Democracy and agency in development ethics

Development ethics is an area of applied ethics that attempts to explore the moral issues involved in global social and economic transformation.  Key to the urgency of the field is the fact of massive global poverty, hunger, and inequality.  The current situation of the world's poor -- in Egypt, India, Mexico, Sudan, or Brazil, for example -- is entirely unacceptable from a human point of view.  And governments, organizations, and individuals have positive moral obligations to work towards reducing these forms of massive suffering, and helping construct social and economic institutions that systematically reduce poverty.  So much is clear from the 60,000 foot level.  But how much more specificity can we provide about the bad of poverty, the principles of global justice, or the goals of development, so that moral theory can provide something of a guide to policy and action?  To what extent can we usefully connect moral theory to the practical challenges of designing workable development strategies?

Philosophers and social scientists have made a series of efforts at formulating a foundation for development ethics since the end of World War II.  Early contributors were Denis Goulet (Development Ethics: A Guide to Theory and Practice) and Robert Chambers (Rural Development: Putting the last first).  But the major progress in the field occurred through the writings of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, in the formulation of the "capabilities approach" to development.  Sen argued that the fundamental goal of development should be to create social and economic institutions within which every individual is enabled to fulfill his/her capabilities and to realize the functionings of a full human life (Development as Freedom).  And Nussbaum extended this idea with particular emphasis on the ways in which gender inequalities in development have deeply harmed women in the developing world (Women and Human Development).

There is now a third generation of thinking in the field of development ethics, well represented by David Crocker's excellent recent book, Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability, and Deliberative Democracy.  (Other important examples include Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms: Sen's Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction and Bina Agarwal, A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia.)  Crocker has been actively involved in the formulation of theories of development ethics for decades, and is the founder of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA).  This is an important forum for philosophers and practitioners to come together to discuss the ethical issues of development.  Crocker has been an exponent of the capabilities approach throughout his career, and has succeeded in deepening the debate by insisting on the importance of bringing the moral theories into direct engagement with the realities and practices of development.

The current book takes an important step forward.  It is framed around the foundation of the capabilities approach; but it goes beyond existing capabilities theory by emphasizing the crucial role of agency and democracy within development.  The capabilities approach focuses on achieving a form of society in which individuals can realize their capabilities and enjoy high quality of life.  This is a focus on the outcome of development.  Crocker refocuses this picture to emphasize the intrinsic and instrumental importance of the agency of the people involved in development -- the process of development.  And people best exercise their agency through a deliberative, participative process -- through a democratic process.  So Crocker's ethics of development might be described as a joining of the capabilities approach with current theorizing about deliberative democracy.  (Here is an earlier post on deliberative democracy.)

So what does this emphasis on agency and democracy involve?  Here is a concrete example: Indian economist V. K. Ramachandran's description of how the development process works in West Bengal and Kerala.



Here and elsewhere in the interview Ramachandran describes a process through which the West Bengal development agencies conduct their work.  They consult broadly with social groups, labor organizations, feminist organizations, and local communities and villages.  Proposals, goals, and strategies are developed through these consultations and deliberations; and the ultimate policy package is intended to represent a synthesis of the insights and claims of the various groups involved in the process.  So the process represents a practical illustration of the approach advocated by Crocker.

Why is a deliberative process along these lines appealing? First, it captures a set of social ideals associated with Rousseau and Marx about the value of individuals and groups self-constituting their goals and values through reflection and deliberation. Rather than the World Bank or the OECD Development Assistance Committee imposing a set of goals on a country or region (liberalization, more rapid urbanization, improvement of markets), the people of the region should have the opportunity and responsibility of setting their course and choosing the strategies they will pursue. Development should proceed through a process of local self-determination, and such a process is itself an intrinsic good.

Second, there is the idea is that the goals chosen through such a process will be in better alignment with the needs of the region, and will be better embraced by the people affected, because they have been refined and chosen through a deliberative, democratic process.  Policies developed through a democratic process have a greater level of legitimacy with those affected by the policies.

Third, there is the expectation that the people of the community will have a better factual understanding of their natural and social circumstances, and will therefore be better able to formulate strategies that will work in the given environment.  So Crocker and others expect that a process of deliberative democracy through which development goals and strategies are selected by a given community will have a higher probability of succeeding.   (Notice the convergence between this set of ideas and Scott's critique of "high modernism"; link.)

This set of values suggests several institutional features: decentralization of decision-making, massive consultation, and a requirement of equality among citizens.  Can we be confident that such a process will work well to reform society and reduce poverty and inequality?  Ramachandran highlights one obstacle to this process in the interview posted above: the fact of extreme inequalities of wealth and poverty in rural India.  But if the social setting is one of great inequalities between landlords, tenants, and landless workers, then to what extent can the requirements of democratic deliberation take place?  Ramachandran argues for the necessity of agrarian reform (land reform and caste reform) as a necessary precondition for just economic development in India.

Decentralization of decision-making raises another potential problem -- the myopia of the local.  A development plan that may be best for West Bengal as a whole may be undesirable to many communities; so how can we expect the process of deliberative democracy to arrive at a good outcome for the state as a whole? (The collapse of the Tata Motor Nano project in West Bengal perhaps illustrates this possibility.)  And the massive consultation involved in this ideal poses its own problems of practicality.  Can we be confident that such a process will come to a resolution, or will debate continue indefinitely?

Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright address practical responses to some of these issues in Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance.  Here is how they set the stage for their analysis:

As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century -- representative democracy plus techno-bureaucratic administration -- seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century.  "Democracy" as a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices.  Yet, increasingly, this mechanism of political representation seems ineffective in accomplishing the central ideals of democratic politics: facilitating active political involvement of the citizenry, forging political consensus through dialogue, devising and implementing public policies that ground a productive economy and healthy society, and, in more radical egalitarian versions fo the democratic idea, assuring that all citizens benefit from the nation's wealth. (3)

David Crocker's focus on the importance of the values and practices of deliberative democracy within the development process is an important step forward.  It helps to make more tangible the implications of the capabilities approach for specific development challenges; and it gives substance to the priority that Sen and Nussbaum accord to "freedom" as a central development value.

(Some readers may also be interested in my 2003 book, The Paradox of Wealth and Poverty: Mapping the Ethical Dilemmas of Global Development. This book likewise places the capabilities approach at the center of the analysis.)

An existential philosophy of technology

Ours is a technological culture, at least in the quarter of the countries in the world that enjoy a high degree of economic affluence. Cell phones, computers, autonomous vehicles, CT scan machines, communications satellites, nuclear power reactors, artificial DNA, artificial intelligence bots, drone swarms, fiber optic data networks -- we live in an environment that depends unavoidably upon complex, scientifically advanced, and mostly reliable artifacts that go well beyond the comprehension of most consumers and citizens. We often do not understand how they work. But more than that, we do not understand how they affect us in our social, personal, and philosophical lives. We are different kinds of persons than those who came before us, it often seems, because of the sea of technological capabilities in which we swim. We think about our lives differently, and we relate to the social world around us differently.

How can we begin investigating the question of how technology affects the conduct of a "good life"? Is there such a thing as an "existential" philosophy of technology -- that is, having to do with the meaning of the lives of human beings in the concrete historical and technological circumstances in which we now find ourselves? This suggests that we need to consider a particularly deep question: in what ways does advanced technology facilitate the good human life, and in what ways does it frustrate and block the good human life? Does advanced technology facilitate and encourage the development of full human beings, and lives that are lived well, or does it interfere with these outcomes?

We are immediately drawn to a familiar philosophical question, What is a good life, lived well? This has been a central question for philosophers since Aristotle and Epicurus, Kant and Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus. But let's try to answer it in a paragraph. Let's postulate that there are a handful of characteristics that are associated with a genuinely valuable human life. These might include the individual's realization of a capacity for self-rule, creativity, compassion for others, reflectiveness, and an ability to grow and develop. This suggests that we start from the conception of a full life of freedom and development offered by Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom and the list of capabilities offered by Martha Nussbaum in Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach -- capacities for life, health, imagination, emotions, practical reason, affiliation with others, and self-respect. And we might say that a "life lived well" is one in which the person has lived with integrity, justice, and compassion in developing and fulfilling his or her fundamental capacities. Finally, we might say that a society that enables the development of each of these capabilities in all its citizens is a good society.

Now look at the other end of the issue -- what are some of the enhancements to human living that are enabled by modern technologies? There are several obvious candidates. One might say that technology facilitates learning and the acquisition of knowledge; technology can facilitate health (by finding cures and preventions of disease; and by enhancing nutrition, shelter, and other necessities of daily life); technology can facilitate human interaction (through the forms of communication and transportation enabled by modern technology); technology can enhance compassion by acquainting us with the vivid life experiences of others. So technology is sometimes life-enhancing and fulfilling of some of our most fundamental needs and capabilities.

How might Dostoevsky, Dos Passos, Baldwin, or Whitman have adjusted their life plans if confronted by our technological culture? We would hope they would not have been overwhelmed in their imagination and passion for discovering the human in the ordinary by an iPhone, a Twitter feed, and a web browser. We would like to suppose that their insights and talents would have survived and flourished, that poetry, philosophy, and literature would still have emerged, and that compassion and commitment would have found its place even in this alternative world.

But the negative side of technology for human wellbeing is also easy to find. We might say that technology encourages excessive materialism; it draws us away from real interactions with other human beings; it promotes a life consisting of a series of entertaining moments rather than meaningful interactions; and it squelches independence, creativity, and moral focus. So the omnipresence of technologies does not ensure that human beings will live well and fully, by the standards of Aristotle, Epicurus, or Montaigne.

In fact, there is a particularly bleak possibility concerning the lives that advanced everyday technology perhaps encourages: our technological culture encourages us to pursue lives that are primarily oriented towards material satisfaction, entertainment, and toys. This sounds a bit like a form of addiction or substance abuse. We might say that the ambient cultural imperatives of acquiring the latest iPhone, the fastest internet streaming connection, or a Tesla are created by the technological culture that we inhabit, and that these motivations are ultimately unworthy of a fully developed human life. Lucretius, Socrates, and Montaigne would scoff.

It is clear that technology has the power to distort our motives, goals and values. But perhaps with equal justice one might say that this is a life world created by capitalism rather than technology -- a culture that encourages and elicits personal motivations that are "consumerist" and ultimately empty of real human value, a culture that depersonalizes social ties and trivializes human relationships based on trust, loyalty, love, or compassion. This is indeed the critique offered by theorists of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School -- that capitalism depends upon a life world of crass materialism and impoverished social and personal values. And we can say with some exactness how capitalism distorts humanity and culture in its own image: through the machinations of advertising, strategic corporate communications, and the honoring of acquisitiveness and material wealth (link). It is good business to create an environment where people want more and more of the gadgets that technological capitalism can provide.

So what is a solution for people who worry about the shallowness and vapidity of this kind of technological materialism? We might say that an antidote to excessive materialism and technology fetishism is a fairly simple maxim that each person can strive to embrace: aim to identify and pursue the things that genuinely matter in life, not the glittering objects of short-term entertainment and satisfaction. Be temperate, reflective, and purposive in one's life pursuits. Decide what values are of the greatest importance, and make use of technology to further those values, rather than as an end in itself. Let technology be a tool for creativity and commitment, not an end in itself. Be selective and deliberate in one's use of technology, rather than being the hapless consumer of the latest and shiniest. Create a life that matters.

Sen on well-being

In 1985 Amartya Sen published a very short book entitled Commodities and Capabilities. The book was reissued by Oxford after Sen received his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

The topic is at the core of Sen's economic and philosophical work. Most basically, he is asking Aristotle's question -- what is happiness? -- and is putting forward an answer that combines analysis of economic behavior with philosophical analysis of action and purpose in human life. Economists from Mill to Samuelson sought to understand economic choices in terms of subjective utilities and unanalyzed sets of preferences. A consistent theme was that economics can't be concerned with the content or validity of the individual's utility function or preference ordering. Rather, economics is about the rules by which rational agents design their actions to maximize utility or preference satisfaction. Economic rationality has to do with the choice of means, not ends.

This approach to action also unfolded into the formal theory of social choice. Given that citizens have a set of preferences about social outcomes, what rational procedures can be designed to aggregate these preferences into a single coherent social choice preference ordering.  Essentially the underlying idea is that the social good is secured when we succeed in aggregating citizens' preferences onto a single social preference ranking.  And this is where Kenneth Arrow's famous impossibility theorem comes in: given a small set of reasonable constraints on social choice, there is no social choice procedure that is both complete and transitive (Social Choice and Individual Values, Second edition). Sen's first major book (1970) gave a different formal exposition to this set of arguments (Collective choice and social welfare).

One of Sen's most fundamental contributions in economics is to question the theory of subjective utility and revealed preference. He thinks that we can give a substantive, not formal, account of wellbeing that permits us to analyze the individual's behavior and choices in a more meaningful way.  He writes here:

It is fair to say that formal economics has not been very interested in the plurality of focus in judging a person's states and interests. In fact, often enough the very richness of the subject matter has been seen as an embarrassment. There is a powerful tradition in economic analysis that tries to eschew the distinctions and make do with one simple measure of a person's interest and its fulfilment.  That measure is often called 'utility'. (1)

He wants to complicate the issue by drawing distinctions -- that is, by breaking down the austere abstractions about choice that are most comfortable to the economists:

I would distinguish broadly between two ways of seeing a person's interests and their fulfilment, and I shall call them respectively 'well-being' and 'advantage'. 'Well-being' is concerned with a person's achievement: how 'well' is his or her 'being'? 'Advantage' refers to the real opportunities that the person has, especially compared with others. The opportunities are not judged only by the results achieved, and therefore not just by the level of well-being achieved. It is possible for a person to have genuine advantage and still to 'muff' them.  Or to sacrifice one's own well-being for other goals, and not to make full use of one's freedom to achieve a high level of well-being.  The notion of advantage deals with a person's real opportunities compared with others. The freedom to achieve well-being is closer to the notion of advantage than well-being itself. (3)

This discussion announces his important distinction between capabilities and functionings; functionings are the realized form that capabilities take when they are fully cultivated.  "A functioning is an achievement of a person: what he or she manages to do or to be" (7).  It is worth noticing that the idea of freedom comes into this formulation in a fundamental way -- fifteen years before freedom becomes central to his thinking about the good of economic development in Development as Freedom.

Sen's argument next moves into another topic that has been characteristic of his thinking throughout his career, the relationship between two or three central components of "satisfaction" or "well-being".  There is subjective satisfaction -- the degree to which the individual has accomplished a large portion of his/her preferences.  There is the role of commodities and material things in the composition of individual satisfaction -- the bundle of stuff that the individual can call upon in attempting to satisfy basic needs and desires, from grain and clean water to iPads and access to the Internet.  And there is the "fit" between the individual's material circumstances and his/her ability to fulfill capabilities and complete an autonomous plan of life.

The key idea expressed in this monograph and subsequently in Sen's work is that well-being is the aggregation of the individual's collection of functionings.  "It is possible to argue that the well-being of a person is best seen as an index of the person's functionings" (17).

On what does the claim of functionings to reflect well-being rest? Basically, the claim builds on the straightforward fact that how well a person is must be a matter of what kind of life he or she is living, and what the person is succeeding in 'doing' or 'being'. (19)

And Sen thinks about this formulation in formal terms: the person's functionings are represented as a vector of qualitatively distinct characteristics, and one of the central problems is to assign relative values to the components of the package.

The primary specification of a person's well-being is in terms of a functioning vector bi. It can be converted into a scalar measure of well-being only through a real-valued 'valuation function' vi(.), mapping functioning vectors into numerical representations of well-being. (33)

Sen's approach is appealing largely because it replaces "utility" with a more granular conception of "functionings".  This permits more concrete discussion of the individual's life activities and, as Sen argues here, a better way of assessing his/her overall well-being.

What has turned out to be enormously important in Sen's framework of capabilities and functionings is its relevance to the topic of economic development.  We want economic development to lead to an overall improvement in human happiness.  But how should such a goal be assessed and measured?  By offering a concrete theory of functionings, Sen lays a basis for attempting to empirically measure changes in functionings over time.  Literacy, for example, is an important functioning for the human being.  Extremely poor societies invest very little in formal education, and literacy in the population is low.  We can make a very concrete argument that a given strategy of development is improving human well-being if we can demonstrate that it is leading to a higher level of attainment of literacy.  Health itself is a complex functioning for the human being; here too, it is possible to measure progress in health achievements in different societies.  So the functionings approach provides a concrete way of trying to assess progress in economic development processes.  The approach is a great improvement over the "average GDP" approach, since Sen demonstrates in numerous places that average income implies something about access to commodities, but it has only a weak connection to the functionings that the population is able to realize.

The Human Development Index championed by the United Nations Development Programme takes advantage of this insight.  HDI includes three measures: life expectancy, literacy, and per capita GDP (link).  And a very powerful argument can be made that societies that make the most progress in improving their HDI levels have made more progress in improving human well-being than those that increase GDP but fail to improve factors like literacy and health.  It will not surprise the reader to learn that Sen's writings and advocacy played a crucial role in the design of the HDI.

Ethical principles for assessing new technologies

Technologies and technology systems have deep and pervasive effects on the human beings who live within their reach. How do normative principles and principles of social and political justice apply to technology? Is there such a thing as "the ethics of technology"?

There is a reasonably active literature on questions that sound a lot like these. (See, for example, the contributions included in Winston and Edelbach, eds., Society, Ethics, and Technology.) But all too often the focus narrows too quickly to ethical issues raised by a particular example of contemporary technology -- genetic engineering, human cloning, encryption, surveillance, and privacy, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and so forth. These are important questions; but it is also possible to ask more general questions as well, about the normative space within which technology, private activity, government action, and the public live together. What principles allow us to judge the overall justice, fairness, and legitimacy of a given technology or technology system?

There is an overriding fact about technology that needs to be considered in every discussion of the ethics of technology. It is a basic principle of liberal democracy that individual freedom and liberty should be respected. Individuals should have the right to act and create as they choose, subject to something like Mill's harm principle. The harm principle holds that liberty should be restricted only when the activity in question imposes harm on other individuals. Applied to the topic of technology innovation, we can derive a strong principle of "liberty of innovation and creation" -- individuals (and their organizations, such as business firms) should have a presumptive right to create new technologies constrained only by something like the harm principle.

Often we want to go beyond this basic principle of liberty to ask what the good and bad of technology might be. Why is technological innovation a good thing, all things considered? And what considerations should we keep in mind as we consider legitimate regulations or limitations on technology?

Here we can consider three large principles that have emerged in other areas of social and political ethics as a basis for judging the legitimacy and fairness of a given set of social arrangements:

 A. Technologies should contribute to some form of human good, some activity or outcome that is desired by human beings -- health, education, enjoyment, pleasure, sociality, friendship, fitness, spirituality, ...
B. Technologies ought to be consistent with the fullest development of the human capabilities and freedoms of the individuals whom they affect. [Or stronger: “promote the fullest development …”]
C. Technologies ought to have population effects that are fair, equal, and just.

The first principle attempts to address the question, "What is technology good for? What is the substantive moral good that is served by technology development?" The basic idea is that human beings have wants and needs, and contributing to their ability to fulfill these wants is itself a good thing (if in so doing other greater harms are not created as well). This principle captures what is right about utilitarianism and hedonism -- the inherent value of human happiness and satisfaction. This means that entertainment and enjoyment are legitimate goals of technology development.

The second principle links technology to the "highest good" of human wellbeing -- the full development of human capabilities and freedoms. As is evident, the principle offered here derives from Amartya Sen's theory of capabilities and functionings, expressed in Development as Freedom. This principle recalls Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures:

Mill always insisted that the ultimate test of his own doctrine was utility, but for him the idea of the greatest happiness of the greatest number included qualitative judgements about different levels or kinds of human happiness. Pushpin was not as good as poetry; only Pushkin was.... Cultivation of one's own individuality should be the goal of human existence. (J.S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought : 454)

The third principle addresses the question of fairness and equity. Thinking about justice has evolved a great deal in the past fifty years, and one thing that emerges clearly is the intimate connection between injustice and invidious discrimination -- even if unintended. Social institutions that arbitrarily assign significantly different opportunities and life outcomes to individuals based on characteristics such as race, gender, income, neighborhood, or religion are unfair and unjust, and need to be reformed. This approach derives as much from current discussions of racial health disparities as it does from philosophical theories along the lines of Rawls and Sen.

On these principles a given technology can be criticized, first, if it has no positive contribution to make for the things that make people happy or satisfied; second, if it has the effect of stunting the development of human capabilities and freedoms; and third, if it has discriminatory effects on quality of life across the population it effects.

One important puzzle facing the ethics of technology is a question about the intended audience of such a discussion. We are compelled to ask, to whom is a philosophical discussion of the normative principles that ought to govern our thinking about technology aimed? Whose choices, actions, and norms are we attempting to influence? There appear to be several possible answers to this question.

Corporate ethics. Entrepreneurs and corporate boards and executives have an ethical responsibility to consider the impact of the technologies that they introduce into the market. If we believe that codes of corporate ethics have any real effect on corporate decision-making, then we need to have a basis in normative philosophy for a relevant set of principles that should guide business decision-making about the creation and implementation of new technologies by businesses. A current example is the use of facial recognition for the purpose of marketing or store security; does a company have a moral obligation to consider the negative social effects it may be promoting by adopting such a technology?

Governments and regulators. Government has an overriding responsibility of preserving and enhancing the public good and minimizing harmful effects of private activities. This is the fundamental justification for government regulation of industry. Since various technologies have the potential of creating harms for some segments of the public, it is legitimate for government to enact regulatory systems to prevent reckless or unreasonable levels of risk. Government also has a responsibility for ensuring a fair and just environment for all citizens, and enacting policies that serve to eliminate inequalities based on discriminatory social institutions. So here too governments have a role in regulating technologies, and a careful study of the normative principles that should govern our thinking about the fairness and justice of technologies is relevant to this process of government decision-making as well.

Public interest advocacy groups. One way in which important social issues can be debated and sometimes resolved is through the advocacy of well-organized advocacy groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Sierra Club, or Greenpeace. Organizations like these are in a position to argue in favor of or against a variety of social changes, and raising concerns about specific kinds of technologies certainly falls within this scope. There are only a small number of grounds for this kind of advocacy: the innovation will harm the public, the innovation will create unacceptable hidden costs, or the innovation raises unacceptable risks of unjust treatment of various groups. In order to make the latter kind of argument, the advocacy group needs to be able to articulate a clear and justified argument for its position about "unjust treatment".

The public. Citizens themselves have an interest in being able to make normative judgments about new technologies as they arise. "This technology looks as though it will improve life for everyone and should be favored; that technology looks as though it will create invidious and discriminatory sets of winners and losers and should be carefully regulated." But for citizens to have a basis for making judgments like these, they need to have a normative framework within which to think and reason about the social role of technology. Public discussion of the ethical principles underlying the legitimacy and justice of technology innovations will deepen and refine these normative frameworks.

Considered as proposed here, the topic of "ethics of technology" is part of a broad theory of social and political philosophy more generally. It invokes some of our best reasoning about what constitutes the human good (fulfillment of capabilities and freedoms) and about what constitutes a fair social system (elimination of invidious discrimination in the effects of social institutions on segments of population). Only when we have settled these foundational questions are we able to turn to the more specific issues often discussed under the rubric of the ethics of technology.

Rawls and classical political economy

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is highly relevant to the ways we think about our economic system.  If we just read the citations, Rawls seems to be primarily influenced by "modern" economics -- Samuelson, equilibrium theory, game theory, and marginalist theory.  And so we might suppose that his moral worldview reflects a neoclassical vision of economy and society.  However, his thought actually seems to reflect a recognition of the intellectual tension between classical political economy and “modern economics”.  In some ways his framework for thinking about our contemporary economy seems to be closer intellectually to Mill, Ricardo, and Marx than it is to Pareto and Samuelson.

Classical political economy was premised on the labor theory of value—the idea that there is a concrete, economically meaningful measure of value that guides economic organization. Further, there was the idea that the economic needs that individuals had were also concrete—the consumption goods that permitted life to proceed. These goods included items like food, clothing, shelter, medicines, and perhaps schooling. So economic activity, according to the classical economists, was about something objective.

Neoclassical economy, by contrast, rejected even the idea of utility as a concrete or objective human reality. Instead, modern economics bracketed the reality of needs in favor of a metaphysics of subjective preference.  Economists no longer needed to think about what people needed, but rather simply what they preferred; so the utilities "consumers" ascribed to outcomes could be discovered by the quasi-experiments of “revealed preference.” Welfare was then defined as the extent to which the individual can satisfy the range of subjective preferences he or she happens to have.  So classical and modern economic paradigms differ substantially on what economic activity ought to achieve: satisfaction of material needs, for the classical economists; and satisfaction of subjective preferences, for the modern economists.

A major thrust of the critique of neoclassical economics arises at just this point. Development organizations like the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and economists like Amartya Sen have put forward fundamentally different ideas about human wellbeing.  The basic needs approach disputed that the goal of economic development in poor countries should be defined in terms of subjective preferences or utilities.  These thinkers argued instead for achieving a decent minimum for whole populations in the satisfaction of basic needs. A 1975 report from the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation to the United Nations (What Now – the 1975 Dag Hammarskjöld Report on Development and International Cooperation; link) is illustrative; it emphasized the idea of basic needs within the discussion of development priorities.

Amartya Sen went a step further, by introducing a more adequate theory of the human person in terms of capabilities and functionings, and argued for a conception of wellbeing that is defined in terms of the ability of individuals and populations to realize their capabilities. Sen advanced these ideas in many places, including On Economic Inequality and Development as Freedom.  (Earlier posts have discussed the capabilities approach; link, link.)  These are objective criteria of wellbeing, not simply summations of subjective preference satisfaction.  And these frameworks of thought present a major challenge to the foundations of modern economic thought.

In light of these observations, it is very interesting to observe that Rawls defined the foundation of his theory of justice, the original position, in terms that are strikingly classical.  In the original position, representative individuals are asked to deliberate behind a veil of ignorance about what principles of justice they would choose to regulate their social cooperation and competition.  Individuals are presumed to be mutually disinterested, and their sole concern is to adopt principles that they can live with in the resulting society.  But what are their interests?  Rawls says that the participants in the OP are interested in a set of primary goods: material resources and liberties, essentially. These are "things which a rational man wants whatever else he wants" (TJ:92).

So Rawls's definition of the situation of deliberation within the original position is one that focuses on primary goods, not subjective utilities. And this sounds much closer to a classical assumption about economic interests and the human good than it does a modern assumption.  It offers an objective and realistic assumption about what people need in order to live decent lives.

This line of thought is supported by a second feature of Rawls's philosophical orientation.  The most basic substantive moral position that Rawls takes is his rejection of utilitarianism as a general principle of justice.  Just institutions are not defined as those that "create the greatest good for the greatest number."  Instead, they are defined as those that can be assured to provide fair circumstances of life for every citizen.  This is established by the unanimity rule.  Choice within the original position must be unanimous; and this means that it needs to support the interests of every participant.  In order to make the idea of the OP an intelligible one, Rawls needs to specify a decision rule for the participants. He argues for the maximin rule over the expected utility rule: the participants will each choose the path that has the least-bad worst outcome.  This choice of decision rule, it should be emphasized, does not reflect an assumption about risk-averse psychology, but rather a compelling reason for choosing this rule.  The stakes are too high to do otherwise. So when participants deliberate among institutional alternatives from the perspective of the maximin rule, they will choose a governing norm like the difference principle. And this too seems to be an implicit rejection of the foundations of modern economics, including the theory of subjective utility and the idea that the only thing that matters from a moral point of view is maximizing "welfare". Here Rawls draws on Kant, to recognize that the way that social outcomes arise is morally as important as the value of the outcomes themselves.  Rights based on justice can be in tension with overall maximum utility.

So I'm inclined to argue that the greatest contribution Rawls made to contemporary economics is his strong and philosophically convincing case for primary goods and his definition of a good life. His rationale for primary goods is that a person’s ultimate goals are set by his or her conception of the good, and there is no reason to expect there to be a common agreed-upon standard for the conception of the good. It is logical, however, to observe that there are some goods that every individual requires in order to pursue any conception of the good: access to material resources and liberties. This seems like a nod towards the moral worldview of classical political economy.

(See a post on "property-owning democracy" for more discussion of the institutional implications of Rawls's reasoning.)

Cyber threats

David Sanger's very interesting recent book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, is a timely read this month, following the indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC in 2015. Sanger is a national security writer for the New York Times, and has covered cyber security issues for a number of years. He and William Broad and John Markoff were among the first journalists to piece together the story behind the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear fuel program (the secret program called Olympic Games), and the book also offers some intriguing hints about the possibility of "left of launch" intrusions by US agencies into the North Korean missile program. This is a book that everyone should read. It greatly broadens the scope of what most of us think about under the category of "hacking". We tend to think of invasions of privacy and identity theft when we think of nefarious uses of the internet; but Sanger makes it clear that the stakes are much greater. The capabilities of current cyber-warfare tools have the possibility of bringing down whole national infrastructures, leading to massive civilian hardship.

There are several important takeaways from Sanger's book. One is the pervasiveness and power of the offensive cyber tools available to nation-state actors in penetrating and potentially disrupting or destroying the infrastructures of their potential opponents. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and the United States are all shown to possess tools of intrusion, data extraction, and system destruction that are extremely difficult for targeted countries and systems to defend against. The Sony attack (North Korea), the Office of Personnel Management (China), the attack on the Ukraine electric grid (Russia), the attack on Saudi Arabia's massive oil company Aramco (Iran), and the attack on the US electoral system (Russia) all proceeded with massive effect and without evident response from their victims or the United States. At this moment in time the balance of capability appears to favor the offense rather than the defense. A second important theme is the extreme level of secrecy that the US intelligence establishment has imposed on the capabilities it possesses for conducting cyber conflict. Sanger makes it clear that he believes that a greater level of public understanding of the capabilities and risks created by cyber weapons like Stuxnet would be beneficial in the United States and other countries, by permitting a more serious public debate about means and ends, risks and rewards of the use of cyber weapons. He likens it to the evolution of the Obama administration's eventual willingness to make a public case for the use of unmanned drone strikes against its enemies.

Third, Sanger makes it clear that the classic logic of deterrence that was successful in maintaining nuclear peace is less potent when it comes to cyber warfare and escalation. State-level adversaries have selected strategies of cyber attack precisely because of the relatively low cost of developing this technology, the relative anonymity of an attack once it occurs, and the difficulties faced by victims in selecting appropriate and effective counter-strikes that would deter the attacker in the future.

The National Security Agency gets a lot of attention in the book. The Office of Tailored Access Operations gets extensive discussion, based on revelations from the Snowden materials and other sources. Sanger makes it clear that the NSA had developed a substantial toolkit for intercepting communications and penetrating computer systems to capture data files of security interest. But according to Sanger it has also developed strong cyber tools for offensive use against potential adversaries. Part of the evidence for this judgment comes from the Snowden revelations (which are also discussed extensively). Part comes from what Sanger and others were able to discover about the workings of Stuxnet in targeting Iranian nuclear centrifuges over a many-month period. And part comes from suggestive reporting about the odd fact that North Korea's medium range missile tests were so spectacularly unsuccessful for a series of launches.

The book leads to worrisome conclusions and questions. US infrastructure and counter-cyber programs were highly vulnerable to attacks that have already taken place in our country. The extraction by Chinese military intelligence of millions of confidential personal records of US citizens from the Office of Personnel Management took place over months and was uncovered only after the damage was done. The effectiveness of Russian attacks on the Ukraine electric power grid suggest that similar attacks would be possible in other advanced countries, including the United States. All of these incidents suggest a level of vulnerability and potential for devastating attack that the public is not prepared for.

Defining the university curriculum

What is the purpose of a university education? And who ought to answer this question when it comes to the practical business of maintaining and reforming a university curriculum?

The second question is the easier of the two. In the United States university, the faculty generally have the responsibility and authority to make decisions about the curriculum -- from the content of a particular course to the requirements of a disciplinary major, to the nature of the general education requirements to the university's graduation requirements. To be sure, there are other significant sources of influence and constraint on this faculty-centered process. Accreditation agencies like the HLC (Higher Learning Commission), ACS (chemistry),  AACSB (business), and ABET (engineering) constrain various levels of curricular design at the university level and the professional or disciplinary levels. Schools of business, colleges of engineering, and chemistry departments are constrained and guided by the agencies that control their accreditation. But it is the faculty of a particular university, school, or department that fundamentally drive the process of curriculum design and maintenance.

It could have been otherwise, of course. Other nations have implemented more centralized processes where ministries of education determine the structure and content of a university program of study. And we could imagine vesting this authority in the hands of local academic administrators -- deans and provosts. But in the United States the role of the academic administrator is largely one of persuasive collaborator rather than authoritative decision-maker when it comes to the curriculum. And the reason for this is pretty compelling: faculty are experts on the content and structure of knowledge and it makes sense to entrust them with the responsibility of organizing the educational experience.

But let's go back to the harder question: what is our society trying to accomplish through a university education? Why is this a worthwhile goal? And how can we best accomplish the goal?

Most fundamentally universities exist to continue the intellectual and personal development of young people; to help them gain the skills and knowledge they will need to carry out their plans of life; and to help them fulfill their capacities as citizens, creators, and leaders. A university education ought to be an environment in which the young person is challenged and assisted in the process of expanding and deepening his or her intellectual capabilities.

We might put these ideas in more practical terms by saying that a university education should allow the student to develop the capabilities he or she will need to succeed in a career and to make productive contributions to the society of the future.

And what do these goals require in terms of a curriculum? What are those skills, capabilities, and bodies of knowledge that young people need to cultivate in order to achieve the kinds of success mentioned here?

This is the point at which there is often disagreement among various academic voices and non-academic stakeholders. There is a very career-oriented perspective that holds that there are specific professional skills that should be the primary content of a university education. On this approach, the specialized major needs to be the focus of the undergraduate's work, and the bulk of the student's effort should be directed towards acquiring these specific skills.

But there is also an approach that emphasizes the importance of breadth and pluralism within the university curriculum. On this "liberal learning" philosophy, the university student needs to be broadly exposed to the arts, humanities, mathematics, and the social and natural sciences.  Here the emphasis is on helping the student acquire a broad set of intellectual capacities, not tied to a particular professional body of knowledge.

The reasons offered for this answer to the question are pragmatic ones. A leader or creator -- in whatever career -- needs to have an understanding of the social and historical context of the problems he or she confronts. He/she needs to have a rich imagination as he confronts unprecedented challenges -- within a startup company, a non-profit organization, or a state legislature. He/she needs to have the ability and confidence needed to arrive at original approaches to a problem. And he/she needs a broad set of skills of analysis, reasoning, and communication, as he works with others to discover and implement new solutions. So a liberal education is a superb foundation for almost any career -- engineer, accountant, doctor, community activist, or president.

This picture argues for breadth in the undergraduate experience. It also argues for two other curricular values: interdisciplinarity and multicultural breadth. It is evident that the difficult problems our civilization faces do not fit neatly into specific academic disciplines. Climate change, mortgage crises, and the legacy of racism all pose dense, "wicked" problems that demand cross-discipline collaboration. And likewise, the advantages created for US society by the racial and ethnic diversity of our population will be wasted if our young adults don't learn how to see the world through multiple perspectives of different human circumstances. A university isn't the only place where multicultural learning takes place, but it is one very important place. And to date universities have only scratched the surface in creating a genuinely multicultural learning environment.

So these are a few leading values that can serve to guide decisions about what an effective university education for the twenty-first century ought to include: breadth, imagination, historical and social context, rigorous reasoning, and a genuine ability to live and work in a multicultural world.  And most great universities in the United States have placed their bets on some version of this philosophy of liberal learning.  This bundle of features should lead to flexibility of mind, readiness for innovation, preparation for working collaboratively, and a set of intellectual skills that support effective problem solving.  (Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education lays out a very similar educational philosophy; her book is worth reading by everyone with an interest in university curriculum reform.)

How can justice be causal?

Is social justice an empirical characteristic of a set of social arrangements? And can social justice be a causal factor in processes of social change or social stability?

Before justice could be considered an empirical feature of a set of social arrangements, we would need to have a more specific understanding of what we mean by the term. And we would need to be able to "operationalize" this complex concept in order to be able to apply it to different social arrangements. But neither of these tasks is insurmountable; certainly not more so than defining and applying the ideas of fascism, liberal democracy, or welfare state to specific societies.

So let's begin with a simple, applicable definition of justice. Let's focus on just three dimensions of a society's functioning: distribution of access to society's wealth; the degree of abuse of power and its contrary, reliable legal protections of the person; and the extent of individual freedoms. Injustice involves --

• exploitation and inequality
• unwarranted coercion by the state or private organizations
• the abuse of people's freedoms.

A society is more just when it involves less of any of these features. And each of these dimensions seems measurable.

But immediately a problem arises. Each of these features requires a key normative judgement. Exploitation is the unfair division of the fruits of productive activity among the participants. The qualifier "unwarranted" requires that we supply a normative theory of the state. And "abuse" of freedom isn't simply restriction on freedom; it is the unjustified or unequal restriction on freedom. So in order to measure any of these characteristics in a particular social context it isn't enough to know who gets what or who does what to whom; we need a background set of normative ideas that allow us to judge which kinds of treatment and inequality count as exploitation, coercion, or the abuse of freedom.

This is where Amartya Sen's ideas about capabilities, realizations, and freedoms are practical and useful. We might substitute "capabilities realization deficit" for exploitation. Here we might argue that a society that leaves a significant portion of its population in material conditions where they cannot fulfill most of their basic human capabilities is for that reason unjust. We might measure the gap in human development between the top quintile and the bottom quintile as an estimate of the degree of exploitation that is prevalent in a given society. We may not know in detail how the system of distribution works, but the severity of the gap gives reason to believe that a portion of the society is being treated unfairly.  The Human Development Index provides a basis for beginning to assess different countries along these lines (link).

Second, we might measure coercion and legality by the estimating the degree to which a society has effectively implemented a working system of law that is applied equally. The World Bank has made some efforts in this direction through its Worldwide Governance Indicators (link; working paper here).  This gives us an empirical measure of the degree of lawlessness and unchecked state power that exists in various societies.

We might measure freedoms by aggregating observable features of democratic participation in various societies.  The Economist has constructed a Democracy Index that was first implemented in 2006 (link). This gives us an empirical way of assessing the rough degree of involvement citizens can have in public decision-making; or in other words, it is a measure of the degree to which it is possible for citizens to exercise their freedoms in a public space.

So we might imagine a "justice index" for a society that aggregates measures like these into an overall assessment of the degree of justice the society currently demonstrates.  It would then be interesting to see how societies differ in this measure, and how other important social characteristics may be correlated with this measure.  I haven't done this experiment, but here's what we might expect: higher injustice ratings correspond to greater likelihood of social conflict, lower productivity, and lower community and civic engagement.

What mechanisms might be hypothesized that would originate in these core aspects of a society's justice profile and its various outcomes?  Here we can identify a couple of factors that would support a causal interpretation.  For example, absolute or relative deprivation can cause people to rebel as they struggle to create social changes that protect their interests.  Further, as Barrington Moore demonstrated in Injustice, the conviction that basic social arrangements are unfair can also move people to activism and resistance -- as we seem to be seeing in the Occupy Wall Street movement.  These factors derive from the distributive arrangements of a society: injustice can provoke resistance.  Similar statements can be made about state violence and lawlessness. We have seen in Libya, Syria, and Morocco that state violence against protesters can actually have the effect of strengthening and broadening resistance.

So these aspects of injustice can have effects on mobilization and resistance by a population. Are there other effects that injustice can have?  As noted earlier (link), Pickett and Wilkinson argue in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger that inequalities of income have surprisingly strong associations with a variety of social ills.  This could be developed into an argument that social justice and injustice lead to behaviors that either promote or undermine social welfare.

Finally, it seems plausible to imagine that the intangibles that accompany a harmonious society -- a population of people who generally feel that they are fairly treated by their basic institutions and their fellow citizens -- will lead to a variety of other social goods, including cooperation, civic engagement, and economic productivity.  Conversely, it is plausible to suppose that a dis-harmonious society would give rise to the negatives of these qualities: less cooperation, less civic involvement, and less economic productivity.

So two things seem true.  First, it does seem possible to "measure" injustice (supported, of course, by a normative theory of why various kinds of inequality are illegitimate).  And second, it does seem plausible that the features of a society that constitute its injustice may also have causal consequences for social unrest, social wellbeing, and social cooperation.  And these are certainly significant social consequences.

(Perhaps there is an analogous set of questions at the individual level: Is "virtue" a specific empirical characteristic of a person's character? And can virtue be a causal factor in the individual's life outcomes and level of happiness?)

What is the good of a university education?

Martha Nussbaum is one of the most exceptional voices in philosophy and public policy we have today, and she has contributed to a wide range of topics.  Her work on the ethics of development has proven to be a very important contribution (for example, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach), through which she has significantly deepened the theory of capabilities as a touchstone for measuring successful economic development.

One of Nussbaum's talents is to bring important issues of value and morality into engagement with the real world -- women in development, the role of ethical thinking in great fiction, and the ways in which the world's religions intersect with important value questions we face today. She rightly sees that purely philosophical reflection on these important issues will not take us as far as an approach that brings together analytic thinking with real historical and sociological inquiry.

Nussbaum's thinking about liberal education is especially important today. Her Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education provided a fresh and vigorous defense of the value of liberal education when it appeared in 1997, and it has gone on to wield influence on faculty and administrators as they engaged in curriculum reform in subsequent fifteen years. The appearance of Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities is a welcome addition to this line of thought.  Her point of view is an urgent one: our collective philosophy of education has gone off the rails.

How is education for democratic citizenship doing in the world today? Very poorly, I fear. This is a manifesto, not an empirical study, so this chapter will not be filled with quantitative data, although the data support my concern. The disturbing trends I am describing must simply be summarized, and illustrated by telling and representative examples. (120)

The central thrust of her argument in Not for Profit is that universities need to own up to the social necessity of preparing young people for democracy -- not merely careers in the most lucrative possible industries at a moment in time.  She believes that the disciplines of the humanities, and the less quantitative disciplines in the social sciences, are crucial for this task.  But she also believes that these disciplines are increasingly perceived by policy makers, the public, and even some university leaders as being irrelevant, useless, and unnecessary at a time when universities are struggling for financial stability.  (She refers, for example, to the cancellation of a major conference on the future of the humanities at a leading university for reasons that seem suspiciously commercial; 4.) And she believes that this is a global trend -- not simply in the United States but in Europe and Asia as well. (One of the strengths of the book is Nussbaum's effort to compare the developments that are underway in India and various European countries.)

So what is it that is of such value in the humanities? Here is what she calls the spirit of the humanities:

... searching critical thought, daring imagination, empathetic understanding of human experiences of many different kinds, and understanding of the complexity of the world we life in. (7)

and:

Education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world. (17)

Nussbaum believes that through studying literature, philosophy, the arts, and other fields of the humanities, the student is led to cultivate each of these qualities. And she believes that these qualities are crucial for a successful democracy; citizens need to have these abilities if a democratic society is to flourish.

I shall argue that cultivated capacities for critical thinking and reflection are crucial in keeping democracies alive and wide awake. (9)

In fact, she articulates a specific set of abilities that the humanities help to cultivate and that are crucial for active and effective citizenship (25).

Moreover, she believes that it is crucial that these experiences and opportunities for development should be available to the widest possible slice of American society -- not simply the students in elite colleges and universities, but in the full range of colleges and community colleges in which the great majority of American young people receive their post-secondary educations.

Though she doesn't put the point this way, perhaps it amounts to a claim that there are two value systems within which education exists.  One is utilitarian and profit-oriented; the goal of education is to produce the most productive workers possible and to permit rapid economic growth.  The other is moral and political; it has to do with instilling the values of democracy, justice, and humanity in young people as they prepare themselves for leadership in their generation. And the crisis she delineates is the result of favoring the first value system while ignoring the second.  This is important for the way we structure our institutions; it is equally important for how young people come to think about their lives.

Why are these qualities so important for a democracy?  Nussbaum doesn't answer this question very specifically, but I think we can fill in the blanks. A modern society always embodies large group differences, competing interests, regional disagreements, religious and ethnic diversity, and other sources of strife.  If we don't work fairly intelligently to create citizens who have qualities of mutual understanding and tolerance, and who have some of the capacities that underlie collaboration and compromise, then a democracy has the potential of unleashing great conflict and polarization.  So building a compassionate and temperate citizenry is a necessary step towards creating a vibrant and flourishing democracy.

This is a book that educators and policy makers should read attentively.  It is pragmatic and clear, and it sets a very different agenda for the goals that we should pursue in designing a university education. Her own moral commitments come through clearly -- a commitment to social justice, a passionate recognition of universal human equality and worth, and a cosmopolitan view of our moral relations to people in other countries.  A decent society has shared commitments that extend beyond a desire for economic wellbeing; and these commitments are a great foundation for a successful democracy.

Comparative life satisfaction

We tend to think of the past century as being a time of great progress when it comes to the quality of life -- for ordinary people as well as the privileged. Advances in science, technology, and medicine have made life more secure, predictable, productive, educated, and healthy. But in what specific ways is ordinary life happier or more satisfying for ordinary people in 2000 compared to their counterparts in 1900 or 1800 -- or 200, for that matter?

There are a couple of things that are pretty obvious. Nutrition is one place to start: the mass population of France, Canada, or the United States is not subject to periodic hunger, malnutrition, or famine. This is painfully not true for many poor parts of the world -- Sudan, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh, for example. But for the countries of the affluent world, the OECD countries, hunger has been largely conquered for most citizens.

Second, major advances in health preservation and the treatment of illness have taken place. We know how to prevent cholera, and we know how to treat staph infections with antibiotics. Terrible diseases such as polio have been eradicated, and we have effective treatments for some kinds of previously incurable cancers. So the basic health status of people in the affluent 21st-century world is substantially better than that of previous centuries -- with obvious consequences for our ability to find satisfaction in life activities.

These advances in food security and public health provision have resulted in a major enhancement to quality of life -- life expectancy in France, Germany, or Costa Rica has increased sharply. And many of the factors underlying much of this improvement is not high-tech, but rather takes the form of things like improvement of urban sanitation and relatively low-cost treatment (antibiotics for children's ear infections, for example).

So living longer and more healthily is certainly an advantage in our quality of life relative to conditions one or two centuries ago.

Improvements in labor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing have resulted in another kind of enhancement of modern quality of life. It is no longer necessary for a large percentage of humanity to perform endless and exhausting labor in order to feed the rest of us. And because of new technologies and high labor productivity, almost everyone has access to goods that extend the enjoyment of life and our creative talents. Personal computing and communications, access to the world's knowledge and culture through the Internet, and ability to travel widely all represent opportunities that even the most privileged could not match one or two centuries ago.

But the question of life satisfaction doesn't reduce to an inventory of the gadgets we can use. Beyond the minimum required for sustaining a healthy human body, the question of satisfaction comes down to the issue of what we do with the tools and resources available to us and the quality of our human relationships. How do we organize our lives in such a way as to succeed in achieving goals that really matter?

Amartya Sen's economic theory of "capabilities and realizations" supports a pretty good answer to these questions about life satisfaction (Development as Freedom). Each person has a bundle of talents and capabilities. These talents can be marshalled into a meaningful life plan. And the satisfying life is one where the person has singled out some important values and goals and has used his/her talents to achieve these goals. (This general idea underlies J. S. Mill's theory of happiness as well in Utilitarianism.)

By this standard, it's not so clear that life in the twenty-first century is inherently more satisfying than that in the eighteenth or the second centuries. When basic needs were satisfied -- nutrition, shelter, health -- the opportunities for realizing one's talents in meaningful effort were no less extensive than they are today. This is true for the creative classes -- obviously. The creative product of Mill's or Hugo's generation was no less substantial or satisfying than our own. But perhaps it is true across the board. The farmer-gardener who shapes his/her land over the course of a lifetime has created something of great personal value and satisfaction. The mason or smith may have taken more pride and satisfaction in his life's work than does the programmer or airline flight attendant. The parent who succeeded in nurturing a family in 1800 County Cork may have found the satisfactions as great or greater than parents in Boston or Seattle today.

So we might say that the only unmistakeable improvement in quality of life in the past century is in the basics -- secure nutrition, decent education, and improved health during the course of a human life. And the challenge of the present is to make something meaningful and sustaining of the resources we are given.

Power within organizations

Sociologists have been thinking about organizations in a careful, empirical way for decades. Here is a volume edited by Mayer Zald that results from a 1969 conference at Vanderbilt on the topic of "Power in Organizations" (Power in Organizations).  The cross-section of sociologists represented here provides a good snapshot of the ways that organizations were conceptualized in the late 1960s.  There are contributions by quite a few interesting sociologists, including Peter Blau, Richard Peterson, Charles Perrow, and Mayer Zald.

Perrow's contribution, "Departmental Power and Perspectives in Industrial Firms,"  is particularly interesting.  Here is how Perrow frames his research problem:

It is my impression that for all the discussion and research regarding power in organizations, the preoccupation with interpersonal power has led us to neglect one of the most obvious aspects of this subject: in complex organizations, tasks are divided up between a few major departments or subunits, and all of these subunits are not likely to be equally powerful. In industrial firms ... there are fairly clear divisions between the basic units of sales, production, research and development (or engineering), and finance and accounting. Equality of these groups is hardly insured by the fact that there is at least one person, the president, who stands above all these functional groups, and by the fact that each department is stratified into roughly equal levels of authority.... The question of which group dominates in industrial firms, then, will be the subject of this paper. (59-60)

Perrow's approach to the problem is empirical. His study depends on interviews with dozens of ranking employees in twelve manufacturing companies with at least 1000 employees, with 2633 individuals interviewed in total.

The study focuses on three primary groups and one "residual" group that could be identified in all the firms: sales and marketing, production and manufacturing, and research and development. The residual group is "staff services", including finance, personnel, legal, and the executive group.  The research question was to determine which group or unit had the most "power" within the firm.  The interview template asks a series of questions about how the interviewee estimates the power and discretion possessed by various groups within the firm.

Perrow notes that the concept of "power" conceals a range of complexities:

Do we mean actual or potential power, power derives from internal workings of the firm or the market place, power based upon the force of personalities or the logic of group functions, power today or power in the next quarter, and so on? (63)

There is a strong pattern to the results for the fundamental question, which unit has the most power? Perrow finds that "sales" is judged to have the most internal power in 10 out of 12 firms; production is generally second; "finance" is commonly third; and R&D is almost always last.

Perrow's next question is "why" -- why should sales be the most powerful unit within manufacturing firms? His answer turns on facts about the market economy.  The sales operation of a company is the interface between potential consumers and the product created by the firm.

As a result of this strategic position, sales is in a position either to exploit present company capabilities or force a change in these capabilities. The consequences for the other groups are manifold, but sales -- with few sunk costs (capital investment) and little interdependence with other functions that would require major changes in its own structure and operating procedures -- is capable of more flexibility. (65)

Perrow finds this result surprising for one category of firm -- those where design and production are "non-routine", or where the product is not yet commoditized. These are what we would today refer to as high-tech firms.

If respondents described their tasks as fairly nonroutine -- indicating frequent problems requiring analysis and uncertainty about the outcomes of their efforts -- then there would be little edge for sales. (66)

So Perrow expected that R&D -- the unit assigned to develop new products and solve problems -- would have greater power in an environment of technological uncertainty.  But the importance of R&D within such a firm does not cash out in terms of internal power, in Perrow's findings based on these twelve firms.  And this fact, in Perrow's assessment, comes down to a tactical advantage possessed by sales within the firm:

Neither of these [prior] analyses sufficiently takes into account the ability of those who once gain power to manipulate the source of uncertainty, at least over a span of, say, ten or fifteen years. The maintenance people in Crozier's study augmented their power by removing information from the files that might make their performance more predictable and less uncertain, and by keeping information secret from machine operators and other engineers. Similarly, I think that sales, or production, or R&D can use their power to maintain either a fiction of uncertainty, or to steer the organization into areas where the uncertainty will be in their hands. (67)

So Perrow highlights an important source of power within an organization: the power to shape or hoard information.

The impression we get from reading Perrow's essay today is that Perrow's conceptual framework moves back and forth between the business environment within which a firm exists and the tactical intelligence of actors within the firm.  The business environment gives an advantage to one group of actors -- those involved in sales; and the tactical actions selected by actors within that unit to maintain their advantage accounts for the persistence of the power of that unit.

What the analysis doesn't pay any attention to is the internal organization of the firm (beyond the functional division into the four units Perrow highlights).  The analysis doesn't make any effort to map out the internal working relationships between functional units, or the ways in which performance of actors within units is supervised, or the ways in which communications occur internally, or the ways in which individuals are recruited into roles, or the ways in which decisions are made.  The article does distinguish between levels of managers -- upper, middle, and lower -- but doesn't provide an "organizational" account of how these levels fit together.  This is partly, of course, a function of the question that Perrow posed for research: what is the perceived level of power associated with the major functional units in the decision-making of the firm? But perhaps it reflects as well the development of the field.  In his later writings Perrow is much more attentive to the "micro-organizations" and systemic interconnections that exist within large organizations such as FEMA or the NRC.

It is also interesting to highlight the time period in which this conference occurred: at the high-water mark of popular mobilization against the Vietnam War and segregation.  The contrast between organizational power and popular protest was a stark one.  And some of the organizations that are considered in the volume -- universities and medical schools, for example -- were at the center of this contrast.

Entertainment as a valuable thing

Quite a bit of the GDP of the United States goes into a broad category we can call "entertainment" -- television, video streaming services, books and newspapers, concerts, theatre, sports events (live and broadcast), and video games. The entertainment industry amounts to $717 billion in the US economy (link), and professional athletics adds another $73.5 billion (link). This category approaches a trillion dollars, and we haven't even taken account of the video gaming sector. US GDP is about $19.4 trillion; so entertainment in all sectors may amount to 5% or more of the total US economy.

It is interesting to take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey (link) to get an empirical idea of how Americans of varying ages spend their time each day. Table 8A breaks down "time spent in primary activities for the civilian population 18 years and over". Out of a 24-hour day, personal care activities and sleeping amount to 18 hours per day; organizational, civic, and religious activities amount to .27 hours per day; and leisure and sports activities amount to 4.12 hours per day. Work takes 3.94 hours per day (on average; 4.96 hours for men and 3.07 hours for women). (These are averages over a population, which explains the relatively low number of hours spent working.)

Both these observations demonstrate that millions of people value entertainment: they pay for it and the spend their time engaging with it. So entertainment is plainly valued in the lives of most people. But we can still ask a more fundamental question: what is the good of entertainment? Should society be organized in such a way as to facilitate the ability of people to find and consume sources of entertainment? Is more entertainment better than less?

There are a few simple answers to the question.

First, people often want to be entertained and choose to be entertained, and it is a basic principle of liberalism that it is good for people to exercise their liberty by doing what they want to do. (Liberty principle)

Second, people take pleasure in being entertained, pleasure is an important component of happiness, and happiness is a good thing. Therefore entertainment is a good thing, and people should be in a position to be entertained. (Happiness principle)

Third, sometimes "entertainment" is developmental and fulfilling of human capabilities for imagination, empathy, and ethical reasoning. By watching Citizen Kane or reading The Fire Next Time, people gain new insights into their own lives and the lives of others; they extend their capacity for empathy; and they enrichen their ability to think about complex social and moral topics. Martha Nussbaum makes this point in her discussions of the value of literature in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life and Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Nussbaum's views are discussed by Heather McRobie in OpenDemocracy (link). These outcomes too seem intrinsically valuable by the individuals who experience them. This view of the potential value of "entertainment" converges with the capabilities approach to human wellbeing. (Human development principle)

But, of course, not all forms of entertainment are uplifting in an intellectual or moral sense. Six seasons of The Sopranos probably didn't result in much intellectual or moral uplift for the millions of viewers who enjoyed the series, and an earlier generation's interest in Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Car 54 was probably equally unrewarded. So what about "pure entertainment", without moral, intellectual, or aesthetic redeeming value? What about Tetris, Solitaire, Grand Theft Auto, or the Madden NFL franchise? What about Downton Abbey?

J. S. Mill, far-sighted media critic that he was, distinguished between higher and lower pleasures, and argued that the former are inherently preferable to any agent who has experienced both over the latter. His reasoning is based on his view that human beings have higher faculties and lower faculties; the higher pleasures exercise the higher faculties; and anyone who has experienced both will prefer the higher pleasures. Here are a few lines from Utilitarianism.

Now, it is an unquestionable fact that the way of life that employs the higher faculties is strongly preferred to the way of life that caters only to the lower ones· by people who are equally acquainted with both and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both. Few human creatures would agree to be changed into any of the lower animals in return for a promise of the fullest allowance of animal pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no educated person would prefer to be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would rather be selfish and base, even if they were convinced that the fool, the dunce or the rascal is better satisfied with his life than they are with theirs. . . . If they ever think they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme that to escape from it they would exchange their situation for almost any other, however undesirable they may think the other to be. Someone with higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is probably capable of more acute suffering, and is certainly vulnerable to suffering at more points, than someone of an inferior type; but in spite of these drawbacks he can’t ever really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. .... It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides. (14)

This position is based on Mill's idea that people who have experienced both kinds of pleasures will choose the higher (demanding, challenging, aesthetically and morally complex) pleasures over the lower pleasures. But this view seems to be largely refuted by the current entertainment industry; the audience for bad television certainly includes a proportionate share of Mill's counterparts today (college professors, literary critics, journalists, and pundits). Plainly, there are many millions of people who have indeed experienced both higher and lower pleasures, and continue to enjoy both.

So Mill did not have a very good psychological theory of "entertainment", even if he had a good aspirational philosophy of living. I doubt that Netflix would want JS Mill to serve as programming chief for its upcoming seasons.

There is probably a nugget of truth in the idea that the challenge and complexity of an activity is a dimension of its continuing appeal to the individuals who engage in the activity. Perhaps Go masters and chess masters take greater satisfaction in their games than do checkers players and aficionados of tic-tac-toe, and people who love literature may take more satisfaction from a novel by Boris Pasternak than Nora Roberts because of the relative complexity, unpredictability, and nuance of Pasternak's love story. But it is clear that pleasure in entertainment derives from more than this: humor, suspense, nostalgia, complicated plots, character development, amazing special effects, depictions of human emotions, violence, plots that speak to one's own experience, and so on indefinitely. Why these elements produce pleasure, however, is still unclear.

Perhaps we need to go back to ancient Greek philosophers in our quest for the sources of pleasure in "entertainment". Is Aristotle right that we enjoy tragedy because of the catharsis it provides, and comedy, because of the physical pleasure we take in laughter? Does Epicurus have anything to tell us about why we enjoy watching Breaking Bad and Blazing Saddles? Can the Stoics shed light on why Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) and Heaven's Gate (1980) were so very unpopular with the movie audience? Does Plato have anything to say about whether Waiting for Godot is really entertaining, and whether people can take pleasure in viewing it?