population growth have been circulating even before Malthus (1798) made them coherent which led to a new science of demographics in the 19C. These concerns made a great revival fifty years ago with Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. All this was before the huge uptick in the global growth rate which began in the late 20C.

Year               Global Population (M)         Annual Growth Rate
1000 (est.)                268                                       .1%
1820                      1,042                                       .2%
1950                      2,524                                       .7%
2000                      6,149                                     1.8%
2050 (proj.)           9,640                                        .9%

Malthus was concerned about the adequacy of food supplies and argued that our species’ proclivity to procreate would consistently outstrip our ability to produce food. Agricultural improvements, including the “green revolution” of the mid-20C more than outstripped those fears, even factoring in longer life expectancies that have come from better health and sanitation. However, recently, the anxiety has been based on our greater awareness of the impact on the environment and the various ways of looking at the planet’s “carrying capacity.”

Future projections of global population growth (as to which there is a wide variation) must contend with a couple of apparent trends: 1) declining birth rates associated with increased urbanization, wealth, and education, especially as relatively poor countries (often characterized by the suppression of women) become more “modern,” and 2) disturbingly high continued growth projections for sub-Saharan Africa.

If the latter concern can be resolved (perhaps by the former), then the chances of total exhaustion of global resources (especially in light of emerging technologies) appear to be receding. The caveat here is continued inequality of global wealth. Stated simply: poor people use less. Global GDP per capita is about $16,000; for the (relatively rich) OECD countries as a group, it’s about $40,000 (& $62,000 for the US). If everyone in the world started living at OECD rates (not at all likely), then the strain on the planet would be overwhelming. And the alternative of everyone moving to the global average of $16,000 is even more difficult to imagine.

So, let’s assume that current levels of income inequality are only slightly trimmed and turn back to the population growth story. If there really is something to the decline of birth rates with increased urbanization, wealth, and education, as is borne out by all the economically advanced countries (esp. Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy), then could we see a time at which the global population actually went down. Certainly, even by UN projections for later in the century, this is a real possibility.

I recently read a somewhat breathless and generally-mediocre treatment of this scenario (Bricker and Ibbitson, Empty Planet (2019)). There are some real concerns about its implications: labor-market adjustments, the burdens from a reduced number of workers supporting a relatively high number of retirees, and (according to a more recent and considerably more cogent economic analysis by Charles Jones) reduced innovation, and human knowledge.

I’m not going to critique either of these works, but I do have a problem with some of their implicit assumptions, particularly the widespread and deeply embedded belief that “growth is good.” First, traditional measures of economic growth, almost by definition, ignore/externalize environmental effects. So, the cost of global economic growth, especially since the industrial “revolution,” has assuredly been significantly understated.

Second, the case for growth is usually made by those who benefit from long-term economic inequality. It’s much easier to tamp down the political risks of poverty by holding out the possibility of “growing out of it” than by structuring a more equal society; in other words, the generic growth argument is premised in part on a version of “trickle-down” economics.

Third, much of the growth mantra (both economic and demographic) has come from national discourses which are based on inter-national competitiveness. France, for example, was seized in the later 19C with dread at “falling behind” Germany (it turned out that they were right about their fears, though its much less clear that another 10M Frenchmen in 1914 or 1940 would have changed the course of either war). This kind of competitive mind-set may be morphing as the concept of global democracy gains a bit of traction in the 21C (of which more next week).

Finally, while there is certainly something to be said for the benefits of innovation and technology, there is also something to be noted in terms of its costs, even beyond the environmental. Modernity is all about change and later modernity has been all about accelerating change. At the same time, we can look at the profound psychological and societal dislocations that have resulted (including well-established tropes about alienation, disconnection, ennui, loss of community/context). The balance is not so clear.

It would be interesting, at least as a thought exercise, to consider what the world would be like with a lot fewer people, slower economic growth (&greater income equality), even with some slowdown in the rate of technology development.

The recent spike in global population would take a while to work off and reverse, but what would a world with 2.5B people look like, even if it took another 100-150 years? That would take us back to the levels of 1950.

It’s hard to get our heads around that kind of scenario and guess what aspects would continue and what would be reversed. There was plenty of growth and optimism back in 1950; technology developed at a robust pace. What if we went back to a US with 150M people, but now most lived in cities (more ecologically efficient); with extensive renewable power systems (much less traffic), and in an economic context that didn’t demand greater soul-sucking productivity?

What if we took economic gains currently envisioned and deployed them to a more equitable distribution, both domestically and globally?

Our culture’s fixation on growth (for reasons noted above) is not the only way to live. Maybe a drop in global population could spur a very different type of thinking, who knows where we might end up….?

Bhutan

4/9/2021

I’ve been lucky enough to travel to lots of obscure corners of the world, far beyond European Capitals and famous sites of natural beauty. But one place to which I have returned over the years is the mountain kingdom of Bhutan and there’s a good chance I will go back again pretty soon (post-Pandemic).

There was certainly some component of exoticism in my decision to go for the first time, 23 years ago this month. Recently married, I was eager to get back to my earlier pattern of wanderings. I prevailed on my bride to join me in this exploration (although the itinerary’s delight in announcing the availability of hot-and-cold running water almost put her off). Six years later, we went again and, while I went off with most of the group on a trek in the mountains, she stayed in “town” and we arranged for her to teach a decorative arts workshop in the local middle school. Ten years after that (2014), I went for a third visit, this time introducing three dear friends of long-standing to the place and people they had heard me talk about for many years.

One of the main draws for me has been to witness and learn from Bhutan as one of the few places which is connected to the global sprawl of modernity, but which is trying to consciously manage its own encounter with that epistemology. Western imperialism and the sparkly lures of capitalism and technology have swamped most parts of the world; most local cultures didn’t stand a chance. Plastic shoes and T-shirts with knock-off logos can be found in the most startling locations on earth. This is not to say the Bhutanese are wholly averse to the things we take for granted, but they do so (if I may overgeneralize a bit) thoughtfully and with a commitment to maintaining their culture while they interface with the wider world.

Part of this is due to the profound resonance of Buddhism. Bhutan is part of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (the name Bhut-an actually means the “end of Ti-bet”). It is the only country that has Buddhism as a state religion. The country’s isolation until the later 20C has enabled the religion’s continued vibrancy and the reverence of the people makes it stunningly different from the noise and bustle of e.g., Bangkok or the sensation in nearby Nepal of being overrun with tourists. Buddhism is embedded in Bhutan in a way hard for those of us from a “modern” Christian-rooted, secular-trending culture to fully grasp.

Bhutan has become (relatively) famous for its concept of “gross national happiness,” which was articulated by the 4th King (the now-retired father of the current King) in 1972. GNH has since been adopted as the government’s foundational policy goal. It symbolizes a priority for the qualitative over the quantitative, for social and cultural harmony over economic development. This is a laudable aspiration, but one should not confuse Bhutan with Shangri-La. By Western development standards, Bhutan is a poor country and there are serious issues about its treatment of Nepali and other Hindus.

Nor is Bhutan immune from modernity (nor COVID (although it was well-managed)). During our second trip (2004) we visited the first (only?) disco in the country. By 2014, electrification had reached a considerably majority of villages and I had to remind our local trip leader that extended conversations with his friends on his mobile phone disrupted the purpose of our trek. Some of the ills of modernity (medical and moral) have come along with internet access.

These developments are important reminders that the Bhutanese are not there for our touristic pleasure, like the re-enactors in Colonial Williamsburg. We might wish to see the way life “used to be,” but the Bhutanese are no less entitled to electrification and inoculations than are Texans or Turks. At the same time, while the colorful festivals and quiet temples continue to exist for the people, not for tourists; they are amazing at several levels.

Beyond the culture at a broad level, Gina and I have been fortunate to connect to individuals who have shown us immense kindness and generosity. These experiences, on walks, in homes, or in more formal settings are worth at least as much as the sites and public events. These sorts of things do happen in travels to Australia or other parts of Asia, etc. but there seem to have been more of them in Bhutan than the time we have spent there would predict.

Yes, London is different than New York, and San Francisco is different from Shanghai, but Bhutan’s different-ness is different. It is not primitive (a la tribes in New Guinea or the Amazon), but it is not-so-modern. Therein lies its ability, for those of us from the “West” to open doors of serenity and perspective. To be sure, its different-ness has lessened some over the years that I have been going; but watching the process (progress?) has been rewarding on its own terms.

I have been working with the Bhutan Foundation on some projects relating to democracy education and tree planting; and lately, we’ve talked about me making a fourth visit (perhaps next year) to check them out. Something to look forward to….

Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.

I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

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