Making A Difference

LinkedIn asks: "Are firms making a difference?" They note that companies have lined up to make their statements of support for anti-racism and social justice, and wonder how the public is taking these. Personally, if I see another random "Black Lives Matter" banner slapped on a random company homepage, I'll want to put my eyes out. But I get it. Companies have to be seen expressing concern and care. At least for the time being.

The Harris Poll "asked Americans how important it is that companies work to truly make a positive difference on specific societal issues and how much of a positive impact they have seen from corporate America." The present data on a wide-ranging basket of concerns, from "Good health and well being" to "Drug addiction," and show the percentages of respondents that said that it was "Very important that companies work to truly make a positive difference" and who said they were seeing a "Very Positive Corporate Impact." And they say that the primary takeaway is that: "What a company does is more important than what it says."

But in the end, the question isn't what companies are going to do. It's what we're going to do.

There has been a long-running debate in the United States over which is the chicken and which is the egg: Are social justice disparities driven by economic disparities, or the reverse? While, most likely, the correct answer at this stage of the game is that the two are inextricably intertwined, there is some ability to engage them separately. And there is some ability to lessen economic disparities, via increased domestic hiring. Companies can certainly do this. But that doesn't answer the question of why they would. Companies aren't going to spend money "to truly make a positive difference" in the country simply because the public at large doesn't want to. To a certain degree, the wealth of affluent Americans has been transferred from less well-off Americans whose jobs have been off-shored or simply eliminated. Advancing them to being better off than they are, let alone something approaching parity, would require redistribution. But if the pie isn't made any larger, than a redistribution of wealth is also a redistribution of poverty. And many people in the United States don't want an iota more than they already have. And the owners and shareholders of companies in the United States are most certainly in that camp.

Capital can flee from taxes and regulations, but it can't run from the simple costs of doing business if it wants to, well, do business. And increasing the costs of accessing the American public, and the money that they spend on goods and services is not a simple task. It takes a level of coordination and cooperation that it hard for a large and heterogeneous nation to manage. It's part of the reason the United States finds itself in the position it is now. And the wealthy capitalist class can afford to wait for the current consensus to break down, given that history shows that it's unlikely to last indefinitely. And if that changes, and the United States does manage to pull together, and stay together, long enough to drive genuine accountability, it won't be companies that have made the positive difference. It will be the public.

Self-Fulfilling

I was speaking with someone about the ongoing SARS-2 Coronavirus outbreak today, and they were lamenting the lack of care that people have for one another, citing the recent rise in cases attributed to states loosening restrictions on businesses and public gatherings, and the widely shared images of people being out in public without masks. During this part of the conversation it occurred to me that I’ve often heard American society described as “dog-eat-dog,” “cutthroat” and/or “every person for themselves.” And if the United States is thought to be oriented around an understanding of “personal responsibility” that tends to translate into “individual self-reliance,” isn’t it be expected that many people take that to heart? For all that it is said that looking out for oneself needn’t mean being unwilling to look out for others, if people understand that the only resource they can count on is themselves, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that they’d concern themselves with themselves. As the ability to both see to one’s own needs and also take care of others is seen as a luxury that accrues mainly to the “privileged,” others are encouraged to see themselves as too poor to be magnanimous.

Likewise, I often wonder if the framing of the epidemic is overly apocalyptic at times. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” is not exactly conducive to long-term thinking about the health of the community as a whole, and the often dire pronouncements of the impacts of the coronavirus outbreak may be contributing to that. Not in the sense that everyone is going to die (although I wonder what things would look like if something closer to the Plague was in play), but in the sense that this will be a seismic, and permanent, shift in that way people live their lives. If this disease is going to force the world to change, people who enjoyed it the way it was are pretty much out of time to savor the old paradigm. I suspect that this drives a certain amount of behavior that people consider reckless. Fear of missing out is the force that it is due more to active (if unintentional) cultivation than to accident.

The messages of “people will take care of one another” and “the world isn’t coming to an end” are not particularly difficult messages to craft, but given the general social climate, they can be very difficult to land. Expressing concern over people’s selfishness and the consequences of same often feels like doing the important work of trying to make the world a better place. But that can create a situation in which “taking things seriously” is often equated with “panicking.” And I think that this panic is not as useful as it’s made out to be.

Injustice for Sale

Recently, I've heard two different stories about the relationship between privately-run, for-profit prisons and the justice system in the United States. The first said that the justice system as a whole was actively working for the prison operators; that the wheels of justice, as it were, were designed to funnel innocent people into a form of modern-day slavery at the behest of rapacious capitalists. The second was the story of a specific judge, who accepted bribes from a local prison operator, to be paid every time the judge sentenced someone to prison. This second one, it turned out, was the Kids for Cash scandal of a decade ago.

The two stories were broadly similar, and point to related, yet distinct problems within the justice system. One says that the system is corrupt in a moral sense, the other is that an individual within the system is corrupt in a legal sense. Both of these can be said to be conspiracy theories; it's the depth and the nature of the alleged conspiracies that differ. Interestingly, the NPR story was updated last year, noting that the story had been circulating on Facebook with an altered headline. I wonder if I haven't heard two versions of the same story, one having been through the social media grinder, and one from memory.

As related to me, the stories carried different themes; one warned of the dangers of a system that operated at the behest of shadowy élites and the other expressed anger at how those who wield the power of the state use it to protect themselves from accountability. Each story reflected the concerns of the people who related them to me. And interestingly, seemed geared towards prompting me to share those concerns.

There is a worry about misinformation in academic circles, with a never ending series of alarms being sounded about false information circulating online. But maybe the worry would be better placed (to the degree that worry can ever be well-placed) if it were concerned with people's worries. If a significant portion of misinformation is driven by people's fears, perhaps working with those fears would kill two birds with one stone.

But What About

I’ve not talked to a single officer who supported what happened in Minneapolis, yet every one of us is being painted with that broad brush. Everyone’s screaming about racism and racial inequality—but is that not what everybody is doing to law enforcement? With racism, people get in power and use that power against another ethnicity. Now, [activists] have a voice because of what happened to Floyd, but they’re using that power against another group. That group happens to be law enforcement.

We understand it’s not all of you, but you wanna sit there—I’m sure you’ve seen memes that people have sent around about 1,000 good cops, but if you have 10 bad cops, you have 1,100[sic] bad cops because we’re not holding one another accountable. The same could be flipped, with 1,000 protesters and 10 agitators.
“In One Day, We Became the Worst Things in the Country” Slate Magazine

The quotes above illustrate for me the idea that suffering does not create empathy for others who suffer. If we take the officers at face value, they clearly feel that the people who protest them, who they feel have been the targets prejudice and the whims of people in power, are more than happy to turn the tables when given the chance. And they are, to some degree, likely correct in that assessment. Yet it's also clear that they're just as willing to paint with broad brushes themselves. Doing unto others as has been done unto them becomes the watchword.

When people suffer, many of them see only their own suffering, and the keen feeling that it is undeserved. And this is often felt more strongly than any identification with others who suffer, even when the sufferers know who those people are, and can name their suffering.

And so the cycle of inflicting pain continues. Philospher Thomas Nagel once noted that people feel that their own pains are morally important, to the point that other people should care about them. Those who claimed otherwise, Professor Nagel claimed, were either dishonest or mentally ill. While I personally feel that he is incorrect in such a blanket assessment, it's understandable how he came to such a conclusion. But perhaps more importantly, for people who do feel that what happens to them is of universal moral significance, it often appears that they see it as the primary thing that others should be concerned with, and when they see others as being dissimilar to themselves, they don't see their pains as being of equal moral weight. And inflicting more pain on them doesn't change that.

Un Together Now

So this collage was shared as evidence that leadership in the United States (At least from the White House) was failing to rally the nation to put an end to the COVID-19 epidemic. Which is fair enough, I suppose, but for me, that assessment relies on the idea that all other things are equal, which I don't really suspect they are.

A strong nationwide response to something like the SARS-2 Coronavirus requires a very high level of social trust. While some 60% to 70% of Americans report that they wear masks and take other precautions when out and around, that still leaves tens of millions of people who aren't. But even getting the level of cooperation into the 60s is quite a feat. Pushing it higher is going to be remarkably difficult.

And I don't know that it's realistic to expect a President who was elected through working the divisions that have grown up between Americans for at least the past 30+ years to suddenly turn around and have everyone pulling in the same direction over the course of a couple of months. Even if he were inclined to operate in that way, and there's little evidence that he is, it would be a nearly impossible task. Leadership is all find and good, but people have to want to follow.

Unheroic

In “The Silence of the Never Facebookers” in The Atlantic, writer Ian Bogost notes that the ability to decide never to work for Facebook “is a privileged attitude.” It's a point well-taken, and it boils down to the simple idea that principles are easy when the costs of acting on them are low. Deciding to walk out on an employer is easier for a person who believes that they'll land safely than it is for someone who believes they'll risk long-term unemployment. This is why Seth Godin speaks of “the difficult and heroic work of acting differently.” But, as Bertolt Brecht put it in Galileo: “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.”

If people generally understand that being the change one wants to see in the world requires privilege or heroism, many people simply won't do it; because they don't see themselves as privileged or heroic. What makes privilege and heroism valuable is their limited status. But if being the change is the path of least resistance, the easiest option, then more people will take it. Changing rhetoric and changing actions are not the same, but both can be accomplished. People do so all the time. They incorporate new sayings and words into their vocabularies, they form new habits and replace old ones, they alter the incentives that they respond to and that they offer to others. And while a sense of urgency is called for, the world doesn't need to be different tomorrow. There is time for people to help one another along the path. There is time to make the change we want to see in the world something mundane and commonplace, and so help it become the world.

No Entry

I came across a blog posting that offered the following definition of an entry-level position: "An entry-level job is a position that requires basic skills and little job experience to obtain." Later, it went on to say that: "Most entry-level jobs list two to five years of previous experience as a requirement." It pointed to an employer website, which, when asked if they had entry-level opportunities for newly-minted college graduates, answered: "For entry-level roles, we commonly look for 3-5 years' of work-related experience in a related field."

While I've seen people describe this as cynical corporate greed (companies wanting experience, but not wanting to pay for it), what I think is happening here is simply an evolution in business language. It's not as splashy or rapid as a new corporate buzzword bursting onto the scene, but in effect, we are watching "entry-level" shift from denoting a role that is intended as an entry into the workforce, or a given industry, to denoting an entry into a particular company. And, as might be expected with such shifts, it's confusing, as job seekers and employees are using the same words, but not with the same meanings. Eventually, I suspect, the language changeover will be complete, and the new definition of "entry-level" will become common parlance, and some new term will arise to fill in the gap.

In the meantime, there are plenty of suggestions as to what job seekers should do. And this is where we arrive at the heart of the matter.

The first common suggestion was to find internships. Note that "internship" also lacks a single, narrow definition. An internship can be either one where the intern is dong work for the company, in which case the United States Department of Labor says that the intern should be treated as an employee, and is entitled to minimum wage and overtime, or one in which the internship is effectively an extension of an educational environment. The expectation that people will work for low wages, or forgo the opportunity for other paid work to land an internship, will have the effect of selecting for people who have other financial support. Which is likely going to mean that they come from more well-off families. (And this doesn't consider those "internships" that are basically training programs paid for by their participants.)

The second common suggestion was volunteer work. This too, selects for those people who can support themselves, or have someone to support them, while they gain unpaid experience.

The third common suggestion was freelance work. The "gig economy" as it's come to be called, may be a better option than a very low wage as an intern, or none as a volunteer, but it also selects for those who have some other means of support. Freelance work often sees people competing for the available jobs by attempting to undercut other applicants for the work. A person who doesn't have to support themselves entirely with their own work can do this easier than someone whose living expenses place a hard floor under their bids.

While all of the above suggestions are well-meaning, they all favor those people who already have a certain amount of wealth, or have families that can afford to support them. This selection process would have the result of entrenching historical patterns of family wealth, as people who can afford to gamble on anywhere from two to five years of low, non-existent or precarious wages are better placed to attain better wages later than those who cannot.

Another suggestion, offered by an employer, was effectively: "Find someone else to hire you, then come over to us later." This has the societal benefit of not locking in current patterns of wealth distribution, but it's unlikely to be a workable strategy in the long term. After all, other employers are unlikely to tolerate being seen as a way for other companies, either complementary or competing, to outsource their training departments, and the costs associated with them. This is the whole root of the idea that landing a first job is a catch-22; no business wants to hire people and train them, just to see them leave for a more desirable employer. As a result, rather than remaining the preference of a few élite employers, the idea is likely to catch on, and employers in general will seek to avoid training, which will mean that it will fall to employees to seek out their own training.

One interesting suggestion, and the last one I'll deal with here, was to simply ignore the requirement. The idea here is that employers always ask for the perfect, candidate, so job seekers should go into the process with the idea that since this perfect candidate doesn't exist, they may way well go for it. According to an often-quoted Hewlett-Packard internal report, while men will apply to roles when they meet only 60% of the listed requirements, women tend to only apply when they can check off all of the boxes. But when Harvard Business Review surveyed people as to why they didn't apply for roles when they didn't meet all of the requirements, the top answer for both men and women was simple: “I didn’t think they would hire me since I didn’t meet the qualifications, and I didn’t want to waste my time and energy.” For women, the second most common answer was effectively that they didn't want to set themselves up for failure, and for men, that they wanted to respect the time of the person doing the reviewing. HBR says that these reasons represent a mistaken perception of the hiring process, but when people are just coming into the professional workforce, how are they supposed to have accurate perceptions? Especially when the language around the process is inconsistent?

The problem is not likely to be resolved any time soon. The term "entry-level" my find a replacement, but employer unwillingness to train and opacity around process will only grow as automation becomes more common, and the ability to have people working from anywhere in the world means that the potential pool of employees grows. Of course, it can't go on forever, but how long it will be until the next big labor-intensive thing comes along remains to be seen.

Ready the Lash

During yesterday's widespread T-Mobile outage, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai took to Twitter to let everyone know just how seriously he was taking things.

The T-Mobile network outage is unacceptable. The @FCC is launching an investigation. We're demanding answers--and so are American consumers.

Yes, yes, Chairman Pai. Bravo. You can go back to whatever you were doing. Although, you know, if you'd really like to help us out, calling on technology companies to avoid unhelpful terms like "issue" and "glitch" would go a long way. The banalities hide the true nature of the problems that result in these sorts of large-scale impacts. When T-Mobile says that "a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country" that doesn't tell anyone anything that their lack of cell service hasn't already communicated. Likewise, "This is an IP traffic related issue that has created significant capacity issues in the network core throughout the day." The term "issue" is undefined, and that's why companies fall back on it so much. It allows them to acknowledge the obvious, that there is a problem, without having to pull back the curtain on what the problem might actually be (and thus risk appearing "incompetent").

Of course, it's possible that T-Mobile simply didn't have the details at hand when their messages went out. But it's almost certain that they had more information than what they were giving. If, for instance, the "capacity issue" was a result of some of their internet infrastructure being offline or bypassed, and the remainder being overloaded because of that, they likely knew that. And they could have said so.

But the general opacity with which companies approach these things gives people like Chairman Pai the opportunity to beat his chest and claim to be standing up for the public. But if the FCC insisted on better transparency to begin with, and were less likely to approve the formation of large enterprises through mergers and acquisitions, they wouldn't need to grandstand in the first place.

Part of the problem as always, lies with the public at large. To the degree that there is an expectation that things will "just work" and that people who aren't visibly scrambling aren't doing anything useful, there are incentives to be reactive, rather than proactive. Many people don't understand the level of effort needed to maintain the infrastructure around them, and when things don't break, there is often an assumption that they never can. It's possible that T-Mobile had done everything in accordance with best practices, and things blew up on them anyway. Technology is no less fallible than people are.

I don't know that greater transparency on the part of large companies will help drive that message home. I do understand that the companies themselves don't see transparency as being in their interests; this is, after all, why they don't offer much of it. But it's somewhat disingenuous, all around, for the FCC to aid and abet them in being opaque, and then turn on them when that opacity becomes a catalyst for public anger. As long as the public is okay with the FCC (or anyone else) having it both ways, though, this pattern will continue.

De Fund Me

Catchphrases, it is generally understood, make for poor policy statements. Mainly because what makes many of them catchy is the fact that they're often appealing by virtue of being vague enough that people can read what they want into them or short enough to be easily remembered. This gets in the way of them being precise, detailed and comprehensive, which are helpful when it comes to policy.

"Defund the police" is a catchphrase, and one born of the idea that problems with police brutality, tribalism and opacity are not the result of rogue officers flouting the rules when they think they can get away with something, but a fundamental part of the way that policing, as an institution, is implemented in the United States. But for all of the genuine anger and concern that lies behind the sentiment, "defund the police" is, like many catchy phrases, vague and short. This allows people to read into it and it doesn't offer any hints of what it would actually look like in practice.

A recent radio story approached "defund the police" from what might be considered the "moderate" angle: the idea that the police are oversubscribed and that many of the things that we expect of them don't require (and my be exacerbated by) an armed responder with the remit to use lethal force. When the host asked if there had been pushback against the idea, the interviewee said "yes," but then went on to express surprise that anyone would disagree with the idea that police forces could do with some trimming. My first thought was that for people who believed that a police officer's primary activity on a day-to-day basis was running down and arresting criminals or otherwise dealing with dangerous scofflaws, any reduction in the police would be seen as a threat.

Cue Andrew Ferguson, staff writer for The Atlantic. His piece is ostensibly about the distinction between taking political speech literally versus taking it seriously, and how the failure of proponents of defunding the police to speak with one voice makes this an impossible question to answer (so Mr. Ferguson decides the answer is "neither"), but it also seems to dwell on the idea that policing, in its current form, is essential.

[Georgetown Law professor Christy E.] Lopez’s premise is one with which I’m sure lots of police officers agree: We ask cops to do too much. They’re expected, Lopez writes, to resolve “verbal squabbles between family members” (in another rhetorical mode a law professor might call such squabbles “domestic violence”), move the homeless “from corners and doorsteps” (to clear public rights of way), and solve “school disciplinary issues” (many of which schools can’t).

It's unclear if Mr. Ferguson is seriously suggesting that one needs an armed response to deal with domestic violence issues that are still in a purely verbal stage (remember, the term "domestic violence" can cover pretty much all forms of abusive behavior between members of a household; where the definition of "abusive" is also fairly expansive), clear public rights of way and tackle challenging disciplinary infractions in school. But I think that it's possible to make the case that he is. But other than the fact that this is currently part of policing, why should it continue to be?

But it's when Mr. Ferguson notes: "But … any cops in there? That is, the kind of public employees who arrest bad guys?" that I see the problem. Firstly, it's not the job of the police to "arrest bad guys." Mainly because the designation of "bad guy" comes when someone has been convicted, that is, after the finding of fact. The burden of proof for a police officer to make an arrest, or for a warrant to issued for an arrest, is not "they're a bad guy." And it's certainly not "they did it." People commonly appear to forget this, but a person who is arrested as a suspect in a crime is legally innocent of that crime. And some number of them will never be convicted of any crime. Unless an officer directly witnesses a crime, it's not their role to make the determination as to whether someone is a criminal. If "bad guy" is simply a shorthand for "people convicted in the court of public opinion," it shouldn't be the role of public employees to pursue them.

It's also worth noting that we don't need to call public employees who carry out warrants and detain individuals based on their own observations "police." The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the principal federal law enforcement agency in the United States. Its agents carry badges, and can arrest people for federal crimes. We don't call them "police." And we don't think of them in the same way that we do the typical beat officer. I am not aware of any given function that the police have that is unique to the role of police officer. This is to say that there is no one single function that defines an agency as a "police" agency. Thus, it stands to reason that one could defund the police, yet not lose any of the functions that police carry out, they would simply be doled out to other organizations. This is not to say that some places won't need agencies that don't currently exist there in order to transfer some of these functions, but the ideas and organization behind the agencies will not be novel; they can be copied from locales that already utilize them.

But the catchphrase of "defund the police" can't, in itself, carry any of this. It is, after all, only three words. The actual policies, and the rationale behind them, are going to be much longer.

Just This Last Time

When I first saw this picture, it caught my eye because of the mis-drawn peace symbol, the center line should bisect the circle completely. This was the sort of thing that would have raised people's ire back when I was in college; the accusation would have been that the news outlet (National Public Radio, in this case) had deliberately run the picture to cast the protestors as stupid and uneducated. Now that I'm older, I suspect that it's the juxtaposition of the sign and the Capitol building that's the draw, but I still found myself sighing. But still, I understand the intent; a semi-visualization of the common protest chant: "no justice, no peace."

Implicit in that threat there is a promise; that if there is justice, there will be peace. The question becomes: Is it believable? I can't remember where I first read this (I may have noted it in an earlier post, though), but a boot on someone's neck can be a problem for both parties involved. While it's fairly clear (and perhaps never more so than in the recent past) why having a boot on one's neck is a problem, the person who owns the boot may also have a problem. To the degree that they fear retaliation, they may feel trapped, needing to leave their boot on the other's neck today to a avoid being punished for it being their yesterday. And as each day the boot is there is added to the tally, the incentive for it to remain grows, rather than lessens, over time.

And this neatly intersects with "no justice, no peace." Because in order to be effective, even in a situation where the accused oppressor understands that they've done wrong, it has to imply "no ongoing payback." If peace is merely a state in which the tables are turned, one thinks that it wouldn't seem very peaceful. And in a situation where the accused oppressor believes that they have done nothing wrong, it's even more difficult. But in either case, "no justice, no peace" is at least somewhat predicated on the idea that once violence has been proven to work, that it will end. This is a heavier lift than I think that people give it credit for.

Pick Your Side

A conflict that does not allow for noncombatants simply makes everyone into a legitimate target of one or the other of the warring parties.

Pass It On

So this morning, I was updating Microsoft Edge to the newly released version. Then a spent some 30 minutes hunting down and trying settings in order to get current Edge to look like the Edge it had just replaced. I'm the sort of person who is irked by these things and once a friend, seeking to be supportive, said: "Wow, man. That's terrible customer service." But here's the point: It isn't. Because I am not the customer.

Microsoft having yet another go at making MSN my homepage is actually good customer service. They are attempting to obtain more attention for the people who advertise on their site (a.k.a., their customers). But this comes at my expense, because I don't find the MSN news and ad feed to be particularly valuable, and so I turn it off. Which is a bit of work, at least the first time. It was a bit of work when I went from Internet Explorer to Edge, and a bit of work when I went from old Edge to new Edge, because the settings were in different places each time. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft could have set things up so that my settings carried over. It may have been some work on their part, however. And rather than assume the time and expense that such work would have entailed, they pushed that work to me, because if I hadn't done it, it would have meant more value to the customer.

How does that relate to the world outside of my home? Well, this pattern of shifting the costs of providing value to customers away from the business providing the value and on to non-customers can be said to be at the root of systemic racism. Take Ferguson, Missouri. One of the findings of the Department Of Justice in that case was: "that Ferguson Municipal Court has a pattern or practice of: Focusing on revenue over public safety, leading to court practices that violate the 14th Amendment’s due process and equal protection requirements." But I suspect that if you asked one of the people that the Ferguson Municipal Court considered it's actual customers, they thought that they were just getting a good deal for their taxes, because some of the costs were being shifted to other people. And I suspect that the case is much the same in Minneapolis. George Floyd didn't die because the Minneapolis Police Department turned on its customers. Instead, it was a matter of costs being shifted from the people that were considered customers, to those that were not.

So what's the solution? Require that the businesses, governments and other institutions that we deal with make or buy all of the value that they deliver, rather than extract value from others by shifting costs. Easier said than done, because it means potentially leaving a lot on the table. It asks people to risk paying more for goods and services, accepting lower rates of return on investments, fewer government services for their taxes and so on. But perhaps more importantly, it asks people to know, rather than assume, how the institutions they interact with work, and be prepared to miss out on things if there are questions about how their value was derived. It asks people to be secure enough to know that they can afford the added costs. And in that, it asks that everyone support one another.

And that, perhaps, is why it fails, time and again. A nation that tends to operate in an every-person-for-themselves mode is difficult to bring together on a large scale. And undertaking that requires a high level of social trust is next to impossible when that trust is lacking.

Misremembered

Shouldn't that be his name? This, perhaps, is the problem when people become symbols. Part of what made them people is forgotten. In the grand scheme of things, the error is perhaps a minor one, but it reminds us of how easily we can allow memories of people to fade when their deaths, rather than their lives, are what made them important.

Problem-Solving

The headline is both straightforward and uncontroversial; "Racism Won’t Be Solved by Yet Another Blue-Ribbon Report." The subtitle is just as straightforward, and while I wouldn't suspect that it enjoys universal support, does seem to align with the conventional wisdom on the subject; "Elected officials instinctively turn to studying problems rather than solving them."

When I read that, I was reminded of something that former Senator Claire McCaskill said during her first term: "What gets you re-elected and what solves problems are sometimes like oil and water. And solving problems makes people mad. Nobody wants to make anybody mad because that's not how you get re-elected."

So if The Atlantic's headline writers point out to us that people in elected office appear to be unmotivated to solve problems, and former Senator McCaskill offers us a reason why that might be, perhaps we can look at what drives the whole thing. Because we can make an inference here: that solving the problem of racism will make people mad. And that's why there have been a century of "Blue-Ribbon" commissions, reports and recommendations, but no concrete actions. I understand that it might seem strange to state that if elected office holders in the United States manage to solve the problem of "racial inequities," as Senator Rob Portman describes them, that they'll wind up making their constituents angry with them.

In a vacuum, "racism" seems to be an obvious problem for everyone involved. The common presumption is that a society that labors under the impacts of poor relationships between its members, when those relationships have been soured mainly by factors of ancestry and/or ethnicity, is worse off than one where this is not the case. But if the benefits are so clear and present, why do societies leave them on the table? It's been more than a century and a half since the end of the American Civil War. Technological and social change have completely altered the face of the United States in that time frame. Given that, it seems reasonable to assume that if a solution was to be found, it would have been by now. So this is either a very difficult, and time consuming, problem to solve, and the timeline that people have set for it is too short. Or, as far as the overall society is concerned, it either isn't a problem or isn't the problem.

What Senator McCaskill had put her finger on is another facet of the idea that in many situations, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Simply solving problems rarely makes anyone upset. Altering the balance of "winners" and "losers," however, does. It's one thing to say that "politicians have to act on the recommendations" that come out of the commissions they empanel. But if the costs of implementing those recommendations are immediate for one group of people, and the benefit are distant (and go to another), the people who pay the costs are going to mobilize to protect their interests.

In The Great Deranagement, Matt Taibbi makes the observation that: "The People aren't always victims in the historical narrative. Sometimes the People are preening, chest-puffing, ignorant assholes, too." But sometimes, they're simply insecure human beings looking out for their interests as best they can. When the two concepts are conflated, it's easy for people to become self-conscious about admitting to placing themselves and their in-groups first. But it doesn't prevent them from continuing to do so.

Right and left-leaning outlets alike have pointed out the links between police unions and the contracts that they are able to negotiate, and violence against civilians. There's been a petition to the King County Labor Council to expel the Seattle Police Officers Guild because of the perception that the Guild prevents the Council from speaking out (whatever good that would do) against racism. But it's likely that police unions will retain their influence, even when unions in general are in rough shape. And this is because the trade-off that the unions offer, indemnification of violence against people determined to be noncriminals in exchange for allowing the bulk of the public to feel safe, is attractive enough that it would make people mad if municipal officials rejected it. At the same time, a "wait and see" approach by the beneficiaries of such a change would mean that the reward for fighting for the change would likely be removal from office; in favor of people who would reverse the change.

Blue-Ribbon panels may not change the world. But they don't often jeopardize the careers of the persons who advocate for them, either. And if that's as close to a win-win as it comes, then that's what people will settle for.

Masked

It's become such a cliché that one need never have flown in an airplane to be familiar with it:

In the event of a sudden drop in cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will drop from above. Secure your own mask first before assisting others.

Part of the reason why this segment of aircraft safety has become so ubiquitous is that it's become a mantra of the self-care movement. But also because it's simply good advice. It's hard for a person who's asphyxiating to help someone else and even if they manage it, if they're now in trouble themselves, the person they've rescued may not be in a position to return the favor.

I thought of this in the light of the recent protests over the death of George Floyd and the recriminations that have followed. A common thread is the idea that more White Americans need to be involved in the work of ending racism, systemic inequality or what have you. And this is common. It comes up pretty much every time frustration with the racial status quo in the United States bubbles up into protests and violence becomes a part of those protests.

I've mentioned before that I think there is a tendency to treat "Alice needs Bob to do something" as equivalent to "Bob needs to do something," so I won't rehash all of that here, but I think it's still a valid idea. But to get back to aircraft safety, the assertion that White Americans need to be doing more to help Black and other non-White Americans achieve parity kind of assumes that White America has managed to secure their oxygen mask, and therefore, they're in a position to assist others. But I wonder how much of White America actually sees it that way.

Again, one of the vagaries of colloquial English is the use of "we" to mean: "some larger group of people, of which I am a part, but not me personally." And when people are looking to others to assist a third party, they are, in effect, saying that while they may be able to manage it without help, their own oxygen mask isn't in place securely enough yet for them to be able to help others. When change has costs associated with it, sometimes the mantra is "be the change you can afford to see in the world." And this tends to spark a debate over who is secure enough to be drafted into the cause. Or perhaps more accurately, a debate over how people actually see themselves versus how others want them to see themselves.

Which of the supposedly affluent parts of society have their oxygen masks on, which are still getting it together and which are flailing around ineffectually is going to be a long debate, especially if the stakes are perceived as high. In the mean time, those people without their masks may be well served to resign themselves to the work, rather than waiting for a resolution.

Taking to the Streets