Category Archives: Political

Mass layoffs, squandered investments

Posted on by Henry

Sometimes there’s a story circulating in the zeitgeist and I have to write about it. Today I’m actually publishing those thoughts instead of shelving them.

There’s a story going around the tech-world (and the people who invest in the tech-world) that laying off staff right now is important, necessary, and a sign of good judgment. It goes hand-in-hand with messages about having over-hired during the pandemic, and messages about an expected recession. I suspect it’s misguided, even if the other connected messages are true and accurate.

Honestly, this current layoff-streak looks to me like companies chasing each other, trying to convince investors that they’re serious and diligent. Better yet, that they’re responsible.

Turns out James Surowiecki sees the same pattern. He has an article on this here. He thinks this looks like a parallel to stories about “downsizing” from decades ago. I see any number of connections to other stories about austerity and responsibility.

I might judge this differently if it seemed like the tech companies involved were firing according to a plan or a consistent basis for judgement. Instead, it looks like they’re firing willy-nilly at all levels. Beyond that Business Insider article, the reports I’ve heard from people working in the affected companies all suggest that this current wave of layoffs is haphazard at best: one reported that the company was still hiring, often for the very positions they just opened by firing experienced workers. It seemed their company paid little attention to the composition of the teams they were firing from, or the relevant experience of the people they fired.

All of that makes me think that this move, firing roughly 6% of a company’s workforce, is more about needing to be seen as doing something rather than about doing the right thing.

So what are the costs incurred by this? If these companies are firing at scale, firing 6% of their employees while still making profit and while still sitting on war chests of as-yet uninvested funds (e.g. Ruth Porat’s segment of Google’s Q4 2022 call)—is that actually a sign of good judgment? Or are these companies shooting themselves in the foot?

In other words, is that story about firing people being the diligent, serious thing to do either true or accurate?

For argument’s sake, I’m going to accept as given that the other two stories are true. I’ll agree that these companies over-hired during the pandemic, and that the economy will either experience a recession this year or at least perform worse than hoped.

I’m not going to dispute any of that.

But what price do these companies pay with these firings? Does it make sense to fire these workers?

Let’s step back. When does it make sense to fire someone?

I posit two general cases:

1) It makes sense to fire someone when they hurt a company more by staying than they do by leaving.

2) It could makes sense to fire someone if their role is no longer relevant to the tasks performed by a company—but that ignores the benefit of reassigning them to a different role and saving on onboarding costs.

I admit, there may be other cases. But I think these two cover the majority of reasonable firing situations.

#2 is probably easiest to understand as a company-wide refocusing of effort. If a company totally shuts down an operation, stops trying to make or support a certain product, etc., it might make sense that some of the staff involved would no longer be relevant to the company’s goals. In that case, firing could make sense.

In counterpoint, I maintain that the company is probably better served by retaining whatever staff it can and assigning them new work in whatever the company’s area of focus may be. Onboarding staff takes time. Training staff takes time. Even if you have to retrain reassigned staff, you’re probably still saving money by conserving your staff pool.

Also, I haven’t seen a dramatic shift in stated plans among the various tech companies that are so eager to fire people. Thus, I don’t think these layoffs fall into case #2.

As for #1… what does it take for an employee to hurt a company more by staying than by leaving?

I’m going to ignore the case of an employee being a toxic piece of shit who harms others around them. That seems like a very clear cut entry in case #1, and it doesn’t match what I’ve heard about the current wave of tech layoffs. If that’s the reason for these firings, they’re firing a lot of the wrong people.

So. How does one calculate the costs of someone staying? How does one calculate the costs of someone leaving?

The costs of keeping an employee can be loosely summed up as “pay, benefits, and overhead.” Employees cost salary or wage, they cost payroll tax, they cost whatever is offered as benefits… there are probably other things I’m missing here: I’m not an expert and this is not intended to be professionally rigorous. But a lot of the costs associated with employee benefits and overhead are reduced by economies of scale: the more X you’re buying, the more efficient that purchase is likely to be. It costs less to offer a ridiculously nice physical work environment for your Nth employee than it does to offer that for your first ten. Based on what I know about negotiating power, etc., I’m willing to bet that those economies of scale remain true to some extent across other realms of company overhead and employee benefits.

Basically, cutting X% of a workforce will reduce a company’s costs. But it will probably reduce those costs by less than X%. Pay isn’t evenly spread around a company’s employees: the C-suite is far more generously compensated than other employees are. And trimming away the costs of benefits offered to that X% likely won’t reduce the total price of those benefits on a 1-to-1 basis, due to the aforementioned economies of scale.

So how much does it cost to fire someone?

In these layoffs, fired employees will receive severance pay. That’s a potentially squishy number, but according to Business Insider, Microsoft expects to pay $1.2 billion in severance for approximately 10,000 employees (averaging $120k per person). If you take Microsoft at their word about their severance package being generous—I’m reluctant to, but this’ll make my math easier—we could guess at a cost of $100k per fired employee.

We can also track how much work-time these companies are losing by firing these employees. What do I mean by that? I mean: there’s a time cost associated with bringing employees up to speed. It’s incurred at the start of any employee’s time at a company. To a lesser extent, it may be re-incurred with any shuffle of personnel.

Friends working in tech tell me it takes roughly six months for someone to be brought up to speed and usefully contribute to a highly specialized team, while ”a quarter or two” might be the normal range for other teams. At the six-month end, firing 6,000 people who’ve been at the company for six months or more is 3,000 wasted worker-years (for reference, Google has fired 12,000 people; Salesforce 7,000; Microsoft 10,000). Even if I assume everyone fired got up to speed in only one month (which isn’t borne out by the spread of teams that lost members), that still comes out to a cost of 500 worker-years for firing 6,000 people. That time was paid for already. Firing those employees, to me, looks like squandering that investment.

What is harder to quantify?

The above math assumes we only count the time of the employee being brought up to speed. It makes no accounting of the time and effort other people on their teams put into helping them catch up. I won’t try to account for that here. Any estimates there would be even more speculative than what I’ve done so far, and I think my assessment of the squandered time investment is already damning.

Another item I can’t quantify here is the cost of the institutional knowledge lost in this firing process. From others’ reporting, some of the people fired have been with their companies for up to 16 years. The company-specific and project-specific knowledge and expertise accrued over a decade-plus of work at a company can’t be understated; knowing who to speak to when seeking answers for specific problems, being able to tell others how older systems work, and having personal experience of previous solutions to prior crises all matter. As with the invested worker-time, all of that is being squandered.

Which brings me to another difficult-to-quantify cost which my friends in tech anticipate: decreased product resiliency. Because “automate yourself out of work” is the standard MO for many development teams, the repercussions of firing chunks of those development teams aren’t likely to be felt until a quarter or two from now when something inevitably breaks. When that happens, it’s a roll of the dice whether the person who designed the system and knew it best is still available within the company. The recent layoff wave, with its apparent scattershot approach, is well-designed to exacerbate those system failures by unpredictably removing the relevant expertise. Maintaining existing products and internal infrastructure will be harder, and that additional load will likely make future development more difficult as well.

All of this is exacerbated by the way in which the firings were carried out, which look a lot like intentional corporate self-harm from the outside.

Those laid off report learning of the firings by surprise. These people were frozen out of their ex-employers’ communication systems with no time given to pass on custody of any of their work to their coworkers. While many of these articles focus on Google, I’ve heard similar reports from people at Athenahealth. Any sane and competent organization—one that wants to preserve continuity of service, continuity of experience, and allow people to pass on custody of their projects to another person without leaving everything in a mysterious mess—would do this differently. Anyone picking up the projects of those who were fired will have to do their best to decrypt whatever notes made sense to the person who thought they’d return to their project the next day. It’s the opposite of good management.

Given that most investors look for companies that take advantage of market downturns to grow their business, this wave of firings seems short-sighted. It appears to have been conducted in a way that guarantees the erosion of product resiliency and handicaps meaningful transfer of projects from those fired to those who remain.

A final element I can’t quantify here: morale.

Companies, whether they like it or not, are communities. Communities function smoothly when their members are able to trust each other and predict each other’s actions. When a company fires 6% of its staff for no apparent reason, that damages any existing trust and puts the lie to predictability.  It makes remaining experienced employees more likely to quit, or seek employment elsewhere.

Also, as a reminder, people may be friends with their coworkers. I am not in a position to quantify friendship. I can’t speak to what portion of the people fired had at least X friends, or whether they were real SOBs that everyone was glad to see leave (an ideal candidate for firing case #1). But seeing one’s friends lose their jobs for no apparent reason, seeing them suffer as a result, is disheartening, discouraging, and encourages anger and resentment—none of which are conducive to greater productivity.

Furthermore, I think this article about the pressure recessions exert on union organizing misses a critical point. Tech companies have been trying to quash union formation for years now. When tech companies show they are willing to fire people for no apparent reason, that may discourage and foster fear amongst their employees. But it can also be another incentive for workers to take actions their companies don’t approve of—like organizing. If they might be fired at random despite playing by the rules, what do they have to lose?

Scared people will certainly pay lip service to frightening authorities. But we have about two more years of Biden’s first term left to go. There’s no time in recent history when employees have been more likely to receive federal support in their unionization efforts. If these companies wanted to undercut pro-union sentiment, they chose a strange way to do so.

In summary, I don’t think these layoffs make much sense. The story tech executives are telling, of these layoffs being a sign of their seriousness and diligence and responsibility, simply doesn’t hold water. Even if dramatically reducing costs right now were necessary for these companies, the way in which these companies went through this firing process verges on self-harm.

My reasoning is as follows:

If a company over-hired, and there’s a recession coming, it makes sense to slow down hiring. It makes sense to reduce expenses. If the company were operating on thin margins and had little cash in reserve, that might require drastic measures and targeted cuts.

When a company is still making profit, and is sitting on a war chest of a hundred-billion-plus dollars, it can afford to eat into that reserve in order to conserve its existing expertise and expand its future capabilities.

Instead, Google spent $59 billion on buying back shares (see Ruth Porat’s segment of that Q4 2022 call). That increases stock price. It does nothing to improve a company’s fundamental performance.

Firing a swathe of employees largely at random has considerable costs. It incurs severance pay. It squanders prior investments of time and money. When firing at random, the money it saves in expenses does not match the proportional impact on institutional knowledge and capability. The firings damage worker morale and foster resentment. And the future cost of time lost to fixing broken systems without the people who knew them best, alongside the associated reputational costs when those systems’ failures impact the company’s customers, are injurious. 

As far as I can tell, the only way that these firings make sense is if the companies involved expect a dramatic drop in revenue. In a moment of grim comedy, these firings may create the environment for those losses, and make weathering them more difficult.

But this brings me back to my suspicion that these firings weren’t about actual diligence and responsibility. The alternative is that these firings have little to do with the companies’ future performance, and everything to do with signaling to investors.

In response to lower than expected earnings over the last quarter, some investors are pushing for cost-cutting measures. This is fairly normal behavior. Investors who expect a recession are also pushing for companies to prepare, or at least to be ready for slower growth against economic headwinds.

How do companies show that they’re taking these concerns seriously?

By firing lots of staff, by creating a narrative of responsibility and seriousness, these companies are attempting to communicate that they’re sober, clear-headed, business-minded. As with the stock buybacks, this message is a reassurance that the company cares about their investors and will do what it must to improve their stock value. But this privileges short-term behavior over long-term investment.

As someone who owns some shares in some of these companies, this is disheartening. These are bad decisions. They’re bad decisions that have been executed poorly in the most injurious ways. They look to me like a surgeon grinning, hands smeared with blood and full of mostly healthy freshly-excised tissue, reassuring the audience that the cuts they just made were all well thought out. I can only hope the audience is not convinced, and doesn’t reward this behavior.

I have few doubts that these companies will weather our next economic storms mostly intact. They have many billions of dollars in reserve, they can afford to choose poorly again and again. But this? This was a mess.

It’s also an opportunity. Those workers still employed by these companies can make their voices heard. Even if they still believe that the company they work for earnestly shares their best interests, they can organize and push their companies to focus on long-term planning instead of the market-rewarded sugar-high of quick fixes and flashy cuts.

Good luck.

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‘Yes’ means nothing if you can’t say ‘No’

Posted on by Henry

I’m fortunate. I’m lucky in the extreme, in many ways. One of those ways is the fact that I exist at all. My existence in the first place was improbable—my conception was a wildly unlikely event. And, given everything else going on at the time, there was no guarantee my mother would want to give birth to me. Yet my mom has told me many times that she feels blessed to have had me. I feel blessed in turn.

“Ah ha, Henry must be anti-abortion!” You say.

No, the opposite.

I was born because my mom wanted to keep me. I was born in a world where she had a choice, unconstrained by legality or safety, about whether or not I would be born. I was raised by a mother who was able to look at her life, at her family, and say “yes, I want to bring another child to this, and I am ready to love and provide for that child.”

I am lucky, I am blessed, because my mother was able to make that choice. In many ways, my life feels more meaningful because my mother had other options and chose me. I was never unwanted. I wasn’t a burden. I was chosen.

I want others to be chosen too.

But being chosen requires that it be a choice. That choice matters. Preserving the ability to choose matters. ‘Yes’ is an empty word when you can’t say ‘no.’

Taking away someone’s ability to say ‘no’ doesn’t mean they’ll say ‘yes.’ It means you don’t care what they think or feel. You might as well just tape their mouth shut.

And it’s dishonest to look at this issue on its own. Abortion access may be legislated separately, but the arguments about abortion and restricting access to it are deeply entwined with other political messages. They coexist with other narratives, and other goals.

The political party that would restrict abortion access also votes to cut funding for public health care. In Mississippi, anti-abortion legislation is passed even while support for future parents is not. And politicians arguing against abortions often also vote against funding programs that support poorer people, or expanding that support to prevent poverty in the first place.

Here in America, many of these arguments come back around to personal responsibility. Individuals are to blame, by the logic of personal responsibility, for all of their success or failure. And many anti-abortion politicians support measures that push this narrative. They sell the idea that they’re empowering the individual to plot their own course or stand up for themself.

Unless you’re pregnant.*

Raising a child in our society is extremely expensive. Giving birth is more dangerous here than in many other countries, on top of being pricey. Quality medical care is not reliably available to everyone, and where it is available it’s still costly.

Choosing not to raise a child under those circumstances is a responsible decision. Choosing to raise only the number of children you can afford to raise is a responsible decision. Choosing not to take the medical risk of bearing a child is a responsible decision.

I am lucky because my mother knew that she could provide for me. She knew that having me wouldn’t be the straw that broke the family’s back. She could make the choice to have me without being irresponsible.

But politicians who love personal responsibility would prevent people from making responsible choices. Because if someone is pregnant, then these politicians know best. They know the government should strip away that vaunted individual choice, they know the government should disempower pregnant people in their own personal lives.

I firmly believe that people should be allowed to not get abortions if they don’t want them, or if they feel abortions are morally unacceptable. They can choose to never have an abortion. They can make many personal choices, for themselves, as they see fit.

But they can’t make those same personal choices for others. They must not gnaw away at other people’s access to health care. It’s unacceptable to force anyone but yourself to carry a fetus to term.

There’s far more to say here: about political narratives, religion, extremism, and broken systems… but I’ll leave it at this for now.

Being chosen was a blessing. Let other people choose for themselves.

*In fact, this message of “empowering individuals” comes with far more caveats. It’s not just about being pregnant: when you look at larger patterns it also often matters whether you’re white, rich, male, straight, etc.

I had a different post, but news

Posted on by Henry

I’m sure plenty of other people are writing similar things. I haven’t been able to focus since I was told to look at the news yesterday afternoon. An angry mob pushing their way into the halls of Capitol Hill, handled with kid gloves by the same law enforcement that beat so many over the summer, attempting to disrupt and undo the peaceful transfer of power that our democracy is built on…

Side note: I don’t want more people shot by law enforcement. I do not think more of yesterday’s mob should have been shot or beaten or anything else. I just want the phenomenally more peaceful protestors of color, those arguing for less police violence who have been treated so much worse over the last summer in the same city, to be handled with more generous restraint.

Resignations of Trump’s Cabinet members at this point are fervently clutched fig leafs, unless they come with something like the following statement: “I was unable to convince a majority of fellow cabinet members to invoke the 25th amendment. As such, I am resigning instead of continuing to support President Trump. I recommend that the President be removed from office immediately, by impeachment since none of the remaining cabinet will speak out.”

Society is a collective agreement about reality. Our democratic republic relies on that consensus reality being broadly shared by a sufficient mass of citizens. Without that shared reality, democracy fails.

Trump and his abettors have been working for years (decades in the case of Fox, conservative talk radio, and now their more radical news network and podcast heirs) to carve away enough people from that consensus to cover their own autocratic impulses. In many cases, this means working hand in hand with fascists and racists. The preponderance of Proud Boys and neo-nazi affiliated groups in the mob yesterday have been there all along (in case no one remembers Richard Spencer yelling “Heil Trump” after the 2016 election). They aren’t a majority, as our elections have amply demonstrated, but they sure can make a lot of violent noise.

Speaking of which, it seems strange that there’s so little coverage of the makeshift bombs found at DNC and RNC headquarters in DC yesterday.

Regardless, there must be consequences of some sort for these actions. Inciting violence and insurrection is bad. And letting people (Trump in particular) get away with it is worse. He’s reopened a wound in American society, or perhaps simply pulled off the pus-laden bandage and gleefully rubbed shit in it until it became gangrenous.

Ignoring gangrene in hopes that “time will heal all wounds” is an excellent way to die.

untitled, 10/22/20

Posted on by Henry

My thesis dealt with political speech by the President of the United States (POTUS). My original topic was ‘enemies,’ and how they were constructed by the POTUS in political speech. I ultimately had to change and narrow my topic to the use of the word ‘government’ by the POTUS in the State of the Union address, because I didn’t have a clear enough consistent and comparable body of data.

I wish Trump hadn’t changed that so much.

No other POTUS has so relied on creating and using “us vs them” relationships in their speech. It’s like he doesn’t know how *not* to. Like he doesn’t know how to say anything without bringing “us vs them” into it.

It’s infuriating.

I hope that our political speech can change. I hope that we can spend more time building each other up instead of driving wedges between us.

I don’t expect that any time soon. Seems likely we have more trouble to get through first.

Choosing Democracy, Peacefully

Posted on by Henry

It’s important to understand that we (the US) are in a tricky place right now. I doubt anyone reading this will be surprised by my saying that. But part of what’s tricky about our current political situation is that—categorically speaking—nonviolent protest is far more effective at achieving its aims than violent protest, and it’s relatively easy for violent instigators to cast doubt on nonviolent protests by engaging in violence around the edges.

If the President refuses to follow the process, it is vital that Americans partake in nonviolent protest and demand that the process be followed. This might be necessary, especially in light of this reporting (there’s far more than just this quote):

“According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.”

The stories we tell about this, before, during, and after, are critical. Our efforts here are to preserve our democracy, and to keep our democratic republic (to paraphrase the apocryphal words of Benjamin Franklin to Philadelphia’s political doyen Elizabeth Willing Powel). If there are calls to cease counting votes, or to ignore votes, we should call it what it is: an attempted coup, and a violation of the processes our elections rely on to maintain their legitimacy and the consent of the governed.

If we wish to keep our democratic republic, we can speak out and engage in nonviolent protest. We can engage with others, and call on them to protect American democracy alongside us. No matter how personal this may seem, this isn’t about an individual; this is about preserving the agreements and values which are the foundation of our democracy. This is something that anyone who believes in a democratic republic should support.

I suggest that you read about the Choose Democracy project, and plan to advocate for our democratic values and process.

“Just Kidding”, quick political thoughts

Posted on by Henry

Trump can waffle and correct himself and scrawl little words into the heaving blank spaces he left to carry his message all he likes. What remains is the fact that he is casting doubt on the American electoral system, casting doubt on voting by mail (which has staggeringly low rates of fraud, even lower than the already low American norm), and trying to use funding to support a piece of critical election infrastructure as a bargaining chip during a pandemic.

He’s said before that he thinks having more people vote is bad for him, and for Republicans in general. He said that back in March.

Now he’s withholding resources for allowing people to vote. It honestly doesn’t matter if it’s serious or “just a tactic.” It’s dangerous, and it’s bad for the republic. It’s bad for America, and for everyone in it, and, fuck, it’s bad for people outside it too because we can’t pretend America doesn’t influence the rest of the world.

I’m fucking upset. I’m angry. I’m… not surprised. Not especially surprised, anyway. Trump’s been saying—for a while now—that he doesn’t believe in voting by mail (despite voting by mail himself). He’s suggested (“joked”?) postponing the election. This is more of the same, but…

But withholding funding for the USPS so that it will be harder for mail-in voting to happen, during a pandemic, is abominable. It’s abominable from the perspective of public health, from the perspective of the continued health of our democratic republic…

It’s something that I feared, and something that I didn’t think he’d actually say out loud.

If knowingly suppressing the vote and eroding elections isn’t criminal, it really ought to be.

Watching Trump do these things, say these things, feeds the fears I’ve felt for years. I’ve told myself I’m paranoid, or at least that I’m catastrophizing, when I worry about Trump’s next steps, but time and again he does the thing that I feared.

The next step, the next thing I (and others I know) fear, is a large scale repeat of the Ballot Security Task Force which, in New Jersey in 1981, effectively suppressed minority voters (here’s the wikipedia article). Until 2017, the RNC was limited by consent decree because their actions in 1981 were so egregious. That consent decree expired (here’s Politico on the expiration of the limiting consent decree), and the RNC is working on recruiting and training election observers (Washington Post on the topic, note about observers is a little ways in) while Trump foments fear about fraud.

I’m not afraid that my vote won’t be counted, not really. I’m voting in Massachusetts, and I’m voting Democratic. If anything, my vote will barely matter for entirely different reasons. That’s okay. I’d rather not use first-past-the-post elections, but I’ll nerd out about election systems another day.

No, I’m worried about the chilling effect on participation throughout the rest of the country, and especially in those places where a small margin might make a big difference for Trump. I’ve been angry with the Republican Party’s elections strategies for a long time now, but if they manage to pull this one off—fuck.

Look, John Scalzi is a generally good person and has lots of other words, including plenty about voting, here.

He also has links to important voting resources there.

In case you’re too lazy, here: REGISTER TO VOTE and CHECK YOUR REGISTRATION STATUS

Election Day is November 3rd, 2020.

Boston Protest March, May 31st

Posted on by Henry

I marched in Boston on Sunday.

I left after standing at the State House for a little while, before the police went into the crowd. Before I left, the crowd was loud but peaceful—as they had been for the entire march.

I had been heartened by the people around me on the march. People were more considerate of each other than a typical Boston crowd, with lots of attention paid to those around them and none of those pockets of oblivious assholes that so often crop up. While social distancing was basically impossible, I think I saw fewer than ten people without masks.

For perspective, that was ten in this crowd:

If I felt so positive about it, why did I leave?

I spoke mid-march with someone who was helping to organize the crowd, keeping it on the route. They noted the profound lack of police managing the boundaries of the route. That was an accurate assessment, as far as I could tell—the march was almost entirely self-managed. I saw only one cluster of cops off to the side along the whole march (2.4 miles from 2343 Washington Street in Roxbury to the State House on the Commons, at a slow pace over one and a half hours). I’m not sure why the police felt they shouldn’t be present along the route. That was a change from what I’ve seen before. The person managing the crowd speculated that the police were all waiting at the State House, and they worried about what that might imply about the police’s plans.

That resonated with my existing fears. It was also prescient.

I know enough people who’ve been hurt by police while peacefully protesting.

I have at least one family member who’s been hurt by police before. They were protesting peacefully. I trust and believe them when they say this; they’ve done martial arts most of their life and are trained in deescalation and crisis management. We’ve worked security together at large festivals. They were backing away from the police and not offering resistance, but the police attacked them anyway.

I’ve watched police attack other people in front of me, outside of protests, when those people were doing nothing more than being loud. I’ve heard stories of other close friends being pepper sprayed or tear gassed without offering any resistance to police officers.

That had weighed heavily on me while I planned to go to Sunday’s march. Because of that, I’d never intended to stay long enough to be around large numbers of police. Even before hearing that crowd-shepherding person’s speculation, I was hyper-aware of what might happen to me if I stayed.

I’m frustrated that this might be seen as a feature by those who support more violent policing, and by those who don’t support protests (or don’t support protests except when a certain President supports them, as was the case with various armed white protestors this April).

But what it comes down to, really, is that I don’t trust the police.

I don’t trust police to deescalate a situation. I don’t trust police to engage peacefully with anyone they don’t like or empathize with. I don’t believe that they’ll avoid hurting people who don’t offer any resistance. I especially don’t trust police to engage peacefully with crowds. Honestly—and I say this as someone with all the benefits of being seen as a white man—I don’t trust police to empathize with anyone who isn’t visibly and vocally supporting them.

On top of that, I don’t trust most people to believe or support peaceful protestors who’ve been hurt by the police. I believe that those hurt will be blamed, instead of the police. As best as I can see, there’s little accountability to that motto “to serve and protect.”

I’m sad about all of that.

Consider, just for a moment, the standards we hold protestors to when we judge whether or not they’re behaving acceptably. Now, what behavior will we permit or excuse among police officers? Police aren’t punished when they use disproportionate force to subdue people, or when they react to provocations. But if protestors are attacked, we gasp and complain when they respond with anything other than nonviolent forbearance. And we accept that people who’ve done nothing wrong, whose very rights to speech and assembly are enshrined in our Constitution, suffer when the police use indiscriminate force to control people.

When one person in a large crowd throws something, the whole crowd is suspect and a legitimate target. When one officer kills someone, they’re “just one bad apple.” Never mind the fact that the idiom about bad apples says that one bad apple spoils the bunch.

I think I’m only not angry about this all the time because I’ve nearly given up on the police being better. That in itself is sad and stupid; I’ve been on security teams that were better, and I know Community Safety Officers more dedicated to (and who do a better job of) serving and protecting their communities. I know it’s possible to have people do similar work that supports and grows the public trust instead of corroding it.

I fear the impact these protests will have, both through violent policing and through Covid-19’s spread, especially in communities of color. Mattias talks eloquently about both of these things in his thread that starts here:

I can only conclude is that it’s vital for these protests to continue. I don’t see another way to make things change.

Hard Work Brings Rewards, National Narratives cont.

Posted on by Henry

When I brought up the Protestant work ethic in my previous post about National Narratives, I glossed over important details and context. The Protestant work ethic is more than “hard work brings rewards,” and it important to know where it came from and what else it’s informed. Its past continues to shape our naturalized beliefs today.

Before I dive in further, I have to define what I mean by “naturalized” (see ‘naturalization’).

First off, in this case ‘naturalize’ is a verb used in semiotics, and has little to do with immigration.

Naturalize (a sign): to make a sign or a set interpretation of signs (a code) appear natural or inherent truth; a naturalized arbitrary cultural arrangement will seem common-sense, normal, or self-evident.

These naturalized arbitrary cultural arrangements can range from deeply held ideological beliefs to surface level impressions. The degree to which codes are naturalized can vary as well, as can the degree to which a code is naturalized across a population. These codes can vary in their complexity and in their interpretation or justification. The important part, for our purposes, is that these codes are held as self-evident, normal, or common sense. Inherent, and natural.

Here are six concrete examples of arbitrary cultural arrangements in the US: “Irish people are drunks,” “WASPs are uptight,” “black people are lazy,” “people have a right to own firearms,” “there should be freedom of speech,” “all people are created equal.”

So let’s look at “hard work brings rewards” as it relates to the Protestant work ethic.

When you trace its roots, the Protestant work ethic is founded on specific beliefs about the possibility of reaching Heaven, and the difficulty of knowing who could or would reach Heaven. It relies on the belief that having true (Christian) faith is the only way to go to Heaven, and the assumption that good people want to go to Heaven. Furthermore, it is founded in the concept of good works, and the idea that true faith in God can only exist if faith is present in conjunction with those good works (provided there’s an opportunity for good works—there’s some disagreement among Christian sects about the necessity of good works for salvation, and about what defines “good works”).

In summary, this belief combines “true faith brings the reward of Heaven,” and “true faith requires good works,” into “good works bring the reward of Heaven.”

Not only that, but because possessing true faith in order to go to Heaven is presumably the ultimate goal of any good Christian (remember: “good people want to go to Heaven,” and “Christianity is the only way to Heaven”), therefore good Christians must perform good works.

Notice all the value statements here, all those ‘goods.’ We’ll come back to them later.

Let’s examine this belief from the inside—the naturalized belief that “good works bring the reward of Heaven.” What if we follow its internal logic when thinking about people in society?

True faith isn’t reliably visible. But a person’s actions are. If someone performs good works, we may reason that they may have true faith and may thus go to Heaven. Good works bring the reward of Heaven (we’ll assume that this person has faith).

Conversely, by this reasoning someone who does no good works lacks true faith. If they lack true faith, they are damned. While the arguments about this are long and varied, the usual answer is that their damnation is probably their own fault.

Thus, if “good works bring the reward of Heaven” is a naturalized belief—if we think it’s inherently true—then it should also be true that someone’s lack of good works means they won’t go to Heaven. It allows us to make a moral judgement about them: they’re not good enough. They might even be a bad person.

That’s a value statement which can be inferred from this naturalized belief.

But what if society reapplies this code, “good works bring the reward of Heaven,” in a secular context? It could be simplified to “work brings rewards.” Or perhaps “hard work brings rewards.”

But it still carries many of the same implications when thinking about members of society.

Again, let’s follow this belief’s internal logic.

If “hard work brings rewards” is inherently true, and someone works, we’d expect that they would be rewarded. If they’re not rewarded, they must not have worked hard enough—and their lack of rewards can’t be bad luck or adversity, because we know that “hard work brings rewards” is true. As with true faith, good works, and going to Heaven, if someone works hard enough they’ll be rewarded enough to overcome any amount of trouble. Like damnation from the exploration above, someone’s lack of prosperity is their own fault.

Moreover, if “hard work brings rewards” is true and someone isn’t rewarded, they must not be a hard worker. It isn’t difficult to make the leap from someone not being a hard worker to not being a good person. That’s especially true when your beliefs about the rewards of hard work are founded on moral beliefs about good works and going to Heaven. According to this belief, people who aren’t hard enough workers may be bad people. That’s another value statement—more on that in a moment.

There’s an important difference between the religious and the secular forms of these beliefs. It isn’t possible to see someone go to Heaven. But we can see people rewarded, or not rewarded.

According to the strictest form of these beliefs, when someone’s good works are lacking we can guess that they’re not a good person. But when someone lacks rewards, we know that they’re not working hard enough. We know that they’re not good enough to enjoy prosperity.

This is long, but hold on: because of the strong associations between rewards and goodness—and between lack-of-rewards and not-goodness—if someone is rewarded, wealthy, or prosperous it’s easy to believe that they’re a good person. And if they’re not rewarded, wealthy, or prosperous it’s easy to believe that they’re a bad person.

And all that reasoning is based on arbitrary cultural arrangements, codified interpretations of a series of signs that we think have specific meaning that is somehow inherently true… even when there’s nothing inherently true about any of it.

It’s easy see the legacies of these lines of thought. They’re deeply ingrained in American society, especially in the secular form. The belief that “hard work brings rewards” is often referred to as Achievement Ideology, and both are integrally linked to the American Dream.

The belief that people who haven’t been rewarded with prosperity may be moral failures or are otherwise to blame has been part of British and American legislation around poverty and welfare for centuries. The moral failing involved varies, depending on who makes the judgement, but it is often laziness, or sin, or some other behavior disliked by the person who believes “hard work brings rewards.” Drunkenness and addiction are often held up as examples, despite research suggesting that these are correlated with environmental stress, and may be reduced through reducing environmental stress.

Yet those moral failings are often taken as signs that people do not deserve aid or succor.

Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth, a basis for modern day philanthropy, very explicitly warns against giving charity to the “unworthy” (p.16, 18) and valorizes the “industrious workman [who says] to his incompetent and lazy fellow, ‘if thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap,’” (p.6). Modern American welfare, with its work requirements and restrictions, is similarly caught up in the idea that giving to people who don’t deserve it is perilous. And Britain’s New Poor Laws in the Victorian Era intentionally made the support they offered no better than living in abject poverty, out of concern that people would rather claim support than work. These are the same laws which gave rise to Charles Dickens’ famous novels about impoverished people in Victorian England.

Yet it’s entirely possible to work hard and receive no reward. American slavery is an obvious counterargument to the naturalization of the idea that “hard work brings reward.” Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed delves into the experience of the low wage labor market in the 1990’s after the US’ 1996 welfare reform act, and how little reward hard labor brought.

The few existing experiments involving unconditional financial giving and support to members of communities (often called Universal Basic Income) suggest that the fear of laziness the New Poor Laws were based on, and which Carnegie articulated, was largely baseless. The Canadian experiments of the 1970s showed little decline in employment after the introduction of Basic Income, and Namibia’s experiments from 2008 to 2009 were successful on multiple fronts, including “facilitat[ing] an increase in employment and income” (BIG Assessment Report, p.68).

“Hard work brings rewards” is a naturalized code. It’s an arbitrary cultural arrangement, a belief that is not inherently true. Plenty of people work hard and get nowhere, while others work little and yet prosper.

I don’t write this to demean hard work, or to claim that people should not work hard. I am too much a product of our society to not value hard work, especially for a good cause.

But what might our world look like if we recognized that those who’ve prospered aren’t necessarily good, and those who’ve suffered aren’t bad? How much better might we treat each other? How much more willing might we be to make ways for us to support each other?

Last time, it took the Great Depression for us to have this epiphany—and we may be on track for another Great Depression. Last time, because of Southern Democrats (and others) clinging to racism, we only helped some of our fellows.

What if we did better this time?

National Narratives

Posted on by Henry

The US has got a doozy of a narrative shift in store for it. I think we’re either going to change our national narratives, or we’re going to find all the ways that our previous narratives don’t match our new reality well. Or both. We could definitely do both.

And that process is going to involve a lot of pain.

These aren’t unique or special thoughts. Most folks I’ve talked with recently have had similar ones. I know I’ve read things like them in other places. I think both John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig have been writing about things related to this, as has Graydon Saunders.

But I’m thinking about all of it from a particularly narrative-based focus.

The New Yorker article Reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders is particularly relevant here.

So, I suppose, is my post last week about finding hope in books.

Let’s talk specifically about narrative.

The New York Times has a piece on the surge in unemployment which includes some good words from Professor Alice Fothergill at UVM: “A lot of people in the United States are very proud of feeling self-sufficient and independent… This is something that is definitely going to be very, very difficult.” She also noted that those who feel ashamed about seeking help are often the ones who need it most.

That same article also had this marvelous quote:

“In its unsparing breadth, the crisis is pitting two American ideals against each other—the e pluribus unum credo of solidarity and its near-religious devotion to the idea that hard work brings rewards. Those notions coexist peacefully in prosperous times. Today, both are being put to the test, forcing the newly unemployed to re-evaluate beliefs about themselves and their country.”

Those ideals are two stories that we tell about what it means to be American. They’re our national narratives. They’re institutions and ideologies, if you want to get into the weeds. These narratives are not always well-rooted in or supported by reality, but being well-supported by reality isn’t a narrative’s job. The narrative, the ideology, isn’t here to accurately reflect our world; its role is to tell us where we fit in, and what we should do. These narratives are often more aspirational than descriptive.

Follow me as I wander through a few more articles:

Some businesses are pledging not to fire their employees. Some are going further to take better care of their employees. I don’t know that I believe the article’s supposition that there will be any reputation-based reckoning for the companies that callously fire their employees. I’ll wait and see. Personally, I’d *like* there to be something, but… yeah, I’ll wait and see.

The Economist has data from the Spanish Flu about how social distancing preserved economic function in the 1918 epidemic, which is both neat and reassuring.

And it’s sensible in light of FiveThirtyEight’s piece on the cost of life which basically agrees that human lives are individually expensive, or at least that we’re willing to put a large number of resources towards preventing human deaths. But I think another profound acknowledgement is buried in a side comment: large scale losses of life also strip society of other things which are entirely in excess of the value of an individual life (arts, culture, education, etc). While we can tally up what we’re willing to pay to prevent a death, we can’t actually account for the full cost of a life… and the loss of many lives creates a loss greater than the sum of its parts.

Wandering back…

That “e pluribus unum credo of solidarity” is the narrative bedrock on which phrases like “united we stand” are built. From many, one. It’s how we come together as a country, as a unified community. It’s no mistake that “e pluribus unum” is on so many official seals of our government. It was adopted as an official motto in 1782 by an Act of Congress. Even when people don’t know what e pluribus unum means, you can see this in the devotion and considerate care people give each other during and after natural disasters (here for article, here for meta-study).

That belief that “hard work brings rewards” moves hand in hand with Professor Fothergill’s point that many people in the US “are very proud of feeling self-sufficient and independent.” Those elements are stories that’ve been part of our national narrative for ages, often referred to as the Protestant work ethic. They fed the romanticized vision of the Western, among other things, and when taken to the extreme encourage focusing on work to the exclusion of most other aspects of life.

They’re also foundational to other more toxic narratives, as people reason out from these ideals as though they were unquestionable truths.

For the past decades, we’ve prioritized the narrative of hard work and independence over the narrative of from many, one. We’ve taken apart our social safety net. We’ve told ourselves that we wouldn’t be the ones needing help. We’d be the ones who were smart, who worked hard, who reaped the rewards of our own work unlike those shirkers over there—because if hard work brings rewards and someone isn’t rewarded, they must not be working hard enough. We were Aesop’s ant, not the grasshopper.

Except, maybe, we as a country were wrong. Maybe sometimes people suffer regardless of whether they deserve it. Maybe people saw the success of mid-century white America and forgot what it was built on, what made it possible. Maybe we saw the later continued growth of corporate America and told ourselves that everything was okay as long as the big numbers went up—because eventually that would help everyone, even the little people. Someday.

It turns out that removing the things that help others around us also weakens us. Avoiding human deaths is good. Not avoiding them—even stripped of ethical or moral judgment—is still expensive.

Look.

It’s fine to take pride in supporting yourself and doing well. That’s healthy. But I don’t think it’s healthy for that to be the only place we find pride in our lives.

It’s important for us to take pride in supporting each other, and others around us. And to remember that we don’t *only* support our fellow humans by giving them money (though money matters, especially given the society we live in). It’s high time we remember that E Pluribus Unum is as much a part of our national narrative as any other ideas are. And with that in mind, and as we take care of each other by not getting each other sick, let’s find ways to make our country a little better at being kind and supportive instead of embracing something as callous as “live and let die.”

Exploring Political Stories

Posted on by Henry

I spend a lot of time thinking about stories and what they offer us, their audiences and their authors.

It isn’t radical to describe a continuous circular relation between us and the stories we tell about ourselves. Nor is it radical to say that many stories we tell can be read as being about ourselves, whether they were intended to be or not.

Where am I going with this?

I’ve studied the creation and propagation of ideology through political speech. I’ve studied the creation of stories.

I don’t know why it took me so long to write something here about the political stories we tell ourselves.

Now, when I say political stories, I’m specifically talking about stories that are incorporated into political speech. I refuse to draw a line and say that these political stories are the only stories which are political—any story, like any art, is political. But I’m most interested in talking about the stories that we use, consciously or not, to ground our political arguments. I recognize that this is a somewhat mushy definition.

How much substance, and what sort, do I need before I’m willing to call something a story? Do I need to have an entire literal Horatio Alger novel about gaining wealth through the assiduous practice of Protestant capitalist virtue before I’m willing to call it a story? No. I’m willing to call most things that we tell ourselves about the world “stories” for the sake of this exploration. The important part, as far as I’m concerned, is that what we tell ourselves inform the way we see ourselves (or other people) and inform our actions going forward.

To clarify, “Some people have blue eyes,” doesn’t qualify. But, “People with blue eyes are good,” does. So does, “All men are created equal.”

Furthermore, you needn’t explicitly say “people with blue eyes are good” anywhere in your story if people are able to infer that from the text. And it’s possible to infer from a text stories that the author didn’t intend to include. Stories—and people—are tricky like that.

I suspect that’s part of why political ideologies aren’t static.

I’ve come to this late enough today that I’ll stick to this introduction for now. I already have some ideas of political stories I’d like to explore in more depth in the future, but I think any particular story I explore will deserve more time than I could give it today (and I want to post today). If you have a particular story you’d like me to write and think more about, feel free to leave suggestions in the comments below.