Josh Barro on the contretemps at the Post; Cactus on envy; Timothy Taylor on human capital; Virginia Postrel on 1970s memories; Nellie Bowles on the news;
I know it's just using the common turn of phrase, but I wish we'd stop "handing out suspensions" altogether in workplaces. It's a trapping of academia that's creeping into the real world, when we should be shrinking academia and pushing reality back into it.
School children are the only people who should be "suspended". There, you're punishing the child and taking the child out of the environment so they don't detract from other students. But you still have an obligation to try and educate them.
Employers have no such obligation and shouldn't have such an obligation. If an employee's behavior makes them a negative, fire them or reassign them to other duties where they don't detract from the overall enterprise. But punishing employees like they're children at School? Ridiculous.
I would frame the problems Barro describes not as "insubordination" but as a breakdown of compartmentalization norms. A healthy compartmentalization norm both trusts and expects people to follow different rules on-the-job vs off-the-job. The expectation part is that while on the job you must follow professional rules and serve the organizational mission, even if that conflicts with your personal convictions. The trust part is that as long as you do that, your fellow employees and your boss should not police how you act off the job.
I think of compartmentalization norms as an important tool for protecting liberalism, including social/cultural liberalism, in a complex society with deep moral disagreements. Part of the motivation for compartmentalization is justified horror at e.g. Henry Ford's practice of sending inspectors to the homes of Ford employees to make sure they were behaving "uprightly" in their personal lives: the trust part of the norm is what says employers shouldn't do that. And the expectation part of the norm is what lets us say to a pharmacist: feel free to express off the job your personal moral opposition to contraceptive and/or abortifacient medications, but on the job you must dispense those like any others. Or to Kim Davis: feel free to express your personal opposition to same-sex marriage rights off the job, but on the job you must sign same-sex marriage certificates anyway.
Activist employees of the sort who cause Twitter dramas often violate both parts of this norm: they don't expect to have to follow professional rules on the job themselves or to take professional actions that violate their personal convictions, *and* they don't trust co-workers to keep their off-the-job behaviors separate from their professional conduct. Their animating moral convictions are usually very different from those of Henry Ford or an anti-contraceptive pharmacist, but their anti-compartmentalization reasoning is the same, and a healthy compartmentalization norm should push back on that reasoning in the same way.
Yuval Levin would probably say this norm breakdown is rooted in the move from formative to performative institutions: a formative institution naturally checks the expression of personal convictions while a performative one amplifies it. You, I'm guessing, would invoke "the religion that persecutes heretics": i.e. if you believe passionately that yours is the one universal moral Truth with which no decent person can disagree, it gets harder to keep that conviction out of your work life, or to trust that others who do disagree with you can still be good co-workers. Both may be contributing factors, but there may be other more positive ones as well: e.g. this may be an inevitable downside of a world where more people have the financial security to choose jobs based on intangible meaning-making aspects of compensation rather than just the salary and benefits.
<i>My inclination is to add another iteration of that last sentence, substituting “Ivy League University” for “the Post.”</i>
The only institutions that have any business limiting speech by employees this way are those whose entire job amounts to publishing opinions. A newspaper qualifies; a government bureau may; a university does not.
Extending rules like this to other institutions produces gross injustices such as that just now inflicted on the head coach of the Washington Commanders, whom the NFL fined $100,000 for comparing BLM's George Floyd riots to January 6.
>>My inclination is to add another iteration of that last sentence, substituting “Ivy League University” for “the Post.”
Really surprised to see you say this, Arnold. I thought you missed the time when universities were more supportive of open dialogue.
Professors are supposed to disagree with each other and argue over questions of substance. I doubt one could draw a bright line around the behavior that counts as team playing without a chilling effect on other important discourse.
I assign a much higher % of causation to ignorance vs. envy. My observation of ineffective leadership at large institutions goes something like this:
- First generation leadership uses critical thinking in novel spaces to develop a tool set effective for solving a particular problem in a specific environment.
- Second generation leadership inherits the tool set but is much less adept at critical thinking because the space/problem combination has been defined and systematized.
- Second + N generation leadership has grown up watching the execution of tool sets accomplish an objective but has no exposure to critical thinking in novel environments borne from either the evolution of the problem or the environment in which it operates. They blindly flail at a new problem with old solutions.
Today's leadership class increasingly comes from a narrow set of Ivy and Ivy adjacent institutions which actively select for individuals who have spent the entirety of their formative years checking pre-determined boxes to pass all the filters. The complete lack of diversity in background and mindset has churned out a ruling class that inherits a tool set inadequate to the both the problems they face and the environment they are operating in. When they encounter failure they just try the same thing harder and externalize blame to "mis-information", "Russia", "maga", etc... It has to be something besides them because they are following the playbook exactly!
"Trying to use a linear model to analyze a nonlinear process will do that to you."
There is not particular reason for the Fed to use linear models. The point of targeting is that each new data point leads one to adjust course (the model).
Cactus's is just a variation of the meme that liberals favor intervention in markets not to improve things for everyone or someone but to exercise power.
Re Barro: Perhaps Sonmez' firing is a good change, but I doubt it. It is is probably a one-off contrary outcome in a trend that is likely continue.
Re Cactus: Motives are always tricky to determine. In this particular case, I wouldn't assign this to envy as much as I would to stupidity and inexperience of how the real world works.
Re Taylor: I call BS on both numbers, or employers are are doing it all wrong (not impossible). After 30 years, pay should reflect 100% the work you have done and do, and probably also after 10.
Re Postrel: A lot of what is happening today reminds me of Spring/Summer 2008. I think I will be reminded of 2008 again late this Summer and Fall.
Re Bowles: Of course the Disinformation Board was intended to police what Americans say online. Anyone who believed Mayorkas' testimony is a fool. And they will continue the operation under new management despite the claims to have ended it.
I know it's just using the common turn of phrase, but I wish we'd stop "handing out suspensions" altogether in workplaces. It's a trapping of academia that's creeping into the real world, when we should be shrinking academia and pushing reality back into it.
School children are the only people who should be "suspended". There, you're punishing the child and taking the child out of the environment so they don't detract from other students. But you still have an obligation to try and educate them.
Employers have no such obligation and shouldn't have such an obligation. If an employee's behavior makes them a negative, fire them or reassign them to other duties where they don't detract from the overall enterprise. But punishing employees like they're children at School? Ridiculous.
I would frame the problems Barro describes not as "insubordination" but as a breakdown of compartmentalization norms. A healthy compartmentalization norm both trusts and expects people to follow different rules on-the-job vs off-the-job. The expectation part is that while on the job you must follow professional rules and serve the organizational mission, even if that conflicts with your personal convictions. The trust part is that as long as you do that, your fellow employees and your boss should not police how you act off the job.
I think of compartmentalization norms as an important tool for protecting liberalism, including social/cultural liberalism, in a complex society with deep moral disagreements. Part of the motivation for compartmentalization is justified horror at e.g. Henry Ford's practice of sending inspectors to the homes of Ford employees to make sure they were behaving "uprightly" in their personal lives: the trust part of the norm is what says employers shouldn't do that. And the expectation part of the norm is what lets us say to a pharmacist: feel free to express off the job your personal moral opposition to contraceptive and/or abortifacient medications, but on the job you must dispense those like any others. Or to Kim Davis: feel free to express your personal opposition to same-sex marriage rights off the job, but on the job you must sign same-sex marriage certificates anyway.
Activist employees of the sort who cause Twitter dramas often violate both parts of this norm: they don't expect to have to follow professional rules on the job themselves or to take professional actions that violate their personal convictions, *and* they don't trust co-workers to keep their off-the-job behaviors separate from their professional conduct. Their animating moral convictions are usually very different from those of Henry Ford or an anti-contraceptive pharmacist, but their anti-compartmentalization reasoning is the same, and a healthy compartmentalization norm should push back on that reasoning in the same way.
Yuval Levin would probably say this norm breakdown is rooted in the move from formative to performative institutions: a formative institution naturally checks the expression of personal convictions while a performative one amplifies it. You, I'm guessing, would invoke "the religion that persecutes heretics": i.e. if you believe passionately that yours is the one universal moral Truth with which no decent person can disagree, it gets harder to keep that conviction out of your work life, or to trust that others who do disagree with you can still be good co-workers. Both may be contributing factors, but there may be other more positive ones as well: e.g. this may be an inevitable downside of a world where more people have the financial security to choose jobs based on intangible meaning-making aspects of compensation rather than just the salary and benefits.
<i>My inclination is to add another iteration of that last sentence, substituting “Ivy League University” for “the Post.”</i>
The only institutions that have any business limiting speech by employees this way are those whose entire job amounts to publishing opinions. A newspaper qualifies; a government bureau may; a university does not.
Extending rules like this to other institutions produces gross injustices such as that just now inflicted on the head coach of the Washington Commanders, whom the NFL fined $100,000 for comparing BLM's George Floyd riots to January 6.
>>My inclination is to add another iteration of that last sentence, substituting “Ivy League University” for “the Post.”
Really surprised to see you say this, Arnold. I thought you missed the time when universities were more supportive of open dialogue.
Professors are supposed to disagree with each other and argue over questions of substance. I doubt one could draw a bright line around the behavior that counts as team playing without a chilling effect on other important discourse.
I assign a much higher % of causation to ignorance vs. envy. My observation of ineffective leadership at large institutions goes something like this:
- First generation leadership uses critical thinking in novel spaces to develop a tool set effective for solving a particular problem in a specific environment.
- Second generation leadership inherits the tool set but is much less adept at critical thinking because the space/problem combination has been defined and systematized.
- Second + N generation leadership has grown up watching the execution of tool sets accomplish an objective but has no exposure to critical thinking in novel environments borne from either the evolution of the problem or the environment in which it operates. They blindly flail at a new problem with old solutions.
Today's leadership class increasingly comes from a narrow set of Ivy and Ivy adjacent institutions which actively select for individuals who have spent the entirety of their formative years checking pre-determined boxes to pass all the filters. The complete lack of diversity in background and mindset has churned out a ruling class that inherits a tool set inadequate to the both the problems they face and the environment they are operating in. When they encounter failure they just try the same thing harder and externalize blame to "mis-information", "Russia", "maga", etc... It has to be something besides them because they are following the playbook exactly!
"Trying to use a linear model to analyze a nonlinear process will do that to you."
There is not particular reason for the Fed to use linear models. The point of targeting is that each new data point leads one to adjust course (the model).
Cactus's is just a variation of the meme that liberals favor intervention in markets not to improve things for everyone or someone but to exercise power.
Re Barro: Perhaps Sonmez' firing is a good change, but I doubt it. It is is probably a one-off contrary outcome in a trend that is likely continue.
Re Cactus: Motives are always tricky to determine. In this particular case, I wouldn't assign this to envy as much as I would to stupidity and inexperience of how the real world works.
Re Taylor: I call BS on both numbers, or employers are are doing it all wrong (not impossible). After 30 years, pay should reflect 100% the work you have done and do, and probably also after 10.
Re Postrel: A lot of what is happening today reminds me of Spring/Summer 2008. I think I will be reminded of 2008 again late this Summer and Fall.
Re Bowles: Of course the Disinformation Board was intended to police what Americans say online. Anyone who believed Mayorkas' testimony is a fool. And they will continue the operation under new management despite the claims to have ended it.