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Rethinking Poverty

A doff of the hat to my colleague Barry Knight for his recent book, Rethinking Poverty: What Makes a Good Society? In the US, we live in a society where few public officials are ever elected for being champions for the poor* (hence all the coded references to “working families”), and in which the art of blaming the poor for their low estate, while widely practiced, is still ugly and unrefined. Nowadays it takes a special kind of person to bring up the subject at all.

Mr. Knight is special in that way. He’s also writing about the UK.

It turns out that the UK had its own “Great Society” experiment in the post-war era and that, like ours, it foundered. The limited success of anti-poverty programs; the ascendancy of free market economics; the stirrings of the “me society”—these and other factors created fresh openings for attacks on Britain’s welfare state, attacks that continue to this day. Mr. Knight uses data from surveys and focus groups to provide a sketch of “the society we want”—a society, not surprisingly, free of poverty—and to suggest a way forward that does not rely heavily on state or philanthropic actors.

Putting differences of context aside, we can draw at least four lessons from his book:

What was achieved can be easily undone.   In the UK, as in the US, hard-won protections for children and others in poverty can evaporate in a single election. How do we shore up gains while we still have them?

Fairness resonates.  In a 2015 YouGov survey of 10,112 adults in England, Scotland, and Wales, “fairness” rated above “freedom,” “equality,” and even “prosperity” as a desired quality of a good society. Ape experiments also suggest that a sense of fairness might be “hard-wired” and thus provide a basis for uniting people across class, gender, race, and other differences.

Good societies—at least better ones—are in plain sight.  Other countries have done and are doing a better job of providing a social safety net, welcoming immigrants, reducing gun violence, conducting fairer elections, reducing health care costs, etc. How do we build the political will to follow their example?

Philanthropy is largely beside the point.   It was refreshing to read a book supported by a philanthropic trust in which so little weight is given to the role philanthropy might play in imagining and ushering in the good society. The next $10 million philanthropic initiative to end poverty will not save us.

In classic Liberalism, the role of the state was to provide a framework of laws under which individuals could prosper by pursuing their own vision of the good. Neoliberals subsequently tilted the playing field in favor of “free market” actors, however significant the damage they might do to social cohesion and other values. In the US, the neoliberal line has now metastasized into a kind of balls-out, post-truth plutocracy that deals with poverty by gleefully shredding the social safety net and jailing its victims. It’s comforting to know that in the UK a book like Mr. Knight’s still has a prayer of a fair hearing.

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* Close to a word-for-word quote from a former DC Councilmember. Things gets worse as you move from local to state and national politics.

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Lessons From The Undeserving Poor

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The motivation for distinguishing between the deserving and the undeserving poor is familiar to many who’ve been approached by a homeless person for a handout.  Will we give without condition? Will we draw a line at those who are visibly intoxicated, reasoning that these supplicants are inviting their own ruin? Will we brush off the request and opt instead to make a contribution to the local shelter? Even after we’ve responded in some way, will we feel we’ve done the right thing? Perhaps our rationalizations will seem a little cold, a little too far removed from what might otherwise have been a simple human response to a simple human need.

The distinctions we sometimes make between the deserving and the undeserving poor have a revealing history.  The first American colonies modeled their poor laws on Elizabethan systems of relief for the needy, where the primary division was between neighbors and strangers.  Your responsibility to those who fell on hard times extended to family members and neighbors.  If evil befell a sojourner, he was sent to his community of origin where, it was assumed, he would receive assistance.  Another distinction divided your struggling neighbors into two classes: the truly impotent and the poor who were able-bodied, believed capable of at least some kind of work.

This latter category was problematic for early policymakers.  Just as an acorn could, by slow degrees, transform into an oak, so could the category of the truly impotent shift through multiple shades of difference into the category of rogues attempting to game the system.  The imperative for drawing clear lines increased as we moved from helping the poor to managing them.

Other challenges were afoot.  In the early days of our republic, there were many poor who struggled privately with their need as a kind of unavoidable evil.  The community’s “paupers,” by contrast, received some kind of public assistance, and it wasn’t long before pauperism became associated in the public mind with moral degradation.  According to Michael Katz:

The redefinition of poverty as a moral condition accompanied the transition to capitalism and democracy in early nineteenth-century America.  It served to justify mean-spirited treatment of the poor, which in turn checked expenses for poor relief and provided a powerful incentive to work.  In this way the moral definition of poverty helped ensure the supply of cheap labor in a market economy increasingly based on unbound wage labor.  The moral redefinition of poverty followed also from the identification of market success with divine favor and personal worth. …

Persistent and increasing misery did not soften the moral definition of poverty.  Neither did the evidence available through early surveys or the records of institutions and administrative agencies, which showed poverty and dependence as complex products of social and economic circumstances usually beyond individual control.*

Over time the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor became deeply embedded in American culture, supported by Calvinist arguments in the antebellum period, by Darwinist arguments after the Civil War, and by the proponents of eugenics in the early twentieth century.  Within the very short span of my own memory, the undeserving poor have broken into the public consciousness as the “underclass,” as “welfare queens,” and, most recently, as Mitt Romney’s “47 percent.”

The labels have changed.  What have remained remarkably constant are the myths that cloud our understanding of poverty.  In an age when information is so freely available, when we stand to benefit from decades of excellent scholarship, we continue to misapprehend the structural and cultural causes of poverty.  We conflate structural arguments with radical denials of human agency.

There are other lessons for us in the story of the undeserving poor.  Some of these have to do with the question of who defines what constitutes an appropriate locus of philanthropic intervention.

In the same manner that elites reserve for themselves the privilege of drawing lines between the deserving and the undeserving poor, so too do their judgments determine what constitutes a “social problem” worthy of charitable investment.  It will be a rare community that wrestles with the distinction between the deserving and undeserving wealthy, or that launches a five-year philanthropic program to increase the elite’s feelings of solidarity with their less fortunate neighbors.  More often than not, philanthropy will be directed at fixing the poor, deserving or otherwise.

The homeless person asking for spare change intrudes on more than our physical space.  He brings before our eyes the dictates of our faith traditions, our responsibility to model good behavior for our children, our desire to act with decency.  At the same time, he surfaces our doubts about his bona fides, and here we are left without a clear script, reproducing on an intimate scale the ongoing, sometimes shrill, American debate about persistent poverty.

Experiences such as these can throw light on the gulf between our personal and our institutional responses to poverty.  Understanding these differences can, I believe, help make us better citizens, better champions of civil society, more fully aware of the frames we impose on our acts of giving, professional and otherwise.

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* The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare; Pantheon Books, 1989; p. 14.

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The View From the Heights of Arnstein’s Ladder: Resident Engagement by Community Foundations

The following article will appear in a special issue of the National Civic Review titled Philanthropy & Resident Engagement: The Promise for Democracy, available October 2013.  It will feature case studies, reports, and essays on the resident engagement experiences of public and private foundations.  This article was co-authored by Barry Knight, Director of CENTRIS-UK, and Albert Ruesga, President & CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

It goes by many names: citizen participation; community or resident engagement; “bottom-up” grantmaking; grassroots philanthropy.  For some community foundations in the US, it’s a pro-forma exercise; for others, a source of power and pride.  For a significant number it’s still little more than a fond dream, something wished for but somehow never attained.

When program officers and other community foundation leaders speak of stakeholder engagement, they often point to the desire to have their grantmaking interventions “informed” or “shaped” by the communities they serve.  These philanthropic professionals might go a step further—at least rhetorically—and seek the “meaningful participation” of underserved communities in the design and leadership of grantmaking programs.  The expression of these desires is sometimes motivated by a regard for democratic ideals or by a sincere respect for self-determination.  It might spring from a deep respect for fairness or an adherence to some form of the Golden Rule.  Stakeholder engagement might at times be sought to put a democratic patina on what are essentially elite decisions. 

Whatever their source, calls for resident engagement have become normative in the field, as reflected, for example, in the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations publication titled Do Nothing About Me Without Me: An Action Guide for Engaging Stakeholders (Bourns, 2010). The primary argument here is one about efficacy: Foundations that engage stakeholders are “part of a growing movement in philanthropy—a movement founded on the belief that grantmakers are more effective to the extent that they meaningfully engage their grantees and other key stakeholders” (Bourns, 2010; 1, emphasis mine).

And yet, when do our efforts to make our grantmaking less “top-down” move from the token to the meaningful?  Beyond the norms of professionalism, beyond the demands of our philanthropic technocracy, is there a moral dimension to the requirement that our grantmaking efforts be more citizen-informed and directed?

Fortunately for organized philanthropy, the issue of how to understand and assess resident engagement efforts is not new.  In 1969, for example, Sherry Arnstein published a powerful article addressing these key issues (Arnstein, 1969).  She proposed a typology, called the “ladder of citizen participation,” that has been widely used.  Her typology looked like this:

Ultimately for Arnstein, citizen participation is about citizen power.  The ladder reproduced in Figure 1 is designed to highlight the “critical difference between going through the empty ritual of participation and having the real power to affect the outcome of the process.”  The higher up the ladder you go, the greater the degree of citizen empowerment.  At rung four, for example, we invite citizen opinions but offer no assurance that these views will be heeded.  At rung five, we place a token number of the “worthy” poor on advisory committees and the like, but “[i]f they are not accountable to a constituency in the community and if the traditional power elite hold the majority of seats, the have-nots can be easily outvoted and outfoxed” (Arnstein, 1969; 9).  And so it goes as we climb or, in many cases, descend the ladder of engagement.  For in the world of community foundations, the kind of resident engagement that Ms. Arnstein holds up as the ideal—full citizen control—is rare or perhaps nonexistent, at least in the US context. 

In what follows, the authors attempt to answer three primary questions:

1. How do we understand the community foundation engagement of residents and other stakeholders and why is it important?
2. How well suited is the community foundation to the task of resident engagement?
3. What does successful resident engagement look like?

It’s certainly easy for community foundations to claim some form of citizen engagement.  But as we shall see, there are reasons why it’s difficult to do well.

How To Manage The Poor: The Bourbon Doctrine of Preemption

In this scene from Monsieur Vincent, the French chancellor summons Vincent de Paul to his well-appointed office to receive a valuable lesson in the management of the underclass.  Challenging the social and political structures that give rise to yawning disparities is out of the question.  But effective managers have many options.  For example, Bottom of Pyramid (BoP) consumers with “severely limited resources” can have their product awareness and demand appropriately “stimulated,” generating market rate returns for Impact Investors. In times of fiscal belt-tighetning, the poor can be persuaded to allow their unused organs to be harvested for the benefit of the more productive classes.  The bracing effect of the market will ultimately separate the winners from the losers, driving the latter to an early demise and thus relieving the strain on public coffers.  If we’re impatient, we can simply “disappear” the poor, putting out of sight a demographic that undermines our faith in the benevolence of market forces.  The goal is an uninterrupted flow of capital and goods, a sustained growth in the GDP.  And for this we need good order.  How to achieve it?  Best not to ask too many questions.

Chancellor:  The poor are multiplying and they’ve become a real threat.  Beggars everywhere!  And nowadays, if you don’t give them anything they threaten you.

 

Vincent de Paul:  They’re hungry.

 

Chancellor:  With my job, I have other kinds of hunger to appease! France is hungry, for safety, for order ... I’ve requested your presence here because I have some good news.  After your life-long dedication to them, you’ll be happy to hear that, in two days, there will be no more poor people!

 

Vincent de Paul:  How?

 

Chancellor:  It’s very simple.  They’re under arrest.

 

Vincent de Paul:  But poverty is not a crime.

Chancellor:  I’m afraid it very surely leads to it.  My job is to anticipate, and that’s what I’m doing.

 

 

Social Change as Cultural Change: How Stephen Colbert’s “Truthiness” Might Set Us Free

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Speaking at a discussion hosted by the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange, made this observation:

Oftentimes we miss moments to challenge the cultural conversation and we instantly go to policy.  And I think that’s where we lose.  We can’t have conversations outside of culture and where people are getting their information every day.  We have to challenge that and hold those structures accountable the same way we want to hold elected officials accountable.

Rashad is right to say that many activists see policy change as the Holy Grail of social change efforts, or that, at the very least, they tend to underplay the role played by culture in keeping low-income communities marginalized.  Activists and funders fall prey to the Systems Heresy: the belief that injustice is largely “structural,” that it’s the property of a system that regulates human behavior rather than a property of actors who are frequently all too human.

If policy change is difficult, the shifting of culture must seem impossible by comparison.  It happens so slowly, so imperceptibly.  We know from the history of large social change efforts in the United States—women’s suffrage, the ending of slavery—that shifts in cultural norms both precede and lag behind significant policy victories.  Attitudes about women and African Americans continue to evolve.  Unfortunately, the time scale for these cultural changes makes them unlikely candidates for foundation funding which is too often focused on the quick victory—or its simulacrum.  Given that a cultural shift will take its own sweet time, is it even worth the attempt to accelerate the process?

If cultural change efforts do in fact get a raw deal from grantmakers (and I have no reason to doubt those who tell me they do), is it time for the foundation world to reassess its priorities?  I’m struck by the fact that my colleagues seldom send me links to earnest reports about low-income communities.  Instead my inbox brims with clips from The Colbert Report and The Daily Show skewering the attempts of policymakers to dismantle the safety net for the poor.  Perhaps more effectively than any study of racial and economic disparities, movies such as Precious have reached millions of people capable of empathy and opened their eyes to the overwhelming challenges of living in poverty.

By contrast, so many reports on the plight of the marginalized have been dead on arrival.  Just in the past three months, in my own beloved city, we’ve been overwhelmed by the bad news.  This past June, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, alongside the Orleans Parish Place Matters team, published a report titled Place Matters for Health in Orleans Parish: Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All.  Among its key findings was the fact that the average life expectancy in Orleans Parish varied by as much as 25 years depending on a person’s zip code of residence, and that those zip codes with the lowest life expectancy had a higher population of low-income and people of color. The poorest zip code in the city, with a majority population of African Americans, had an average life expectancy of 55 years while the zip code with less poverty and a mostly white population reached 80, a 25-year difference!  Another report this past June from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center analyzed new census and other survey data to find, among other things, that 48 percent of our black children in Orleans Parish—that’s one in two—live in poverty, defined as an income of about $18,000 supporting a family of two adults and a child.  A more recent report published by the Urban League found that nearly 30 percent of black students in New Orleans—that’s one in three—had been suspended or expelled from the Recovery School District, more than twice the statewide rate and over four times the national rate, due to stringent, zero-tolerance policies.  These policies have left us with 14,000 youth between the age of 16 and 24 who are neither enrolled in school nor employed.  My foundation contributed to the long string of dismal news with its own study of asset poverty in New Orleans.

And yet there’s been no outcry, no wringing of hands, no rending of garments.

We need these data to understand the magnitude of the challenges that face us.  Yet what a serious miscalculation to believe that numbers quantifying the misery of our neighbors are sufficient to move us to action.  And here, I believe, is where we can learn from the cultural geniuses among us.  They, much more than the rest of us, understand how to make lifeless numbers jump off the page; they have ideas for breathing life into depressing graphs of mostly downward trends.

One aspect of their genius is their appreciation of the complexity of culture.  Culture to them is not a bone we gnaw on together, a dented fender we attempt to hammer smooth.  It’s less like an object we bang on and more like the air we breathe, the invisible threads of meaning that connect us.

I fear that activists and funders might be stuck, unable or unwilling to embrace the key roles played by potent cultural forces such as empathy and shame-inducing satire.  How can the champions of culture help us reinvigorate our sluggish steps toward social change?  In the US context, perhaps, we’ll never acquire a culture in which public deliberation becomes a significant force.  In this new Dark Age, dominated by the new American Visigoths—the Radical Religious Right, the anti-government activists—how can culture help truth gain a foothold?

The Foundation as Borderland Institution

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I.

How, short of civil war, does a nation typically work through periods of intense social polarization?  In the United States we face persistent racial and ethnic divisions as well as stark income and asset inequalities.  We’re currently experiencing these differences in the context of some very uncivil election year rhetoric and the emergence of a new kind of American class consciousness characterized by the Occupy Movement.

Given these polarizing forces, what is the glue that keeps contemporary American society from spinning apart?  Is it simple inertia, a kind of consumerist satiety?  Do we ever in fact learn to resolve our differences, or do they come into greater or lesser focus depending on the whims of our commentariat?  If we manage somehow to work through our divisions, where does this bridging work happen?

It’s not the first time in recent history that we’ve come to a perceived boiling point.  In a 1995 book titled Beyond Individualism,  Michael Piore wrote about a “social deficit” created in the 1980s and early 90s that eventually led to increased political mobilization and social instability.  A pivotal event of that era, according to Piore, was President Reagan’s crushing of the federal air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981, an action that “galvanized anti-union managerial factions in a whole variety of industries and occupations where union organization had previously been unassailable.”   It was open season on organized labor.  The wealthiest Americans saw a marked increase in their standard of living while the incomes of blue collar workers declined.  The savings and loan crisis and its attendant bailout presaged our contemporary financial market meltdown and moved some commentators to dub the period between 1985 and 1995 the “Looting Decade.”

Political life also took a nasty turn.  The Bush campaign’s Willie Horton ads in 1988 alienated black Americans, while the family values rhetoric of the 1992 campaign targeted single mothers, feminists, and gays and lesbians.  Against this backdrop of political turmoil, identity groups grew in visibility and pressed their claims on American society.  According to Piore, we could not, during this fiscally lean era, opt to settle these claims through massive social spending.  All of this created an atmosphere of tension and instability, perhaps not substantially different in feeling and tone from the one we’re currently experiencing.

To address this increased polarization, Piore suggested that politicians and policymakers champion the borderlands, institutions in which “social claimants” could cross group boundaries and communicate their needs and concerns to society at large.   Through dynamic give-and-take “political conversations” in these borderland institutions, marginalized identity groups could become agents in the creation of a new national culture.  Participants in these discussions would interpret their actions to themselves and others in ways that acknowledge the effects of one community of meaning upon another.  Perhaps on occasion these discussants would even celebrate their inevitable clashes of interpretation.

II.

There’s so much that’s compelling about Piore’s vision of the borderlands, rooted, as it appears to be, in Aristotle’s view of Man as the “political animal.”  Somewhere between Wall Street and the Occupy Movement’s encampments in Zucotti Park there would be a space where both bankers and activists could plead their cases.  Ideally the 1% would get a clearer sense of the effect of their actions on people with modest means, while the 99% would better understand the economic system that for better or for worse implicates us all.

Unfortunately, in twenty years or so of nonprofit work, I’ve known only a handful of organizations* that fit the description of a borderland institution.   First, most civil society organizations are segregated by race, ethnicity, class, and the other divisions that borderland institutions are expected to bridge.  Even when these organizations are not segregated, they seldom make it their mission to champion give-and-take conversations across group boundaries.  From my own experience of participation in diversity trainings, poverty summits, and other intergroup meetings, these bridging conversations are fiendishly difficult to pull off.

Of course the mixing of people from different backgrounds happens outside the context of civil society organizations, in such venues as grocery stores, sports stadiums, parade routes, and popular music concerts.  But these are not typically places consecrated to boundary-crossing deliberation and the forging of a new civic culture.  The fact that Piore dubs his institutions “borderlands” suggests how marginal this kind of discussion has become.  Perhaps in some real or imagined past we talked through our differences in the town square or the agora.  In these nefarious times, however, we’ve pushed these conversations to the edges of civic life, we’ve made them exceptional rather than central to the political and other processes that shape our national character.

Steve Jobs, The Meaning of a Nonprofit, and The Moral Imagination

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I.

I remember my sense of anticipation some 18 years ago when I landed my first foundation job. None of my friends or colleagues had any inkling what happened inside these black boxes that consistently swallowed our proposals and issued polite rejections.

I had heard that foundations were about social change, that they were about marshaling private capital for the public good. I was excited by the idea of working with colleagues who had the time to think deeply about our community’s greatest challenges, who were not constantly passing the hat to pay the light bill.

My first day on the job, I met former activists who knew what it was like to grow up black and poor; I admired the view from my 28th story window of the city I loved. On my second day, I chided myself for my overly romantic idealizations of foundation work. Of course sexism, careerism, and other isms could exist here as elsewhere. But still, foundations were anointed institutions, set apart to serve as the conscience of the community. On my third day I was wondering what I had gotten myself into.

If my idealizations were so far off the mark, what then was a foundation supposed to be about?

One reader of a recent post commented thoughtfully about the purpose and identity of community foundations:

… [S]hould philanthropy uphold or challenge the status quo? I've always seen the role and purpose of [community foundations] as being one of brokerage between the two positions. We stand of necessity with a foot in both camps, and it is our specific function to interpret each side to the other and make them intelligible. A [community foundation] that plants itself squarely on one side or the other will betray its mission.  …  We serve mutually incompatible constituencies—proponents of social change vs upholders of the status quo. All over the world, I suspect, people in [community foundations] are deliberately muddying waters in order to satisfy both at once. It’s what we’re good at, and if we leaned too far in either direction we’d stop being [community foundations] and become something else.

So beautifully expressed. I immediately begin to wonder about the apparent cold-bloodedness of our hypothetical translator. Was he supposed to have no feelings one way or the other about what he was asked to interpret, and if so, why did he bother? Did he interpret ultimately for the sake of a paycheck or for the sake of justice? And did it matter?

It’s not only community foundations that struggle to keep one foot in two camps, to broker between the lived experience of poverty, say, and the privileged world of trustees.  Small and large private foundations struggle with this as well, as does every nonprofit intent on survival.  Can an organization interpret the world to everything and everyone except itself?

Perhaps a community foundation ceases to be a community foundation not when it sides with justice, but when it fails to understand what living in community requires of us.  Perhaps any foundation or charity betrays its purpose, its identity, when corporate thinking completely replaces moral imagination.

II.

I expect many observers of the nonprofit field have grown tired of arguments that pit values like efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability against more liberal values like adaptability, empathy, and justice. Organizations that embody the latter need a nonprofit chiropractor to straighten their spines, the argument goes; their stiff-necked corporatist cousins need to work on their flexibility. Those who make these arguments typically come to the triumphant conclusion that we need both kinds of thinking in our field.

Some go further and remind us that the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit, while still relevant to the Internal Revenue Service, has lost its meaning for a new generation of social entrepreneurs who have learned to think outside the IRS’s checkboxes. They argue that there’s a growing sector agnosticism in our field, and that it’s only a matter of time before the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit goes the way of the 8-track tape. They point to the jobs made possible by for-profit companies, to the services they provide and the products they create, and they ask, “Is this not also a kind of social value?”

In our headlong rush to let everything be everything, to embrace blended corporations and the like, it’s important to call to mind some values that cannot be so easily “blended.” Consider one of the stories currently in circulation about Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple.

China to the West: Pay No Attention to Those Corpses Behind Our Bilateral Trade Agreements

So, this past Friday in Oslo, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was barred by Chinese authorities from attending the ceremony at which he would have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Here are three takes on the same non-event where concerned Westerners wrung their hands and lamented the state of human rights in China:

1. From the New York Times:

Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, [adds] that China [needs] to learn that with economic power [comes] social and political responsibility.

“We can to a certain degree say that China with its 1.3 billion people is carrying mankind’s fate on its shoulders,” Mr. Jagland said in a speech at the [Nobel Peace Prize] ceremony. “If the country proves capable of developing a social market economy with full civil rights, this will have a huge favorable impact on the world.”

Translation: I’m convinced we’re screwed unless we find a way to rationalize trade with the Chinese.  But the human rights Liu Xiaobo is fighting for are a moral issue not an economic one.  I will therefore split the baby by invoking the notion of a “social market economy,” the Middle Way between socialism and capitalism.  That way we can have our almond cake and eat it too.

Getting a recalcitrant population to acquiesce to a market economy on the state’s terms is a gentleman’s game requiring a delicate touch not an iron fist.  And China is being, well, gauche, n’est-ce pas?

2. From Congresswoman Pelosi’s speech on the House floor:

“Today, the House of Representatives is congratulating Liu Xiaobo on the Nobel Peace Prize and sending a clear message of support for human rights and democracy in China. We do this in recognition of the importance of the relationship between China and the United States, that we have many issues where we have common ground or where should seek common ground. But all of that is better served by candor in our friendship and not ignoring sore spots.

“We continue to call for Liu Xiaobo’s immediate and unconditional release, and for the Chinese government to listen to the many Chinese citizens who are calling for human rights and freedom in China.”

Translation:  I can safely refer to the most egregious abuses of human rights—the denial of basic freedoms, the jailing of thousands of dissidents and their families, and the torture of Falun Gong members—as “sore spots” because the American public isn’t paying attention and half of them wouldn’t be able to locate China on a map anyway. 

So, who’s mixing the martinis? 

Editor’s note:  Before we move on, I need to get this off my chest: It’s a mystery to me why our leaders bother with these effete upbraidings.  After all, by many accounts, our policy of constructive engagement with China has been enormously successful.  Over the past several decades we’ve learned some important lessons from the Chinese about denying due process and using state-sponsored torture to strengthen national security.  And while the US government does not control the media, we’ve succeeded in concentrating ownership of it into the hands of an ever-smaller fraternity of elites.  China, for its part, has embraced capitalism and is deeply grateful for an American public sated by its purchases of cheap Chinese goods.  Not too long ago, China Security and Surveillance Technology, a company that installs surveillance systems for the Chinese security apparatus, was the first Chinese company to join the New York Stock Exchange.  According to Terence Yap, then-vice chairman and chief financial officer:

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.

Sounds like a growth industry to me, both in China and in the West, as an increasingly restive population begins to form crowds at unusual hours in unsanctioned places for allegedly nefarious purposes.

3.  Stay away from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, urges China.  Here’s its officially sanctioned rationalization:

Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Dec. 25, 2009, after a Beijing court convicted him of violating Chinese law and engaging in activities aimed at overthrowing the government.

“We urge relevant U.S. lawmakers to stop their wrongdoing on this issue, change their arrogant and rude attitude and show due respect for the Chinese people and China’s judicial sovereignty,” said Jiang.

... Jiang said earlier that more than 100 countries and international organizations had expressed support for China's stance.

“Justice lies in the heart of the people,” said Jiang.

This man Liu is a convicted criminal for God’s sake!

China is betting that world leaders will be more concerned about their own hold on power than about the ultimate disposition of their immortal souls.  The argument seems to have worked for at least 19 countries and sent a frisson of terror through many more, judging from the anemic statements coming out of Oslo.

Meanwhile, let's enjoy those everyday low, low prices while we still can.

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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Have a thought to share?  Leave a comment by clicking here.

Image source: Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book

Philanthropic Market Alignment: Getting That Green, Green Feeling

Everything’s within the realm of plausibility as we gad about in our consumerist trance, sated with our latest purchases.  In a bid to corner the new “eco-tainment” market, Discovery is launching Planet Green, a channel that will forego a hard look at Man’s effect on the environment to present consumers with new product lines they can use to redecorate their homes in eco-friendly ways.  General Motors, maker of the nine-mile-per-gallon Hummer, is a lead advertiser and partner.

I believe that in contemporary parlance this is called “making philanthropic markets more efficient.”  It’s what happens when you attempt to align market demand with social benefit.  The alignment isn’t perfect in this case—is it ever?—but we can sweeten the deal by offering to save a square inch of Amazonian rainforest with each purchase of 100 gallons or more of gasoline.  With an Environmental Product® to which we can now dedicate our consumer dollars, we can make our other purchases with a clearer conscience.  And we can forego a fruitless search for the root causes of our present predicament since that too would likely end up being a waste of precious natural resources.

We’ve come a long way since the days of Plato’s Republic.  Far from electing philosopher kings, we’ve chained them deep inside the Cave along with the rest of us and made them watch the dance of shadows on the wall, now called the NBC Nightly News.  It’s not that we can’t turn our heads to see the puppetmasters, it’s that we simply choose not to: we might in that moment of aspiration miss the ad for an important new product that will change our lives.

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Disclaimer: Only recycled 1s and 0s were used in the machine code for this blog post.

Image source: Nunc Scio

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

Possible Worlds: The Beguilement of Juxtaposition

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Some scientists use possible worlds to explain the physical features of our universe.  More accessible, perhaps, are the possible world theories that philosophers of language use to model concepts like possibility and necessity.

Closer to home, the October issue of The Atlantic, dubbed the “values issue” by the editors, provides an extended meditation on a possible world that might be familiar to many of us.  The magazine takes articles on the “reinvention of philanthropy” and socially responsible investing, and puts them together with ads from car companies and Ralph Lauren.

In the possible world suggested by the editors, unchecked consumption coexists peacefully with a feeling for self-sacrifice.  We can, without the slightest pang of conscience, drive to that Sierra Club fundraiser in an SUV; we can discuss our love of animals over a steak dinner with our friends.  Not only is this world possible, the Atlantic editors seem to tell us, it’s the world we currently inhabit.

Providing a materialist grounding for this view, the issue includes an article by Olivia Judson on the evolutionary basis of altruism.  Kindness and cruelty spring from the same source—the human genome—and we are born to save the planet even as we destroy it.

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Image source: One of the panels from the cover of Roz Chast’s Parallel Universes.

Labor Day 2007: A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts

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Dear Fellow Workers:

Happy Labor Day!  It’s dry and sunny in my east coast village with just enough of a breeze to give my American flag a satisfying snap.

I’m writing because I heard money was a little tight for you.  I’m going to assume you’re making the current minimum wage ($5.85 an hour) and your tax rate is about 15 percent; your housing expenses, including utilities, are $832 per month; your food costs on the “Thrifty Plan” are about $34 per week; you take public transportation to and from work (about $12.50 each week, say); and you pay about $40 per month for the cheapest phone plan.  When I do the math I discover you’re already overspent by $2,631 for the year, leaving you imaginary dollars to buy clothes, do your laundry, and catch the occasional movie, never mind save for your retirement or visit that niece in Columbus.

You might consider ordering a copy of Preparing for a Financial Setback, a handy guide distributed by Northwest Airlines to its employees.  The four-page booklet contains suggestions such as shopping in thrift stores, taking “a date for a walk along the beach or in the woods,” and not being “shy about pulling something you like out of the trash.”

Fortunately, the news isn’t all bad.  Thanks in large part to your efforts, the richest one percent of Americans now earn 15 percent of all income and own 38 percent of all wealth.  There’s also been a boom in the building of mega-yachts, some as long as a football field, creating new labor markets for folks like us.  Low- and moderate-income people by the thousands are now able to start military careers in Iraq while helping to preserve our American way of life.

So suck it up.  And God bless America!

Call For a General Strike on 9/11

A group of citizens has called for a general strike on 9/11.  Read about it here.

Has there ever been a successful nationwide general strike in the United States?  Thank God the organizers aren’t calling for a “turn off your TV day.”  I wouldn’t have the strength to forego the Bionic Woman fall sneak peak.  I’m only human.

Robert Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century”

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1.  In case you haven’t heard all the hoopla, sociologist Robert Putnam, most famous for his book Bowling Alone, has published a new article arguing that “In the short to medium run, … immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital.”

2.  It’s an excellent article; a thought-provoking read. Apart from a dicey section on the multivariate analysis of data to control for the effect of certain variables, the study is accessible to non-experts like me.  Don’t make the same mistake as 98 percent of the people who are currently dismissing Putnam’s results: read the article for yourself.

3.  An aside: More interesting than Putnam’s article, in my view, has been the sociology of its reception. There’s a palpable hesitancy, in polite liberal circles, to bring up the subject.  First, it’s never his article, but rather somebody’s gloss on it that my colleagues suggest I read.  Second, no person of conscience broaches the subject of Putnam’s article unless, in the same breath, he also recommends a book or article that purports to advance a countervailing thesis.  Putnam’s work is clearly radioactive.

4.  Never fear the truth, whatever it might be.

5.  Putnam’s article might ultimately rival Christine Letts’s “Virtuous Capital” for the volume of eyebrow-raising commentary it will generate—much of it, I predict, involving a great deal of hand-wringing.

6.  Liberals are in some ways hoist on their own petard: Putnam uses variation in ethnic/racial category as a proxy for “diversity.”  This is what I sometimes refer to as the Whitman’s Sampler Model of diversity, an impoverished notion that enables well-meaning liberals to declare victory when they have “one of these, one of these, and one of those” on their staff or on their board.

7.  Putnam’s results will play handily to those conservatives who believe that self-segregation works with, rather than against, “the grain of human nature.”  We hear this kind of argument in apologetics for “a conservatism comfortable with materialist self-interest.”  These same conservatives will likely pass over in silence those sections of the article that review the many benefits of increased immigration and diversity: greater creativity; better, faster problem-solving; and more rapid economic growth, among others.  Putnam never argues that diversity is, on balance, a bad thing.

8.  Putnam’s results discredit the idea that greater diversity is correlated with increased inter-ethnic hostility.  He stresses that “[d]iversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation.”  To put it another way, “In more diverse settings, Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do.”

9.  Putnam points out that:

All our empirical analysis to this point has involved ‘comparative statics’—that is, we have compared people living in places with different ethnic mixes at one point in time—namely different American communities in the year 2000. Although our evidence does suggest that it is the level of diversity that matters, not the rate of change, we have not yet considered any ‘dynamic’ evidence about the effects of immigration and diversity over long periods of time within a single place (whether a single community or the nation as a whole). Exploring the dynamics, as opposed to the comparative statics, of diversity and social capital requires entirely different methods, and my research group has only begun to explore those avenues.

What would these further studies likely reveal?

10.  Finally, and most importantly in my opinion, Putnam doesn’t argue that we can’t learn to respond to ethnic and racial diversity better than we currently do.  We’re not fated forever to respond irrationally to fear of the “other,” however much recent history has inclined us to this view.

Absolutely Fabulous Meets the Third Sector

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(An excerpt from The Last Shout, Part 2.  London, 1996.  The Monsoons’ kitchen.  Edina is opening her mail.)

Edina: (Reading letter.)  Do I want to do something on the Millennium Committee?    Do I want to do something for the Millennium?  (To Patsy.)  Do you think I should do that?

Patsy:  (Pinning up her hair.)  Well, when is it?

Edina: (Looking at letter.) It doesn’t say.  (To Saffy.)  Darling, when is it, when is it, the Millennium?

Saffy: (Pointedly.)  The year 2000.

Edina:  (Balling up letter.)  Well, why are they bothering me now, eh?  Anyway, I know exactly what they should do.

Saffy:  (Disdainfully.)  What? Let me guess: a free Stones concert in Hyde Park.

Edina:  No, no, no.  A huge worldwide bacchanalian feast.  They should just live it, darling.

Patsy:  And a free Stones concert, Eddy.

Edina:  (Quickly agreeing.)  Yeah, and a free Stones concert.

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Image source: Morty’s TV

Lies My T.V. Told Me: A Plea for Media Literacy

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Everything communicates.  Learning what this means is one of the keys to good citizenship and good philanthropy.

I’ll state the case more strongly: The health of our society depends critically on the ability of each citizen to read, listen, and observe deeply; to interpret thickly; and to understand the promises and beguilements of media, both old and new.  Because most of us lack these skills, or worse, fail to exercise them, we’re in danger of throwing away our democracy.  We leave ourselves at the mercy of those who can exploit our ignorance to advance narrow interests.

Recent history has shown us, in a very dramatic way, how manipulation of the media can take a powerful nation into an immoral, disastrous war against an imagined threat.

The vast majority of Americans simply sleepwalk through the news.  We consistently fail to detect propaganda, bias, and censorship in the media we consume.

Just as young people learn about the three branches of government in their civics classes, they should learn to identify lead-ins, angles, and talking points—and think critically about them.  When they see an image, they should ask, “What’s missing from it?  How was it manipulated? Why was this chosen by the editors from among all possible images?”  Instead of passively watching television, they should pay close attention to the carefully constructed juxtapositions of images and sounds; they should make note of who’s given the last word in a discussion; they should challenge the narrow frame of a debate.  And they should always make a point of asking, “Who pays for the news?”

I don’t think it’s an accident that in our hemisphere only Canada has mandated media literacy in its school curricula.  In Europe, it was the Nordic socialist democracies that led the way.

Unfortunately, staying well informed and immunizing ourselves against manipulation by the media is only one battle in the larger war of ideas currently being fought on home turf.  Once we know the truth, how will we be motivated to act?  And what are the values that will animate us or fail to animate us?

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Favorite media literacy links:

Center for Media Literacy

Adbusters

Action Coalition for Media Education

Media Awareness Network

Media Literacy Clearinghouse

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Source of images: Media Literacy Clearinghouse

Highway Robbery: Notes on the RS 2477 Land Grab

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I.  Enemies of the Motoring Public

As I drag my way out of a week in the Sierras and crawl up the nearest magazine rack, my vision obscured by hovering midges, I discover in the July/August issue of Mother Jones that I’ve been framed as an elitist enemy of the motoring public, a bugbear of the “non-hiking people.”*

A little known law, Revised Statute 2477, passed in 1866 to encourage development by granting rights-of-way on publicly owned lands, is being used by Washington-hating local officials and big industry lobbyists to stake road claims all over the western states.  Trails inside of wilderness areas and national parks are not exempt.

According to San Juan County (Utah) commissioner Lynn Stevens, who is championing an RS 2477 claim on a canyon leading to scenic Angel Arch, “These are cherished, beloved places among [local residents]. … It’s elitist to say if you can’t hike, you’re not entitled to have that beauty.”

The Bush administration is supporting many local claims, despite the fact that the feds are technically the defendants in these cases.

II.  The Big Gubmint Lockout

Last year, according to the Mother Jones article, the Blue Ribbon Coalition, “the voice of the American off-road rider,” sponsored an ad

featuring a trio of cigar-chomping gangsters aiming Tommy guns and wearing slouch hats labeled “Sierra Club” and “Wilderness Society.”  The headline read, “These guys wanna rub you out!  Their racket is to lock you out of YOUR public lands.”

This is a sobering reminder of the value-neutrality of the Third Sector, where one man’s tax deductible donation supports another man’s environmental nightmare.

Communications Strategies: Coopting Deviance

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As I watch the video, I wonder if it might be the projectionist’s labor of love.  Did he cobble it together with his art school friends?  If so, it’s very well done.

There’s a whiff of subversion in it.

In a world that is bland, colorless, and cold
Where banality grows like a fungus or a mold
There live the boring Sheeple who look just like each other …

My mind conjures the usual suspects.  I think of the American polity (myself included), passively bleating while we join the family of nations that commit torture.  I think of how disconnected we are from the political process at all levels, where candidates are transformed by polls and big donors into nicely wrapped products we purchase at election time.  I think also of the market’s homogenizing influence, of the failure of our schools to produce engaged citizens equipped to think critically ...

Finally I realize what a jackass I am for reading so much into just another car ad …

In a process that’s familiar to historians, philosophers, and others, the outside becomes the inside.  Deviance here is identified with the purchasing of a trendy product, and the idea that “this is not your father’s Oldsmobile” is given a violent new spin for these darker, more nefarious times.  Ultimately, subversion is subverted.

Is nothing sacred?

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Image source: Tropist

Late Night Shots: How the Other One Percent Gives

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The July 13-19 issue of the Washington City Paper takes us inside Late Night Shots, an exclusive social networking club that helps DC’s well-heeled party animals connect on-line and off.  “Think of a new generation of young Republicans getting trashed at St. Elmo’s, hooking up, then writing about it at 3 in the morning,” writes City Paper reporter Angela Valdez.

It’s not every wannabe who can party with the GOP.  According to blogger Wonkette, the club maintains “that special mix of date rape, shitty beer, and racial homogeneity that is the Georgetown nightlife.”

The liquor flows—in great torrents, apparently—but so do the charitable dollars, providing a kind of fig leaf for the general debauchery.  This past June, for example, LNS member Andrea Rodgers

attracted a crowd to the Courage Cup, a polo match in Virginia that raises money to teach disadvantaged D.C. youths to play polo. Although the charity receives a fair amount of scorn (several posters asked why anyone would teach poor kids to play a game they can’t afford), it was one of the early summer’s most popular events.

You can imagine that the eleemosynary veneer might begin to crack after some time, and it does, as in this online exchange between two LNS members:

D.C. Charity Addiction
Posted By: [v—] on 04-11-2007 1:23 pm
Is there a city anywhere in the world that has more charities than D.C.? I moved here about 2 years ago, and at first it seemed nice that everyone was invovled with and supporting local charity events. However now I am beginning to question a number of the charitable causes and find it annoying to pay $10 to $20 just to step in somewhere for a drink with friends.

Am I being a cold-hearted miser?

RE: D.C. Charity Addiction
Posted By: [N—] on 04-11-2007 1:27 pm
I am 26 and DC wasn’t always like this. Most people just threw parties to throw parties. Now they feel compelled to do a charity or feel it makes them more sophisticated.

To responders: Don’t give me any bullshit response about wanting to help a charity because I know all of you and you’re not that decent (neither am I).

What would you call this?  Does this strange paroxysm of honesty represent a moment of grace, a door opening to the infinite?  Or is it simply a flash of existential clarity before this young man is hired by some conservative think tank to restore moral order to this country?

I’m reminded of the story of a young girl who once murdered her twelve family members with an axe, and who immediately confessed her crime after the police arrived and made inquiries because she had always been taught that lying was a sin.

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Image source: Washington City Paper