Monthly Archives: April 2014

youth Participatory Budgeting in Boston

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On Friday, I had the opportunity to observe about 50 Boston young people at work on the city’s youth Participatory Budgeting initiative. I will write the whole story for GOOD Magazine, so this is just a teaser. In essence, volunteer young people (ages 12-25) have brainstormed more than 400 projects that the city could support out of its capital budget. I watched committees of youth come together to study, refine, and screen these proposals. In June, as many youth as possible will be recruited to vote for their favorite proposals at meetings across the city. The city will then allocate $1 million of its capital budget to fund the top-scoring projects.

This is an example of Participatory Budgeting, a process that began in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989 and has since spread to 1,500 locations in many countries, according to the Participatory Budgeting Project. It bears some resemblance to other processes, including the New England town meetings that began in the 1600s and still survive in some towns in our region, not to mention the 265,000 village councils of India and other participatory government mechanisms around the world. It is nevertheless an innovation. The three-step process (brainstorming, project-development, voting); the application to big cities; and the allocation of capital budgets are all distinctive features of Participatory Budgeting. Boston’s process is not the first to restrict the franchise to young residents (regardless of US citizenship status, by the way), but that remains unusual.

I will have more to say about the details as the process unfolds. See also: “the rise of urban citizenship“; “participatory budgeting in Recife, Brazil wins the Reinhard Mohn Prize“; “participatory budgeting in the US“; and my chapter entitled “’Social Accountability’ as Public Work.”

Joyce’s The Dead

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James Joyce’s “The Dead” is certainly the most famous chapter of Dubliners, the only part made into a Hollywood film. Like the other chapters, it is a short story that can be read on its own. But having recently experienced it with the rest of Dubliners for the first time since the 1980s, I realize that it is most effective in its proper context.

Dubliners depicts a huge sociological range, from a child-molesting vagrant to a rich young heir. But to us, who do not live in Dublin ca. 1900, the characters are all specimens. It is not that they are more parochial or naive than we are. They are just people in a particular setting whom we can observe from afar thanks to the extraordinarily fluent and knowing prose of James Joyce. We are free from their particular narrowness.

“The Dead” is different because Gabriel, alone of all Dubliners’ characters, is our peer. The very first sentence is a solicism: “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” That is how Lilly would describe her own plight–its grammar distances us. She happens to be running to open the door for Gabriel, who observes her as Joyce would: “Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname and glanced at her. She was a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-colored hair.” Here the narrator’s style merges with Gabriel’s. The door has opened to admit a knowing observer, our proxy. Gabriel then asks Lilly an insensitive question about her “young man” that he immediately regrets. He stands apart from the social world that he inhabits, as we do.

His task is to give a speech, but

He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognise from Shakespeare or the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his.

I have no Browning by heart; I am not above the men with the clacking heels. But because I read about them from Gabriel’s perspective, which is also Joyce’s, I stand above them for the duration of the story.

One thing unites everyone who lived in Dublin in 1900: they are all dead now. When Joyce wrote, many were still alive, but the future had always been inevitable: they would die while Joyce’s prose still lived. In that respect, the very end of “The Dead” makes it a ghost story. The characters are not literally ghosts, but although we have outlived them–and their author–we can still observe their “wayward and flickering existence”:

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

why is oligarchy everywhere? (part 2)

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By 1937, John D. Rockefeller had accumulated $1.4 billion from his monopolistic oil business. That was 1.5% of the whole nation’s GDP, concentrated in one person. It conferred vast political power on him and his family. His descendents were to include New York Governor and US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, West Virginia Senator and Governor John D. Rockefeller IV, and other prominent leaders of government and philanthropy. In Aristotle’s terms, the Rockefeller family and their peers added an element of oligarchy to the mixed regime of the United States.

However, per Thomas Picketty’s argument, economic growth was larger than the returns to capital from 1913-2000. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller clan grew in number. They earned money from their capital (and from other business activities), but the country grew at a faster pace. As a result, according to Forbes, there are now 200 descendents of John D. Rockefeller, and they have $8.5 billion in combined assets. Their total wealth is 0.05% of the nation’s GDP. It is shared 200 ways, leaving each Rockefeller with an average share of .0002% of GDP.

In short, John D. had a slice of the national pie 7,500 times bigger than that of his descendents. To the extent that today’s Rockefellers have an advantage in politics, it is mainly because the generations after John D. genuinely served the public and built up some honor. His son John D. Jr. quit active management of the family business and devoted himself to philanthropy with a strongly progressive tilt. Many of his children and in-laws then became public servants.

Arguably this happened because, in Aristotle’s terms, the Rockefellers lived in a constitutional polity, or at least a society that aspired to be one. In any proper constitutional polity, “The end of the state is the good life … by which we mean a happy and honorable life” (Politics 3.9). Congress forced John D. Jr., to testify about the Ludlow Massacre, and then Mother Jones herself persuaded him that his testimony had been false. “Mackenzie King was later to say that this testimony was the turning point in Junior’s life, restoring the reputation of the family name; it also heralded a new era of industrial relations in the country.”

In a constitutional order, the rich can grow richer than they were, but their ability to convert their wealth into power must shrink over time; they must be required to explain and justify their behavior; and they must be disciplined by the need to demonstrate public service.

But Aristotle observed a cycle of decline before his own day: “The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honor, and so oligarchies naturally grew up.” Signs that the same decline is happening today:

  • The owners of capital and their heirs accumulate growing shares of GDP.
  • Capital can be converted into political power. Restraints are removed.
  • Wealth (inherited or otherwise) confers respect or honor, independent of genuine public service.
  • The very wealthy are insulated from their critics and do not have to explain themselves.

[This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post. See also Ezra Klein’s “Doom Loop of Oligarchy” posted today.]

why is oligarchy everywhere?

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The first governments were kingships. … . But when many persons equal in merit arose, no longer enduring the pre-eminence of one, they desired to have a commonwealth, and set up a constitution. The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honor, and so oligarchies naturally grew up. These passed into tyrannies and tyrannies into democracies; for love of gain in the ruling classes was always tending to diminish their number, and so to strengthen the masses, who in the end set upon their masters and established democracies. — Aristotle, Politics III

Recent headlines suggest that the Aristotelian cycle is happening globally–with the very important difference that Aristotle believed oligarchies turned into democracies, but the reverse seems to be happening now. For instance:

Why would this be happening? Mainly, it’s because we aren’t fighting back effectively; and I am optimistic that sooner or later we will. But in doing so, we’ll have to address the underlying currents that seem to cause democracies to drift into oligarchies unless we act.

First, consider the argument of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, which–to be clear–I have not yet read. His point is that almost always, the return to capital has been greater than the economic growth rate. That means that the people who possess capital get progressively richer than everyone else, and their children get even richer than them. The period 1913-ca. 2010 was anomalous because growth exceeded the return to capital, meaning that people with wealth got richer, but their societies got richer still. That is also a period when democracy and socialism (between them) covered most of the global north. One might assume that market democracies boosted growth and lowered the returns to capital, and that would imply that they can do so again. But it’s also possible that the returns to capital were lower than growth for external reasons (technological change; war), which is why democracies survived. If the latter explanation is true, we are in trouble, because returns to capital again exceed growth and are expected to do so for decades to come.

Second, there’s the disturbing thesis of Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatized the Public. In my version of their argument: starting in the 1600s, certain nation-states allowed the mass public to have power. As a result, these states were able to mobilize their people to fight wars and to lend money to finance wars. In turn, the states that had the biggest armies either dominated everyone else or forced the others to imitate them. The exceptions were terrifying tyrannies that conscripted their men and seized their wealth, but they turned out to be fragile. By a kind of Darwinian process, the nation-states that were democracies prevailed; they were “fittest.” But then technologies of death became more sophisticated. Wealthy nations no longer needed lots of soldiers. They could win wars with a few well-equipped professionals. They only needed a small proportion of their people to finance these 21st century militaries. As a result, the Darwinian pressure to expand democracy is now gone.

Again, I am not proposing an inevitable drift to oligarchy. These are simply tendencies that we must confront.

free speech at a university

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(Charlottesville, VA) From Mr Jefferson’s University, here are some thoughts about free speech in academia.

This may seem a simple topic: students and faculty should be able to express themselves freely. But I think it is quite complicated, for two reasons.

First, the university is all about adjudicating and rewarding quality, which conflicts with freedom. Every admissions letter, grade on a paper or a class discussion, decision about hiring or promotion, peer-review, invitation to give a lecture, or choice to acquire a book for the library is a decision about quality. The First Amendment gives you the right to say what you like. But if you write a weak argument for a paper, or express yourself on an irrelevant topic, you will get a lower grade. An institution thoroughly dedicated to making high-stakes assessments cannot also be a free-speech zone.

Second, educators and students both have claims to freedom of speech, and those claims may conflict. Duke Provost Peter Lange was once presented with this scenario:

In the Jan. 25 issue of the Chronicle, a Duke student complained about what he perceived as propagandizing in one of his classes: “One of the most insulting moments of my Duke education occurred in an ancient Chinese history class in spring 2003, when the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq. Our teacher took a break from Confucius and the Han Dynasty to stage a puzzling “teach-in” about Iraq in conjunction with some national organization. During this supposedly neutral discussion, she regaled us with facts and assertions suggesting that the Iraq war was scandalous, foolish and doomed to fail …”

Of course, the Iraq war was scandalous, foolish and doomed to fail. But the teach-in, if accurately described, sounds improper to me. This kind of complaint leads to the provision in the “Academic Bill of Rights” that “Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.” But that clearly trades off against a different provision in the same document: “Academic freedom consists in protecting the intellectual independence of professors …” An intellectually independent professor could choose to indoctrinate (or could speak in a way perceived as indoctrination by students who disagree). As Lange said, to ban that kind of expression limits the professor’s freedom of speech.

Perhaps professors have no valid claim freedom within their classrooms. Let them talk freely on their own time; when on the job, their purpose is to educate the students in their charge. That argument presumes that the value of free speech accrues to the speaker alone–it is about protecting her liberty, dignity, or sheer preference. But free speech also benefits the listeners, including listeners who sharply disagree. As J.S. Mill argued, you cannot test an idea unless you can hear it forcefully expressed by someone who actually believes it. To prevent professors from expressing their own ideas is to take those ideas off the table. In a famous statement from 1894, the University of Wisconsin Regents claimed that professorial freedom would lead toward truth:

We cannot for a moment believe that knowledge has reached its final goal, or that the present condition of society is perfect. … In all lines of academic investigation it is of the utmost importance that the investigator should be absolutely free to follow the indications of truth wherever they may lead. Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

That is an eloquent expression of one side of the debate, but we should not ignore the other side: the rights of the students. A professor has the power to set the agenda and can assign grades for what students say and write. Untrammeled liberty by professors can definitely “chill” the freedom of expression of their students. I think the evidence that professors actually indoctrinate on any substantial scale is weak.* But it could happen.

To make things even more complicated, educators talk to educators; and students, to students. They should all be able to express themselves freely, and yet one’s expression can hamper another’s freedom and flourishing. That is especially true when the balance of power among them is unequal: for instance, when one side outranks or outnumbers the other or has more social clout. “Microaggressions” are exercises of speech that suppress the welfare–and perhaps the liberty–of others. To those who are wholeheartedly committed to confronting microaggressions, I would recall the importance of the speakers’ freedom. Unless people are permitted and even encouraged to say what they think, their ideas cannot be debated, and we can pursue the truth. On the other hand, to those who see the language of “microaggression” as oppressive political correctness, I would argue that some statements really do undermine the standing of our peers and are incompatible with the demanding norms of speech in a university. That doesn’t mean that rules against demeaning speech are wise, but we should be able to denounce a verbal aggression when it occurs.

Since I am here as the guest of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, among other sponsors, I will end by quoting Jefferson: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.” But he was also the author of the Senate’s “Manual of Parliamentary Practice,” with its elaborate rules to promote civility and mutual respect. That balance is difficult but crucial.

*(As I noted in a previous post, Yates and Youniss find that a powerful dose of Catholic social doctrine does not convert predominantly Protestant African American students, but provokes them to reflect on their own values. McDevitt and colleagues (in a series of papers including this one), find that political debates in school stimulate critical discussions in the home. Colby et al. find that interactive political courses at the college level, although taught by liberal professors, do not move the students in a liberal direction but deepen their understanding of diverse perspectives. Evidence of the effects of college ideological climates is ambiguous because of students’ self-selection into friendly environments.)