Making sense at Harvard
How do efforts to do good backfire?
We see people working for peanuts, so we enact minimum wage laws. Some workers get paid better (yay!), but more workers lose jobs (hey, zero wages are fun; you get even more leisure).
The irony is that the minimum wage often becomes the maximum. A good economist will explain that the employer will rearrange things so the employee merits his wage.
We see traffic congestion and decide to expand the road networks. But the congestion resumes because of the phenomenon of induced demand. We do not see that it is better to improve public transportation and reduce our reliance on private cars.
One explanation lies in understanding the limits of laws and public expenditures. These do-good efforts cannot run only on the fumes of good intentions; they must also be robust.
For example, the road to financial hell is paved with Bitcoin gold. Do you want to fix the world? A friend says we must “fix the money.” We should buy cryptocurrencies to punish the evil money-printing seigniorage-enjoying central banks. We should give our hard-earned cash to hodler-pump-and-dumpers, and Satoshi Nakamoto thanks us very much. In short, crypto is the great non-scam that benefits only its promoters.
There are for sure larger ills than good old inflation. Thomas Piketty reminds us that inequality is everywhere. The blame should then be on the elite (the 1% or even 0.1%) who want the rest of us to eat Marie Antoinette’s cheesecake. Piketty is undoubtedly correct in the extreme. The problem is that kings (or dictators) believe in absolute inequality. The solution is to reduce kings to quasi-billionaires. And they will laugh.
Inequality has its kissing cousins, such as exclusivity and even racism (another version of nationalism). Climate change is in the mix because we feel sorry for the rest of the world who cannot go to Paris or have air conditioning and private jet planes. Yes, it’s a miserable human existence after 4 billion years of not much happening.
What to do then?
One way is to take old words, like old wine, twist their meanings a bit, or put them in fancy bottles, and somehow, they trigger “movements” and new religions. The Christian ethic (“Love thy neighbor”) has been replaced by acronyms (ESG, DEI, CSR) that rapidly become meaningless. ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance. DEI means diversity, equity, and inclusion. CSR means corporate social responsibility. These words mean well. They are meant to help us toward old-fashioned “social justice.” Thus, being woke (being aware of social ills or unfairness) means being attuned to these words and concepts.
But being woke can morph into Wokeism, defined as “a system of thought and behavior characterized by intolerance, policing the speech of others, and proving one’s own superiority by denouncing others” (Michael Karson at Psychology Today). The proponents of wokeism are at the forefront of DEI. They are fellow travelers in the ESG, CSR, and climate change junkets, er, debates.
Being aware of social ills (being woke) is excellent, but it can be exploited by bad actors. The third plank of wokeism — “denouncing others” — is no different from a game called Shame and Blame, which is essentially useless. At Psychology Today, Andrea Matthews said we all lose when playing this game. Why? She explains:
“Shame and blame only make the problems worse. For if I identify with the shame and blame that you put on me, then I become that very shame and blame—acting it out in ways that might harm the self or others. If I, rather, hate you for shaming and blaming me—which is a very common response—then we’ve just added more hate to the ever ballooning landscape of hate.”
Wokeism also encompasses intolerance and the policing of speech. These tools are anti-democratic. If we believe in democracy as an experiment, all is not lost.
Recently, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, resigned, ostensibly for a weak response at a Congressional hearing on antisemitism and amid claims of plagiarism in her scholarly works. However, in an op-ed, Jonathan Zimmerman at The Philadelphia Inquirer pointed to wokeism as the “real problem.” He pointed out that a non-adherent of wokeism (Carole Hooven) was drummed out of the Harvard faculty for taking the position that “there are just two biological sexes — male and female” — something at odds with the current wokeism. Supposedly, the offending view was “transphobic and hateful,” even though Hooven took care to distinguish biological sex from gender preference. Gay was then an administrator at Harvard who apparently gave no support to Hooven, even though Harvard declared that it welcomes opposing academic viewpoints.
In this connection, we ought to see Gay’s resignation in the context of what changes we seek. Karson suggests that wokeism can be avoided by the “big idea — change policies, not people.” I infer from this that doing good involves focusing on changing policies. People are, well, people.
The solution to the problem of do-gooders failing is avoiding wokeism. Do-gooders fail when they think too well of themselves (hello, Greta, Elon, Bernie) and embrace wokeism. Their followers can be fickle and see the snake oil in clickbait, public relations, or slogans. More importantly, because wokeism limits free discourse, we often overlook the best solutions.
Today’s wokeism can be traced in part to 1968. That was when a tobacco company used feminism to sell Virginia Slims. Different meanings can attach to the idea that “we have come a long way.” The Gay saga of recent note will likely be one where some had it good for a while but mainly for themselves.
Fighting inequality with another form of (dictated) inequality is an oxy. Forget the moron.
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Author’s email: [email protected]; Twitter: @ORoncesvalles
