Monthly Archives: April 2015

Innovation and Civic Engagement

I’m speaking briefly tomorrow at a Tufts Institute for Innovation symposium on “Research, Innovation, and Community Engagement.” I may say something along these lines:

It is exciting and valuable to put these four words together. We need innovation because existing strategies have not solved stubborn problems. We need research to explain the problems and to assess what works. We need communities, meaning not just populations of people who happen to live in particular places, but groups of people who have networks and norms that allow them to improve the world. (Voluminous scholarship finds that community ties are essential for success.) And we need engagement if we want research and innovation to influence the world.

So I am a fan. But I would like to take a few minutes to note some risks that may arise if we try to combine research, innovation, community, and engagement in the wrong ways.

Research and innovation go together neatly. In fact, university-based research must be innovative, almost by definition. An inquiry doesn’t count as “research” if it has been done before. To be sure, some academic research is highly routine and standard. But that kind of work is valued less than original research. Innovation is esteemed in the university. Famous scholars are innovators.

Innovation is also valued highly in the private sector, in part because making or doing something new can be especially profitable. One definition of a “commodity” is a good for which the demand is met by undifferentiated suppliers. It doesn’t matter whether your shirt was stitched by Bangladeshi workers or a machine in Germany; the shirt comes out the same. A commodity yields low profits because anyone can turn capital into the good and compete. Innovation allows the innovator to reap greater advantage by avoiding competition.

Since innovation is prized in the academy (where the currency is fame) and in the marketpace (where the currency is money)–and since the academy and the market are merging–it is no surprise that glamor attaches to the idea of innovative research that produces innovative solutions that go to market. That is the current ideal.

It is an ideal that also finds its way into public policy. The Obama Administration loves concrete new policy interventions that can be rigorously evaluated. In 2o13, for instance, the administration proposed $200 million in a competitive pool for state governments that cut energy use and expanded HOPE (Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation and Enforcement scheme), which had performed well in evaluations. But it proposed to cut Social Security by $130 billion and Medicare by $380 billion.

Social Security and Medicare are old, not innovative. These big, old programs are not subject to being invented and then tested in randomized experiments. Yet cutting $130 billion from a basic entitlement is massively more consequential than spending $200 million on innovations. And the reason for the cuts was not an actual preference by the administration; it was a function of the balance of power, with Republicans controlling Congress. If we presume that innovation by itself solves problems, we forget about power–power to devise innovations, power to use them, and power to change larger systems that have little to do with innovation.

If innovation and research fit comfortably enough together, innovation and community make a more difficult pair. Communities do not necessarily need innovation. They may prefer to preserve what they have, or to develop in regular and predictable ways. They may value tradition. They will ask whether an innovation is an improvement or a new evil. For these and other reasons, they often resist innovations.

Even when it comes to research, communities may not need originality. Once it is known that cigarettes cause cancer, a community needs to know who is smoking and where the cigarettes come from. The original discovery about the impact of tobacco was valuable, but now the community just needs routine data of the kind that will not look impressive on an academic’s CV.

In a competitive research university, the more innovation, the better. In a community, that is not the case. True, a world of innovation can be exciting and liberating. But if everyone else is innovating, it becomes difficult to make plans for yourself. That actually undermines personal liberty; you are constantly reacting and adjusting to other people’s innovations. The same is true for communities. They cannot govern themselves and form durable laws if everything if always being changed. As James Madison argued: A “mutable policy … poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws … be repealed or revised before they are promulg[at]ed, or undergo such incessant changes, that no man who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”

I haven’t said anything about “engagement” yet. Real engagement is not a one-way flow. For instance, to develop and deploy an innovation in a community does not reflect engagement. Two people are said to be engaged if they plan to form a couple. Two gears are engaged if turning either one moves the other. Two gears are engaged if stopping one stops the other. A community and a university are engaged if they form a kind of couple, and if motion–or stillness–on either side influences the partner.

Communities can innovate. And civic engagement can be done in innovative ways. Indeed, Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland’s book, Civic Innovation in America: Community Empowerment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal is an indispensable work that counters narratives of civic decline by showing that new forms of civic engagement have been painstakingly developed to respond to a changing world.

In an age of innovation, we’d better engage citizens in new ways. In that respect, innovation and engagement fit neatly together. But we must not yield to the assumption that “innovation” is desirable because it is the path to fame and profit. If we are really engaged with communities, they will have the power to stop or alter the cleverest innovations. At least some of the power will come from their side.

In short, I am all for developing innovative solutions to social problems and engaging communities in using them. But we must not forget issues of power and of ethics. Some innovations are good, some are bad, and some are insignificant compared to bigger social decisions. A relationship should form between any academic or entrepreneur who is strongly motivated to innovate and the community that might want to participate. That relationship must be ethical and fairly equitable. Ideally, some of the insights and innovations will come from the community side. And like an engaged gear, the community will have the power to stop and prevent the research partner from moving forward.

civics in the Senate education bill

a deep dive on deep dives

1 Reply

Suddenly everyone wants to do a “deep dive” into every subject. Today, for instance, Pew offers a “Deep Dive into Party Affiliation.” The phrase appears in The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary right after “decruit,” an Orwellian term for firing someone. I would have said that metaphorical uses of “deep diving” were much less common even a year ago, but these things are hard to measure. Books always provide a lagging indicator and don’t necessarily catch up with spoken language even after a delay. But the Google book trend for the phrase “deep dive” is interesting. It shows a rapid increase in the 1970s, a bear market for deep diving in the 1980s-1990s (my impressionable years), and then a steep upward slope until 2008, which is the last year of available data.

To decode the scale: this graph means that one of every five million phrases in printed books in 1972 was the phrase “deep dive.” Some uses probably referred to pearl fishers and Soviet submarines. But the increase could reflect an emerging business metaphor.

The word “cliché” was invented by French printers in the age of moveable type to refer to a precast word or phrase that could be dropped into text for efficiency. I don’t think you would bother to forge a cliché for the word “deep dive” as long as it stayed at the level shown above. Thus it isn’t literally a cliché. But two parts in every ten million seems like plenty to me.

against fatalism: responding to Krugman and Sunstein

Leave a reply

(Washington, DC) Harry Boyte, Albert Dzur, and I have a letter in the latest New York Review of Books that is pertinent to today’s column by Paul Krugman. Krugman’s piece, entitled “Economics and Elections,” is deeply depressing and depressed, exemplifying the very mode of thought that Harry, Albert, and I wanted to challenge in our letter about Cass Sunstein and Michael Walzer, which we wrote more than a month ago.

Krugman argues today that the British Tories did immense and unnecessary damage to the UK economy by enforcing austerity policies. However, the British economy has grown of late, and “a large body of political science research” finds that what determines the outcome of a national election is economic growth during “the last two quarters before the election.” That factor is much more important than any behavior or rhetoric by politicians or anything that the media can say or do. It explains why the Tories may win.

For politicians, the lesson is to ignore the good of the country if you want to be reelected. In fact, “the politically smart thing might well be to impose a pointless depression on your country for much of your time in office, solely to leave room for a roaring recovery just before voters go to the polls.” Scholars and public intellectuals can do little to change this reality, Krugman argues, but they should commit to the truth anyway, like geeky existentialists. Our duty as intellectuals:

Try to get it right, and explain our answers as clearly as we can. Realistically, the political impact will usually be marginal at best. Bad things will happen to good ideas, and vice-versa. So be it. Elections determine who has power, not who has the truth.

(By the way, this is an interesting reversal for Krugman, who early in the Obama years was quick to accuse the president of not using the Bully Pulpit effectively. As he now notes, political scientists basically don’t believe in the Bully Pulpit.)

Cass Sunstein, a distinguished and often insightful political scientist, has collected evidence along similar lines to the “large body” of research cited by Krugman today. Sunstein and his co-author Reid Hastie argue that individuals and groups reach irrational conclusions because of hard-wired cognitive limitations, such as a tendency to “groupthink.” The behavior of voters in a national election is just an example.

Such evidence should be taken seriously. But Michael Walzer offered an important critique in the New York Review of Books that could also apply to Krugman’s article today. Walzer argued that problems (like groupthink) that bedevil discussions inside Congress, the Supreme Court, or any committee room may not be as serious as “powerlessness and inequality.” He concluded:

Organizing, agitating, demonstrating—these are ways of bringing the powerless to the attention of the powerful. They can contribute importantly to democratic decisions, even if they seem nondeliberative. … Sometimes we will want the people outside the room actually to win—to organize and agitate so successfully that they take over the small groups who dominate decision-making, with the result that they change the political conversation. … So, yes, we need to be wiser in the ways described by Sunstein and Hastie; but we also need a radically different kind of decision-making than what they describe, involving a larger number of people inside and outside the rooms where small groups sit.

We concur but would push the argument further. Political institutions can be changed. This is not only a matter of adjusting the rules that govern, for instance, parliamentary districts in the UK or campaign finance in the US. It is also about achieving cultural change within major institutions, such as legislatures, newspapers, and schools and colleges. It is about changing us (the citizens), not just them (the rulers). We wrote:

Sunstein, like Habermas and many others, sees major institutions as largely fixed and unchangeable, not subject to democratizing change. This assumption generates fatalism, which has shrunk our imaginations about decision-making, politics, and democracy itself. The challenge is to recognize that institutions of all kinds are human creations that in turn can be recreated, reconnected to questions of civic and democratic purpose. For this task we need to bring in Max Weber as well as Machiavelli and Marx [whom Walzer had recommended in his review]. Weber described the “iron cage” that results from technical rationality. In his essay “The Profession and the Vocation of Politics,” Weber also evocatively termed the pattern “the polar night of icy darkness.” Thawing the polar night is a frontier of democracy in the twenty-first century.

The evidence that Krugman and Sunstein cite is empirical. By definition, it derives from the past. In the case of Krugman’s column today, it derives from quantitative studies of US presidential campaigns since World War II. We should pay attention to trends in the recent past so that we know what to change. But we cannot allow the past to become a dead hand so that we surrender our political agency.

I addressed the very same topic in We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For (pp. 26-7):

The outcome of presidential elections in the United States is strongly correlated with the performance of the economy in the previous year. That means that all the deliberate work of campaigns, parties, and independent advocacy groups matters less than the blind, impersonal force of the business cycle.

Nevertheless, working together in small groups is morally important—it is what we should do and should care most about. To be a good person is to do this work well. That is reason enough to make it a central question for reflection and research. In addition, deliberate human action has significant impact. Small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens do make a difference under appropriate circumstances, as shown by the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the conservative legal movement, and numerous other examples. … Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating that the organization and governance of voluntary groups affects whether they can solve social problems. These findings suggest that “small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens” matter, even if other factors matter too.

If the leaders of the South African freedom movement reviewed the scholarly literature on democratization during the apartheid years, they must have found it depressing. Prosperity, economic equality, and ethnic homogeneity were the factors that had been found to increase the odds of a successful transition to democracy. These structural factors were all evidently absent in South Africa. … Thus, if the African National Congress and other democratic reformers had been guided by hard-nosed, empirical research, they would have chosen a goal short of democracy, something like a negotiated arrangement among separate authoritarian communities. But they were right to ignore the scholarly literature because it was based on empirical data—in a word, on the past—and the past can never determine the future. So far, their peaceful revolution appears a monumental work of deliberate human agency.

Discovering Justice and civics for young children

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal