When Faced With Moral Hazard, Err On the Side of the Innocent

Moral hazard is the idea that, if you insure against some hazard, the insured will act in an even riskier way, knowing they are insured.  Economists usually just focus on the economic costs of changing the balance of risk.

The moral part of moral hazard, though, is that people will behave worse than they otherwise would if we, collectively, try to protect people against bad actions.

This has led some people to harden there hearts - if we have no social insurance, then everyone will behave better because they are on their own.

Yet this runs the risk of hurting people who are hurt through no fault of their own.  It is to take care of the vulnerable that we create social insurance in the first place.

So which side should we err on -- taking care of the injured innocent, or promoting the risky guilty?

Personalism - treating everyone as a worthy person - says we err on the side of protecting the innocent, even at the cost of producing some more bad behavior than we otherwise would have.

We Don't Like to Contemplate Our Vices, But Could Reap the Easiest Benefit from Doing So

It is easier to contemplate our virtuous habits than our vicious ones, because we don't want to think about the ways we are vicious.

Yet Aristotle is right that contemplation leads to the highest happiness.  I take this to mean that happiness requires the continuous feedback of contemplation of our habits, both the good habits and the bad ones.  Gretchen Rubin, in The Happiness Project, found that she was made happier by reducing her bad habits than by increasing her good ones.

Contemplating our vices, and reducing the habitual ways in which we engage in them, are the low-hanging fruit for increasing our own happiness.  But, for the reason given above, we resist contemplating our vices.

Aung San Suu Kyi is Squandering Her Moral Capital by Persecuting Muslims

I have admired Aung San Suu Kyi above all current world leaders.  She earned her Nobel Peace Prize in the long democratic resistance to the military dictatorship in Burma/Myanmar.

Now, though, the government and local mobs are killing and burning out the Royhingya, a Muslim minority whom the Buddhist majority regard as foreigners and an impurity in the body politic.

In any other country, "The Lady" would be part of the opposition to this ethnic cleansing.

It is therefore very sad that she is squandering it by not stopping this evil act.

Karma is ... a Nice Young Woman

We had a wonderful family moment at our recent reunion.  One daughter asked another go get her something.  It is probably relevant that it was a younger sister asking an older one; also, that they are now grown women.

The asker reminded the askee of the many times in their youth when the roles were reversed.

This was a happy exchange, and the returned service was readily offered.

Which prompted me to say "Karma is a nice young woman."

Which then led the whole family to reflect on how we usually take justice to be harsh.  Yet, just as often, what we deserve for the many good things we do in life is good things in return.

Straight Swap: Lynching Memorial for Confederate Memorial in Danville

In Danville, Kentucky, where I live, there is a Confederate monument in the park between my church and my college.  It is supposedly of a local resident, but is looks like a generic Robert E. Lee-type officer.  It was erected in 1910 -- not in the aftermath of the Civil War, but at the height of Jim Crow.  My favorite part is the caption on the back - What They Were, The Whole World Knows.

Heh, heh.  I'll buy that.

Which is why the monument should come down.

I learned this week that a black man was lynched in Danville in 1866.  He was killed by a mob of Danvillians right in this same park.

The Equal Justice Initiative is making a memorial pillar for each lynching victim, to be erected near Montgomery Alabama.  One excellent feature of their plan is that an identical pillar be erected in the place where the lynching took place.

I propose a straight swap.  Take down the Confederate memorial in Danville, and erect a lynching memorial in the same spot.

The Mundanity of Virtue

I went to the “Post-Bourdieusian Theory” session at the American Sociological Association annual meeting yesterday.  Mustafa Emirbayer was the respondent.  In talking about a paper unpacking the idea of talent, he cited Dan Chambliss’ article about swimmers.  I know Dan as a Yale Ph.D. and fellow small-college professor, but I had never read this article.  I mistakenly thought it was about swimming.  But Emirbayer praised it as one of the ten best sociology articles ever written. So I downloaded it and read it just now.

His title is “The Mundanity of Excellence.”  He says, in conclusion:

“But of course there is no secret; there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one’s everyday life.”

It struck me that this is what critical realists should say about the virtues.  They are habits of action.  They are mundane in themselves.  The excellence of virtue comes from their being habitual in a person, and in a social institution. Just about anyone could learn to be virtuous.  Why relatively few do is an important empirical question.  But is it not because we lack a talent for virtue.

I think there is an important way forward here.

Integrity Idol Elevates All by Honoring Honest Officials in Corrupt Systems

My topic on WKYB.

Integrity Idol is a popular competition to honor public officials who do their jobs honestly, transparently, and well in places where that is not the norm.

Created by the American good-government group Accountability Lab, the project now exists in five countries notorious for their endemic corruption.  Starting in Nepal in 2014, the local teams take nominations from all over the country of public officials doing their jobs well.  The five nominees are then profiled on television.  Popular voting determines the winner, who is then honored on the show.

The first winner, Gyan Mani Nepal, is a District Education Officer in Nepal.  He was faced with a terrible pass rate by his students - 14% - on the national exam.  When he looked into why, he found that many teachers simply did not show up for work.  Many were patronage appointments made by local politicians.  They collected their salaries, but often were out doing the bidding of their political bosses.  Mr. Nepal gave his phone number to all the students and had them text him whenever their teacher was absent.  He had the students keep attendance logs for their teachers.  Using this, he fired the worst offenders, trained the best teachers, and encouraged those in the middle to commit to their jobs.  He also reduced his own budget, and posted all of his expenses, thereby winning the respect of the public.  The parents, in particular, were grateful supporters.

In one year, the pass rate on the national exam rose to 60%.

Max Weber said that money and command authority are, indeed, two kinds of power in the world.  But an equally important kind of power comes from status.  Status is not something we can give ourselves, but comes from the honor we earn from others.  Integrity Idol puts status power to work to lift up the honorable, empowering them to improve their whole system.

Jonathan Haidt says that when we see others doing good things, it elevates our own happiness, and makes us want to go out and do good, too.

American Religious People Now Evenly Split Between Young-Earth Creation and God-Guided Evolution

A new Gallup poll shows that the 4/5ths of Americans who are religious are now evenly split - 38% to 38% - over whether God created the universe pretty much the way it is within the last 10,000 years, or whether God created the universe a long time ago and has guided evolution since then.

For decades, most religious Americans took the "young earth" creationist position.  That support has dropped in the last few years.  The contrasting "theistic evolution" position has risen somewhat.

At the same time, the belief in a wholly secular evolution has doubled to nearly a fifth of all Americans.

Theistic evolution has been the majority opinion among the most educated religious people for decades.  Most college-educated religious Americans accept that there is no conflict between creation and evolution.  It may be that what we are seeing reflects the fact that more religious people are getting a college education.

This is also good news for all centrists, who lament the polarization of much of our culture by false dichotomies.  May we all be more willing to consider the middle position.

Heroes Help Us Elevate Our Own Virtuous Actions

My topic in WKYB this morning.

What are heroes for?

One important role of heroes is as models for us.

Positive psychologist Jonathan Haidt found that when we watch other people do morally uplifting things, we feel elevated - which he reads as the opposite of "ashamed."  Moreover, feeling elevated makes us more likely to want to help others ourselves. When we publicly celebrate real heroes in our midst, it raises the happiness of the whole community.  We share in the good act, and the proportion of those feeling elevated shapes our culture to make good acting habitual.

A study of Carnegie Hero Medal winners - ordinary people who risk their lives to save strangers - found that they were much more likely to just act when they saw another in trouble, rather than carefully weigh pros and cons.  They were empathetic people who were not torn by ambivalence about whether helping others was really wise. These real (not fictional) heroes had a habit of trusting that virtuous action really works in the world - they are not suckers for helping.

Which got me thinking about the current boom in fictional superheroes.  I am not much drawn to superheroes - I am a sociologist because I find real people and real lives fascinating and meaningful.  Still, when hundreds of millions of real people around the world go out of their way to watch and emulate fictional superheroes, that turns the phenomenon back into sociology. Most of the superheroes in movies at the moment are ambivalent about whether they have to be heroes - whether "with great power comes great responsibility."

It was in this mood that I was helped by a review which made clear to me why I really liked the new "Wonder Woman" movie.  Wonder Woman is a hero like the real Carnegie heroes - she knows she has the power to act, and is not ambivalent that her actions are worth doing.

And observing that kind of hero is elevating.

Would You Have Supported the Revolution in 1776?

I audited a colleague's course on the American Revolution this year.  It made me revisit some attitudes I had taken for granted, probably since elementary school.  As an American today I am a patriot. I strongly support republican government.  When I was in Britain and someone offered a toast to the queen I discovered just how visceral my loathing for monarchy is.

I was raised a Quaker in the originally very Quaker town of Plymouth Meeting, PA.  The Revolution was fought in the territory around where I lived.  And Quakers, as pacifists, were mostly opposed to the war.  So what would my position have been if I had been, say, 16 in 1776 (as I was in 1976)?

I probably would have opposed the American Revolution.

Since my 20s I have been a Presbyterian.  Of all the American denominations, Presbyterians were the most responsible for promoting the Revolution. If I had been 26 in 1776, I would have been more moved by the arguments of republicanism. But as a meliorist, I would have thought the arguments for achieving a republic by immediate revolutionary war were dangerous.  I expect I would have pointed to the the bad effects of a previous revolution, the regicide of Charles I and the gross excesses - Presbyterian excesses - of the Commonwealth.

I probably would have supported the aims of independence, but opposed the revolution.

If I had been 56 in 1776, I would have been more confident that justice requires changing the culture, as well as changing the laws.  I would have supported a movement for gradual, negotiated independence from Britain.  But in the negotiation we would firmly push for liberty for all.  Using the power of the crown on the way to an American republic, the United States of America might not have emerged until a generation or two later - without slavery.

Mitch McConnell is the Boies Penrose of Today

I recently read a claim that we will look back on Senator Mitch McConnell, the current majority leader and power broker of the Republican Party, the way we now look back on John C. Calhoun.  I do not think this is the right comparison.  Calhoun was a committed ideologue from beginning to end.  Senator McConnell, by contrast, has no real commitments except staying in power.  This is why his signal achievements have all been obstruction.

I think we will look back on Mitch McConnell the way we now look back on Boies Penrose.  This means:
a) We will think of him primarily as a skilled manipulator of the machinery of politics - a politician, in the pure form; but
b) No one but politics nerds will remember him.

I would guess that very few of my readers will have have ever heard of Boies Penrose.  He was a powerful U.S. Senator of a century ago, the head of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania.  In the words of The American Heritage, he was a "boss" of the gilded age kind, who, "having acquired power, wanted simply to hold on to it instead of parlaying it into something else. ... Among these Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania stood out.  ... he was the biggest boss of his day."

What was notable about Penrose was his cynicism about politics, politicians, and, especially, ordinary voters.  "Their tastes are very simple;" he said, "they dearly love hokum."  And he supplied it to derail reformers and good government leaders.  He stayed in power for more than a quarter of a century, spiting his enemies until death took him.

Non-Profits and Volunteering in the Greenwood Help Fight Recessions

“One extra non-profit per one thousand people added up to a half percentage point fewer out-of-work residents.” 

This is from Melody Warnick's This is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live.  We are reading this for our alumni study group this year.

The finding is based on a running study by the National Conference on Citizenship.  They counted a baseline of non-profits and volunteering per capita in many cities and every county, starting in 2005.  When the recession hit at the end of that decade, the Conference was able to correlate the non-profit rate with the unemployment rate.  

The result:  places with more non-profits before the recession had less unemployment during the recession.

Warnick's reading (following other researchers): places were people show more "place attachment" by volunteering, also show greater local investment in more material ways.

Reading Harry Potter Reduces Prejudice

My topic on WKYB this morning.

For this twentieth anniversary of the release of the first Harry Potter book, I was happy to review the studies of the good moral effects of reading this series.

The central plot of the series pits the racist villains, who believe they are magical "pure bloods," against what they regard as impure "mud bloods" and inferior "muggles." Harry Potter, though himself of a magical lineage, fights heroically with the good guys of all groups against the racists.

Researchers in Italy tested the effects of this story on children. With one group they read and discussed passages in which Harry and friends stood up to the racists.  With another group they read and discussed other passages, not dealing with this conflict.  They then tested the children on their attitudes toward immigrants, a stigmatized group in Italy.

The first group of kids absorbed the message of Harry Potter: they were significantly less prejudiced toward immigrants than the other group.

Helpful Neighborhoods Tend to Stay Helpful

My topic on WKYB this morning.

Neighborhoods differ in how helpful they are.

Robert Sampson studies "enduring neighborhood effects," to take the subtitle of his fine Great American Cities. He did surveys of Chicago neighborhoods, and found that they differ in how trusting or cynical they are.  However, what people say is not always what they do.  So he compared this attitude data with some ingenious studies of behavior in different neighborhoods.

People have heart attacks all over Chicago.  Sampson looked at how likely bystanders were to offer CPR in different neighborhoods.  This gives a map of helpful behavior.

Then, years later, he did a letter-drop study.  He dropped addressed, stamped letters all over the city, then counted how many from each neighborhood were picked up by a stranger and put in the mail.  This also gives a map of helpful behavior.

The two maps are highly correlated.  Helpful neighborhoods tend to stay helpful; unhelpful neighborhoods likewise have an enduring effect.

Sampson then compared these behavioral maps with the survey data. Here, again, there was a strong correlation.  People in helpful neighborhoods said they were trusting, thought local government was legitimate, and were more likely to create civic organizations to do good.

Other research has shown that helpful attitudes and behavior are contagious.  So if you want your neighborhood to be one of the helpful ones, start a viral trend of visible helpfulness.

Centrist Principle: Social Movements Come from the Failure of Meliorism

I write on the principles of centrism at the Gruntled Center whenever I think of one.

Sociology as a discipline celebrates social movements.  We look for the conditions under which people can be roused to activism for social change.

Yet in a centrist social theory, in a well-functioning society there would be no need for social movements.  The daily action of incremental improvement - meliorism - would gradually mitigate social problems and improve social life.  Social life will never be perfect, but the meliorist ideal does believe in gradual improvement.

Meliorism reduces social friction.  Social movements are like earthquakes, which happen when unresolved friction builds up.

The proponents of social movements like the conflict, as well as the social progress.  Centrists, by contrast, see conflict as a danger and a social failure.  We try to engineer a society with gradual progress that removes the need for social movements.

I Condemn Left-Wing Terrorism and Right-Wing Terrorism

This morning a Bernie Sanders supporter shot a Republican member of Congress, and others with him.  This is a vile act.

The great majority of terrorist acts in this country are committed by right-wingers, and I condemn them.

On this occasion of left-wing terrorism, I am equally strong in condemnation.

Celebrate Loving: Interracial Marriage on the 50th Anniversary of Loving v Virginia

This week is the 50th anniversary of one of the great Supreme Court decisions, Loving v Virginia.  In 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in the lingering residue of the slave states.  Only 3% of American marriages were interracial. Loving changed that.

Today, 11% of all marriages are interracial, and the rates are rising.  An even better indicator of the future is that 17% of all new marriages are interracial.  Hispanics and Asians are leading the way - already more than 1/4th of their marriages are interracial.

Attitudes toward interracial marriage have also improved dramatically.  In 1990 - not in the dark ages before the Civil Rights Movement, but just one generation ago - most white people opposed intermarriage for themselves or their relatives.  Now that group is down to 14%.

Even more indicative of a sea-change in attitudes: today, almost 40% of Americans think interracial marriage is a good thing for the country.

E Pluribus Unum America will ultimately triumph over In [White] God We Trust America

My thought for the day.

Are Strangers a Benefit or a Cost?

If you trust the world, strangers add to your diverse treasure of interesting experiences.

If you fear the world, strangers cost you an expensive evaluation of their threat.

Celebrating Global Stability

My topic on WKYB this morning.

The Fund for Peace calculates a stability measure for almost every country in the world, every year.

This year, South Sudan is the least stable country.  This is not surprising, as they are in the midst of a civil war.

Finland is the most stable country, as it has been several times before in this ranking.

We tend to focus on the scary instability arising here and there in the world.

But the big picture is actually that the world is pretty stable - especially in NATO territories.  On this D-Day, that is something to celebrate.