Author Archives: Peter Levine

in DC

My commute to the University of Maryland

takes me about an hour and fifteen minutes each way (I live in Washington

and take the Metro to work). Therefore, I like to cluster my downtown

meetings on the same days, rather than shuttle back and forth between

DC and Maryland. Today—the coldest day so far this winter—I

had a string of meetings neatly arrayed across downtown. The first was

a breakfast with my good friends from the Study

Circles Resource Center. They support thousands of local "study

circles" around the county—groups of citizens who meet face-to-face

to discuss issues. We ate in an Irish-themed hotel restaurant near Dupont

Circle and talked about ways to promote a national deliberation for young

people on the topic of young Americans’ role in public life. As a researcher,

I am interested in what would happen if several organizations that promote

deliberation in very different ways all conducted a deliberation on the

same topic at the same time. For example, there are online deliberation

sites like E-ThePeople; grassroots

networks of citizens involved in face-to-face discussion like the National

Issues Forums; groups that convene randomly selected bodies of citizens

for intensive, lengthy conversations; and groups that manage very large

summit meetings of citizens all convened together in a single place. I

am interested in the differences among these methodologies. However, as

a result of the discussion with Study Circles, I realized that the important

differences are not really in methods. There probably isn’t even a huge

difference between online and face-to-face conversations. The important

distinction is the way that these groups fit into a larger social context:

how they recruit people, who participates, and what outcomes potentially

result from the deliberation.

Next stop was a meeting with United

Leaders, a Massachusetts-based group that has a Washington outpost

in a major law firm. So I found myself sitting in the lobby of an elegant

office building, decorated with scupltures that looked like Henry Moore’s.

(They weren’t.) The flagship program of United Leaders is a summer internship

for young people, and they wanted me to help them get some support from

the University of Maryland. I’m going to do my best.

Then on to the Council for Excellence

in Government, a major nonprofit, where my colleague Deborah has an

office. I wanted to camp out there for a little while, get Internet access

so that I could catch up with the latest developments with The Civic Mission

of Schools, and talk to Deborah.

At 3, my colleages Margaret and Carrie and I met with Dorothy Gilliam,

a distinguished Washington Post reporter who now manages the Post‘s

programs

in journalism education. Our goal was to acquaint Ms. Gilliam and

her colleagues with our work with high school students in Prince George’s

County—work that involves a lot of journalistic skills (from interviewing

citizens to interpreting news articles). We were not well prepared and

did not have a good answer when we were asked what we wanted from the

Post. I blurted out that we were simply hungry for guidance from

people who had more experience than we do in journalism education. I don’t

know how we came across, but I did enjoy the conversation about young

people of color and their relationship to news and newspapers.

Margaret and Carrie and I then had a quick coffee near my house to debrief,

and that ended my work day.

oral history of desegregation

I spent most of the morning advising a potential applicant for the Rhodes

Scholarship—something that I do on the side because I feel that Maryland

students need coaching. (We haven’t won since the mid-1970s.)

In the afternoon, our class at Northwestern

High School interviewed two people for our oral history project

on the desegregation of Prince George’s County schools. One interviewee

was the first African American student at the school. (He was still the

only one when he graduated three years later). He said: "Initially

I was actually hoping that it wouldn’t work. My parents had said that

if there was a lot of violence, we would back up. … Instead of violence,

there were three years of hostility." His main motivation was to

be "part of something bigger," the Civil Rights Movement. He

later became a successful chemical engineer. I found him enormously appealing—and

easily understood what he meant in his understated way, but the kids took

his reticence about his own emotions as evasiveness.

The second interviewee was a current member of the County Council, a

white man who was formerly a civil rights lawyer. He had sued to force

bussing in the county schools and then arranged the settlement that ended

bussing. He moved to the County in 1971, and his family was the only White

one in the local community. At a community meeting, "I said I was

a civil rights lawyer and I wanted to be active in the community."

A community leader said, "Man, you are a phenomenon. Most white people

are trying to move out of here." In the 1970s, roughly 100,000 African

Americans relocated to Prince George’s County (mostly from Washington),

and roughly 100,000 White people left—a pattern that continued for

the next 20 years. "Those folks who moved in the seventies were running

from black folks … In the eighties and nineties, it had more to do

with the aging of the population and the changing of circumstance."

People left for upper income housing and better schools.

"My dream in the early eighties was that this is the place where

we would make it work. This is the place where we would demonstrate to

America that it can work like it says in social studies books. Today I

would say that we are still working on that."

relationship mapping

In the midst of a hectic and bleary day, I participated in a conference

call for members of the steering

committee. I proposed an idea that seemed to get a lot of support. Sociologists

sometimes survey individuals or organizations, asking them with whom they

interact most. They create a database showing all the individuals and

their mutual relations. They then use

"relationship-mapping" software to spit out maps that cluster

all the most closely related individuals together and use lines to show

how they are linked. If we did this to all the groups involved in the

field of deliberative democracy, then we could see which ones work together,

which ones are completely separate, and which organizations serve as bridges

between clusters of groups. This is the kind of analysis that political

organizers have always used; software can help to do it more easily and

thoroughly.

earned and unearned income

The President’s surprise proposal to abolish dividend taxes is big news.

There are many ways to evaluate the idea, including consideration of the

effects on short- and long-term economic growth, equity, and the federal

budget. The Administration also emphasizes that a dividend tax is unfair,

since the income that was used to buy the shares was already taxed once.

(The response from commentators like Paul Krugman is that there are many

double taxes, including all sales taxes.) Another consideration seems

to be overlooked. I believe we should retain a distinction between earned

and unearned income, and we should be less hesitant to tax the latter.

There is nothing wrong with investment income. But work—purposeful

human effort—is much more closely linked to human dignity and value.

As Pope John Paul II wrote in Laborem Exercens (1981), "Work is a

good thing for man-a good thing for his humanity-because through work

man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also

achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed in a sense becomes ‘more

a human being.’"

Robert Nozick, the great libertarian philosopher, denied that there was

any moral difference between work and other activities (such as investing)

that produce value. He was reacting to the old leftist idea that labor

alone creates value, and therefore laborers deserve the full price of

their products. It is a scandal of capitalism that some of the reward

goes instead to capitalists, who do not work. In the words of Ralph Chaplin’s

old Wobbly anthem, "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.

This song implies that we should recoup the money that capitalists have

taken from the workers who really made everything. Dividend taxes would

then be a good idea, and the higher the better. Unfortunately, the song

is pretty clearly wrong: investors, managers, and inventors create value,

just as workers do. However, we can still understand labor as morally

different from other economic activities. Compare two people, one of whom

makes a living by digging ditches, while the other profits from inherited

stocks even though she is comatose after an accident. The first labors;

the second does not. An intermediate case is someone who actively invests,

mixing knowledge, intellectual labor, and accumulated capital to generate

wealth. I think that the work aspect of wealth-creation is virtuous, onerous,

and not sufficiently rewarded by the market. This is an argument for policies

(such as dividends taxes) that favor work.

(All this is "auto-plagiarized" from a law

review article I wrote some time ago.

My wife and I went to an event at my 3-year-old’s nursery school today.

She saw me still in my pajamas just before she left for the day, and said

"Daddy, you will get dressed before you come to my school, won’t

you?" This is the beginning of at least 18 years of her worrying

about whether I am about to embarrass her in public.

consensus!

A long day that ended at 3:00 am when I finally submitted The Civic Mission

of Schools to the designers—10 hours late. I spent most of the middle

of the day participating in spirited email discussions about specific

points in the 40-page document that raised problems for some of our endorsers.

I think we have everyone on board.