The Outlines Of The Mentor State
In my last post, I told the story of taking my old BMW to Dave Marshall's garage in New London, New Hampshire; of the novel opportunities for entrepreneurial growth the new technologies have bestowed on him. I suggested the ways he was keeping up his end of a new social compact, and I ended the post by suggesting also that there was another side to this compact, a novel role for government--which I've nicknamed "the mentor state"--whose responsibilities to the commercial ecosystem we are just beginning to understand.
Given the often heated reaction to this post, let me hasten to reassure readers, what I took to be self-evident, that the first responsibility of any democratic government (including the one we ought now to envision) is the cultivation of citizens; obvious things like the comparatively excellent public schools in New London, or the New London hospital, which enjoys a measure of municipal support, or land conservancies that make New London beautiful. Kant once said that all things, including people, can be seen as both ends and means; that as ends we have a dignity, as means we have a price. The first role of government is to attend to our dignity.
But unless we commit to socialism in the full sense, which has its own obvious pitfalls, we resign ourselves to the ways of market economies. Governments, Smith said (and who disputes this?), also have to "facilitate commerce in general." They enforce contracts, protect property, inhibit monopolies, and build roads and bridges. How has the new economy changed, extended, the scope of government action? What will the mentor state do differently?
Actually, Dave's story suggests one of the most important new responsibilities--well, not exactly new, but novel in its importance--which Dave saw clearly, but makers of public policy usually see more dimly. In this particular case--Dave's repair of my car's computerized heater/air-conditioner--the federal government had acted some years before, largely behind the scenes, to determine critical standards upon which all mechanics like Dave now depend--standards it set deliberately, without waiting for market conditions to evolve them haphazardly. These standards opened the playing field for entrepreneurs like Dave, while the big car companies would have preferred no standards whatever:
EVERY COMPUTER IN every car is governed by specialized software. Cars are becoming bundled computers on wheels. Back in 1995, the EPA mandated that the "port"--the interface connecter--to the engine's main computer be of a standard size, so that every mechanic's "scanner"--a critical piece of diagnostic equipment--could be manufactured and programmed to handle all cars. (Think of how every personal computer's USB port is a standard size.) For the EPA, the chief consideration was empowering local garages to check cars for a yearly road-worthiness sticker, including compliance with state emission standards. But there were more important collateral benefits, which not all parties fully understood at the time.
To put things simply, were the hardware fittings for each car as proprietary as the diagnostic software, Dave could never have afforded the wide spectrum of appliances that he would have needed to serve all makes. The cost of hardware would have become (what business schools call) a "barrier to entry." Imagine having to buy one computer for word processing, another for spread-sheets, another for browsing the web, etc.
But since, by law, the hardware fitting conformed to a mandated standard, Dave only had to purchase the BMW diagnostic software--not cheap, but cheap enough to allow him to compete with BMW dealers. (On the whole, software is always much cheaper than hardware, because--again, in business school jargon--the "marginal cost" of adding another customer is essentially nothing: make software for one customer and you've pretty much made it for a million.)
So Dave was able to buy a standard scanner and then supplement his purchase with a portfolio of custom software for most lines of cars. Mandated standardization unleashed a new competition to provide local excellence.
Government standards meant that the complex repair market, which would otherwise be stacked in favor of big dealers even after warrantees expired, could now include smart, independent technicians like Dave as well. The EPA did not presume to "regulate" competition in the diagnostic or repair industries. No bureaucracy presumed to control the provision of services. What the EPA did, rather, was precipitate a self-organizing system of repair-shop competitors, who themselves used the platform to overcome any barriers to entry and find their own ways to pursue distinct business offerings--services in which the EPA had an interest, and services like Dave's, which the EPA had no interest in at all.
Indeed, the small-shop repair industry organized itself so well that, almost from the start, a partnership developed between two non-profit trade associations, which might have been at each other's throats: one representing repair shops like Dave's, and the other, manufacturers and their dealers. By 2003, the Automotive Service Association (ASA) had reached an agreement with the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers (AIAM) on a series of standards to keep "after-warranty" repair open to smaller shops, where 70% of repairs are now done.
The quid pro quo for the manufacturers was an agreement that repair shops would not infringe on manufacturers' intellectual property--the source code for automotive software, which the repair shops did not need to compete. This may seem a humdrum development, but it is hardly that: by comparison, cell phone makers agreed only this past January, and under pressure from the European Union, to a standard for charging handsets through the USB cable.
IN A SINGLE stroke, in other words, the government catalyzed a "cross-sectoral" partnership, a new kind of cooperation between the public and private sectors. Enforced standardization led to more voluntary standardization, which led to market efficiencies and personal opportunities. The government had inadvertently created not only new terms of competition for entrepreneurs, but demonstrated a new means of delivering a public good.
The relevance of this model to the delivery of healthcare should be self-evident. To deliver a "public option" the first priority is to subsidize people who cannot buy into any plan, private or non-profit. But the next should be standards for claims processing, disease monitoring, and digitizing medical records. If this is done, we will not need huge insurers, or a Medicare-sized bureaucracy, to gain efficiencies and create buying consortia for drugs and medical devices. If this is done, the non-profit cooperative idea might well work better than any other, for it will encourage the development of non-profit HMOs, specialized hospitals and clinics, and reduce the perverse incentives built into fee-for-service.
THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF the mentor state are too complex to do justice to here. But some things can be said. First, the mentor state must enhance the "network effect" of linked businesses, nationally and internationally, much the way corporate leaders now manage businesses through the development of their knowledge management platforms. This means tending to the platform directly: building out the platform's hard infrastructure, making access universal, and mandating, where necessary, protocols for the platform's software spine infrastructure. It will encourage "open source" where possible; it will build continuing systems of classification for vanguard science, the new "roads and bridges" of the knowledge economy.
It will reform the overburdened patent system, and define new protections, distinct from patents and copyright, for inherently shared forms of intellectual property. It will use public sector institutions to advance novel methods of compensation for "snips" of information which cannot be protected as intellectual property, but are everyday assembled into intellectual property.
Biopharmaceutical companies, for example, have over $28 billion tied up in research, and National Institute of Health sponsored labs have over $30 billion. Consider how universities, developers of bioinformatics platforms, etc., would benefit from (what they call) "common ontologies" for structured scientific findings--and especially in vanguard fields such as genomics and proteomics, where different researchers, coming from different frames of reference, are always calling essentially the same physical events by different names. It would be natural for the publically funded NIH to take the lead here, especially in the most advanced areas, where language for findings is least standard. Such systems of classification give a new meaning to roads and bridges.
Indeed, what about protection for "negative findings" that are by-products of ordinary work--information about things that don't work. This kind of information is mostly trivial but not always. It is anything but trivial in life sciences, where eliminating candidate drug molecules from a biopharmaceutical company's pipeline early on may save this company tens of millions of dollars. You cannot patent the fact that a particular molecule does not work, or is toxic, in mice at a certain dosage. But another company at the other side of the world would pay real money to find out about failed experiments elsewhere. The government will have to regulate how participation is promised and compensated and what information is withheld, much as the Security and Exchange Commission regulates audits.
Second, the mentor state will focus on the triangular challenge of cultivating human capital: education, healthcare and environmental decency, which corporations will not do. The mentor state will, however, pursue these goals in innovative ways exploiting the virtues of the platform itself. It will, as Michael Porter and others have written, set strict performance specifications, and prompt start-ups and chartered non-profits to compete on enacting technical specifications. It will thus catalyze cross-sectoral partnerships (like charter schools, teaching hospitals, eco-partnerships, etc.) to pursue the social good more efficiently than through direct government agency. It is peculiar that school choice (vouchers, etc.) are considered a rightist proposal, and single-payer health insurance is considered a leftist proposal, when both rely on this same reasonable logic.
Third, for people incapable of making the transition to knowledge work, the mentor state will invest in--and employ many thousands in creating--an environmentally sound educational and communications infrastructure for future generations. Our children will need many smaller and better schools, competing with each other to advance curricula. They will need many more small liberal arts colleges. They will need national service programs that teach them teamwork, diversity, and poise. They will need wireless networks, ecologically friendly trains, and more--even where private investors would earn only marginal returns. Our inner-city children will also need thousands of preschool centers, thousands of wellness clinics. The cost will be great, but not as great as the costs of not making timely investments in our citizens' minds and bodies.
THIS MENTOR STATE will rise in fits and starts, but rise it must, and this is very good news for citizens and entrepreneurs both. It means that where life in the industrial factory once deformed people by requiring dumb, repetitive tasks, life in the solutions team elevates human skill, requiring deep literacy, curiosity, and a cosmopolitan heart. In the bounded logic of commercial markets, people are still means not ends: they have a price, not a dignity. But the fact that there is more to our lives than markets does not mean we should fail to consider how to make market society work as well as it can.
The good news is that--for the first time in the history of capitalism, really--life on the job will enhance the skills and means that engender democratic citizenship. Never before have human faculties been advanced by ordinary work. This is a relief, or would be, so long as we qualify people to work at all.
It's funny that you bring up pollution standards and the mandated technologies involved. A lot of people will argue that we shouldn't even be testing pollution that way, that most new cars do just fine and that you can actually, with a detector hooked up to a highway sign, figure out which cars are emitting beyond the standard and which aren't. It's one of those counter-intuitive Gladwell things (that Gladwell wrote about at this link: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/13/060213fa_fact ) In this case, the mentor state's ham-handed solution doesn't really work and there's no real reason to add this level of standardization into the construction of cars because there's a better way to root out polluters. Don't confuse this with a dislike of regulation. I love smart regulation. This isn't.
I'm surprised (maybe I shouldn't be) to see you defending education vouchers. It's a completely right wing idea, by the way, because it posits that a person's only responsibility is to educate their own children, even though everyone benefits from having universal education access. Single payer health care supporters argue that we all derive benefit from simple, universal health care access. There's no ideological confusion there.
But, to your main point -- the idea that the mentor state sets the goals and that we do our best to meet them is novel and good, so long as the goals are agreeable. My libertarian side says you need to make room for people who look at the goals, call them crap and strike off in another direction, but I think you do that fine. My more lefty side wonders what quality of life this will lead to. You say it's productive work and it might well be. But the most productive work you do is when you follow your bliss, not the bliss of some government standard setting body, and you haven't even begun to address the biggest problem with the American economy: people work too much for too little reward.
October 3, 2009 3:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
But unless we commit to socialism in the full sense, which has its own obvious pitfalls, we resign ourselves to the ways of market economies.
Just so that we don't get bogged down right at the start in false dichotomies, let's remember that there is probably no economy on earth that is socialist, "in the full sense". Yet, among the most prosperous and harmonious countries in the world, we find a variety of mixed economy models incorporating elements of social democracy and democratic socialism.
All of these systems embrace and make use of private markets and private ownership in various ways. They also use the rule of law to regulate the behavior of people and firms interacting in the markets; and in some industries the whole body of the people, represented by their government, is a major participant in the market as either a seller or buyer. The choices made reflect the priorities people assign to the promotion of social values that are important to them. Even the US has an economy of this kind, although it is currently at the far liberal end of the spectrum.
Each of these models partakes of a unique set of institutional and legal arrangements, and each has its own triumphs and pitfalls, but there are many models for American progressives to prospect for useful ideas, and to copy. Americans are also in a position to contribute some elements of their own, based on some neglected, but traditional American ideals of community and democratic sociality, ideals which have been steadily eroded by the rapacious and disintegrating individualism of radical American capitalism.
The other developed countries in the world have seemed capable of managing something close to a rational debate between liberalism and socialism, the two main post-enlightenment movements in political thought, and have incorporated insights from both. The American economic system has generally been marked - except for the period of our prosperous post-Great Depression and postwar heyday - by a fanatical aversion to the vigorous rule of law in the economic sphere, and resentment of the intrusion of community and social values into the marketplace.
But now the US economy - excuse the vulgarity - has just taken a giant shit on the world economy, and has proved its systemic failures is a very public fashion. It is time for the US to bring its own economic practices more into line with civilized standards. This is a particularly urgent and opportune time for a deep reappraisal, because the whole world is engaged in a discussion and reevaluation right now of the common rules that should govern our unprecedented material interdependence, and the cooperative tools we need to address new challenges - particularly environmental challenges.
Other countries have copied useful ideas from the American example and experience. But long before the current hideous collapse of the American Ponzi-economy, civilized people had already refused to embrace fully the American model, which tolerates outrageous levels of inequality, and promotes extreme forms of antisocial individualism, aggression and violence. Americans should no longer embrace this model either.
American history is dotted with many traditional examples of communities built on strong moral and institutional foundations exemplifying democratic ideals of community, equality and mutual obligation. But our tradition also contains contradictory and discordant elements, and the genuinely democratic moral foundation has been ripped apart by laissez faire creative destruction, which transforms each thing of value into a commodity; each human individual into an economic free agent unto himself, in competition with every other human being; every aspect of the natural world into an exploitable tool; and which progressively pollutes and degrades the unregulated human and natural environment with filth, destruction, noise, commercial harassment and ugliness.
I don't support purely socialist alternatives, Bernard. For one thing, I do not want to eliminate private property and replace it by public ownership of the means of production. But I do think we can do many things to redesign and better regulate the institutional and legal environment in which private businesses function, so that the outcomes that are produced promote democratic self-governance, peace, a beautiful and sustainable natural and human environment, and healthy human relationships, rather than working against these things as as our current system does.
We can require that governance of the workplace be more democratic. We can pass laws that promote social equality by placing stricter limits and requirements on the distribution of income as wages within firms, and the distribution of profits to investors. We can re-design our capital markets to make the flow of savings to ventures less capricious, Barnumesque and exploitative, and to incentivize investment and production that serves broad, socially supported goals, rather than merely capitalizing on ephemeral, self-destructive, resource-hogging and anti-social lusts.
There are many different choices we can make. But we do have a choice. What I don't accept is that we simply have to adapt ourselves to every kind of economic change that comes along. The economic system in the large and in its details exhibits general tendencies that are the products of human design and legislative choices of omission or commission, even if that design is very complex, and even if the design choices were thoughtlessly blundered into rather than being made with care and deliberation. We can thus design a different system, one in which the tradeoffs are made in different ways, and in which different kinds of values are promoted.
I think once we start growing comfortable with words like "resigning", we should realize something is wrong. The economic order we live in isn't primarily a natural phenomenon. It is in large measure the result of our choices. We might have to resign ourselves to sunspots and the tides. But we don't have to resign ourselves to American-style capitalism, and a culture based on the promotion of entrepreneurial free-agency as the ruling ideal.
One way to avoid giving rhetorical ammunition to the enemies of democratic community is to avoid referring to the people's government, the government by democratic citizens, as "the state". That is old European language that partakes of various kinds of superstition and elitism, both left and right, and that fails to make full contact with the most enlightened American ideals. According to the democratic ideal, government is not exercised by some impersonal or supra-personal entity - the state. Government is a community responsibility. Democratic citizens seek to form and sustain a national community which is self-governing. We the members of that community work with each other to govern ourselves. We deliberate, vote and settle on rules, and then we agree as a community to establish and enforce that rules. I govern my neighbor and he governs me, and the whole thing is bound together by a mutual commitment to live a common life and to submit to the legitimately arrived-at decisions of the community. An essential component of democratic self-governance is a deep commitment to equality. If there are radical differences in power, wealth and standing in a society, then in being subordinated to the community, we become subordinates as slaves to masters. That is not democracy, but tyranny. Democratic citizens must be equals: We are equal under the law; equal in our responsibility to make law; equal in our commitment to seeing that the law is executed. Governing a community is hard work, and democrats commit to sharing equally in that work, and to the equitable distribution of the benefits of that work.
October 3, 2009 5:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, I'm traveling and cannot do justice to your many thoughtful comments. I am sure we could enjoy drinks someday. The point of my posts was not to invite a rehearsal of all the old arguments in favor of commonwealths regulating markets. I have made clear often enough that do not think markets self-regulating and remain a "Canadian" in the search for the balance you spend much energy reaffirming. The question is how to deliver this balance: through government agencies and bureaucracies or through new alternative ways that exploit the very new technologies that make this blog space possible. We live in an age when every public good, from newspapers to universities, are being reinvented. So, too, does the commonwealth need to be. If the government can mandate standards, and unleash competitive entrepreneurial ventures of all kinds without sacrificing the efficiencies we once got from government's scale, why would we not welcome the change?
October 6, 2009 6:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bernard, I agree that timely government standardization can be useful in catalyzing growth in some fields. And if information processing platforms are one area in which that standardization now needs to occur, fine. And I know that entrepreneurial activity produces things of value.
But what I don't believe is that the free play of entrepreneurial activity alone, whether catalyzed by government intervention or left alone to work out its own standards, whether confined entirely to commerce or also at work in the field of non-profit civil society work, is conducive to a good society. I don't believe the classical liberal line that the best kind of society of which we are capable is the one that emerges or self-organizes when free individuals are left alone to seek their own happiness, make their own private economic arrangements and pursue their own personal entrepreneurial dreams. These activities can be harnessed and used to help promote the common good and built the optimal commonwealth, but to do so they need to be much more heavily regulated and deliberately directed toward community ends than they are now.
I believe historical experience has shown that the natural tendency of unregulated commerce and finance is toward hierarchy and away from democracy, toward individual solitariness, anomie and psychopathology and away from healthy community life and sociality. The individual human will and mind is a confused battlefield of discordant drives. It thrives best and is happiest in society, but it also rebelliously seeks escape from the very society that sustains it, and harbors resentful urges to destroy that society. People seek to break loose from obligations to others and submission to community rules, and try to dominate everything around them, and make their own rules. Left on their own to seek power as they will, the most aggressive and talented tend to succeed in realizing their imperious urges. They build hierarchical empires, competing with each other such empires, and organized internally on a command and control model. If a democratic community allows its members too much individual freedom to remake the world as their individual wills dictate, the result is the anarchic self-destruction of the community, and its replacement by empires of power checked only by other empires of power.
It also leads to the ruthless sorting of human beings into economic types, determined by their usefulness to the commercial order, and that leads to marginal, discarded communities. A boy in Chicago - apparently a good student - was beaten to death by gang members on his way to school a few days ago. This kind of thing disturbs me more than the fact that MIT grads could use a somewhat better record-exchange platform on Route 128.
The CEO of WellPoint made close to $10 million dollars last year, while her company is asking the State of Maine for steep rate increases. I'm sure she is an excellent entrepreneur.
October 6, 2009 8:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
The chief executives of big companies are not entrepreneurs. That's like comparing apples to orangutans.
October 6, 2009 9:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe not. But the established corporate empires they now rule were built by entrepreneurial activity.
October 6, 2009 10:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Many of them were, but that spirit has long since fled.
October 6, 2009 12:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Under a mentor state, I suppose we'd all be part of the protégériat.
How, I wonder, will shrinking governments be able to effectively mentor? I'd be pleased if they simply kept up with maintaining infrastructure.
October 3, 2009 6:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like that. And renegades will be diagnosed and treated with drugs for Oppositional Defiant Disorder. That doesn't sound like socialism, although it reminds one of the some of the worst aspects of "actually existing socialism."
October 4, 2009 10:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bernard, I like these essays, you bring up some good points. But come up with a better name, "mentor state' is a little grating, too much like "big brother".
October 4, 2009 3:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
How about "big sister"?
October 4, 2009 7:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Uncle Sam?
October 4, 2009 10:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
The term “mentor state” seems like an unattractive label in search of a unifying theme to designate. But let me say something about the first of the three roles for government action you discuss:
By establishing unitary standards for certain kinds of products and services, the government might sometimes help eliminate a needless and inefficient Babel of local or proprietary standards, and help stimulate a network effect in linked businesses. This might particularly be the case where many businesses share an information processing infrastructure or platform.
Of course this is tricky, because the government could jump the gun and standardize some aspect of a product or practice just before the introduction of a next round of innovation, and thereby prevent the introduction of a new enhancement that might have improved quality, lowered cost, etc. The regulators might also have insufficient knowledge of the evolving standards in a rapidly and dynamically evolving field. And industries frequently settle into standards on their own, without government intervention, as they self-organize into a symbiotic equilibrium, sometimes assisting the process through the formation of voluntary professional or manufacturers groups. For example, an automobile manufacturer might decide on their own that they can sell more cars if they can spin off most of the servicing of those cars to general practitioners, rather than rely on their own network of dealers and service technicians. This might push them in the direction of standardized parts, manufacturing processes, etc. But certainly in principle, this are opportunities in this area for an effective government role in adding value and catalyzing growth in particular industries.
Anyway, this is not exactly new stuff. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association standardized socket size in the US in 1962. The promulgation of the National Standard Plumbing Code promoted by the Plumbing-Heating-Contracting Association accomplishes much the same Standards and codes are sometimes made statutory by federal, state and local law. So I don’t see how the BMW diagnostics anecdote really represents “a new kind of cooperation between the public and private sectors.”
Government involvement in standardization is sometimes justified by safety considerations. But the commercial and public economic benefits play a role as well. Local manufacturers of appliances, cords plugs and piping can effectively participate in national industries. Plumbers can buy a standard assortment of supplies and work on any home, so we don’t need to rely on confusing separate networks of plumbing dealerships franchised by separate homebuilding companies, each with its own set of standards. Of course, people in fancy new knowledge-based industries might not like to think they are doing the same thing as plumbers and electricians. But it’s all about determining the best way of making sure the various square pegs in our society don’t meet up with too many round holes, or square holes of the wrong size, and about deciding where compulsory universality promotes value, and where it inhibits competition and innovation.
I’m skeptical of the claim that this kind of standardization has a major role to play in health care delivery. Buying cooperatives establish their value based on their sheer size, which enables them to drive hard bargains for the products and services they are buying, because they are buying so many of these services, and in so much bulk. So I doubt very much that mom and pop health insurance providers, or mom and pop HMOs, etc. will be able to deliver great value at low cost, simply because records and claims processing have been standardized. The Daves of this world will never be able to deliver anywhere close to the value that the Canadian government can deliver by commanding extremely low prices from pharmaceutical companies.
The co-op issue is an entirely different matter. The economists I have read who have looked at co-op do not predict any great benefits from them, although it can’t hurt to grease the regulatory wheels that are required for their formation in some inhospitable US states. There are some existing co-ops. Some have done well; some have failed. They will take a long time to ramp up. And while they are non-profit on paper, the head of Partners health made 3.5 million last year. So I wonder whether they will really do a great deal to pressure down costs.
October 4, 2009 10:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Or perhaps you'd care to comment on this quote from the Israel News Agency:
Now, if our present economic system is so heartless that in country like Israel, which was founded as a refuge for the Jewish people, many helpless, elderly, Holocaust survivors and small children are forced to live in abject poverty and even hunger, what can we expect from the United States, which has never professed such devotion to its citizen's welfare as Israel professes for the Jewish people, and where, "the devil take the hindmost" could be embroidered on our flag?
What could be a more telling portrait of Milton Friedman's, brave new world than the story of the impoverished holocaust survivors and the hungry children of Israel.
October 4, 2009 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Second, the mentor state will focus on the triangular challenge of cultivating human capital: education, healthcare and environmental decency, which corporations will not do. The mentor state will, however, pursue these goals in innovative ways exploiting the virtues of the platform itself. It will, as Michael Porter and others have written, set strict performance specifications, and prompt start-ups and chartered non-profits to compete on enacting technical specifications. It will thus catalyze cross-sectoral partnerships (like charter schools, teaching hospitals, eco-partnerships, etc.) to pursue the social good more efficiently than through direct government agency. It is peculiar that school choice (vouchers, etc.) are considered a rightist proposal, and single-payer health insurance is considered a leftist proposal, when both rely on this same reasonable logic.
This second proposed component of the mentor state’s functioning is the part of Bernard’s vision I find the most potentially disturbing. Behind the detached corporate-speak, it delineates the outlines of what could be a new market-based caste system, in which the people’s government has been turned entirely into an antidemocratic “state”, whose foundation and raison d'etre is the satisfaction of the needs of industry, including the provision of human resources to industry. Of course, the outcome really depends on how exactly the “performance specifications” are written. Bernard seems to incline toward the conservative calls for more choice and diversity. In any case, the coldly industrialized and corporatized nature of Bernard’s description of “human capital” provision reveals the grotesquely euphemistic nature of the term “mentor” in his description of the mentor state.
If you think of people mainly as “human capital” that need to be “cultivated”, according to their economically desirable traits, for optimal employment in the system of production and exchange, then it makes sense to diversify, privatize and stratify their education and training, and even their living conditions, so as to generate different kinds of human beings suited for different tasks. Even better, why stop at the diversification of education, health and environmental conditions? Why not encourage the emergence of a diversified cradle-to-grave human manpower industry, with specialized firms that genetically engineer, and then rear and intellectually cultivate their human product for different tasks? Some of the human output could be brawny, with docile and obedient temperaments; others could be mid-brainy, and suited to the tech jobs. Others could be more creative, entrepreneurially aggressive and intellectually poised, with knowledge of history and human nature sufficient for dynamic leadership of the evolving economy. Finally some could make use of inherited wealth and privileges to purchase cultivation for their own young that provides the latter with an appreciation of beauty, knowledge and the leisure arts for their own sake.
Of course, if your primary goal is to create a democratic community of equals, based on solidarity, easy empathy and universal feelings of brotherhood and comradeship, then you are going to approach the “cultivation” issue in an entirely different way.
Now, Bernard’s claim that school and single-payer health “rely on this same reasonable logic” is well-nigh unintelligible.
Public education is not a single-payer system; it is closer to a single provider system. But more accurately, as it exists now it is a system in which very large government providers compete with a variety of private providers, and exploit the government’s taxing power in order to make sure that the country’s educational resources are not siphoned entirely away into the production of a full-blown educational caste system, leaving larger and larger pools of human dregs behind. Of course, we are well down the road toward that kind of system already. But if the system is thoroughly privatized, or its resources channeled away through vouchers and other such mechanisms, we can be sure that the segregation and diversified cultivation of different human types will proceed with more abandon.
Single-payer health care; or single-provider health care, does not share the same “reasonable logic” of school choice at all. It does not lead to the stratification and diversification of human types by their health condition attributes, but instead leads to universality and equality. Of course, parallels to the voucher system for health care have been proposed by antidemocratic conservatives, whose proposals constantly emphasize diversity and choice. But progressives tend to oppose these proposals for reasons that seem obvious to everyone but Bernard. For Bernard to pretend not to recognize the deeply anti-democratic and caste-generating tendencies of the school choice agenda is strange.
Government participation as a major player in the provision of health care, health insurance or education seems the only way to assure that significant amounts of the resources of the affluent will be harvested through taxation, and distributed to the provision of these essential services to the whole body of our fellow-citizens, including the least fortunate. Privatization and choice only only assure that capitalism will do what capitalism always does: divide people into competing groups, and empower the most affluent to steer even more resources into the satisfaction of their own needs. Once again, we won't be using markets, but markets will be using us.
October 4, 2009 12:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Third, for people incapable of making the transition to knowledge work, the mentor state will invest in--and employ many thousands in creating--an environmentally sound educational and communications infrastructure for future generations. Our children will need many smaller and better schools, competing with each other to advance curricula. They will need many more small liberal arts colleges. They will need national service programs that teach them teamwork, diversity, and poise. They will need wireless networks, ecologically friendly trains, and more--even where private investors would earn only marginal returns. Our inner-city children will also need thousands of preschool centers, thousands of wellness clinics. The cost will be great, but not as great as the costs of not making timely investments in our citizens' minds and bodies.
The third described component of the mentor state is the one in which Bernard, to his credit, seems most inclined to support genuinely progressive and democratic outcomes. I’ll just make a few comments:
First, Bernard tends to blunt the credibility of whatever democratic impulses might be expressed by these progressive goals by indulging in gratuitously snobbish and elitist language. His old-fashioned disgust and horror at those who work with their hands and his overdone admiration for “knowledge” work come through in everything he writes. Why, for example, talk of “those incapable of making the transition to knowledge work.” Anyway, as a result of the current “Great Recession”, we may find more and more of our economic activity moving back toward the industrial production of physical products and away from services. In that case, the people who need pity, and who find themselves the targets of snobbish scorn, might very well be those who find themselves incapable of making the transition to physical manufacturing work.
As we mentioned before, people will and have discovered that the distinction between work that is demoralizing and mutilating, on the one hand, and enervating and rewarding, on the other, does not necessarily track with the distinction between physical work and knowledge work. I am reminded of the film Office Space, in which the hero ends by giving up his career in the tech industry to go to work in construction.
Second, whether our schools themselves should be smaller – a very plausible suggestion – is a different question than the question of whether the provision and administration of those schools should be accomplished by a very diverse and competitive privatized industry, by a few private monopolies, by local governments, by state governments or by the national government. In the end, the real questions for progressives are “Who pays?” and “How much difference do we tolerate in how much is paid to educate different children?” If the purchase of education for the young is left mainly in the hands of individual parents, or highly segregated communities, then we will get highly differentiated results. If we want more universal and democratic educational outcomes, then resources need to be pooled and distributed more equitably. Whether this is done entirely by government-run educational system, or employs private contractors, is a secondary issue. If we do use private contractors, then progressive democrats should at least support “single payer” government contracting authorities, which will enable us to better regulate outcomes, drive hard bargains, keep costs down, and prevent the extraction of wasteful and extravagant profits and salaries.
Anyway, the failure of schools is more often a symptom than a cause. There is a far deeper issue to be concerned about involving the savage degradation, immiseration and failure of whole communities in the United States. If children are being born and reared in hellholes, our public investment in fixing the problem needs to go well beyond what we spend on improving their schools.
October 4, 2009 1:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm also disturbed by Bernard's use of words like "incapable." Does he consider that some people just don't want "knowledge jobs" and that for some people working in an office or sitting near or at a computer all day can be quite stultifying? I think when you take such a judgmental attitude to some occupations that it tends to warp the policy you make.
The other issue I see is that Bernard's call for standardization will probably most annoy the knowledge pros he so loves.
Anyway, good on you dor writing such fair and detailed analysis given his downright rude reaction to you in the earlier thread.
October 4, 2009 1:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
I didn't take his reaction to be so rude, destor. I think his point was to suggest that I might be a hypocrite in extolling the virtues of the workaday life, while clutching to my position in precious PhD-land. So I just had to point out that my own actual day job is pretty humdrum.
October 4, 2009 1:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're a long time commenter here. I'd take it as rude whenever any of the featured posters here accused some one such as yourself of hypocrisy.
But I guess my larger point is that Avishai's tone is a real problem. There's an arrogance to it, for sure.
October 4, 2009 6:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Biopharmaceutical companies, for example, have over $28 billion tied up in research, and National Institute of Health sponsored labs have over $30 billion. Consider how universities, developers of bioinformatics platforms, etc., would benefit from (what they call) "common ontologies" for structured scientific findings--and especially in vanguard fields such as genomics and proteomics, where different researchers, coming from different frames of reference, are always calling essentially the same physical events by different names. It would be natural for the publically funded NIH to take the lead here, especially in the most advanced areas, where language for findings is least standard. Such systems of classification give a new meaning to roads and bridges."
How about teaching our children the metric system first.
October 4, 2009 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
But that's unMerican!
October 5, 2009 11:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bernard, there is a hugely important element that you are leaving out--software patent reform. Despite the fact that computer programs are essentially mathematical, many businesses have been trying, and succeeding in getting patents for computer programs and algorithms. This has a tremendous chilling effect on innovation in the software industry, as software patents are used as anticompetitive weapons. At this moment, the Bilski case is up for Supreme Court review, with the validity of computer patents at stake.
The 'Mentor State' needs to embrace Linux and FOSS software as an essential foundation, if we want to truly empower individuals and non-monolithic computer businesses. This is infrastructure for the 21st century.
October 5, 2009 2:41 PM | Reply | Permalink