Opening Up or Shutting Down?

            Just when the shock of the Boston Marathon attack was beginning to settle a bit (I was less than two blocks from the infamous boat on the Thursday afternoon), the horror story out of Cleveland again shatters our sense of safety and human decency.  Everyone will make their own moral story out of each event, and I’ve been thinking about mine.

            Of the facts that have come out so far, the description of the homeowner’s way of living struck me most.  He was a man who, according to neighbors, never used his front door, but drove into his back yard, locked the gate, and entered from the rear.  People said he was friendly when outside, but that he never had company and never visited anyone else. 

            What occurred to me was my own childhood in a lower-middle to middle class neighborhood in Queens in the 1950s and 1960s.  There were about ten houses on each side of our street, and I can still recall at least eight of the families on my side, and about half those on the other (there was more movement on the other side, so a few families changed over in my six years before college).  Every family interacted with every other over the backyard fences, on the front lawns, and in each other’s houses.  A few families didn’t have kids, but they were as connected to the rest of the block as all those with school-age children. 

            Before that I lived in a far more urban part of Brooklyn, where three-story and somewhat taller apartments were the norm.  Every day from first through sixth grade I walked 8 blocks to school, often four times a day, since we could go home from lunch.  I was at the outer edge of the school catchment area, and I often heard from my mother that another mom had seen me doing something like wandering up one of the streets between school and home at the end of the day.  My wife lived in suburb of Providence, and recalls how the five-year-olds and up would walk to school, picking up members of their little crew on the way.

            Today we live on a block with 16 houses.  We have exactly one friend on the block (two others moved away), and perhaps two others with whom we have a cordial acquaintance.  The rest are total strangers to us, and I think, to each other.

            Beyond anecdotes, numerous studies report that parents are far more fearful for their children’s safety than at any time in the past.  The distance even older children are allowed to travel unsupervised has shrunk from miles to backyards.  Yet there is no evidence that events like that in Cleveland are any more common than in the past.

            The problem, it seems to me, is twofold.  First, we know about every incident immediately, no matter where it happens.  That means we have a collection of frightening events that covers at least all 300+ million Americans, plus occasional major abominations abroad.  But one evolutionary biologist has suggested that we take in these events as if they had occurred in the small, local social unit that was what our ancestors knew: a hundred people or somewhat more.  So our calculation of odds is inevitably warped. (I know one person who is fanatical about locking the back door to her well-fenced yard in a very safe neighborhood.  Why: because she can list three home invasions leading to murder that appeared on the local news: one in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut, and one in New Hampshire over a period of six years.)

            But the paradox is that the more we shut down in order to feel safe, the less safe we are.  On my current block there are no block parties, the yards are larger and farther apart, and most people spend their time indoors.  Everyone has a garage, so no one comes home, parks on the street, and chats with another neighbor arriving at the same time.  In fact, 15 of the 16 homes on my street have attached garages, so hidden movement between car and house would be even easier than in Cleveland (the 16^th had a garage but converted in into added living space).

            So we follow the reverse strategy of what many living creatures have developed to protect themselves against predators.  Instead of flocking together, watching out for the whole herd, or circling around the young, we do exactly what predators hope for: we carve ourselves out from the herd and so have no one but ourselves around when the predator comes stalking.  And we put our faith in security cameras, while complaining that these are an invasion of privacy when put up by government to protect us, but not when installed by businesses to protect themselves.  (And even though they helped capture the perpetrators in Boston, they aren’t very good at the “See Something, Say Something” model, except in tightly monitored circumstances.) No wonder a frightening number of us want assault rifles by our bedsides. 

The Happiest Day, or April Fool?

            Having just watched a piece on “Good Morning America” in which a reporter conversed with a gorilla to demonstrate a major scientific breakthrough, I was primed for more April Fool’s fun.  So when the Harvard Business Review Daily Statistic sent me an article purporting to be by scholars in Germany and the U.S., I thought our collective legs were being pulled by that usually fairly humorless institution.   Here’s why.  The breakdown of this 16-hour happiest day was:

106 Minutes a day of “intimate relations”

82    Socializing

78    Relaxing

75    Eating

73    Praying or meditating

68    Exercising

57    Talking on the phone

56    Shopping

55    TV

50    Preparing food

48    Computer

47    Housework

46    Napping

46    Caring for children

36    Work

33    Commuting

But if it’s a joke, Harvard either created a fake web site for the renowned Elsevier publishers, or had them put up a hoax dated February 13.

            I can happily accept the rough validity of some of these allocations: Socializing, Eating, Praying, Exercising, and Napping all seem to me pretty much on target.  But then it gets dicier.  Who can spend 106 minutes a day in “intimate relations”?  As the old joke goes:

       Preacher: Do you want to suffer in hell for an hour of carnal pleasure?

       Congregant: How do you make it last an hour?

I guess the reason you have to spend 78 minutes relaxing and 46 napping because of the intimate relations, since otherwise you have only about 5 hours of activities that you need to rest from, (and over 4 like socializing and talking on the phone or watching TV, that seem pretty relaxing).  And who wants to spend even 33 minutes commuting, or 47 in housework? 

And what do the academics mean by “Work”?  On the one hand, that isn’t enough work to buy most of us a computer, a TV, food, a couch for napping, a bed for intimate relations, a means of commuting, or much else for ourselves or the children.  Without those things, how many happy days would you have?  On the other, if you enjoy your work, is 36 minutes enough? 

Of course, it’s hard to argue with researchers who provide tables with “Comparison of 5 day schedules: calculated schedules based on log, squared, and hedonic utility functions, linear (assuming no utility decrease from activities), and actual schedule.”  But that’s only because it’s hard to understand them.

Aside from the specific quibbles, there’s the whole “one size fits all” form.  At what age?  Rich, retired, or in the midst of a working life? What interests?  What aversions?  What temperament? And what about the missing categories? 

My added categories would be Reading, Listening to Music, Being in Nature.  I would enjoy the full complement of 6 to 7 hours a day interacting with others, at least some of the time, but many would like much more alone time, some even more interaction. (Of course many can be combined, like being in nature, exercising, and socializing.)

My suggestion: start with a new category: My Favorite Activities. Allocate ideal time to them.  (Maybe 120 minutes reading, 30 just listening to music, and 90 in nature, for me.)  Then take the rest, drop any that are simply necessities, and calculate your ideal day off.  Then do a second plan for a work day, calculating how long you’d like to work at the job you have now, and parcel out the rest for what the church calls “ordinary days.”  Finally, add a third: ultimate reward days, that might include devoting almost all your waking hours to one activity, minus the necessities like eating or, if necessary resting or napping.  Maybe yours is a multi-day wilderness trip, or a visit to a world-class city to drink wine, shop, and take in the sights, or just a full day fishing, sailing, painting, or whatever.  Then plan your year to allow you at least 100 days of time off and about 10-20 of ultimate reward.

            Give it a try and let me know what you find.

Too Rich? Not Thin Enough?

Two apparently disparate issues in the news caught my eye recently.  Here in Massachusetts, unprecedented beach erosion is causing homes, many of them quite expensive, to tumble into the sea or come perilously close to doing so.  Just across the border, Rhode Island’s CVS Pharmacies have announced that overweight employees will have to pay $50 a month more for their health insurance.  Both events have caused outcries from those affected.  The homeowners want to be allowed to protect their homes by seawalls or any other means they can afford, and employees and other advocates are angry at CVS’s intrusion into their personal lives.

            Very different issues it seems: in one case, the government is preventing people from doing something costly that they want to do; in the other a business is requiring employees to pay unless they take an action.

            But both in some ways amount to the same thing: the belief that individual rights always trump those of the group.  Both ideas are very popular in the U.S., but both have serious limitations that often go unacknowledged.

            In the case of homeowners, it might be useful to apply the “right to swing my fist ends at my neighbor’s nose” principle.  There are many things I can’t do with my property because they affect my neighbor adversely: raise roosters or pigs in a crowded suburb, put up a windmill that is overly loud around his house, perhaps let trees grow so they block the view that made his house desirable, etc.  Since seawalls shift water’s action, they can easily cause greater erosion in their near neighborhood.  So the homeowner who has the funds to protect his property may be hastening the loss of his neighbor’s. 

One solution is the “no man is an island” model.  If you do indeed own an island, maybe you can protect it by a 360-degree seawall. Otherwise, you and all your neighbors will have to bear the mutual risks of nature, not additional risks imposed by one another.  There is an adage, after all, “Oceanfront property is God’s way of telling you you have too much money.”

            As for health insurance, the case is actually simpler.  If you want your employer to pay for your health insurance, as we unfortunately have decided to do in America, can your employer expect responsible action from you to hold down costs? Take the analogy of expense accounts.  A company may provide expense accounts, but put numerous restrictions on their use: caps on meals, travel rules, overnight stays, etc. If you buy life insurance, the company may restrict dangerous activities for which it will not pay.  Sports teams likewise place contract restrictions on physically hazardous activities of their players. If your habits raise the cost of health insurance for the whole company, should you be exempt from paying for those habits? 

            Certainly there’s a slippery slope argument.  But where both the health risks and the costs to society of smoking and obesity are so well documented and the prevalence of the activities is so widespread, selecting these and only these for intervention makes sense, while, say, charging anyone who skydives or bungee jumps has minimal payoff for society as a whole.

            The best reason for intervening is that its opposite is socially unthinkable.  No one, I imagine, is ready to say “If you smoke or are obese we won’t give you care for the subsequent illnesses.”  (There’s an interesting analogy: nine states so far bill people for the costs of being rescued, say from mountaineering. Is that different from billing people ahead of time for the insurance coverage they will statistically need because of their risky behavior?)

            I do see one error in CVS’s approach.  As it has been designed, it’s an individual punishment, or at least that’s what it feels like.  Why not reverse it?  All employees will pay $600 a year more for their health insurance.  But if you weigh in and are less than 10% over an accepted weight, you get the $600 back.  Anyone who doesn’t want to be intruded on just pays the $600.  (Thanks to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge for alerting me to the benefits of this kind of approach.)

Guns by the Numbers

    Let me start by saying I’m no math whiz.  The fact that all three of my college roommates were math majors had no impact whatsoever on my understanding of the field.  In fact all I recall from conversations with them about their disciplines comes down to this: from the point of view of topology, a human being is just like a doughnut, and there’s a formula that can prove there’s always one spot on earth where the wind isn’t blowing, and one spot on a head with no hair.
    That being said, I think I know enough math and science to disqualify me for membership in the NRA and the Republican Party.  I thought my beef with them was limited to evolution and global warming, but now I see it extends to simple statistics and basic scientific method as well.
    I’m talking about the NRA’s gun logic, and its gun proposal.  Let’s review their recent arguments: guns are not the problem.  Violent video games are the problem, and media coverage of these events.  The solution: guns in every school.  (Let's skip the fact that the great majority of mass killings happen in places other than schools, from malls to movie theaters to religious establishments, and most often in workplaces.)
  What do you do when you’re building a hypothesis about what causes Phenomenon B?  You look at the possible factors, and eliminate them one by one until you’re left with unique characteristics of the environment where B happens, or as close as you can get.  That’s how we finally proved smoking caused cancer, microbes caused disease, seat belts saved lives, etc.
    So let’s try that.  The U.S. has violent video games and media coverage of violence.  Let’s compare some other places that have both, and let’s choose places as like the U.S. as possible.  We’ll use English-speaking countries that share a lot of our heritage: Canada, right next store, England, and say Australia.  Do any of them ban violent video games?  No.  Is there any reason to believe these games are not sold there, as they are here?  No.  Do any of them avoid media coverage of violent events?  Apparently not: replacing “U.S.” with “Canada,” “Britain” or “Australia” in a Google search of “Sandy Hook coverage” reveals 114 million hits for the U.S., 92 million for Canada, 32 million for Australia, and 28 million for Britain.  In fact, Canada has almost three hits for every Canadian, and Australia more than 1 per Australian.  (As a sidebar, the video game industry has pointed out that since the 90s sales of video games have quadrupled, while rates of homicide by juveniles have decreased by 71%.)
    Now what about gun ownership?  The U.S. has nearly 90 privately owned guns per 100 people, Canada 30, Australia 15, and Britain 6. Homicide rates in these four countries: 4.8 per 100,000 in the U.S., 1.8 per 100,000 in Canada, 1.4 in Australia, and 1.2 in England.
Most important, firearms account for 67% of all U.S. homicides, 26% of Canadian homicides, and 8% and 6% of Australian and British homicides, respectively.  Putting it at its simplest, your chance of being killed by a gun in Britain is about 1 in 1.6 million; in the U.S. it’s about 1 in 30,000. 
    I wish I was a great chart-maker or statistician, but it’s pretty clear that the number of guns a country has is the key variable in murder rates, at least among the factors the NRA has proposed versus the guns themselves.
    One more excursion into numbers.  What would we need to put the NRA's "guard in every school" into effect?  We’d need more than 132,000 full time guards, assuming exactly one per school.  How does that compare with the protections we have now? It’s more than all the police officers in the 36 largest police departments in American cities.  If we eliminate New York, which has an astonishing 26% of those 131,000 officers, it means more trained officers than all the other 106 cities with over 250 police.  It’s actually equal to 47% of all the police in all the 867 cities listed by the FBI.  It’s more than 3 times the Coast Guard, and nearly ¾ as large as the Marines.
    And what would that cost?  If we paid these people the same amount as the lowest starting police officer’s salary in the country, it’s around 4.2 billion dollars.  If we pay them a teacher’s average salary, it’s 6.2 billion, besides the cost of arming and training them.  That’s about 20 times the NRA budget, so I’m afraid they couldn’t help much even if they wanted to.
    And of course they don’t.  What they want is to preserve an antiquated right that has now been extended far beyond what any signer of the Constitution could have imagined, when no gun existed that could fire more than one shot before being reloaded by hand, a  process that took between 20 seconds and a minute.  Maybe that’s the answer: go back to the hallowed “strict construction” and allow anyone who wants to own a single-shot weapon that takes at least 20 seconds to reload.  Make everyone who wants more than that to build a case (e.g showing they’re engaged in a dangerous profession, or are a proven hunter or have been trained by one to use the standard weapons for hunting game), or else spike their guns and hang them on the wall as antiques from a more savage and violent era.

How Not to Write

As anyone can see, I’ve been away for a while.  The main reason is course work; I’m taking two classes for my certification in mediation and organizational conflict.  Unlike last semester, I’ve fallen into the land of the pure social scientist.  My courses require formal submissions in APA style, and I’ve done six papers in that genre.  The experience has been so traumatic that I fear I’ve forgotten how to write like a normal human being, so aside from the time it’s taken to produce 34,000 words in this dialect, I’ve been reluctant to risk confusing real writing with what’s done in social science courses.
    But the last paper is in, and it’s time to start recovering.  I thought the best way to do that would be to contrast what’s been required for the past four months with the way people normally write.
    Now I know every field has its jargon.  But some fields are worse than others.  English and history, I would say, except when contaminated by dogmas like semiotics, can actually produce something approaching real communication.  There are peculiarities, of course.  Mike Rose, in his wonderful Lives on the Boundary, said that when you write an English paper about a play or a novel, you’re not supposed to do what any normal person does when they’re talking about plays or novels: tell what happens and tell if it was any good.  Instead you’re supposed to delve deeper into matters of style, theme, archetype, ambiguity, etc. that prove you can read more carefully than the average best-seller consumer.  But you’re still connecting your reader to the book, often with extensive quotations.  You may also take issue in English and history with other prior writers, whose case you describe in more or less detail before demolishing it.
    The key here is that you’re writing about things that have been written, whether imaginatively or historically.  Often you’re actually reading excellent writing, which may improve your own.
    But in the world of social psychology and the like, none of the above applies.  You don’t follow most of the rules of ordinary discourse, and you almost seem to avoid illuminating your reader.  Take the mention of Mike Rose, above.  This might be re-written as: “Rose (Year) has analyzed the narrative-evaluative paradigm and its inapplicability to the academic setting.”  You would then have to supply the full reference to Rose in a list of references, like “Rose, M. (Year). Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin.”  That, of course, is an oversimplification.  To do the job right, you might have to put “Rose, 1995/2005)” to distinguish when the book came out from the edition you consulted.  But you aren’t giving a page number or even a chapter number, so if anyone wanted to find out if Rose really said what you say he said, they would have to read the whole book.  Even more complex, if you bought the book while traveling, you might feel you should cite the country (out of 8) where Penguin has offices; or maybe you should say “London,” because that’s where their registered office is.  This often means interrupting the flow of your thoughts to track down all the data, or else facing hours and hours of citation management just when you’re done and would like a walk, a beer, or some other distraction, like reading a real book.
    The wisest among the professors I’ve had in this program explained to me that my problem is I’m not the intended reader of the article.  The authors are writing for the select group of people working in the same field or sub-field, who know Rose inside out, and they’re just trying to tell the readers that they’re filling in a hole left by Rose and whoever else they cite, so that the others can see whether it’s a hole they need to know about while they’re filling in whatever hole they’ve staked out.
    Question 1, then, is why are we reading people who are not writing for us, and whom we can’t understand until we’ve read everyone else?  Question 2 is, really?  One article I read had 77 references for seven pages.  What are the odds that reader X or Y has read all 77 things that writer A has read, and remembers them in such detail that a single word and a last name brings it all back?  (One of the interesting tricks played is that these writers also cite everything they’ve ever written that is remotely germane to the current piece.  Are they just showing off, or are they listing 8 other articles so that a research engine will tick off 8 more citations of their work for “mine is bigger than yours” judgments by the powers that be?   They also play the Alphonse-Gaston game: if Larry, Curley and Moe do three pieces of work together, they evidently negotiate whose name goes first, so each of them, or at least each with clout, can get “lead author” props.)
    Believe me, I do not exaggerate the time and energy spent citing.  I have counted paragraphs where 66 words are actual text and 61 are citations in parentheses.  My own long papers have consisted of 80% writing and 20% references, not counting the parentheses in the text that lead you to the 20% at the back of the paper.  This proportion is required by the demand, articulated by one of my teachers, that you need to cite everything that is not your own opinion or observation.  Mention D-Day and you’d better have evidence that it happened on June 6, 1944.  Quote the phrase “the rest is silence” and you’d better credit Shakespeare.  I’m not kidding.  For a sentence that said Lord of the Flies and The Fountainhead reflected views of their era about human nature, I was told to give full citations: last name of author, first initial, date of publication, and city, with details if the city isn’t a famous one.  Do I have a copy of either book nearby?  What edition should I cite?  Will any of my readers go to New York to buy Lord of the Flies and read it to see if I’m right?
    Now it’s easy to play this game.  Think of an idea you want to include, state it in a word or two (Oedipus complex, cognitive dissonance, conditioned response), go look on your shelf or in Google, and you’ve got another citation.  My 14-page paper had 102 citations; my 347-page doctoral thesis 112. 
    What I find worse than the tedium and the impenetrability, the cliqueishness and the petty point-scoring, is the impersonality. No one gets a first name, no one’s argument is given any scope. (A teacher even said it’s bad writing to quote other people: just paraphrase them.)  Everyone else’s work is simply one more pebble piled on the mound that will get you to the top of tenure hill.
    To paraphrase Edgar Lee Masters: Tick, tick, tick.  Such little citations. While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines.  (“Petit the Poet,” Spoon River Anthology, written for all time.  Read it.)

Straws in the Wind

            Several minor incidents in the last couple of weeks have gotten me thinking about the ways of the world.  Not that I want to go all Andy Rooney on you, but sometimes you do just have to ask if anybody’s noticed.

Example 1:

A mile or so from my home there’s a little square that sits on the edge of the Boston town line.  Not much there: a Dunkin’ Donuts (this is Massachusetts after all), a liquor store, pizzeria, gas station, neighborhood bar, and tiny, imperiled post office with friendly staff and no lines.  One of its roads passes under a commuter rail line, and sitting above the embankment for the trains is a billboard, which mixes ads and public service announcements every few weeks or so.
            This week, however, it sports the most distressing PSA I’ve ever seen.  Next to a photo of a young black boy are these words in giant letters:
                                                     MURDER   
                           IT'S NOT OKAY
My first impulse was to say “I knew that.”  Then I began to wonder who doesn’t? And in our age of hyperbole, who decided to take this understated approach?
            There are, I believe, a number of “It’s Not Okay” campaigns, or similar, around.  I’ve seen the “It’s Not Acceptable” campaign about name-calling, with Jane Lynch and Lauren Potter, and I find it very impressive.  But “It’s Not Acceptable” seems like a tougher stance than “It’s Not Okay.”  The latter sounds rather playground or parent-child to me: It’s not okay to take the last cookie, leave someone out of the game when choosing sides, or bite your older brother.  But is murder now just “not okay”?  Isn’t not being okay part of the definition of murder, as opposed to say justifiable homicide, self-defense, or a few other types of death-dealing that have at one or another time, in one or another place, been socially sanctioned.
            We do live in the age of water-boarding, drone strikes, and stand your ground laws, but none of these seem exactly relevant to this ad, which almost undermines itself.  After all, I do a fair number of “not okay” things from time to time: slide through a yellow light at the last minute, feed the parking meter, say I’ve only had two glasses of wine when I’ve really had three.  Those are not okay.  But murder?  That’s forbidden by all the laws of God and man, in every religion I know of, and with the strictest of penalties for murderers of almost any crime on the books.  What young person with a grudge (because that’s certainly what the image suggests to me) will be dissuaded from a drive-by shooting by a sign at the intersection telling him “It’s Not Okay”?  As far as I'm concerned, this billboard is not okay.
Example 2 (a and b) :
            I’m taking classes, as I’ve mentioned before, in conflict resolution.  Most of my classmates are young enough to be my grandchildren, and in general I am impressed with their commitment to make the world a better place, and with the work many of them are already doing toward that end.  I certainly never did as much as they have when I was their age; working in the State House, volunteering as mediators, or even working their way through school while carrying full-time jobs.
            But every once in a while, one of them says something that makes me realize how differently we see the world.
            Two of these happened recently in my Theory of Conflict class.  In one case, we were discussing a famous 1949-54 study called “The Robbers Cave,” in which a group of social psychologists took two groups of kids to a summer camp.  Each group didn’t know the other existed until they were brought together and urged to compete for prizes.  They became antagonistic and aggressive toward each other, but when the adults arranged “real” challenges that could only be solve by their working together, the rivalries diminished and cooperation increased.
            An interesting study, to be sure.  But I raised my hand to suggest that extrapolating from 11- and 12-year-old behavior to fundamentals of group behavior was rather dubious, especially given the intervening fifty years of research on brain development and its impact on judgement.  Another student responded that maybe these kids were closer to “real human nature” than adults would be.
            “Real human nature”? I wondered. Did he mean literally that the underdeveloped young of a species are more true to the type than the adults?  Or that aggression and conflict are what he thinks of as human nature, and everything else is a veneer covering the brutish and nasty reality of our biology?  The long arm of Social Darwinism, and Freud’s rampaging ids still stretch into the twenty-first century.  Is the impulse to resolve conflict peacefully that motivates students in our program “against nature”?  If so, are we doomed to fight a losing battle?
            There’s a lot of recent research that challenges the “red in tooth and claw” image of human, and general mammalian, nature. The discovery of bonobo culture, evidence that being social and helpful may be a better survival strategy than dominance among the great apes (Alan Alda does better than Arnold Schwarzenegger is the way one wag put it), and studies showing that chimps, and even rats, will refuse to take a reward that costs a peer suffering, are among many that suggest cooperation, altruism, and group solidarity may be as well-founded in our makeup as survival of the individually fittest.
            That’s example two(a).  Two(b) comes from the same class.  In a small group discussion, five or us were asked to design ways of calming tension in a multicultural community dealing with economic struggles and racial tension.  When someone suggested using the churches of the various ethnic groups to connect young people around projects, one student said “That never works.”  She went on to say that she hated religion, and asserted that “You should do what’s right because it’s right, not because someone in an old book said it’s right.”  (She also mentioned that she was upset that the school did not have an atheist alliance.  But hold that.)
            An interesting view.  But how do you know what’s right?  Because you have reasoned to a “right” that eluded all the people before you – the ones who wrote or set down the books?  Because you met someone who persuaded you of their vision of what’s right?  Or because you just knew, from birth, or from some other moment of insight, what was right?  Given a choice between those who listen to a long tradition of wisdom and analysis of right and wrong, or someone who just “got it” between birth and today, whether from solo ratiocination, sitting at the feet of a master, or the promptings of their own heart, I think I’d feel safest with the first.  To go back to our beginning, would I rather be surrounded by people who had heard “Thou shalt not kill” from the time they could understand the words, people who had worked out the sanctity of human life all by themselves, or people who need a poster in Hyde Park to tell them “Murder: It’s Not Okay”?  Tell me what you think.
          

The "Business" of Government, Part One

            One of the biggest themes of the Republican campaign in this election is Mitt Romney’s alleged business acumen.  Of course, some debate his track record, and others the relevance of business skills to the presidency.  Be that as it may, I’ve been thinking about Republicans, Democrats, and business wisdom, and in the next blogs I’ll apply some of the tenets of the past decade’s biggest business book, Jim Collins’s Good to Great to the two parties. GtoG seems particularly apt, since going from good (or bad) to great is what every presidential candidate promises he’ll do for America.

            For the unfamiliar, Collins’s Good to Great followed a number of businesses that had made a leap from average to dominant in their fields, paired with similar companies that had not leapt forward, (e.g. Walgreens vs. Eckerd, Circuit City vs. Silo).  His research team found certain characteristics that they believe consistently distinguished such companies. 

            The first of these I’ll consider is “First Who…Then What.”  The idea is that great companies put together the right team of people and only then decide new directions for the company.  The popular phase that captures this theme is “getting the right people on the bus.”  So I decided to choose one particular seat on the bus –the relief driver, so to speak – the Vice Presidents and VP candidates of the two major parties.

            In my lifetime (which I’ll stretch to include prenatal life, to be fair to Republicans), the two parties have put forth 25 candidates for the position (besides those three who have stepped up after deaths or resignations): 11 Republicans and 14 Democrats.   Here they are:

Republican VPs                                                Democratic VPs

Richard Nixon                                                Harry Truman

Spiro Agnew                                                   Alben Barkley                                   

George H.W. Bush                                          Lyndon Johnson

Dan Quayle                                                     Hubert Humphrey

Dick Cheney                                                   Walter Mondale

                                                                        Al Gore

                                                                        Joe Biden

Republican Candidates                                    Democratic Candidates

Earl Warren                                                       John Sparkman

Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.                                     Estes Kefauver

William E. Miller                                              Ed Muskie

Bob Dole                                                           Sargent Shriver

Jack Kemp                                                        Geraldine Ferraro

Sarah Palin                                                        Joe Lieberman

                                                                          John Edwards

Now let’s ask if these were the right people to put in the relief driver’s seat.  The first cut:

Each party has had two VPs who later ran for and won the presidency (I won’t insult you by naming them.)  The Republicans have had two VPs who lost (Papa Bush is on both lists), the Democrats three. 

            But digging deeper, how about the general quality of the choices?  We could look at it this way:  Were any of the losing or non-running VPs plausible presidential candidates?

Obviously the five who ran (Bush, Dole, Humphrey, Mondale, Gore) were.  Judging from history, Kefauver, who would have been the nominee in 1952 if primaries had functioned as they do now, Ed Muskie, and Joe Biden could easily be added to the list.  Equally obviously, Spiro Agnew and John Edwards scandaled or grafted themselves out of the running.  On the Republican side, I’d give a loud no to Quayle, Cheney, and Palin, as well as William E. Miller who, although only 50 when he lost in 1964 left public life completely thereafter.  I would give a yes to the early Republican losers, Warren and Lodge, though neither ever expressed interest in the presidency.  That’s three yeses and five no’s for the Republicans; five yeses and one no for the Democrats.  (Let’s pair Jack Kemp and Geraldine Ferraro as unlkelies but not no’s; we’ll get to Sargent Shriver and a few early ones later.)

Oddly, each party has had one VP candidate they would later consider as a traitor: Warren and Lieberman. Taking this a step further, while no Democrats other than Lieberman would be rejected by their party if they were running today, Warren (usually labeled “progressive”) and Lodge (“moderate internationalist”) would be as unlikely to finish in the running today as John Huntsman did. 

In the broadest sense, which party has nominated more people whom history might regard as “great Americans”?  In Tier One I’d put Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, whose records in Civil Rights alone earn them that honor.  Humphrey, Lodge, and Warren come close, for their many impacts on history and the extent of their service.  George H.W. Bush is the only other Republican contender, and perhaps deserves a Tier 3 slot. (I’m steering clear of Bush and Iran-Contra, as I have with Johnson and Vietnam, Truman and the atomic bomb.) Gore, Mondale and Muskie all deserve mention, perhaps a notch below Bush, though Gore’s the only Nobel Prize winner among these VPs.  Sargent Shriver may in fact rank higher than several of these: his role in starting the Peace Corps, Job Corps, and Head Start match Warren’s for long-term impact.  Then there’s Kefauver, who not only could have been president, but also was one of the bravest Democrats of his generation, one of three southern Democrats (with Al Gore’s father and Lyndon Johnson) to refuse to sign the Southern Manifesto of 1956, objecting to Brown vs. Board of Education.

Finally, there’s the category of disgraces and laughingstocks. John Edwards’ certainly belongs here, but his personal sins pale in comparison to the crimes of Nixon and Agnew, while the sheer triviality of Palin, Miller, and Quayle are unmatched in Democratic circles. Considering life after the VP run, far more Democrats than Republicans made contributions after their moment or years in the VP spotlight: Gore, Ferraro (UN Commission on Human Rights), Mondale (Ambassador to Japan, Minnesota A.G.), John Sparkman, Kefauver, Alben Barkley, Lieberman (all returned to the Senate), Ed Muskie (Secretary of State).  Only Dole and Warren played significant roles after their Vice Presidential runs.

Summing up: which party shows the better business sense in getting the right people on the vice presidential bus?  In my book, the Democrats come out way ahead; since 1960, only Bob Dole and Papa Bush have been people of stature, while Nixon, Agnew, Quayle and Palin (and I’d add Cheney) have been disasters or embarrassments.  Post-World War II, all the vice presidents or candidates whose major achievements will go down in history unmarred by their crimes are either Democrats or old Republicans who would be thoroughly repudiated today.

Next: “Confront the Brutal Facts”