White Courtesy Telephone

The Island of the Yooks and the Zooks: Notes on the Systems Heresy

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In philanthropic and nonprofit work, discussions of “systemic reform” can sometimes beguile us.  We might, without realizing it, succumb to the Systems Heresy: the naïve belief that fair institutional structures and a fair enforcement of laws will inevitably produce fair social outcomes.

We understand that unequal initial conditions—a legacy of slavery for one group, say, but not for another—can lead to unequal outcomes, however fairly constituted our institutions and laws might be.  But the problems associated with the Systems Heresy go deeper than this.

Imagine an island of ten million souls inhabited by two tribes, one called the Yooks, the other the Zooks.  The Yooks, who outnumber the Zooks ten to one, part their hair on the right while the Zooks part their hair on the left.  Imagine further that a god—call him Milton—endows the island’s inhabitants with equal abilities and gives to each Yook and Zook five thousand Talents with which he or she might participate in a system of production and exchange.

There’s one problem: the Yooks hate the Zooks.  This bigotry drives the Yooks to give all their business to Yook merchants.  Yooks, who by their overwhelming numbers own most of the island’s wealth, more readily aggregate their capital to increase the productive capacity of their businesses, further favoring Yook communities.  Over time, the Zooks fall behind the Yooks.  Unable to compete effectively with their more numerous and increasingly more prosperous neighbors, Zook communities languish then decay.

This thought experiment suggests one way a fair system with equal initial conditions might lead to unequal social outcomes over time.  It’s certainly not fair of the Yooks to shut out the Zooks, but it’s a bit of a strain to say that this lack of fairness is a property of the island’s system of institutions and laws.  It’s more accurately a moral failing on the part of the Yooks.  This moral failing undermines whatever degree of fairness might be built into the island’s institutional structures.

This is for me the great lesson of the Systems Heresy: systemic reform that doesn’t somehow attend to the values we bring to a given system is a shot in the dark and borders on social engineering of the most speculative variety.

The classically Liberal conception of the state provides a values-neutral framework of rights in which each individual can pursue his or her own vision of the Good.  In a Liberal state, it’s not the government but rather civil society that’s most clearly charged with perfecting and transmitting the values we share as a people.  This great civilizing work happens—or rather, should happen—in our schools and churches, in our trade unions, on the streets, wherever people gather to reflect and deliberate.

I’m not convinced, however, that our discussion and negotiation of values is robust enough to prevent us from injecting the venom of the Yooks into any system we might yet devise or evolve to.  Our ignorance of history, the corporate ownership of the media and its concentration in fewer hands, and the abiding anti-intellectual climate in this country are among the factors exploited by those who resist the kind of social transformation many of us desire and work for.

Systemic reform is necessary, but it’s only one of the battles progressives need to engage.

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Image source: Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book

Think Impactful. Think Turn-Key. Think Sticky C2C.

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As the new business manager for the White Courtesy Telephone, I asked my assistant Pauline to check out the company we keep in our blogroll.  She found this post from Phil Cubeta on The Role of the Holy Fool:

If we are to cure the souls of our clients, or victims, much less our leaders, we must first cure ourselves of vanity, and of fear. The first sign of wisdom is Motley.  Anyone who thinks that The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the like are enough is a Fool, and a bad one, lacking humor.  Ignorance, dogma, and complacency, bourgeois striving for measurable results denominated in inches, ounces, or dollars are virtues up to a point because they connect you to the mass market and the mass mind in a society devoted to base enjoyments.  But to cure yourself and others you must go a lonelier way.

Look at me, Phil.  Don’t slouch: What’s with all the big words, my friend?  What you write is the Old School thinking of a pre-networked age, more bricks than clicks.

Here, hop aboard the corporate torpedo.

At the White Courtesy Telephone, we believe it’s better to mesh strategically than reconfigure reactively. We know that without infomediaries like ourselves, subscriber communities will be forced to de-optimalize. Our feature set is unmatched, but our one-to-one e-commerce and non-complex incentivization are often considered a terrific achievement.

Quick, Phil: Do you have a 24/7 plan for syndicating new paradigms? I didn’t think so.

We, on the other hand, will transform the power of metrics to exploit.  It may seem realistic, but it’s compelling.

What will you offer them, Phil?  Grown men and women in motley; overcooked servings of satire and parable.  If these things really had the power to change the world, they’d be illegal.  Moral truth is what’s traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Here’s a few bucks.  Get yourself a new hat.  And here’s my card: call me if you want me to do for you what I did for Sean.

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Business-babble courtesy of the Corporate Gibberish Generator at AndrewDavidson.com.

The Nonprofit Money Ethics Quiz

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For each question below, choose the answer that best applies, then check your score at the end of the quiz …

1.  We should accept money from Philip Morris USA for our Snuff Out Teen Smoking campaign.  After all, the Philip Morris tobacco company doesn’t force people to use its products—each of us can choose to smoke or not.  And even if a grant from the Foundation is blood money, and the company will use its support of our program to convince feeble-minded regulators that tobacco companies prefer to see members of the American public die from other causes, the grant will nevertheless succeed in doing some good for the world.  In any case, the real problem with tainted money is that there’s not enough of it.*

Agree or Disagree?

2.  It’s OK to name our theatre for a major donor who really cares nothing for the dramatic arts—and who in fact snores loudly during each performance he attends—rather than name it for our founder who put every penny of his modest savings into the company.  After all, our founder—now an insane pauper living in a discarded refrigerator—doesn’t want the recognition, and the major donor’s gift will clearly accomplish a lot of good.

Agree or Disagree?

3.  Even though the human rights organization I lead champions the cause of prisoners of conscience and other persecuted minorities, it’s perfectly reasonable for my board, when choosing to invest our modest endowment, not to screen for corporations that invest in China Security and Surveillance Technology, a company that operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies.  After all, this company will soon become a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and the tens of thousands of dissidents who are sent to the Chinese gulag every year would want us to hasten China’s entry into the family of nations (including the United States) that marry state-sponsored torture and the denial of basic human rights with the other benefits conferred by free-market economies.

Agree or Disagree?

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Check your score: Score zero points for each “Agree” response and one point for each “Disagree” response.  A score ranging from zero to three indicates that you’re probably human.

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Image source: Curtis Publishing

*Thanks to my colleague Akwasi Aidoo for this bon mot.

How To Free Our Funder Minds ...

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We can start by contemplating, then rejecting, the following two widely held notions.  Ready?  Say omm ...

1.  It’s my job as a funder to separate the wheat from the chaff, the bad nonprofits from the good.  I reward the effective nonprofits by giving them money (for a few years anyway); I discourage the ineffective nonprofits by denying them funding.

What images come to mind when you hear grantmakers describe their relationships with applicants and grantees?  A judge who listens with strained solicitude to an attorney’s pleas?  A pioneer who circles the wagons against marauding Indians?  A benefactor who becomes peevish when his ward speaks out of turn?

The tropes we live and work by might not seem important, but they reveal a lot about attitudes and habits of mind that keep us mired in the transactional, unable to make that important shift to the transformational.

The funder who sets himself up as judge makes two critical mistakes, in my view.  First, he fails to see applicants and grantees as potential colleagues working toward a common goal.

The second mistake is a little more subtle.

If you’re a funder, isn’t it really your primary responsibility to achieve your mission—to feed the hungry, to help people quit smoking, to produce plays of the highest artistic quality?  If so, achieving your mission might require you to help certain underperforming nonprofits do their work more effectively.  Their leaders, for example, might be long on vision but short on management skills.  By focusing exclusively on an impoverished set of performance measures, you might miss key opportunities to advance your goals.  You might also end up missing the point entirely.

2.  Different funders have different missions and therefore different funding priorities.  Thus it’s perfectly appropriate for some funders to forego supporting “overhead” and other organizational strengthening costs like board development, the upgrading of financial reporting systems, and the like.

That’s like saying you’ll support all the consonants but none of the vowels in a commissioned report.

Don’t let yourself become a philanthropic freeloader, a tick on the body of responsible grantmakers.  It’s every grantmaker’s responsibility to support overhead and organizational development costs.  I’ll go further: Because almost all nonprofits benefit from organizations like the Foundation Center and Independent Sector, it’s every grantmaker’s responsibility to help underwrite the costs of these organizations as well.

Give responsibly.

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Image source: All-American Ads of the 30s

Business As Usual For The NYSE

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Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.     —Mao Zedong

1.

From “An Opportunity for Wall St. in China’s Surveillance Boom” in the September 11 New York Times:

Li Runsen, the powerful technology director of China’s ministry of public security, is best known for leading Project Golden Shield, China’s intensive effort to strengthen police control over the Internet.

But last month Mr. Li took an additional title: director for China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks, among other customers. The company has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company’s listing and Mr. Li’s membership on its board are just the latest signs of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government’s security apparatus.

Wall Street analysts now follow the growth of companies that install surveillance systems providing Chinese police stations with 24-hour video feeds from nearby Internet cafes. Hedge fund money from the United States has paid for the development of not just better video cameras, but face-recognition software and even newer behavior-recognition software designed to spot the beginnings of a street protest and notify police.

According to Terence Yap, vice chairman and chief financial officer of China Security and Surveillance Technology:

his company’s software made it possible for security cameras to count the number of people in crosswalks and alert the police if a crowd forms at an unusual hour, a possible sign of an unsanctioned protest.

2.

The New York Stock Exchange Foundation supports programs that:

help to achieve equality for all people by promoting civil rights, inclusiveness and respect for people’s differences …

It’s a good thing the Foundation only funds these programs in New York.

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Image source: The Age