These pieces are similar in that both authors write about highly educated people who are two-faced. In Argyris' piece, he describes executives who, on the one hand, have an espoused theory of behavior, but, on the other hand, their actual theory in action is quite different, so the two theories do not act in concert. The espoused theory, and now I'm putting words into Argyris' mouth, is to be a good listener and be responsive to the other person. The theory in action, in contrast, is to be proven correct, to win the argument at all costs, and to force the other party into agreeing that the fault was theirs. Argyris refers to this theory in action as Model 1. That the two theories can coexist arises from the many tacit beliefs that the executive has, yet the executive is not conscious that these beliefs impact how decisions are made and quite possibly the executive is unaware of holding these beliefs. They are only revealed by doing a careful post mortem analysis on the executive's decisions.
Similarly, Reeves takes to task members of the professional class (my label for households in the upper quintile of the income distribution, but not in the top 1%). Members of these households argue, at least implicitly, that the U.S. economy is a meritocracy, hence they deserve the good life that their hard work provides for them. But the ignore their own gaming of the system, e.g., sending their kids to posh private schools at a very high tuition to increase the likelihood of their getting into an elite college. The data show that if the household is in the upper quintile then the children, when they reach adulthood and have their own families, are very likely to also be in the upper quintile. This makes it extremely challenging for those who start in the lower quintiles to make it to the top. Thus, the system seems more rigged than meritocracy. But those at the top seem hell bent on preserving the system, rather than changing it, though they go about that quietly if they can rather than make a big commotion.
The experimental design that Argyris employs to illustrate the issues is very clever. He has a transcript of a high-level executive, Y, talking with a subordinate, X. The situation is that X has been under productive on the job for a long time, but X himself believes that this is because the organization has hampered his efforts, not because of his own lack of initiative. Y, in quite blunt terms, lets X know that he can no longer rely on excuses. Either his performance improves or that's it for him. In so doing, Y is utilizing Model 1 to deliver his message. That message puts X on the defensive. It does not empower X to improve his work. Instead, it encourages a passive aggressive response.
The executives who read this transcript are very critical of Y. They don't like how he acted in this exchange at all. Yet, ironically, in offering up their critique they too employ Model 1. In other words, while they are dismayed by how Y handled the situation, they see no inherent contradiction in criticizing Y along the same lines. Therein lies the fundamental problem.
Near the end of the piece Argyris discusses an alternative approach, Model 2, which is about bringing to the surface those implicit assumptions that remain submerged when Model 1 is employed. It is fundamentally an inquiry approach and it requires questioning those assumptions and replacing them with something else when those assumptions are proved wanting. Argyris argues that it takes a lot of practice to become proficient at the use of Model 2 and it should not be assumed that a mere embrace of it will bring immediate good results. Nevertheless, he puts Model 2 forward as the path to use for making real progress that does not produce fracture but instead incorporates the views of all the participants.
I imagined Argyris reading Reeves' Op-Ed piece. Argyris might begin by noting that members of the professional class are well educated and almost surely exude a competence about the work they do. In this they are similar to the executives he has studied, if not identical to them. Reeves likely would agree with that assertion. Then Argyris would follow up with this observation. Reeves may be unaware of this, but his piece reads like an exercise in Model 1 thinking. If Reeves was actually trying to persuade members of the professional class to mend their ways, he likely would be achieving the opposite. They would dig in their heels. Argyris would then recommend that Reeves try a sustained effort at Model 2 on this same general topic. He then says that at present he is unsure what a Model 2 conversation would look like on this matter, but he'd be happy to work with Reeves to design such a campaign. Reeves contemplates this offer.
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Now a disclaimer. I an nowhere near an expert practitioner at Model 2. In particular, in my teaching of an upper level undergraduate class in economics intended for econ majors, the students are either children of parents already in the professional class or have high aspirations of entering the professional class once they graduate, get a good job, and find a spouse. Yet these students are remarkably heads down about their own education, meaning they care a great deal about their grades but care much less about learning in a fundamental way and trying to develop habits of mind that will allow such learning to persist after they graduate. I have tried, mainly unsuccessfully, to get these students to see the folly in their endeavor. And, at least some of my efforts have employed Model 2 methods.
Further, as I teach my students in the very first class session, whatever human capital is produced by our course is owned by them. If they are heads down about their own learning, where they themselves are the beneficiaries, imagine how they would be, or their parents would be, when considering a societal redesign where, at least by the normal economic analysis, they would not be the beneficiaries. In addition, such a redesign would entail enormous complexity. Most people don't know how to think about complexity in a thoughtful and constructive way. Further, for those in the professional class the system does work for them. The status quo maintains an appeal for that reason. Rejecting the status quo in favor of something else will take an awful lot of convincing. I wrote about this quite a few years ago, during the Obama Presidency, in a post called Gaming The System Versus Designing It.
Alas, during political campaigns soundbites tend to dominate, even when politicians make an effort to produce serious proposals. And the discussion turns to policy recommendations, too quickly in my view. Much less discussed are the underlying principles that people should have, which then would guide which policies they prefer and which candidates they will support.
My reading of Reeves essay, put in the context of this election season, is that those in the professional class, at least who vote for Democrats, should not vote their pocketbooks. Instead, if they recognized that they were indeed rich, they'd be obligated by a 21st century version of noblesse oblige. They would then support principles that defined what that obligation looks like. Surely it implies increased taxation (some of which might come from reduction or elimination of preferred deductions, such as the one for mortgage interest) but, to use a little math jargon, the principle should pertain to the integral, not to the derivative. In other words, it should speak to the right level of taxation, not just that taxes should be raised on the professional class (and on the the 1% as well).
But we don't have this sort of discussion. Instead, we have an indirect conversation about whether the candidates should be centrists or leftists, where this issue of principle lurks in the background. This has the consequence of pitting working class voters against professional class voters instead of together forming a united front.
This is potentially a huge blunder, where under the current circumstances it could lead to Trump being reelected. I wrote about this in a post called How to Unify the Left and the Center - One Voter's View. There is an immediate tactical agreement that needs to be made to cover the election next year. There is a long-term agreement that incorporates the principled approach, which if done reasonably well should assure the party dominance for the indefinite future.
But to get there from here those principles need to be unearthed. How do we do that?
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As I said above, I'm not an expert practitioner of Model 2. But I'm buoyed by the quite recent attention being given to Mr. Rogers, his gentleness and the respect he showed for children. I'm going to use him as a proxy for what effective Model 2 communication looks like. This bit from The Mr. Rogers No One Saw says it all.
“I wasn’t about to participate in any fund-raising or anything else,” he told me later. “But at the same time I don’t want to be an accuser. Other people may be accusers if they want to; that may be their job. I really want to be an advocate for whatever I find is healthy or good. I think people don’t change very much when all they have is a finger pointed at them. I think the only way people change is in relation to somebody who loves them.”
In other words, the communication must appeal emotively and not merely be made cognitively. If you are asking people to rise to the occasion they will do so by being inspired, and that's the only way that will really work. Further, such inspiration will be found only by tapping into beliefs the people already have. But we don't really know what these beliefs are. They should be investigated as part of a Model 2 inquiry.
I wrote about such an investigation in the first part of this post. I envisioned an interviewer doing spot interviews with a person on the street. Many such interviews would be conducted. Then this would be done again in longer focus groups, with the participants chosen because they fit certain predefined demographic categories. And it would also be done with certain celebrities. Each of these would be video recorded and made available to the public. The idea would be to make this an ongoing learning activity. I envisioned three different topics. One about being responsible, another about being a good citizen, and a third about paying taxes. The topics obviously overlap but clearly are not identical. To illustrate what such an interview would be like, these are the scripted questions I came up with for the first category.
On being a responsible adult:
1) What does it mean to be a responsible adult?
2) Can you give an example where you've behaved as a responsible adult?
3) Does that example typify your behavior or do you often act irresponsibly? You don't have to give an example of where you've behaved irresponsibly if that helps you answer the question.
4) What about other people? Is your impression that they mainly act responsibly or not?
In any inquiry, one must make the follow up dependent on what is learned in the first round. Also, what I have described so far could readily be manipulated by cherry picking the participants in the interviews or screening the results and only showing those that were favorable for the prior maintained view. The process needs integrity so those things don't happen. That itself will not be easy. But if it could be achieved, the results then might be surprising and facilitate the learning that we hope would follow.
A different sort of learning needs to happen as well. The label "professional class" is very broad strokes and may not be refined enough to identify households that if they were true to themselves would call themselves rich. Let me give the sort of particulars that I think might matter here. One pertains to where people are in the life-cycle. A household that enters the professional class only after the parents have reached their mid 50s, but weren't there until then probably were unable to accumulate a lot of savings until then and might really deserve to keep more of their income than to pay that in taxes. This example suggests that past income should matter in this consideration, as should the age of the household members.
Another pertains to the income of the parents. If the parents were already in the professional class, then the children making it there may be considered an accomplishment, but it is far less of an accomplishment than for those whose parents are working class or poor. Here I will speak about my own situation. My parents paid for my college, so I carried no tuition loan debt. After my parents retired, they started to give cash gifts to my brother and me, a way to make some of the bequest well before they passed away. This enabled me to save a good chunk of my income even in the early years, when living expenses can take a good bite out of income. I had colleagues who lived more frugally than I did (smaller apartment, older car) because they were cash poor then. Their parents weren't as well off financially. None of us were uncomfortable with quality of life stuff. But I had the added luxury of not worrying about money. I don't know if that made me rich then, but I was definitely comfortable. My preference would be for Reeves to have more categories that would together include the entire professional class - comfortable, upscale, and rich. I'm not sure where the boundaries should be, but my intuition in regard to the added tax burden these people should absorb is that a progressive tax principle needs to be applied.
This third particular I'm finding difficult to write about because, on the one hand, it gets at the sort of gaming of the system practices that Reeves has singled out but, on the other hand, it may be that many are followers in this sort of gaming and only a few are really strident about it. I am talking about zoning restrictions for housing and whether income or wealth should be defined, at least in part, by the zoning restrictions of the community in which the household is situated. For example, my parents when they retired moved to a condominium community in Boca Raton called Century Village. It was a very large development. While my parents apartment was modestly sized and provisioned, the place was gated with security guards at the gate. I gather that many communities in Florida are set up this way. The place may have had a minimum age requirement for ownership of a unit. (I'm thinking that was 55, but I can't really recall.) Most of the residents were Jewish and there was a Synagogue on the premises. So there was exclusion of others, which is just what zoning restrictions do. But in this case, that my parents felt comfortable living there is what mattered to me and I think some of these restrictions facilitated that, especially the age restrictions. So how do you parse this out? I'm not sure. Yet I think something along these lines is needed.
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I want to wrap this up. I wrote this post to encourage Reeves and others of his ilk to engage in a learning exchange with members of the professional class on what their social responsibility should really entail and whether they themselves can embrace their social responsibility. I believe such a conversation needs to happen now, but it will take quite a long time for it to reach even tentative conclusions. Surely there is not enough time now for it to conclude by the 2020 elections, even if it were to start today. Maybe, however, if this conversation did start now it would be done by the next Congressional elections.
The concept of center versus left does a disservice to thinking jointly about economic issues and identity issues. I tried in this piece to stick with the economic issues only and it is there where I believe that members of the professional class who vote their pocketbooks are in the center or even right of center. This needs to change for the good of the order. But that change will only come slowly and then through a concerted education effort. It's time for that education effort to begin.
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