Progress Has a Direction

When it comes to politics, there are a lot of people who believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle and that if only we listened to each side we'd find the truth there.

I actually agree with this on one dimension. Imagine a scale of 0 to 100. 0 is a world in which not a dollar of income is taxed, not a dollar of government money is spent, and not a single activity is regulated. 100 is a world where every dollar of income is taxed, every dollar spent is government money, and every activity is regulated. (And you could make this more complex and have three scales for the tax, spending, and regulation.) I have my own opinions about where we should be on this scale and so do you. (Mine involves more hand waving than precision.) It might be a simple thing to have democracy by averages in this instance and simply let every single American pick a value from 0 to 100 and let the tyranny of the average (or median) define our policy. We now have the technology for this. If every voter's opinion matters, we could easily weight every opinion equally and find our truth in the middle and let it move around over time as awareness of problems and possibilities changed.

(And it annoys me that we spend so much time debating this. Again, we have the technology that would let people quickly express their values and opinions on this. Once in place, we could know the answer to the question of where Americans think we should be on this scale in an instant.)

But some policies are not subject to average. Is slavery legal or illegal? Abortion? Do we make schooling mandatory for every child? Do we make child labor illegal? Or more relevant to my own obsession with economic progress, do we put in place policies that assume and support a national industrial economy or a global information economy? Or even better, an economy that popularizes entrepreneurship?

Progress has a particular direction and for me it can be captured along these four dimensions or scales. Progress isn't found in some average on these scales but always in one direction. 

Greater Interdependence and Specialization

Progress steadily makes us part of larger groups. Progress is coincident with greater levels of complexity and interdependence. One of the simpler ways that shows up is that we move from economies largely bound by tribes to city-states to states to nation-states to global markets. Individuals specialize more and more and their work is coordinated with bigger groups (partly through management and partly through markets and partly through platforms like Fiverr). When you are self-sufficient, you have to be a generalist rather than specialist and your living standard is very low. When you are interdependent, you specialize and your living standard has the potential to be very high. Nobody on a deserted island is living a life of luxury; some people in big cities are.

Autonomy Supportive vs. Control or Abandonment

William Deci makes really great distinctions for parents, teachers and managers. You can control a child or employee, driving them towards the fulfillment of your own goals. At the other end of the spectrum you can abandon them, leaving them to do what they want without your control, influence or help. He advocates instead supporting their autonomy by enabling them to define and pursue their own goals. Rather than dictate goals you help them to articulate their own. Rather than shrug and say, "Good luck with that," you help to develop their ability to pursue those goals.

Autonomy supportive is relevant in so many dimensions but for now I'll simply say that it applies in this matter of greater interdependence. Empire is one way to expand the circle of people upon whom we depend. In that sense it is progress. A global market is even better than an empire as a mechanism for increasing our level of interdependence. And of course even better than free markets is a world in which government enables individuals to succeed in markets, is autonomy supportive. What does that look like? Regulating health and safety so that the person can trust the water and transportation systems they depend on. Providing lots of research and education so that the individual has the benefit of a steady parade of new knowledge and best practices. Education and training so the person knows how to be productive. The government neither dictates nor abandons its citizens but instead is autonomy supportive.

Greater Inclusion

At one level of progress, white, male, land-owning Protestants are able to use government as a tool for their goals. At another level of progress, minority women atheists who rent are able to use the government as a tool for their goals. One dimension of progress is Carl Benz inventing the car. Another dimension of progress is Henry Ford applying the concept of the assembly line to building cars and making them affordable for 90% of households. It is the same concept for our government, laws, and institutions. The more people able to use them and call them their own the better.

More Inventive

As we make progress, our world becomes more inventive. We invent computers and canned goods as well as banks and corporations. The speed with which we travel across town is less defined by how fast we can run than it is by whether we have access to a bike, car or subway. Our level of affluence is less dependent on our ability to hunt or build our own hut than our access to great schools or venture capital markets or table saws and nail guns. Progress means increasing reliance on inventions - social and technological. This can be disruptive.

Given the above, progress clearly has a direction. Policies that are autonomy supportive rather than controlling or abandoning represent progress. Policies that help us to become more specialized and more reliant on a larger group are progress. Policies that are more inclusive, that allow more and different kinds of people to have the same access to the institutions - institutions like credit markets, courtrooms and schools - we rely on is progress. Policies that encourage more invention - technological and social - is progress. 

There will be times when we move backwards on these scales. Such movement might even be necessary. For instance, during war we no longer trade with some group of people we were formerly reliant upon. There are people we will have to imprison, to control. Again, that is not progress but is instead a breakdown at the individual level from what is ideal to what is necessary. Moving backwards on these scales is not progress. It is - at best - an interruption to progress.

It is true that for some issues, the best resolution is in the middle. Progress, though, is not somewhere in the middle but further along. 

iBudget: The Per Person National Budget, Allocated by You

I think it is time that federal budgets be translated into per person amounts so that we all can have some sense of perspective.

The idea of a $14 trillion economy or a $3.5 trillion federal budget is mind numbing. I propose that all talk about budgets and taxes be adjusted to per person totals. Our roughly $14 trillion economy, for instance, translates into about $46,000 per person. The first number makes no sense to me; the second does.

So, even if - like me - you haven't a clue what $663 billion for defense looks like, you can understand what it means to have each person pay $2,200 a year for defense, or about 5 cents of each dollar they make. A National Science Foundation budget to finance all basic research is about $7 billion. Sounds like a lot, but that means each American chips in about $23 a year. In other words, if you go to a nice, but by no means extravagant, restaurant, you'll spend as much on that one meal as you spend to help fund basic research.

It wouldn't be hard for the federal government to have a website that allowed people to enter their income to see how much they were funding in each category. And I think that if we can calculate taxes we owe each year, we should also have the ability to allocate those taxes. I'd be fascinated to see what gaps showed up between current government outlays and what the average person thought we ought to allocate to. If we were really brave, we could let each tax payer allocate - the total budget distribution a weighted average of every taxpayers' allocation.

These steps would make the budget process more personal and maybe even make it feel a little more like it was our government.

Beyond Freedom and Control: Autonomy Supportive Politics

The child who grows up without the laws, education, or health care is not free: he's been abandoned. There is a difference.

I demonstrated my stupidity again this weekend trying to look smart. (Which might, upon reflection, be the most effective route to looking stupid.) I tried to argue for universal health care with a man who, I’m pretty sure, has been a Republican since he was 12. We agreed that catastrophic health care would be a better option. I think it would be best to simply tell every American that they will not go bankrupt because of bad health and ensure that their personal expenses don’t exceed, say, $5,000. (And yes, this would have to be adjusted for people who are even more poor, but not as much as one might think. But I digress.) We disagreed about whether there ought to be universal health care regardless of the plan.

For me it is simple. If a 19 year old living on his own, working a job without benefits, should get cancer he should not have to die for lack of money. The market is a marvelous mechanism for distributing cars, designer jeans, and glazed donuts. It should have no say in whether someone lives or dies. (And if you agree with this, you do believe in universal health care. You may simply disagree on the extent of it and details.)

And reflecting on this, I realized that one of the most influential books I’ve read turns out to define my politics as well as my ideals for managing, teaching, or parenting.

Edward Deci wrote Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation. In it, he offers three models of parenting or managing. The first is controlling, where the locus of control is with the parent or manager and where the child or employee is expected just to follow the lead. This is actually pretty effective at certain stages of development. The other model is abandonment, where the parent or manager essentially doesn’t care, leaving the child or employee to work things through on her own. Some call it freedom. Again, this could be effective at times. But Deci argues that the real purpose of any kind of leadership is to work towards autonomy for the individual. He advocates autonomy-supportive behavior that is intent on creating the ability for self-directed behavior. This is enabling and like the abandonment model shifts the locus of control to the individual and like the controlling model offers help.

For me, this seems like a wonderful model for government. Things like public education, health care, and police protection enable individuals to live their own lives. A good government does not control or abandon its citizens: it enables.

Conceptually this is such a simple thing that I would imagine everyone would agree with it and perhaps all political disagreement traces back to differences in opinion in trade offs. (For instance, conservatives who oppose Obama’s health care hate being told that they have to buy some health insurance plan. They find it controlling. I guess the same could be said of seat belts or motorcycle helmets. For some, the law is controlling because it makes so many people do what they wouldn’t. For others, it is enabling because it leaves so many more brains in skulls, giving individuals the possibility of autonomy.)

But for me, realizing the applicability of Deci's model to politics was an epiphany of sorts (what Hyrum Smith of Franklin-Covey would call a “blinding flash of the obvious”), helping to define so many of the policies that are important to me, from generously funding basic research to education to making it easier for people to start businesses.

Modern Corporation: modeled on the medieval church

In two earlier posts, I concluded that the medieval church became evil. This matters because the medieval church is still a model for institutions who could follow it down the same path. It is difficult to overcome a blueprint at the foundation of Western Civilization, a blueprint referenced in the design of the modern corporation. The medieval church had popes and priests who discerned the will of God and directed the congregants; the modern corporation has CEOs and mangers who discern the will of the market and direct the employees.

The US represents for many the apex of progress yet 84% of people here are unhappy in their jobs.

Job dissatisfaction hardly compares with burning at the stake. In the grand scheme of history, it is a fairly petty and pathetic complaint to be unhappy at work. Yet if one can’t enjoy what one does all day – what defines one’s life – it makes one question the progress up to this point. Is this really the culmination of thousands of generations of genetic and social evolution? Or could it be that the transformation of work and what it means to create value and to be valued is the next personal frontier, the domain for the next revolution?

About a decade ago, I went into GM to do some training and consulting work. I left appalled. The managers were conscientious and the employees seemingly sincere and yet they seemed more like parents and children than consenting adults. The distribution of power constrains employees from acting like adults.

The corporation – GM and nearly every business – could learn something about needed change by looking at the huge transformation of the church over the last half millennia.

Two big changes to come out of the Protestant Revolution were the entrepreneurial approach to religion and the shift in authority to the individual. These two are inextricably linked.

Post- Protestant Revolution religion is wildly entrepreneurial. Luther claimed that we are all priests and the germ of this idea – the notion that individual revelation and conviction ought to be the root of religious belief – continues to spark new denominations. The World Christian Database tracks 9,000 denominations.

In terms of freedoms granted, the church may be the most evolved and modern of our institutions. Churches either meet the need of their congregants or the congregants go elsewhere – or nowhere. It is not just freedom across religions but within. Even people who call themselves Catholic can profess and practice very different things from each other.

If the medieval church is the model for the current corporation, we can hope that the post-Protestant Revolution church is the model for the future corporation.

There is a great deal that will be different in the next version of the corporation, but most of these changes will begin with a shift in the notion about where authority ought to lie: in central authorities or in the individual. It means trusting the individual with true freedom. All the needed design changes for the corporation can follow from this profound shift.

Minority Religions in a Democracy

But what has upset many gay-rights advocates is the extent of the Mormon church's support for Proposition 8, which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and overrides a ruling that a ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional.

Top church leaders urged members in California to do all they could to support the proposition, and members gave millions. [story here]

A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil."

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.[story here]

I have an idea for people who think that their religious beliefs should be imposed on everyone: let them live under a theocracy (Iran or Saudi Arabia perhaps?) for a few years and see how that works out.

The really odd thing about this support? Mormons and Catholics were initially - and reluctantly - tolerated in this country because of their minority position. In part because of their tendency to insist on making reproduction actually productive, their numbers as a percentage of the American population have grown. Now that they are not just tolerated but have been made a part of the American landscape, they are going to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us? Could anything be more absurd?

We tolerated their odd religious beliefs and have come to accept them. Perhaps they could be gracious enough - and wise enough - to tolerate the rest of America and perhaps even accept them.

(And lest my Mormon and Catholic readers think that I'm unnecessarily picking on their churches, let me say that many members of my own faith are even more absurd. At least Catholics and Mormons are a sizable minority. We have no name and don't even make up one-tenth of one percent of the population and yet I've heard a number of folks from my faith talk as intolerantly as any Catholic or Mormon. I can only attribute it to a lack of awareness. There is no majority religion in this country. No state religion. We all ought to have the common sense to tolerate beliefs that are unlike our own. Christ taught that believers would be forgiven only as much as they were willing to forgive. Maybe we should have a secular law that a religion will be tolerated only as much as it is willing to tolerate.)

President as Community Organizer - A New, 21st Century Model?

Every successful candidate allows allows the polity to project upon him as he (or she) nods and smiles. So, to interpret Obama now is as much a confession of hope as it is analysis. My confession? I rather hope that Obama re-defines the presidency along the lines of community organizer.

I find it curious that so little has been made of Obama’s background as a community organizer. Personally, I think that it offers a delightful model for modern leadership.

A community organizer has no formal power. The older I get, the more I think that formal power is a joke. Employees, citizens, players on a team … they all tend to do what they want. I realize that my own personality is ambivalent about formal authority, but I think more people are like me than not. Leaders have to work with people – not dictate to them. Formal power is gradually going the way of thumb screws.

A community organizer has a goal that transcends the organizations in that community. If you live in a good community, that suggests things about the families that live there, the jobs available, the aesthetic, the health care, the options for entertainment and engagement … it suggests a great deal that transcends any one institution or group. A community shows up in the spaces between traditional organizations – not within them.

A community organizer has to use conversation as a starting point for creating commitments. A community organizer needs to talk about consequences and the impact of one group upon another. A community organizer needs to create visibility – making visible the impact of polluting to industry and the impact of job loss to the environmentalists.

It’ll be interesting to see how Obama draws from his experience as a community organizer. I quite like the idea of his using the position – not as a bully pulpit so much as a local pub where everyone can gather to discuss what kind of a community we want to create.

Obama pioneered the use of the Internet, texting, and email for campaigning in ways that will be talked about for decades. Now he can be to the Internet what FDR was to the radio in his presidency - using new technology to enable virtual communities to emerge and impact real policy and physical communities.

And perhaps what I find most alluring about this model is the notion that a conversation about something bigger than any one industry or school could emerge. We have an array of possibilities that are still largely untapped because we take as a given that, to quote Lilly Tomlin, “We’re all in this alone.” What if someone actually could again make us a community instead of a collection of competing special interest groups and individuals trying to make it alone?

We live in a time of massive interdependency. This suggests the need for more coordination and unifying goals than ever. And yet the real measure of progress is autonomy – allowing each individual more freedom of choice about how to live. The one way I can think of to reconcile these two competing needs is through leadership that looks more like community organizer than elected dictator.

Let’s hope that Obama remembers his roots.

Liberation Leadership

For me, the measure of progress is autonomy. People with cars are more advanced than people who only have shoes because people with cars have more choices about where to go and when. People who live in a democracy are more advanced than people who live under rule of a despot because they have more choice about how to live their lives.

If autonomy is the measure of progress, it suggests something about leadership. Peter Block once said that he saw leadership as a collusion between control freaks and the irresponsible. In my mind, genuine leadership shows people a way out - it instructs, inspires, and liberates a person to live life more fully. Great leadership should end at some point - leaving the person more free than when first led, more able to define and pursue a life of one's own choosing.

One of the many problems with most models of leadership is that they institutionalize leadership into a position. I think that leadership ought to be better thought of as a project - like parenting. Get the led to a particular point and then allow them their own lives. Employees, citizens, and believers all ought to reach a point of graduation, like students, after which they are expected to operate with what they have learned.

Leadership that does not have the goal of liberation is not leadership - it is control. Leadership creates choices, control constrains them.

Individuals & Heroes

"I asked myself 'What is the myth you are living?' and found that I did not know. So ... I took it upon myself to get to know 'my' myth and I regarded this as the task of tasks ... I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me."

- C.J. Jung

Charles Tart makes the point that a hypnotist, in a matter of minutes, can program you to do things. How much more powerfully can society program you during the course of your life?

The purported purpose of life until now has been to be a good Christian, a good citizen, a good employee. That is, purpose has been given to the individual by social institutions.

The genuine individual distances himself from these institutions to do the hard work of defining herself with a degree of autonomy from them. The hero comes back from this shape-shifting exercise and transforms these institutions. It's hard work - and nobody's got to do it.