Monthly Archives: September 2007

civic skills/workplace skills

America’s Promise has identified five supports that every child needs to develop successfully: caring adults, safe places, a healthy start, effective education, and opportunities to help others. The America’s Promise research team frequently releases interesting studies showing the positive consequences of having these five supports and the unequal degree to which we provide them.

The latest published report (pdf), entitled “workforce readiness,” identifies several skills that are essential for success in the workplace: decision-making, teamwork and leadership, communication, working with diverse people, computer skills, and money management. The Alliance’s survey data show that most students report few opportunities to develop any of these skills; and outcomes (as assessed by the kids themselves) are unequal. For example, “fewer than half (46%) of the youth surveyed believe that they communicate well with others. African American youth were nearly twice as likely to report poor communication skills as white youth.”

For those of us who want schools to develop civic skills, these data provide an opening. Surveys cited by the Alliance show that business employers want workers who can communicate, collaborate, and make decisions in diverse groups. If we can harness that demand to persuade schools to teach such “soft” skills, we should be able to prepare students better for active citizenship. That will require more team projects in schools and less narrow preparation for paper-and-pencil tests.

Lévi-Strauss lives

Did you know that Claude Lévi-Strauss, the great structuralist, is still alive? He has survived all the major French post-structuralists for whom he was a foil. Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault are all dead. There is an opportunity here for a little “revanche.” I think the man should write a book called Post Post-Structuralism, by Claude Lévi-Strauss. It wouldn’t matter what he said; he would have the last word.

where morality comes from

Nicholas Wade’s New York Times article, entitled “Is ‘Do Onto Others’ Written into Our Genes?” started off badly enough that I had a hard time reading it. Stopping would have been a loss, because I appreciated the reference to YourMorals.org, where (after registering) one can take a nifty quiz.

Wade begins: “Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.”

First of all, the evolutionary basis of morality is not “seldom considered.” It has been the topic of bestselling books and numerous articles. Even the student commencement speaker at the University of Maryland last year talked about it.

More importantly, Wade’s comparison of philosophers and biologists is misleading. Biologists may be able to tell us where morals “come from,” in one sense. As scientists, they try to explain the causes of phenomena, such as our beliefs and behaviors. We call some of our beliefs and behaviors “moral.” Biology may be able to explain why we have these moral characteristics; and one place to look for biological causes is evolution.

But why are we entitled to call some of our beliefs and behaviors moral, and others–equally widespread, equally demanding–non-moral or even immoral? Why, for example, is nonviolence usually seen as moral, and violence as immoral? Both are natural; both evolved as human traits. Moreover, not all violence is immoral, at least not in my opinion. Not even all violence against members of one’s own group is wrong.

Morality “comes from” reason, not in the sense that reason causes morality, but because we must reason in order to decide which of our traits and instincts are right and wrong, and under what circumstances. Evolutionary biology cannot help us to decide that. If biologists want to study the origins of morality, they must use a definition that comes from outside of biology. One approach is to use the definition held by average human beings in a particular population. But why call that definition “moral”? I would call it “conventional.” Conventional opinion may, for example, abhor the alleged “pollution” caused by the mixing of races or castes. It is useful to study the reasons for such beliefs, but it is wrong to categorize them as moral.

Perhaps I wrote that last sentence because of my genes, my evolutionary origins, or what I ate for breakfast this morning. Whether it is true, however, depends on reason.

coming of age in your thirties

She gives a short, mirthless laugh. “It’s no wonder we’re all in such a mess, is it? We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it. And it’s much worse in a real life, because it’s not just snogging and bunk beds, is it? There’s all this as well.” She gestures though the windscreen at the field and the bus stop and a man walking his dog, but I know what she means.

That’s from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a very entertaining and well-constructed novel that I just finished reading. It belongs to the genre of coming-of-age stories in which the appealing male hero realizes that other people also matter and that happiness will require commitment. Compare and contrast James Atlas’ The Great Pretender, Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers, or all the early Phillip Roth.

What struck me, though, was the age of Hornby’s protagonists. These people are turning into adults in their mid-thirties, not their early twenties like Portnoy. Come to think of it, that’s not a surprising phenomenon. We’re living longer, women can safely bear children later, and there are impressive returns to education–including not only school and college, but also such educative experiences as internships, living abroad, and experimenting with jobs. Under these circumstances, people who can delay do delay all the irreversible markers of adulthood.

Laura says to Rob in High Fidelity, “You’ll keep your options open for the rest of your life, if you could. You’d be lying on your deathbed, dying of some smoking-related disease, and you’d be thinking, well, at least I’ve kept my options open. At least I never ended up doing something I couldn’t back out of.” She’s describing Rob’s amusing character flaw, but it’s more than that–not just a personal trait, but a consequence of investing in people’s “human capital” for the first four decades of their lives so that they can produce economic goods and children for the next three decades before comfortably retiring.

Overall, I think this is progress. People are developing their own rational autonomies by learning and experimenting before they make critical decisions about work and family. One drawback, obviously, is inequality. While some take a decade after college to explore their options, others have left school at 16 and have few choices at all. Hornby’s novel is not really about inequality, but it is about the ethical dimension of delaying adulthood. What makes it time to start the real business of life? How should one treat other people during the period of exploration? (I’d say that no 16-year-old owes any friend or romantic partner a lifelong commitment, but I feel differently about a 30-year-old. Why?) What are the appropriate purposes of exploring one’s options?

motives and incentives in the Iraq war

I’m generally against imputing motives to political leaders. I don’t think we can know what they want; there are too many screens and interpreters between them and us. Motives don’t necessarily matter, because a leader can do the right thing for bad reasons, or the wrong thing with good intentions. Finally, looking for motives encourages us to rely on the wrong criteria of judgment. For instance, a change of position looks like a “flip-flop,” suggesting that the politician’s motive is to attract votes. Consistency over time looks like evidence of sincerity. But we should want leaders to change their minds as circumstances evolve, not show that foolish consistency which is the hobgoblin of small minds.

Although I generally resist inferring motives, it is a different matter to analyze the incentives that apply in a given situation. Once we understand the incentives, we may be able to change them. And changing the incentives is worthwhile, because over time, on average, all else being equal, institutions will act in accord with the incentives.

It has been widely noted that the Bush Administration has an incentive to prolong the Iraq war until the next administration, which will then take the heat for the withdrawal. This does not prove that George W. Bush wants to “run out the clock.” He may want to win and he may believe that some kind of victory is either possible or probable if we stay in Iraq. But the incentive structure probably influences and distorts administration policy in favor of staying the course.

Likewise, several commentators (e.g., Tom Friedman) argue that the United States should consistently and loudly denounce each major terrorist attack that kills Muslims, thereby contesting the false notion that we kill Muslim populations whom terrorists defend. But the incentive for the Bush Administration is to minimize all mass killings in Iraq, in order to argue that our troops are keeping the peace. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) says that civilians in Washington, D.C. are at “far greater risk” of violent death than “average civilian[s] in Iraq.” I don’t know why he and his colleagues say such things–maybe because they believe them. But the incentive for the administration and its allies is certainly to downplay mass killings in Iraq, even if the result is a lost opportunity for public relations.

Of course, the Democrats in Congress face incentives, too. If they do not shorten the war, there will be considerable disillusionment in the country, especially among new voters on the progressive side. But disillusionment by itself doesn’t cost incumbents elections. Prolonged war will be much worse for Republicans than for Democrats. Democrats will have an antiwar presidential ticket, and in most of their districts, their candidates (incumbents or challengers) will be less hawkish than the opponents. If the war continues unabated, turnout may be low because of disillusionment, but I suspect that the Democratic margin will be enormous–a landslide. On the other hand, seriously challenging the president and shortening the war carries all sorts of political risks for the Democrats, who then become responsible for what unfolds in Iraq.

More incentives: To borrow $1 trillion to fight the war and let our children pay it off later with interest. To push our volunteer forces to the limit without expanding their numbers with any kind of draft. To remain in a state of high fear and antagonism toward several foreign countries, justifying all kinds of expansions in federal power and spending. To import carbon fuels from some of those same countries to burn in the atmosphere.

In short, the incentives line up to promote disaster. Even if one imputes somewhat decent motives to some of our leaders, we are in trouble.