Author Archives: Peter Levine

7 questions about the campaign

On the front page of Saturday’s Washington Post, in a “Campaign Memo” addressed “To: The Voters” about “The Seven Things You Need to Know about the 2008 Race,” Dan Balz addressed the following questions:

1. Is the Clinton campaign a true juggernaut — or is that just what she wants everyone to believe?

2. Is there a Republican front-runner?

3. Is anyone on either side positioned to break into the top tier?

4. Does the new, turbo-charged calendar make Iowa and New Hampshire more important — or less?

5. Is it too late for Al Gore or Newt Gingrich to get into the race?

6. Do ideas matter in this election?

7. When do I really need to start paying attention, and should I trust the polls?

These are questions for spectators who are considering following the 2008 campaign as they might follow the NFL season–as a contest among professional teams. The big underlying question is: Who’s going to win? But what if you follow the campaign as a citizen concerned about the country and the world? Then your questions would be quite different:

1. What are our problems as a country?

2. What are some leading diagnoses and interpretations of these problems?

3. What should we do about our problems?

4. What role do I have?

5. What role does the next president of the United States have?

6. What are the candidates saying about how they would play their roles if elected?

7. What does other evidence (such as the candidates’ records, behavior on the campaign trail, choice of advisers, and core constituencies) tell us about how they would play their roles?

Perhaps Dan Balz would say that he cannot address my questions without editorializing. But he can hardly claim that he merely provides “the facts,” since his memo is full of declarative judgments about the horse race. (In his magisterial opinion, it is too late for Gore and Gingrich. No candidate has proposed any significant big ideas yet. Etc.) Besides, I’m not asking the Post to tell us what our problems are and how to solve them. I’m asking them to give us the factual basis to help us make up our own minds–along with a sampling of interesting views quoted from a variety of experts and activists.

a thought for Labor Day

Nelson D. Schwartz, the New York Times, August 26:

Although corporate jets tend to use smaller airports in the New York area, it’s possible that a crowded 737 might have to wait for a tiny Gulfstream to take off in Miami or at Dulles, outside Washington.

The users of corporate jets defend this practice, saying they deserve equal takeoff rights. “On a business flight, you might have people going to Wall Street from companies who are creating jobs and generating billions of dollars in commerce,” Mr. [Steve] Brown [of the National Business Aviation Association] says. “People on a commercial flight might be going on vacation or going to New York to go to the theater.”

The old populist and socialist reply was: Workers make things of value. Those who boss them around or make profits from investments are just skimming off the top. In the words of Ralph Chaplin’s “Solidarity Forever” (1915):

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid

* * *

All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.

We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.

It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.

According to the labor theory of value, those people sitting in the Gulfstream jets are “idle drones.” The ones who wait in coach class (or those who cannot afford to fly at all) are the people who create all value. Pope John Paul II seemed to agree; see On Human Work (Laborem exercens) of 1981.

But the labor theory of value is problematic, because clearly the people in the Gulfstreams “work,” even if all they do is make decisions about where to invest. Their work can have an enormous influence on the products of the economy. If affecting output is a measure of how much they work, then it is they who build the cities and dig the mines.

And they are enormously well paid for their pains. Corporate executives take home about 400 times as much pay as average workers. They use some of that pay, as well as their leverage over corporate resources, to obtain conveniences, such as flying in corporate jets that use public runways. And they feel important and worthy, as Mr. Brown of the National Business Aviation Association implies.

If one’s work is to make decisions, there is no doubt that one’s impact is consequential. But the consequences can be negative instead of positive. To paraphrase Mr. Brown, those people on the Gulfstreams might be flying to Wall Street to make boneheaded decisions that cost jobs, or selfish decisions that benefit them at the expense of their workers. Their risk is very limited; their expected gain is enormous.

Further, we might wonder whether their salaries and perks are worth the cost. Imagine that a corporate executive adds $10 million to the company’s bottom line by making a good decision. Does that mean that the company needs to pay him $10 million to obtain his services? Not if the decision was basically determined by the facts, in which case anyone with appropriate technical skills could have made the same call. Not if the decision was basically lucky, in which case the company could have flipped a coin. And not if the decision was determined by many of his underlings’ input.

The theory of markets suggests that companies in a competitive environment will never overpay for decisions, any more than they will overpay for crude oil or real estate. But that ignores the possibility of very systematic bias among the whole class of decision-makers, who are likely to overestimate the impact of their own brains and underestimate the importance of the people who work for them. Labor Day is for the folks in coach, and those who never fly at all.

national service

Time Magazine’s editor, Rick Stengel, makes the case for a large-scale but voluntary national service program in an editorial that accompanies a whole cover issue on service and volunteering. It’s a useful contribution because:

  • It’s a concrete policy recommendation that would respond to a widespread feeling that our communities and democratic institutions have weakened dangerously. Stengel assembles rather specific ideas for federal service programs.
  • Stengel wisely builds on our experience with existing projects. Domestic service goes back to the New Deal, but the most immediately relevant programs are part of AmeriCorps, which was founded in the Clinton years
  • Stengel wisely recommends a voluntary program. He writes, “Americans don’t like to be told what they have to do; many have argued that requiring service drains the gift of its virtue. [The new programs] would be based on carrots, not sticks.” I would add another reason. It is crucial to offer high-quality programs, and we’ll need to build those incrementally. A universal requirement would doom many young people to poor programs, with counter-productive results.
  • Service opportunities for people in their twenties would help them navigate an increasingly long and difficult transition to adulthood.
  • Service has potential appeal to conservatives and liberals, and it’s a big enough idea that it could help to define a campaign or party.

    • good news about NCLB

    Rep. George Miller, who leads the House Democrats on education policy and strongly backed No Child Left Behind, has issued draft language regarding reform of that Act. It says, in part:

    Title I, Part I, includes a new program to provide funds to low-income districts to support high quality instruction in music and arts, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, history, geography and physical education and health. Funds would support expanding the amount of instructional time in such subjects, developing high quality curriculum, providing essential materials and textbooks and partnering with community- based organizations to increase student learning in these subjects.

    This is a big deal in my little world of “civic ed.” But I’d suggest it matters to all Americans, and the full argument goes like this:

    Children who have experiences to participate as citizens and learn about their communities and politics flourish better in adolescence and develop lasting habits of civic participation that benefit our democracy.

    … but …

    Current education policy revolves around the testing of reading and mathematics. As a result, schools, and especially those with low rates of academic success, are cutting civics, arts, and community partnerships.

    … so …

    We need incentives for schools–especially those with low academic performance, which usually enroll mostly poor kids–to provide civic opportunities. And this is what Mr. Miller appears to be trying to do.

    hypocrisy

    If Senator Larry Craig opposed gay rights and said hostile things about gays while occasionally soliciting gay sex, he was hypocritical. Hypocrisy is one of the easiest faults to prove, but it is not one of the worst faults, especially in a leader.

    Hypocrisy is easy to establish, once the facts are out, because it involves a contradiction between the person’s statements and his actions. (Likewise, lies are evident when a person’s statements contradict what he knows or believes.) You can have very few moral commitments and very little knowledge of issues, and yet detect other people’s hypocrisy.

    But what if Larry Craig were completely heterosexual and totally faithful to his wife, yet anti-gay? In my view, his position would then reflect injustice and intolerance. These are worse faults than hypocrisy; they have far more serious consequences. But many Americans are uncomfortable about charging anyone with injustice. That’s because: (1) the charge is controversial, given that definitions of justice vary; (2) the accusation reflects deep moral commitments, which are incompatible with moral relativism or skepticism; and (3) the claim requires knowledge of issues and policies. The issue of gay rights happens to be relatively easy to understand, but I would argue that Senator Craig’s votes on economic policy display equally serious injustice. To make that claim, I have to follow politics fairly closely and develop strong moral commitments.

    Thus I think that Americans who are disconnected from politics and issues tend to jump on evidence of hypocrisy as if it were very momentous (and interesting) news, whereas far worse faults are ignored.

    (It’s not even crystal-clear that Larry Craig is a hypocrite, because one could oppose certain rights for gays and yet be gay or bisexual, without a contradiction. If Craig is a hypocrite, it’s not because of his policy positions but because he falsely denies being gay himself–or so his accusers claim. I happen to feel considerable sympathy for a gay person who hides his orientation, given the general climate of intolerance and the tendency of police to entrap gay men. But hypocrisy, while not the worst moral fault, is wrong. The wrongness, it seems to me, lies in the failure to treat other people as responsible and rational agents who can make decisions on the basis of facts. Instead, the hypocrite feels it necessary to deceive in order to get the results he wants. This is manipulative; it is using someone else as a means to one’s ends, not as an end in himself. But of course there are many forms of political manipulation that do not involve hypocrisy–for example, fear-mongering and exaggeration.)