Stock ownership as system-wide exploitation?

 

A prior post made an effort to gain greater analytical clarity concerning the unfairness involved in the separation between the “one percent” economy and the rest of us. In what ways is the wealth owned by the super-billionaires an “unfair” extraction from the rest of US society? How can we account for the very rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of the richest 1 percent of US wealth holders since 1980? The answer seems to largely turn on the rapid expansion in wealth represented by the US stock market over that period, and the fact that a very small number of wealth holders captured the lion’s share of these gains. The following graph shows a five-fold increase in the value of the US equity market in part of that time, from about $12 trillion in 1998 to $52 trillion in 2024. The wealth owned by the top 1% of households increased at about the same rate, which implies that this class rode the wave to wealth right along with the stock market in those years. “Corporate equities and mutual fund shares” are the largest component by far of the wealth portfolios of the top .1% and 1%, as reflected in the second chart below, produced by the Federal Reserve.

Screenshot

It was shown in the earlier post that the growth of the super-billionaires’ share of the nation’s wealth cannot be explained in normal “business profit” terms. (For reference, the top twenty billionaires in the US own 2.8 trillion dollars of wealth; link.) Rather, the bulk of the wealth now held by individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos represents the rapid appreciation of value in capital markets of the companies in which they have large ownership stakes. The companies themselves do not generate billions of dollars in dividends; rather, their total stock value has witnessed billions of dollars in gains over very short periods of time.

So why should we think this is in any way unfair? How is it exploitative? Is it not more like the fortunate visitor to “Antiques Road Show” who finds that the forgotten painting in the closet is in fact an early Picasso and is worth millions on the art market? This is good fortune for the owners of the canvas, but surely these facts don’t suggest “exploitation” of anyone else. Perhaps not in the case of the Antiques Road Show guest; but the majority owner of Amazon, Tesla, or Meta is in a different set of circumstances. Rather, the existence and continuing success of these companies depends on background conditions to which all sectors and components of the US economy contribute: a stable system of law and regulation, a robust education and research sector, a skilled workforce, an infrastructure of roads, ports, rail lines, fiber optic cables, and electricity providers. The value of US companies is at least in part a system effect: it is facilitated and constituted by a vast network of private and public stakeholders, all of whom contribute ultimately to the success of the company and the value it finds within the equity market. So the value of the US company is inseparable from the large and heterogeneous economic and political system in which it operates, and the increase in value over time of the US company reflects the continuing contribution expected by the investing public from the functioning of that system.

It will be said, of course, that the companies and their executives themselves contribute to the value that investors attribute to them: innovative products, good management systems, efficient decision-making, appropriate personnel practices, “entrepreneurship” and risk-taking. This is true. But it is also true that these contributions represent only a portion of the increase in value that the company experiences over time. The system effects described here represent an independent and important component of that substantial increase in value. So we might say that “system-created increase in value” is the uncompensated part of wealth creation in today’s economy. Companies pay little or nothing to cover the cost of these system-level inputs on which they depend; these are the inverse of “externalities”, in that they are benefits taken without compensation from the public (rather than harms imposed without compensation on the public). And these system-created increments in value constitute a very important part of the increase in value that they experience over time.

We might therefore look at “system-created increase in value” as the counterpart to “unpaid labor time” in the classic theory of exploitation. It is the source of wealth (profit) that the owners of wealth derive simply in virtue of their position in the property system and in their opportunity to benefit from the economic system upon which they depend. But now it does not derive from the “surplus value” contributed to profits by each worker, but rather from the synergies created by the socio-economic system as a whole.

It should also be noted that the ability of private companies to “extract” value from system-level inputs without compensation depends on their ability collectively to influence government policy. Therefore owners of private companies and stock wealth have strong incentives to shape the decision-making of elected officials, government policy makers, the fiscal system, and the regulatory process. This reinforces the arguments made by Thomas Volscho and Nathan Kelly in “The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008” (link). It follows, then, that achieving powerful influence on public policy and economic rule-making is not just a hobby for the oligarchy; it is an existential necessity.

This analysis of “system-input exploitation” has important consequences for distributive justice. If the whole of society contributes to the creation of the system-level properties that generate a significant fraction of the new wealth created in the past forty years, then surely fairness requires that all participants should receive some part of the gains. It would seem logical for the non-wealth-holding stakeholders — workers, farmers, and uncompensated contributors to social reproduction — to demand economic reforms that direct a fair share of that new wealth to the benefit of the whole population.

The previous post suggested one possible mechanism that would do this. The post discusses a hypothetical “public investment fund” that “would be automatically vested with ownership shares of businesses and corporations as they are created and grow, and that would function as a ‘wealth reserve’ for all citizens”. This would constitute a large and growing asset to be used for the benefit of the whole of society. In that discussion a distribution of gains resulting in public ownership of 1/3 of all capital was considered. Such a division would reduce (though not eliminate) the most extreme inequalities of wealth that currently exist, and would provide a financial basis for a more genuine “free community of equals” through the secure establishment of a high level of the resources most needed — healthcare, education and training, environmental protection, and provisioning of basic human needs for children, the disabled, the elderly, and the unemployed.

This idea of a public investment fund corresponding to the “systemic value creation” of the economy might go a long way towards the securing political values embodied in John Rawls’s concept of a “property-owning democracy” (link). Rawls argues that “the equal worth of liberty” is incompatible with a society in which political influence is proportional to wealth and where wealth is extremely unequally distributed. Wealth inequality of this magnitude means that the oligarch’s liberty and worth are magnified many times relative to the ordinary citizen’s situation. The creation of a substantial public investment fund representing the value created by our social, economic, and political system of cooperation would reduce the total proportion of the total value of the economy that the multi-billionaire class is able to expropriate. It would create real property entitlements for the great majority of society, and it would redress the current horrendous inequality of political influence that exists between the super-rich and the ordinary citizen.

A new form of exploitation

 

Much thinking about economic justice for working people has been framed by the nineteenth-century concept of “capitalism”: owners of enterprises constitute a minority of the population; they hire workers who represent the majority of the population; wages and profits define the distribution of income throughout the whole population. This picture still works well enough for a range of economic activities in the advanced capitalist economies when it comes to manufacturing, agriculture, and service industries. According to recent tabulations by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (link), there were 158 million workers in wage and salary employment in 2023. Manufacturing represented 8.2%, retail and wholesale trade 13.7%, information 1.9%, financial services 5.8%, leisure and hospitality 10.5%, and federal and state government 14.4%. This adds up to 54.5% of the US labor force, and these workers and firms can be thought of in roughly the framework offered by the traditional idea of “capitalism”. Many of these workplaces are amenable to union representation (though relatively few are in fact unionized). But improving access to union rights and workplace consultation would significantly improve the conditions of life for this segment of the US population.

Marx’s view of the unfairness of capitalism, then, comes down to workplace exploitation — the capture of “surplus value” by the firm’s owner from the workers whom he or she employs. Profits derive solely from surplus value, so wealth accumulation is fundamentally limited by the size of an enterprise.

However, current realities seem to suggest that this classical Marxist account is no longer sufficient. To see this point it is crucial to look at the details of the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. Consider the graph of median US income by quintile above in constant 2018 dollars. Since 1989 only the top quintile of household income has demonstrated significant growth (in a timeframe of more than thirty years); and the top 5% of households shows the greatest increase of any group. 80% of US households are barely better off today than they were in 1967; whereas the top 5% of households have increased their incomes by almost 250% in real terms. The bottom 80% range in household income from “poor”, the bottom 20% at an average household income of about $14,000, to the second quintile (60%-80%) of about $102,000. But virtually all of these households — 80% of all households — earn their livings through wage and salary income, in “capitalist” workplaces.

Further, only a very small fraction of these households are in a position to accumulate significant savings or investments. As the second graph shows, the bottom 50% of households have only 2.6% of all U.S. wealth, and the 50%-90% segment owns only another 30.8%. The top 0.1% owns 13.9% of all wealth, and the remainder of the top 1% owns 16.6%. That amounts to 30.5% of all wealth, held by 1% of households — and almost incomprehensible figure.

These two graphs have a very clear, unmistakable implication: that working people, including service workers, industrial workers, and most professionals have received a declining share of the economic product of the nation over the past 40 years. (Amazon warehouse workers fall in the 2nd-lowest quintile (poorest 21-40%).) Further, the vast majority of U.S. residents have only a tiny share of all property in the U.S. According to the Federal Reserve 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, median household net worth in 2022 was $192,700, including private savings, retirement savings, and personal property and home value (link). And, of course, this implies that the median household net worth of the bottom 80% of the U.S. population is significantly lower.

It seems apparent, then, that capitalist exploitation is no longer the primary mechanism through which wealth is accumulated by the top 10%, 1%, and .1% of wealth holders. The top group gains income at a rapid rate and increases its share of the national wealth comparably; whereas the bottom 80% have almost stagnant incomes and negligible wealth. And this accumulation occurs almost entirely through rising value of the stock issued on behalf of private companies. The national economy generates all of this wealth; but the vast preponderance of the fruits of this production flow to the top 10% and 1% of wealth holders. This is a different kind of exploitation: not exploitation of a specific group of workers (employees of General Motors, for example); but exploitation of the whole of the U.S. economy for the benefit of a tiny minority of wealth holders.

Essentially it seems fair to say that the contemporary U.S. system involves two economies — one that includes 60%-80% of all people, and who depend on wages and salaried income to earn their livings; and a second economy that is itself steeply stratified, involving only the top 10%-20% of households. This second economy includes highly paid professionals, executives, and individuals who derive a substantial income from investments, financial assets, and other capital assets. The distribution of income and wealth in this second economy depends on ownership of capital (including human capital) of increasing value in a “knowledge” economy.

It appears, then, that the gross advancement of wealth inequalities in the past three decades has little to do with traditional “exploitation” – an unfavorable wage relationship between owners and workers. Instead, the sudden explosion of tech-oligarchy in the US seems to have to do with financial markets, the stock value of private companies, and the environment of business and tax policy in which they operate. The super-wealthy class in the US came into multi-billionaire status through the rapid acceleration of market value of companies like Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook/Meta. And this process reflected a macro-level mechanism that we might describe as “exploitation of the US economy as a whole” rather than “exploitation of a specified group of workers employed by these companies.

Thomas Volscho and Nathan Kelly provide a careful analysis of the dynamics of income inequality in the US economy over time in “The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008” (link). They note that there was considerable variation in the share of income flowing to the top one percent between 1900 and 2020, with a rapid rise beginning in about 1980. And they attribute much of this variation to facts about political power, public policy, and fiscal legislation. (This bundle of hypotheses is referred to as “Power Resources Theory”.) And a key finding in this literature is that the relative levels of political power and influence held by economic elites versus working people have a very large effect on the degree and direction of change in inequality at the top.

Consider the short history of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth increased from 2008 from $1.5 billion to $236 billion in 2025. The employee count of Facebook/Meta increased comparably during that period, from 85 employees in 2008 to 76,800 employees in 2025. But Zuckerberg’s wealth does not reflect the “surplus value” created by these workers, but rather the perceived value of the company in the eyes of private and institutional investors. And critically, it is difficult to imagine institutional changes within Facebook/Meta that would lead to greater overall societal equity simply by providing the company’s workers more input into the management of the company. The median income for a Facebook/Meta worker is $257K – hardly an exploitative wage. It is the rest of society that is disadvantaged by Zuckerberg’s $236 billion, not the direct employees. The same seems to be true for Tesla and the wealth accumulated by Elon Musk and for Amazon and the wealth of Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s business operations have many of the same features of domination and exploitation identified by Engels in Manchester; but these operations do not constitute the fundament of Bezos’s wealth except perhaps for the “performative” of a company single-mindedly devoted to efficiency and speed of operations.

The experience of the reforms of the welfare state after WWII shows that capitalist exploitation can be reformed through measures that improve the public provision of some crucial services (education, healthcare, retirement income, unemployment insurance); improve the ability of workers to represent themselves effectively in the workplace (legislation ensuring unionization rights); and improve conditions of health and safety in the workplace (OSHA protection). These reforms are “redistributive” in the sense that they depend on taxation of income and profits of private individuals and corporations to fund public provisioning. But can reforms like these address the inequalities — economic and political — created by the two economies described here? Can the oligarchy economy be reined in? It would seem that the answer is “no”.

So we are forced to ask, what kinds of fiscal and tax reforms could effectively rein in the wealth inequalities created at the very top of the wealth distribution? The annual wealth taxes proposed by progressive Democrats extend to taxes in the range of 1%. But this would represent a negligible reduction in the oligarch’s portfolio, and does essentially nothing to reduce the steepness of the distribution of wealth in America. A “confiscatory” tax of 33% would have a measurable effect by increasing available public funds for expenditure; but even reducing Elon Musk’s wealth from $368 billion to $245 billion – still results in a staggering inequality relative to 99% of US workers. And this still leaves the wealth-holder with a million-fold advantage in his/her political and media influence relative to almost all other US persons. (As mentioned above, the median net worth of all Americans is currently about $192,000. It is of course striking that three of America’s largest tech-oligarchs privately own a media company: Zuckerberg (Facebook), Musk (X/Twitter), and Bezos (the Washington Post).)

It appears, then, that standard “New Deal” or “welfarist” approaches to greater economic equality have no prospect for success whatsoever when it comes to reducing the overwhelming inequalities of wealth that exist between the two US economies described here. A graduated income tax works to moderate income inequalities (when it works at all); but the rapid accumulation of wealth represented by the emergence of the “tech-oligarchy” and the graph of wealth distribution above do not derive from income inequalities. The richest 1% did not primarily gain their wealth through annual savings from their high salaries; rather, they gained their wealth through stock ownership in companies whose value appreciated exponentially during the time of their ownership. And taxing the holders of wealth on the income generated by their holdings does not materially affect the distribution of wealth across the population and across generations.

Suppose we viewed a national economy as an interconnected and highly complex form of “joint production”, in which the efforts of all parties are instrumental in the creation of the new wealth and prosperity of the economy. And suppose we believe that this system should be organized as a “fair system of cooperation” in which all parties benefit in a fair way. Can the workings of capital markets and financial systems be incorporated into our institutions in ways that would give the working public (the 80%) a fair share of the products of cooperation? Could we imagine a fiscal mechanism that would provide the public with a “fair share” of the U.S. economy as a whole, including the growth of the value of private companies (Caterpillar, General Motors, Krogers, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, …)?

For example, would it be possible to imagine a public investment agency along the lines of CalPERS that would be automatically vested with ownership shares of businesses and corporations as they are created and grow, and that would function as a “wealth reserve” for all citizens? Suppose the hypothetical “public investment corporation” eventually possessed assets worth about 1/3 of the total value of the US stock market. (The value of stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange is currently $28.3 trillion, so we are imagining a public wealth fund of about $10 trillion.) On this model, private owners and shareholders would own 2/3 of the capitalized economy, and the public would own 1/3. Would such a system be feasible? Could such a system redress the insupportable economic and material inequalities that exist in our country? Could it redress the gross inequalities of influence and power that exist between a tiny class of oligarchs and the vast majority of democratic citizens? Could the shareholder voting rights that correspond to the public shares created in this way serve to alter corporate priorities?

It seems clear that the photo below taken from Donald Trump’s inauguration represents a horrendous flaw in contemporary democracy. The “tech oligarchs” turned out in force for the new administration, and a group of wholly committed political partisans stand behind them to enact policies in the United States that serve their interests. If this is the best that our democracy can currently offer working people, then we need to work much harder at finding political and economic solutions that can elicit broad support from ordinary citizens, workers, farmers, and Uber drivers to push forward a better agenda for democratic equity.

Republicanism and multicultural democracy

Philip Pettit’s writings about republicanism offer a valuable and distinctive perspective on individual freedom and the nature of a good society. He develops those ideas most fully in Republicanism : a theory of freedom and government. Pettit’s core idea is that we should conceive of freedom as “non-domination” — that is, that an individual is free when he or she is not subject to the arbitrary power of other individuals, groups, or institutions. He emphasizes that non-domination is a more demanding concept of freedom than either “negative” or “positive” freedom as characterized by writers as diverse as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, or Amartya Sen, because domination can occur even when crude coercion is absent. The threat of constraint or punishment for one’s “free” actions can make those actions and actors unfree, even if coercive means are never invoked. And most pertinently today, a structure of discrimination and negative stereotypes about members of a minority group can present barriers to the free and non-dominated choices and life trajectories of a despised minority — African-American men and women in the American South in the 1950s, Black South Africans during the post-apartheid period, women in a period of male domination and chauvinism, and Jewish men and women in pre-war Poland.

The other idea constitutive of republicanism is the view that the commonwealth, the civil society, or the republic have a value over and above the value of the individual activities of the citizens. Rousseau emphasizes this point in The Social Contract: entering into a unanimous and binding agreement with one’s fellow citizens is fundamentally transforming of each individual. Each is an expression and constituent of the “general will”, and the whole of the political collectivity is a moral presence for all the citizens. To be a citizen is to be civically motivated, to be concerned to bring about the good of the whole (and not solely one’s own particular good). And this civic membership is in turn constitutive of part of the value and satisfaction of the individual citizen. Citizens are morally invested in the wellbeing of their fellow citizens. This set of ideals, once again, is incompatible with a society that embodies persistent forms of social and legal domination of one group by another, because domination is incompatible with equality and dignity for all citizens.

The question of domination is central for Pettit. Here is how he explains this concept.

Domination, as I understand it here, is exemplified by the relationship of master to slave or master to servant. Such a relationship means, at the limit, that the dominating party can interfere on an arbitrary basis with the choices of the dominated: can interfere, in particular, on the basis of an interest or an opinion that need not be shared by the person affected. The dominating party can practise interference, then, at will and with impunity: they do not have to seek anyone’s leave and they do not have to incur any scrutiny or penalty. Without going further into the analysis of domination or indeed interference—we turn to that task in the next chapter—a little reflection should make clear that domination and interference are intuitively different evils. (22)

It is worth noticing how this conception of non-domination converges with Rousseau’s concept of “a free community of equals”. It is fundamental to Rousseau’s concept of a proper “republic” that no citizen is superior to another, none has dominion over another in virtue of property, status, religious authority, or other extraneous characteristic. In a free community of equals, no citizen is enabled to dominate another. This view is celebrated in The Social Contract and the Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality Among Men.

Pettit especially praises the theory of republicanism because it provides a basis for articulating “grievances” at a wide range of causes. Whereas the “non-interference” theory of liberty does not provide a basis for articulating a grievance about engrained social hierarchy (squire to tenant), the “non-domination” perspective permits this grievance and many others: patriarchy and male supremacy, racial discrimination, a group’s exercise of unequal economic power over another group, and the many other ways in which entrenched patterns of thought and power give one group influence over the affairs and wellbeing of another group (Republicanism, p. 134).

In particular, Pettit argues that republicanism offers a strong moral basis for articulating the values of a multicultural democracy and the equal dignity of the diverse participants in such a democracy. And he forthrightly defends the idea that a democracy based on “non-domination” will require substantial programmatic efforts at reducing and eliminating the sources of domination that exist among groups in the existing society. He puts his view this way:

The challenge raised by that complaint [by members of minority groups within society] is whether the modern state can be given a rationale and a form that will enable it to serve the interests of those in minority cultures equally with the interests of those in the mainstream. The point that I want to make here, in defence of republicanism, is that if the modern state is orientated around the promotion of freedom as non­domination, then it will have a reason and a capacity to cater for the claims of those in minority cultures. … The lesson of this observation is that so far as membership in a minority culture is likely to be a badge of vulnerability to domination, the members of that culture, and the state that assumes concern for their fortunes, must address the needs of the culture in general. It is not going to be enough to claim to be concerned with individuals in the culture, without any particular reference to what binds them together. (Republicanism, 144, 145)

It might be noted that this conception of a multicultural democracy is itself somewhat limiting. It emphasizes the importance of “counting every voice” within a democracy — certainly an important value. But it doesn’t emphasize explicitly the positive value created by a multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multicultural society and the forms of learning and enhanced fulfillment that are enabled by full and equal relationships with members of groups other than one’s own. At its best a multicultural democracy is more than a social and political setting in which different groups can live peacefully together; it is one in which the lives of all members of society are enriched and enabled by the thoughts, experiences, and values of members of other groups.

Let’s now see how these ideas about republicanism intersect with the rationale for organizational programs enhancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). In the past twenty years universities and businesses have introduced a variety of programs under this banner that are designed (in part anyway) to reduce and eliminate the barriers experienced for various groups in our society due to discrimination and negative stereotypes. Consider two specific examples: the well-known social phenomenon of “stereotype threat” (link) that Claude Steele and others have explored; and the persistent life disadvantages created for poor children and young adults by inadequate public schooling in urban centers (link).

Steele’s central finding as a social psychologist is that a widespread belief in society and in schools that the X group generally cannot perform as well as the Y group on a certain kind of task (a stereotype) causally brings about poor performance in members of the X group. Instead of the stereotype deriving from the facts, the facts of unequal performance derive from the stereotype. So what can be done? One possibility is to explicitly recognize the workings of this mechanism within schools, and to educate teachers about the harmful effects that follow from even veiled expressions of the stereotype. Suppose an engineering professor often begins the semester with a speech saying, “I see there are a few women students in the class. I know this will be a challenging class for you, and I want you to know that my teaching assistants and I are available to you to clarify things you don’t understand”. We may assume the professor’s intentions are good; but according to Steele’s research, the effects on some of the female students may be significant. So the professor would be well advised to learn to emphasize his or her availability in different terms, without reference to the gender of the students in the class. This suggests the value of programs in “hidden-bias” training for faculty and staff. And we might go a bit further: if the engineering college faculty is 90% male, the signal to female students seems to be that “engineering is not a profession for women”. So the college should make special efforts to recruit highly talented female faculty.

Now consider the second example: the barriers created for black and brown students who are heavily concentrated in urban neighborhoods with relatively less effective public schools, due to persistent residential segregation (link). How should selective universities address the fact that black and brown students from low-income families are persistently under-represented in their incoming classes? A program that has often been adopted is a university-funded supplementary instruction program for low-income districts in their state or region. The idea is that the university can help talented high school students close the attainment gap that exists between them and typical suburban high school students through intensive programs of this kind. This would have two positive effects: it would increase the preparation level of these low-income-neighborhood students so they are competitive for admission in selective universities; and it would potentially increase the confidence in a cohort of under-served students that the host university is indeed an attainable and attractive destination for them. These effects would increase the number of under-served students — black, brown, and white — who attend selective universities, and it would reduce the barrier that exists for residents of segregated neighborhoods and cities when it comes to college attendance. This would be one step in the direction of securing a more free and equal society, from the point of view of non-domination.

Now let’s return to “non-domination” and Pettit’s republicanism. These reparative policies are urgently needed, and many others as well, in order to eliminate the social barriers that have the effect of establishing relations of “domination” among specific groups in society. Moreover, policies and programs like these are not performed out of “charity” or noblesse oblige. Rather, measures like these are needed as a matter of reparative justice to all free and equal citizens — in the first case, in order to reduce the barriers created to female students’ ability to enter an engineering curriculum and to thrive in the profession; and in the second case, to begin to address the barriers to full educational development created by continuing racial segregation. In each case the policy is intelligently designed to reduce domination of one group in a democratic society by another group. And in this way the DEI policies currently under attack are specifically needed if we are to achieve the idea of a “free community of equals” in a multicultural and multi-racial society.

Why "DEI"?

The current war on DEI has proven to be unrelenting and highly destructive to the independence, academic freedom, and inclusiveness of American universities. And yet the values that gave rise to DEI initiatives throughout the country in the past two decades are deeply grounded in fundamental American values of equality, freedom, and community. How did we get to the place where DEI is regarded as extremist and alien?

First, some background. DEI is a slogan; it stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The fundamental idea is that the basic institutions of a multicultural and multiracial democracy should actively embody the facts of social and cultural diversity of the population; they should welcome all comers in a spirit of democratic equality; and they should actively strive to create environments that are genuinely welcoming to people from all aspects of American society. Unlike elitist institutions of the 1920s, universities should not be places where economic, religious, or racial elites have primacy, and people from other groups are only marginally welcome. Instead, an institution in a democratic society, including especially universities, should actively embrace the equality, dignity, and worth of all its participants.

Given the history of discrimination in our society -- discrimination based on religion, ethnic origin, gender, race, and other social or cultural characteristics -- any thoughtful observer will realize that full democratic equality requires more than slogans, more than banners, and more than "celebrations of global diversity". Democratic equality requires active work on the part of citizens, leaders, and institutional participants to remake the culture and systems of the institution in ways that deliberately turn back the impulse of discrimination and disparagement across identity groups. If Chicagoans have the view that down-staters are backward, conventional, and generally not very innovative, then banks, labor unions, and universities in Chicago are likely to reflect those assumptions without any special effort on the part of "hate groups" to bring this about. It reflects what we might call "cultural-assumptions discrimination". So special efforts would be required to change the mentality and culture of all the participants, to un-do the workings of these forms of "implicit bias". And if down-state urban school systems are typically underfunded and under-performing relative to their counterparts in the affluent Chicago suburbs, then down-state urban students are likely enough to be under-represented at "merit-based" elite institutions in Chicago. This would be an example of "structural discrimination". And it implies that "affirmative" efforts would be needed in order to give down-state urban students an equitable opportunity of access to the elite university.

And what about inclusion, welcome, and equal dignity and respect for the individuals and groups who wind up participating in the institution? If the biased assumptions that color the perceptions and expectations of Chicagoans and down-staters alike persist in the institutional environment of the elite university, then we may expect that consequential inequalities of respect, dignity, and worth will persist into the institutional environment as well. This will have the effect of reproducing locally the group separation and disparagement that exists in the broader society. Active efforts at the local level -- in the classroom, in the residence hall, in the eating club or Greek organization -- will be needed in order to change the way that eighteen-year-olds think about themselves and their classmates, without falling into the traps of orthodoxy, political correctness, or ineffectual scolding.

Is there any doubt that cultures of discrimination, disparagement, and bias continue to exist in American society? Of course not; the persistence of these attitudes and behaviors are all too evident, even when expressed in indirect and "socially acceptable" ways. So people who are committed to full democratic equality as a goal, even though not a current reality, are forced to face the question: what kinds of social messages, programming, and educational initiatives can be imagined that have a real effect on each individual's private culture of bias and acceptance? Doing nothing means allowing patterns of bias and discrimination to continue indefinitely; enacting a program of "mandatory hidden bias training" may seem to be too prescriptive for an institution that respects the autonomy and dignity of its participants. So neither action seems right.

This is the problem that commitments to DEI are trying to solve: to find avenues through which inter-group antagonisms and suspicions, usually based on ignorance, can be relaxed in favor of an acceptance of difference and an eagerness for learning from people different from oneself. And significantly, participants in DEI initiatives have often made use of careful empirical research in various disciplines of the social and behavioral sciences. We might describe this as a challenging project of social engineering. Or more appropriately, we might describe it as the work of establishing and securing a robust multicultural inclusive democracy. And we have plenty of examples of leaders who understood the importance and difficulty of this challenge, including Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama.

This goal is indeed worth struggling for, and its roots did not begin twenty years ago when the phrase "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" came into use. Rather, its roots go back to some of the most morally perceptive theorists of democracy itself -- not chiefly the classical liberal theorists like Hobbes and Locke, for whom a democratic society is simply an instrument through which rationally self-interested citizens pursued their own interests in their own ways, but in the more substantive theories of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was Rousseau who formulated the idea that all citizens contribute equally to the "general will" and to the wellbeing and freedom of the whole of society; it was Rousseau whose views could be summed up in the phrase, "a free community of equals". And it was Rousseau who argued unflinchingly for the equal freedom, dignity, and worth of all human beings. This is what the slogan "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" is all about and what its advocates are trying to achieve.

Thomas Carlyle on government and England's poor

Thomas Carlyle was an acerbic conservative social thinker, given to assuming the fundamental legitimacy of social and political hierarchies and hostile to democracy. A re-reading of Chartism (1839) shows that he also possessed a white-hot anger at England's indifference to the conditions of the poor, and he raged against Parliament, which whistled while catastrophe loomed. In its own way there is as much anger at England's injustice and cruelty to its working people here as is found in Engels's more or less contemporary The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) (link). In Chartism Carlyle takes on the 1834 Poor Law Act and the draconian version of laissez-faire that these policies imposed (link), and he interprets the Charter movement as a natural and predictable response to social and political indifference to the conditions of working people. In some passages he sounds a bit like E.P. Thompson himself, in The Making of the English Working Class, when he writes about the need for dignity and justice for working people.

What is the underlying view that Carlyle seems to have in mind? It is not a call for more charity to the poor, more noblesse oblige. Rather, it is a call for a system of government that effectively confronts the pressing problem in the first decade of the nineteenth century, of the conditions of the English poor. He is scathing at the inability of Parliament to adequately formulate and assess the problem, and he is contemptuous of the solution offered in the form of new Poor Laws.

Carlyle's conservatism emerges fully when he advances his own views of governing, which is the primary thrust of the pamphlet. Carlyle is full of ironic disdain and contempt for the irrelevance of Parliament in the first part of the nineteenth century; whereas he admires the rule of the strong man with a unified will. Carlyle's prescription to the task of addressing the hopeless condition of the poor in England is a return to wise but absolute government.

What are all popular commotions and maddest bellowings, from Peterloo to the Place-de-Greve itself? Bellowings, inarticulate cries as of dumb creatures in rage and pain; to the ear of wisdom they are inarticulate prayers: " Guide me, govern me! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide myself!" Surely of all 'rights of man,' this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, the indisputablest. (52)

In effect Carlyle sides with Hobbes against Locke or Jefferson: the sovereign will find it in his or her interest to rule strongly but wisely, and with laws that protect the important interests of the people.

How can-do, if we will well interpret it, unites itself with shall-do among mortals; how strength acts ever as the right-arm of justice; how might and right, so frightfully discrepant at first, are ever in the long-run one and the same, — is a cheering consideration, which always in the black tempestuous vortices of this world's history, will shine out on us, like an everlasting polar star. (39)

This view may be thought to serve as a rejoinder to the critics of Hobbes who hold that the sovereign will do no more than exploit and oppress his or her "sheep"; Carlyle argues that it is not in the interest of the sovereign to do so, and rule based solely on coercion is doomed to end in short order.

Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute force and compulsion; conquest of that kind does not endure. Conquest, along with power of compulsion, an essential universally in human society, must bring benefit along with it or men, of the ordinary strength of men, will fling it out. The strong man, what is he if we will consider? The wise man; the man with the gift of method, of faithfulness and valour, all of which are of the basis of wisdom; who has insight into what is what, into what will follow out of what, the eye to see and the hand to do; who is fit to administer, to direct, and guidingly command : he is the strong man. His muscles and bones are no stronger than ours but his soul stronger, his soul is wiser, clearer,— is better and nobler, for that is, has been, and ever will be the root of all clearness worthy of such name. (39)

Over the fullness of time, then, Carlyle seems to assert that might and right converge; the "strong man" who survives will be the wise man. "His soul is wiser, clearer -- is better and nobler". And Carlyle appears to believe that this is part of the "natural" order.

But what assures Carlyle that in the long run, the rulers will respect and support the dignity and wellbeing of the "lower classes"? It is the rage and violence that is produced by a widespread feeling of injustice and unfair treatment that he believes is apparent in the violence of the Chartist movement or the French Revolution. Oppressive or negligent rule leads to its own overthrow by enraged masses. For Carlyle the French Revolution was mindless terror -- and a stark historical lesson to rulers. The lesson is simple: they must rule wisely, or the terror awaits them.

He also takes it as an axiom that the poor -- that is, the great majority of the English population -- cannot govern themselves; the demand for universal suffrage is hooted off the stage. Democracy is a ludicrous ideal for Carlyle. The inarticulate, suffering poor can demand only to be governed well by their superiors. Even more explicitly:

Democracy, we are well aware, what is called ' self-government' of the multitude by the multitude, is in words the thing everywhere passionately clamoured for at present. Democracy makes rapid progress in these latter times, and ever more rapid, in a perilous accelerative ratio; towards democracy, and that only, the progress of things is everywhere tending as to the final goal and winning-post. So think, so clamour the multitudes everywhere. (53)

But: "Democracy never yet, that we heard of, was able to accomplish much work, beyond that same cancelling of itself" (59). "Napoleon was not president of a republic Cromwell tried hard to rule in that way, but found that he could not. These, 'the armed soldiers of democracy,' had to chain democracy under their feet, and become despots over it before they could work out the earnest obscure purpose of democracy itself!" (54).

In particular, Carlyle writes again and again that the underclass cannot rationally articulate its needs or make a rational plan for progress. For Carlyle, the underclasses are incapable of subtle or nuanced analysis of the causes of their condition, or of possible reforms that realistically could address their condition.

Dingy dumb millions, grimed with dust and sweat, with darkness, rage and sorrow, stood round these men, saying, or struggling as they could to say: " Behold, our lot is unfair ; our life is not whole but sick; we cannot live under injustice; go ye and get us justice!" For whether the poor operative clamoured for Time-bill, Factory-bill, Corn-bill, for or against whatever bill, this was what he meant. (91-92)

Moreover, they live in a world that is naturally stratified between superior and inferior:

Recognised or not recognised, a man has his superiors, a regular hierarchy above him; extending up, degree above degree; to Heaven itself and God the Maker, who made His world not for anarchy but for rule and order! (94)

His view of the radical leaders who claim to speak for the underclasses is equally severe: they are cynical opportunists.

There is a class of revolutionists named Girondins, whose fate in history is remarkable enough! Men who rebel, and urge the Lower Classes to rebel, ought to have other than Formulas to go upon. Men who discern in the misery of the toiling complaining millions not misery, but only a raw-material which can be wrought upon, and traded in, for one's own poor hidebound theories and egoisms; to whom millions of living fellow-creatures, with beating hearts in their bosoms, beating, suffering, hoping, are 'masses,' mere 'explosive masses for blowing down Bastilles with,' for voting at hustings for us: such men are of the questionable species! (93)

And as for the issue of the day, the Charter -- the Charter is nonsense, simply an enraged bellow of pain and a demand for relief. The Chartist movement is one of violence, burning, and murder. Carlyle rejects entirely the idea that the underclasses might formulate their own diagnosis of the ills of their society, or a plan for addressing those ills.

Neither is the history of Chartism mysterious in these times; especially if that of Radicalism be looked at. All along, for the last five-and-twenty years, it was curious to note how the internal discontent of England struggled to find vent for itself through any orifice: the poor patient, all sick from centre to surface, complains now of this member, now of that;— corn-laws, currency-laws, free-trade, protection, want of free-trade: the poor patient tossing from side to side, seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none. This Doctor says, it is the liver; that other, it is the lungs, the head, the heart, defective transpiration in the skin. A thoroughgoing Doctor of eminence said, it was rotten boroughs; the want of extended suffrage to destroy rotten boroughs. From of old, the English patient himself had a continually recurring notion that this was it. The English people are used to suffrage ; it is their panacea for all that goes wrong with them ; they have a fixed-idea of suffrage. (90)

Moreover, rebellion is always wrong, because:

No man is justified in resisting by word or deed the Authority he lives under, for a light cause, be such Authority what it may. Obedience, little as many may consider that side of the matter, is the primary duty of man. No man but is bound indefeasibly, with all force of obligation, to obey. (93-94)

With an intriguing sleight of hand, Carlyle maintains that democracy and laissez-faire are one and the same; both amount to a "do-nothing" approach to government. Democracy cannot rule wisely, as the principle of "laissez-faire" cannot guide social and economic life.

So who should rule in England? Carlyle makes his preferences clear; and it is a preference for the feudal past, where feudal lords governed their bonded workers and farmers. It is the aristocracy that must take up the responsibility of governing -- the aristocracy must lead and govern.

Yet we do say that the old Aristocracy were the governors of the Lower Classes, the guides of the Lower Classes; and even, at bottom, that they existed as an Aristocracy because they were found adequate for that. Not by Charity-Balls and Soup-Kitchens; not so; far otherwise! But it was their happiness that, in struggling for their own objects, they had to govern the Lower Classes, even in this sense of governing. For, in one word. Cash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man; it was something other than money that the high then expected from the low, and could not live without getting from the low. (58)

This is the passage where the "cash nexus" phrase originates. And the passage appears to express one of Carlyle's fundamental beliefs -- that a harmonious society depends upon strands of loyalty, trust, and commitment between unequals -- not simply impersonal economic relationships.

We might say that the political theory expressed in Chartism amounts to only a handful of assertions:

1. The poor are suffering enormously under current conditions in England. They are both severely impoverished and treated unfairly.
2. The poor are naturally inferior to the aristocracy and are incapable of rational political thought.
3. The current system of government (Parliament) is incapable of perceiving the crisis, let alone addressing it with intelligent policies.
4. England is in crisis because of these facts.
5. Only authoritarian, unified government by a natural aristocracy will have the insight and wisdom to remedy England's crisis.

It is interesting to recall that Engels, and later Marx, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, would agree with premises 1, 3, and 4, but disagree fundamentally with 2 and 5. It is also interesting to observe that Carlyle's conservatism (authoritarianism, really) became a branch-line in the coming century of conflict over "the social question", with social democrats and revolutionary socialists defining the main contenders for a program of progress. And Carlyle's political views do not line up with other forms of conservatism in the twentieth century very closely either -- whether fascist ideology or the persistence of English laissez-faire conservatism grounded in pre-Keynesian political economy. Carlyle was sui generis.

Gross inequalities in a time of pandemic

Here is a stunning juxtaposition in the April 2 print edition of the New York Times. Take a close look. The top panel updates readers on the fact that the city and the region are enduring unimaginable suffering and stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with 63,300 victims and 2,624 deaths (as of April 4) — and with hundreds of thousands facing immediate, existential financial crisis because of the economic shutdown. And only eight miles away, as the Sotheby’s "Prominent Properties" half-page advertisement proclaims, home buyers can find secluded luxury, relaxation, and safety, for residential estates priced at $32.9 million and $21.5 million. In case the reader missed the exclusiveness of these properties, the advertisement mentions that they are "located in one of the nation's wealthiest zip codes". And, lest the prospective buyer be concerned about maintaining social isolation in these difficult times, the ad reminds prospective buyers that these are gated estates -- in fact, the $33M property is located on "the only guard gated street in Alpine".

Could Friedrich Engels have found a more compelling illustration of the fundamental inhumanity of the inequalities that exist in twenty-first century capitalism in the United States? And there is no need for rhetorical exaggeration — here it is in black and white in the nation’s "newspaper of record".

There are many compelling reasons that supported Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax. But here is one more: it is morally appalling, even gut-churning, to realize that $33 million for a home for one’s family (35,000 square feet, tennis court and indoor basketball court) is a reasonable “ask” for the super-wealthy in our country, the one-tenth of one percent who have ridden the crest of surging stock markets and finance and investment firms to a level of wealth that is literally unimaginable to at least 95% of the rest of the country.

Here is the heart of Warren's proposal for a wealth tax (link):

Rates and Revenue

• Zero additional tax on any household with a net worth of less than $50 million (99.9% of American households)
• 2% annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion
• 4% annual Billionaire Surtax (6% tax overall) on household net worth above $1 billion
• 10-Year revenue total of $3.75 trillion

Are we all in this together, or not? If we are, let’s share the wealth. Let’s all pay our fair share. Let’s pay for the costs of fighting the pandemic and saving tens of millions of our fellow citizens from financial ruin, eviction, malnutrition, and family crisis with a wealth tax on billionaires. They can afford it. The "65' saltwater gunite pool" is not a life necessity. The revenue estimate of the Warren proposal is roughly proportionate to the current estimate of what it will cost the US economy to overcome the pandemic, protect the vulnerable, and restart the economy -- $3.75 trillion. Both equity and the current crisis support such a plan.

Here is some background on the rising wealth inequalities we have witnessed in recent decades in the United States. Leiserson, McGrew, and Kopparam provide an excellent and data-rich survey of the system of wealth inequalities in the United States in "The distribution of wealth in the United States and implications for a net worth tax" (link). Since 1989 the increase in wealth inequality is dramatic. The top 10% owned about 67% of all wealth in 1989; by 2016 this had risen to 77%.

The second graph is a snapshot for 2016 (link). Both income and wealth are severely unequal, but wealth is substantially more so. The top quintile owns almost 90% of the wealth in the United States, with the top 1% owning about 40% of all wealth.

The website Inequality.org provides an historical look at the growth of inequalities of wealth in the US (link). Consider this graph of the wealth shares over a century of the top 1%, .1%, and .01% of the US population; it is eye-popping. Beginning in roughly 1978 the shares of the very top segments of the US population began to rise, and the trend continued through 2012 -- with no end in sight. The top 1% in 2012 owned 41% of all wealth; the top 0.1% owned 21%; and the top 0.01% owned 11%.

We need a wealth tax, and Elizabeth Warren put together a pretty convincing and rational plan. This is not a question of “soaking the rich”. It is a question of basic fairness. Our economy and society have functioned as an express elevator for ever-greater fortunes for the few, with essentially no improvement for 60-80% of the rest of America. An economy is a system of social cooperation, requiring the efforts of all members of society. But the benefits of our economic system have gone ever-more disproportionately to the rich and the ultra-rich. That is fundamentally unfair. Now is the time to bring equity back into our society and politics. If Mr. Moneybags can afford a $33M home in New Jersey, he or she can afford to pay a small tax on his wealth.

It is interesting to note that social scientists and anthropologists are beginning to study the super-rich as a distinctive group. A fascinating source is Iain Hay and Jonathan Beaverstock, eds., Handbook on Wealth and the Super-Rich. Especially relevant is Chris Paris's contribution, "The residential spaces of the super-rich". Paris writes:

Prime residential real estate remains a key element in super-­rich investment portfolios, both for private use through luxury consumption and as investment items with anticipated long-­ term capital gain, often untaxed as properties are owned by companies rather than individuals. Most of the homes of the super-­rich are purchased using cash, specialized financial instruments and/or through companies, and ‘the higher the price of the property, the less likely buyers were to arrange traditional mortgage financing for the home acquisition. Whether buyers are foreign or domestic, cash transactions predominate at the higher end of the market’ (Christie’s, 2013, p. 14). Such transactions, therefore, never enter ‘national’ housing accounting systems and play no part in many accounts of aggregate ‘national’ house price trends. For example, the analysis of house price trends in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation UK Housing Review is based on data relating to transactions using mortgages or loans, and EU and OECD comparisons between countries are based on the same kinds of data (Paris, 2013b).

Also fascinating in the volume is Emma Spence's study of the super-rich when at sea in their super-yachts, "Performing wealth and status: observing super-­yachts and the super-­rich in Monaco":

In this chapter I focus upon the super-­yacht as a key tool for exploring how performances of wealth are made visible in Monaco. A super-­yacht is a privately owned and professionally crewed luxury vessel over 30 metres in length. An average super-­ yacht, at approximately 47 metres in length, costs around €30 million to buy new, operates with a permanent crew of ten, and costs around €1.8 million per year to run. Larger super-­yachts such as Motor Yacht (M/Y) Madame Gu (99 metres in length), or the current largest super-­yacht in the world M/Y Azzam (180 metres in length) cost substantially more to build and to run. The price to charter (rent) a super-­yacht also varies considerably with size, age and reputation of the shipyard in which it was built. For example, a typical 47-­metre yacht can range between €100 000 to €600 000 per week to charter, plus costs. At the most exclusive end of the super-­yacht charter industry costs are much higher. M/Y Solange, for example, is an 85-­metre newly built yacht (2013) from reputable German shipyard Lürssen, which operates with 29 full-­time crew, and is priced at €1 million plus costs to charter per week.  The super-­yacht industry is worth an estimated €24 billion globally (Rutherford, 2014, p. 51).

Sexual harassment in academic contexts

Sexual harassment of women in academic settings is regrettably common and pervasive, and its consequences are grave. At the same time, it is a remarkably difficult problem to solve. The "me-too" movement has shed welcome light on specific individual offenders and has generated more awareness of some aspects of the problem of sexual harassment and misconduct. But we have not yet come to a public awareness of the changes needed to create a genuinely inclusive and non-harassing environment for women across the spectrum of mistreatment that has been documented. The most common institutional response following an incident is to create a program of training and reporting, with a public commitment to investigating complaints and enforcing university or institutional policies rigorously and transparently. These efforts are often well intentioned, but by themselves they are insufficient. They do not address the underlying institutional and cultural features that make sexual harassment so prevalent.

The problem of sexual harassment in institutional contexts is a difficult one because it derives from multiple features of the organization. The ambient culture of the organization is often an important facilitator of harassing behavior -- often enough a patriarchal culture that is deferential to the status of higher-powered individuals at the expense of lower-powered targets. There is the fact that executive leadership in many institutions continues to be predominantly male, who bring with them a set of gendered assumptions that they often fail to recognize. The hierarchical nature of the power relations of an academic institution is conducive to mistreatment of many kinds, including sexual harassment. Bosses to administrative assistants, research directors to post-docs, thesis advisors to PhD candidates -- these unequal relations of power create a conducive environment for sexual harassment in many varieties. In each case the superior actor has enormous power and influence over the career prospects and work lives of the women over whom they exercise power. And then there are the habits of behavior that individuals bring to the workplace and the learning environment -- sometimes habits of masculine entitlement, sometimes disdainful attitudes towards female scholars or scientists, sometimes an underlying willingness to bully others that finds expression in an academic environment. (A recent issue of the Journal of Social Issues (link) devotes substantial research to the topic of toxic leadership in the tech sector and the "masculinity contest culture" that this group of researchers finds to be a root cause of the toxicity this sector displays for women professionals. Research by Jennifer Berdahl, Peter Glick, Natalya Alonso, and more than a dozen other scholars provides in-depth analysis of this common feature of work environments.)

The scope and urgency of the problem of sexual harassment in academic contexts is documented in excellent and expert detail in a recent study report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (link). This report deserves prominent discussion at every university.

The study documents the frequency of sexual harassment in academic and scientific research contexts, and the data are sobering. Here are the results of two indicative studies at Penn State University System and the University of Texas System:

The Penn State survey indicates that 43.4% of undergraduates, 58.9% of graduate students, and 72.8% of medical students have experienced gender harassment, while 5.1% of undergraduates, 6.0% of graduate students, and 5.7% of medical students report having experienced unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. These are staggering results, both in terms of the absolute number of students who were affected and the negative effects that these  experiences had on their ability to fulfill their educational potential. The University of Texas study shows a similar pattern, but also permits us to see meaningful differences across fields of study. Engineering and medicine provide significantly more harmful environments for female students than non-STEM and science disciplines. The authors make a particularly worrisome observation about medicine in this context:

The interviews conducted by RTI International revealed that unique settings such as medical residencies were described as breeding grounds for abusive behavior by superiors. Respondents expressed that this was largely because at this stage of the medical career, expectation of this behavior was widely accepted. The expectations of abusive, grueling conditions in training settings caused several respondents to view sexual harassment as a part of the continuum of what they were expected to endure. (63-64)

The report also does an excellent job of defining the scope of sexual harassment. Media discussion of sexual harassment and misconduct focuses primarily on egregious acts of sexual coercion. However, the  authors of the NAS study note that experts currently encompass sexual coercion, unwanted sexual attention, and gender harassment under this category of harmful interpersonal behavior. The largest sub-category is gender harassment:

"a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes about" members of one gender (Fitzgerald, Gelfand, and Drasgow 1995, 430). (25)

The "iceberg" diagram (p. 32) captures the range of behaviors encompassed by the concept of sexual harassment. (See Leskinen, Cortina, and Kabat 2011 for extensive discussion of the varieties of sexual harassment and the harms associated with gender harassment.)

The report emphasizes organizational features as a root cause of a harassment-friendly environment.

By far, the greatest predictors of the occurrence of sexual harassment are organizational. Individual-level factors (e.g., sexist attitudes, beliefs that rationalize or justify harassment, etc.) that might make someone decide to harass a work colleague, student, or peer are surely important. However, a person that has proclivities for sexual harassment will have those behaviors greatly inhibited when exposed to role models who behave in a professional way as compared with role models who behave in a harassing way, or when in an environment that does not support harassing behaviors and/or has strong consequences for these behaviors. Thus, this section considers some of the organizational and environmental variables that increase the risk of sexual harassment perpetration. (46)

Some of the organizational factors that they refer to include the extreme gender imbalance that exists in many professional work environments, the perceived absence of organizational sanctions for harassing behavior, work environments where sexist views and sexually harassing behavior are modeled, and power differentials (47-49). The authors make the point that gender harassment is chiefly aimed at indicating disrespect towards the target rather than sexual exploitation. This has an important implication for institutional change. An institution that creates a strong core set of values emphasizing civility and respect is less conducive to gender harassment. They summarize this analysis in the statement of findings as well:

Organizational climate is, by far, the greatest predictor of the occurrence of sexual harassment, and ameliorating it can prevent people from sexually harassing others. A person more likely to engage in harassing behaviors is significantly less likely to do so in an environment that does not support harassing behaviors and/or has strong, clear, transparent consequences for these behaviors. (50)

So what can a university or research institution do to reduce and eliminate the likelihood of sexual harassment for women within the institution? Several remedies seem fairly obvious, though difficult.

• Establish a pervasive expectation of civility and respect in the workplace and the learning environment
• Diffuse the concentrations of power that give potential harassers the opportunity to harass women within their domains
• Ensure that the institution honors its values by refusing the "star culture" common in universities that makes high-prestige university members untouchable
• Be vigilant and transparent about the processes of investigation and adjudication through which complaints are considered
• Create effective processes that ensure that complainants do not suffer retaliation
• Consider candidates' receptivity to the values of a respectful, civil, and non-harassing environment during the hiring and appointment process (including research directors, department and program chairs, and other positions of authority)
• Address the gender imbalance that may exist in leadership circles

As the authors put the point in the final chapter of the report:

Preventing and effectively addressing sexual harassment of women in colleges and universities is a significant challenge, but we are optimistic that academic institutions can meet that challenge--if they demonstrate the will to do so. This is because the research shows what will work to prevent sexual harassment and why it will work. A systemwide change to the culture and climate in our nation's colleges and universities can stop the pattern of harassing behavior from impacting the next generation of women entering science, engineering, and medicine. (169)