Will Micro-tasking Take Over the World

President Obama and his acolytes are making a big deal about "outsourcing", the evil Republican plan to help evil corporations send all American jobs offshore.

But perhaps an even bigger threat is "microtasking", the on-line movement for people to do small tasks for corporations over the Internet for cash.  After all, argues Jonathan V. Last, it could detach corporations from the people that do the work.

Because while it’s true that the new world of anonymous, mass, remote freelancing may be a perfect distillation of a textbook labor market, it’s also a radical change in Americans’ understanding of the social compact between business and the citizenry. And it’s not clear that this change is for the good...

Because they are perpetual and, in a certain sense, unaccountable, modern corporations have a different set of interests than flesh-and-blood people, and a very different relationship with the people’s voice--government--than old-fashioned sole proprietorships or partnerships... [T]he corporation by design has only an interest in its own survival and profitability: It will concern itself with government insofar as it can enlist the government in helping it make money. On every other question, the corporation is, by definition, indifferent.

So global freelancing will take over the world, right?

Well, not exactly.  We turn to liberal Jonathan Haidt and his The Righteous Mind.  He writes about how instinctively humans color every action with moral judgment, and how profoundly "groupish" we are.

Humans love to belong to "teams", according to Haidt, from families to tribes to religions, and we do our best work when we work as part of a team.  The most notable kind of team is the military squad, and it turns out that parade-ground drilling helps form the bond of the band of brothers, the critical bonding between soldiers that prompts them to sacrifice for each other.  Rhythmic dancing is similar to rhythmic marching; it helps promote a "groupish" feeling.

A corporation, Haidt reminds us, is just such a group.  Loosed upon the world two hundred years ago, it turned out to be a "winning formula."

It let people place themselves in a new kind of boat within which they could divide labor, suppress free riding, and take on gigantic tasks with the potential of gigantic rewards...

It is possible to build a corporation staffed entirely by Homo economicus... But this approach (sometimes called transactional leadership) has its limits...

In contrast, an organization that takes advantage of our hivish [i.e. groupish] nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less closely. This approach to leadership (sometimes called transformational leadership) generates more social capital--the bonds of trust that help employees get more work done at a lower cost than employees at other firms... Unlike Homo economicus, they are truly team players.

 Maybe we should stop worrying about whether "outsourcing" and "offshoring" will end the world as we know it.  Markets are wonderful, and capitalism has given us enormous wealth.  But almost everyone navigates the capitalist ocean in a boat with a crew of other humans.  It's likely that capitalism wouldn't work at all unless its workers worked in the modern teams we call corporations.  Just as soldiers since time immemorial have been organized in the 150-man unit called a "company."

Where's Romney?

Things feel a little flat on the presidential campaign front, and Republicans are beginning to fret.  Where's Romney?  How come he hasn't hit ObamaCare out of the ball-park?  How come he hasn't wrapped Obama in ObamaTax?  How come he got photographed riding a jet-ski?



Here's what I think.  I think that Mitt Romney spent the entire Fourth of July week strategizing.  And that's a good thing.  Starting from now we will start to see what Romney and his people think they need to do to prepare for the Republican National Convention in Tampa, August 27-30, 2012.



The first thing out of the box appears to be a decision to go after the president on his Bain outsourcing message.



Meanwhile everyone is offering their advice.  Here's Pat Caddell writing about "trust" and "taxes."  Here's Hugh Hewitt's chappie Clark Judge writing about the "battle of the agendas phase" of the campaign.  And there are a ton of people declaring that Romney has screwed up.  Totally.



In my view, this campaign offers Republicans an extraordinary opportunity to talk to the American people about some basic facts of life.



On taxes, I'd talk about the choice.  OK, Mr. President, so you want the rich to pay a little more.  Let's agree that we want to use the money of the rich for a good societal purpose.  Now, the question is: will the rich contribute more by creating new jobs (since almost all of "the rich" apart from liberal trustafarians are business owners) or by paying more in taxes?  What do you think, America?



On trust, the question is how to call the Barack Obama untruthful without calling the President of the United States a liar.  It's a delicate question that I am happy to leave to the professionals.



But the bigger question, I feel, is to make politics bigger.  The fact is that politics seldom gets beyond "what have you done for me lately?"  People support candidates that they expect to turn around and reward them.  That's why Social Security is a success.  Most people think that they benefit.  That's why ObamaCare is in trouble.  Most people think that they are going to get screwed.  It all adds up to Springtime for Freeloaders.



Our liberal friends are the worst at this.  They claim to be working for the good of all, but when it comes to the hustings it's all about class warfare and the race card and we care about you because we spend money on you.



What I want is a move away from the clientism of welfare-state politics towards a "culture of involvement."  In my America we won't need big government because every person in America will be engaged civically in contributing their time and money to the solving of social problems large and small.  It would be a society that is less governmental and more social.



Meanwhile we have an election ahead, a sluggish economy, and a president doing his best to divide us. I just hope that Mitt Romney came up with a good plan from his Fourth of July recess.



I am not talking about a "plan" for the economy.  We know what is needed there: tax cuts, spending cuts, regulation cuts, and sound money.  I am talking about a "plan" to persuade the American people to vote out President Obama, the worst president in history.

The Real Blunder of the Sixties

The sensible Robert Samuelson has a piece out today about the economic blunder of the 1960s.  He writes:

Until the 1960s, Americans generally believed in low inflation and balanced budgets. President John Kennedy shared the consensus but was persuaded to change his mind. His economic advisers argued that, through deficit spending and modest increases in inflation, government could raise economic growth, lower unemployment and smooth business cycles.



None of this proved true; all of it led to grief.

OK.  It's true, as far as it goes.  Although there have always been advocates of "cheap money" and there always will be. Sometimes they get the ear of politicians, and sometimes they don't.



It is true that, by giving itself permission to borrow and print money, America's ruling elite basically exempted itself from rules of prudence.  It swept away an important political excuse, as in "Gee fellas, I'd love to spend more money on your pet program but it would involve deficit spending, and that would be wrong."



But the real blunder is the whole idea that major social functions should be performed by government.  It is just not true that there is a need for a compulsory program of national retirement savings.  Most people are pretty prudent; once they get their kids raised they start to save for retirement.



That goes for health care and education, too.  Women are passionately engaged in health care for their family, and drive family spending to budget for health care.  Ditto education.  If the government weren't delivering health care and education then people would do it on their own, like the middle class did before the invention of the welfare state.



Of course, all these social functions would be different if government didn't do them.  They would involve a lot more personal involvement.  People would volunteer at hospitals and schools and give money to them; they would help their relatives with hospital bills and school fees; they would belong to fraternal organizations that provided social benefits to their members.  That is what middle-class people used to do.



But the ruling elite decided that they wanted to run all these social functions.  They would use government and the tax system to organize and fund it all, and they would use university experts to plan and structure the programs.  And when they got in a jam they would borrow a little money.  When they got into a recession they would print a little money.



That is what Keynesianism is all about.  It is all about the welfare state pitcher trying to get out of a jam.  A little spit, a little scuff, and he should be able to throw a strike and make that last out.



The trouble is that, after a century of spit-balls and scuffing, the Keynesian ball is such a mess that today's pitchers can't deliver that crucial out.



Ten years ago Robert D. Putnam set our liberal friends tut-tutting with his Bowling Alone.  He mourned that America was hollowing out because people weren't "joining" any more.  Of course liberals completely missed the point.  Humans join organizations not because they like joining up but because social organizations help them to live and thrive and help them when they need help.  But with the welfare state and its bureaucratic provision of all the social functions there is no point in joining organizations for mutual benefit.  It's a waste of time as you merely end up duplicating a function that the government provides for "free".  You might as well just stay home and sit in front of the TV.



The truth is that our liberal ruling class has created a monster.  The more that it taxes and spends the less that people feel responsible for getting out and making a difference, and the more people demand "free stuff" like everyone else.



The bottom line with blunders is that it costs a bundle to set a blunder right.  Usually the cost can be counted both in money and in heartache.  Back in the 1980s Ronald Reagan gave us a chance to correct the blunder after the stagflation of the 1970s, but liberals refused to reform their welfare state and their "free stuff" subsidies.  Today, the politics of President Obama amounts to "free stuff" politics on steroids.



So now we have to go through the horrors of 1979-82 all over again.  Only this time it is hurting a lot more than back in the early days of the Reagan revolution.  That is because we are in a bigger hole this time.



Will liberals learn their lesson this time?  We can but hope.  Here is an idea. Eight years of a Republican in the White House and a Republican Congress would go a long way to changing their minds.

Keep On Higgsing

The discovery of the Higgs boson is a great achievement for physics.  Whether the discovery is the Higgs boson or a Higgs-like boson is besides the point.  The characteristics of the products of proton-proton collisions at the energy levels in the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will doubtless expose anomalies that will partly confirm and partly challenge current theory.



Of course, at the layman's level, with its metaphors of "particles" and "zoo," we really don't have a clue what is going on.  After all, we are dealing with a micro world where there are no particles.  There are quanta of energy and some of the quanta have mass, whatever that is.  The whole thing is a morass of mathematics and the particles and fields are just convenient metaphors.  Everything is a question of probabilities until there is an observable event. The Higgs boson is associated with the Higgs field and is supposed to explain why some quanta have mass and others don't.



In my layman's view, all the narrative around physics is the same as Plato conjuring up his cosmology in the Timaeus.  It takes current knowledge and recklessly extends it towards an explanation of the eternal mystery of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."



But all science ever seems to do is unfold even deeper mysteries.  Today, as we wrap up the Standard Model of 20th century physics, we already have a mystery waiting in the wings.  As one physicist put it:

"Even if we find out that this is indeed, to the best of our ability to measure, the Standard Model Higgs boson, there are all these other questions that are unanswered. One of the first questions is: What composes the dark matter in the universe? There's no room in the Standard Model of the universe to make up the dark matter, so we have to look at other candidate alternatives."

So we are at the same position as we were over a century ago when the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 revealed that the speed of light always checked out the same.  According to the best physics at the time, it ought to be different, depending on its orientation to the "ether."   If the speed of light is the same in all directions, what does it mean?  A man who was then 8 years old came up with the shocking answer.



Every time we make a big breakthrough in physics, we pretty soon find that there is another mystery confronting us.  That is why philosophy has abandoned "foundationalism."  We don't know the basic building blocks of the universe.  All we know is that we have science that checks out at observable energies.  Knowledge is good until it gets updated with something new and improved.



Meanwhile the physicists need to come up with a rationale to keep their big toys going and maybe come up with a reason for something bigger and better.  I wonder what they will propose.

Why Liberals Like ObamaCare

Last week I picked up a copy of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State on my way from Seattle to Ashland, Oregon.  It had been on my Amazon Wish List and so when I went into Powell's I was looking for it.



But how had it got on my Wish List?  I checked and I see it's because I read a piece by Jonah Goldberg back in April.  Now that I have read it, I can say that, like Jonah, Seeing Like a State has "left a lasting impression on me."



Let's have Jonah tell the story.

If there were one thing I could impress upon people about the nature of the state, it’s that governments by their very nature want to make their citizens “legible.”...



The premodern state was “blind” to its subjects. But the modern state was determined first to see them, and then organize them.

Sound familiar?  This legibility project involved a host of efforts, from mandatory surnames to changing land tenure from communal to freehold.  Why?  Because a person with a surname is easier to find.  A freehold is easier to tax than a village with a word-of-mouth understanding of who owns what and why.



At a basic level, the state need to be able to "see" its subjects in order to tax them and conscript them.  An Asian state with rice cultivation needs to identify and control the people working in the paddy fields.  A modern industrial state needs to know all about its economy so that it knows how much it can spend on buying peoples' votes, or how much national debt it can afford.



There is no end to this.  The state pretty soon decides it needs to run the education system so it can generate productive workers--and also make sure that they learn the right history.  It decides that it needs to vaccinate to control infectious diseases and know who has and who hasn't been vaccinated.  From there, it decides it needs to provide basic health care to keep its workforce (and possible soldiers) strong and healthy.



Pretty soon you get to Obamacare where the government wants to monitor and control everything about healthcare.  Here's what is in store for doctors under ObamaCare according to Daniel Henninger.

[It's the] Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), lodged in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.



Here's the Centers' own description of what PQRS does: "The program provides an incentive payment to practices with eligible professionals (identified on claims by their individual National Provider Identifier [NPI] and Tax Identification Number [TIN]) who satisfactorily report data on quality measures for covered Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) services furnished to Medicare Part B Fee-for-Service (FFS)."

See what is going on?  The physicians will be required to report their activities to the government so the government can figure out what is going on in healthcare--make it "legible"--and control it.



It is exactly as Scott writes in Seeing Like a State.  In Scott's view, the way this government imperative works in the modern state is that it wants to reduce everything to a rational system, like mass production in the industrial corporation.  Only, of course, these days the huge bureaucratic corporation is going out of style.  People talk of rapid-response, flexibility, print-on-demand, etc.  And there is F.A. Hayek who argued that big bureaucracy was inherently flawed because it could not know as much as thousands of workers or millions of consumers.



If the government is not to be all-seeing and all-powerful, then we need to restrict its right to know everything about us.  Our liberal friends talk a lot about "privacy," but they usually restrict it to sexual and political matters.  They don't want the government to know what they are doing in the bedroom or in the activist group.



But liberals don't care about privacy in economic matters.  That's why they support massive centralized systems to control pensions, healthcare, education, and welfare.  That's because liberals are the modern ruling class and that makes them "see like a state."



When conservatives call for strengthening civil society they are calling for reducing the legibility and visibility of individual citizens.  That's why Berger and Neuhaus wrote about "mediating structures" to shelter individuals from the "megastructures."   All they are proposing is to restore the protections that village communes and medieval guilds used to provide.  But the modern state did away with the old mediating structures precisely because they prevented the central government from knowing about individuals and controlling them.



Of course, the horse has left the barn on that, centuries ago.  But it is clear that individuals need to be protected from the power of the state.  What other way is there than a civil society that restricts the visibility of the individual to the state and restricts state control?



We also need to see that the market reduces the need for the state to make the individual visible and legible, because the market economy is a system where economic actors produce and serve and buy and sell.  We don't need to see inside the head of a trader, and we don't need to see inside the boundaries of a corporation.  We just need to be able to trust them.  In the market economy it is perfectly OK to have companies and corporations that throw a veil over many of their internal activities.  But certain facts need to be public, such as income, equity, debt, etc.



Back in the Soviet Union they pretty well destroyed the Russian peasant world in a crazed effort to make it organized and visible and to tax it with grain seizures to pay for its forced industrialization.  But many social activities just cannot flourish if they are organized like a bureaucracy and simplified down to one-size-fits-all.



If we learned anything from the Soviet Union it is that an individual that is completely visible to the state is an individual that is completely in the power of the state.



Conservatives have the answer, of course.  It is that the government welfare state should be broken up and returned to civil society institutions.  Government really shouldn't do anything unless it absolutely requires force: national defense and internal policing.  And when it sticks to that it doesn't need complete visibility and legibility, to know everything about every single individual.



The problem is how to persuade the American people, especially those hooked on "free stuff."  Which is just about all of us.

My Faith in America

When plotting to hoodwink White Snake's husband, after he has unfortunately seen White Snake in her true form, White Snake and Green Snake agree, in Mary Zimmerman's The White Snake, to tell him that he didn't see what he saw.  "Believing is seeing," they say.

So it is with these United States of America.  If you believe that "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" is a good thing then you will look out at America and see that it it good.

Or you could believe that human Life is a disease on this fragile Earth, that Liberty is nothing but selfish individualism, and the Pursuit of Happiness is nothing but feckless hedonism.

The way you look at America depends on how you look at the world.

There are two modern beliefs that dominate men's minds today.  One is the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith.  It argues that, in order to meet our selfish needs, humans must work to satisfy the needs of others.  On this view the "inalienable rights" of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are mild and beneficial, for they urge us to cooperate with our fellow humans, but without the yoke of compulsion.

There is another modern faith; it is the Exploitation theory of the left.  On this view society is irretrievably broken.  The laborer cannot earn the full fruit of his labor because its full value is siphoned off by his employer and only a fraction returned to him in wages.  Workers are therefore coerced into working for others to stave off the pangs of hunger and experience their work as alienation from their true metier.

Notice how these two faiths essentially agree.  If you want to eat, you have to work.  The Invisible Hand idea says that this is a good thing, for it encourages selfish individuals to be social.  The Exploitation idea says it is a bad thing because it forces people into working for others.

So with the American troika of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Human life is a blessing, according to Christians, or a curse, according to environmentalists.  Liberty is a blessing, according to libertarians, or a curse, according to socialists.  The Pursuit of Happiness is all-embracing, according to optimists, or narrowly selfish, according to pessimists.

But we Americans, those of us that believe in American exceptionalism, believe in Life, because that is what living things are for, to live life and produce new life.  We believe in Liberty, because Liberty is creative, expansive, generous and good, while compulsion is cramped, narrow, brutish, and short.  We believe in the Pursuit of Happiness, because that upward, hopeful gaze is the very essence of what it means to be human.

Arthur C. Brooks in The Road to Freedom argues, from modern social science, that the Pursuit of Happiness has two components.  The first is the pursuit of meaningful work and earned success.  Not just any success, for unearned success doesn't make us happy.  The other component is giving.  If you want to be happy then you have to give.  This is not new.  The Methodist creed was: Work all you can, save all you can, give all you can.

Now go back and look at the two modern world views: the Invisible Hand view and the Exploitation view.  What do you think?

Understanding the Intimidation of Justice Roberts

Whether or not Chief Justice Roberts changed his mind about ObamaCare because of liberal media intimidation doesn't change anything.

The fact is that all politics is civil war by other means.  Different groups have different power centers.  When you are fighting the political wars you cannot just do frontal assaults like World War I.

By the end of World War I the Germans figured out how to attack an entrenched line.  You divide up your assault force into small squads, each led by an NCO.  The job of the squads is to find the soft spots in the line, penetrate them, and then call for reinforcements.  You have to hit the enemy where he is weakest.  Otherwise you get defeated.

Same thing goes for conservative politics.  We cannot expect to win with a frontal assault on liberalism in the Supreme Court.  That's because the present ruling class is not a landed ruling class or a business ruling class; it is an educated ruling class.  If the Supreme Court ruled against ObamaCare 5-4 the educated ruling class would combine to utterly destroy the intellectual basis of the ruling.  It wouldn't matter how specious and mendacious the attacks would be.  The conservative court would just get overwhelmed.  And then where would we be?

Whatever the strength of conservatism, it cannot concentrate in the intellectual strongholds of the educated elite.  It has to concentrate elsewhere and then storm the liberal strongholds.

The overriding goal of the conservative movement is to overthrow the current regime of big-government hegemony, the "internal colonialism" of a wise and beneficent Oz that knows better than the people how to organize life in this advanced and complicated world, a world too complex and too bewildering for ordinary people to navigate without expert supervision.  Colonialism is colonialism, whether conducted by the British in India, local strongmen in Africa, or liberals in the United States federal government.

There is a role for experts in our modern society.  But the lesson of the 20th century is that you don't want the experts in an unholy coalition with the politicians.  Why is that?  Because when you build anything, from a building to a social program, you will probably build it wrong and have to change it.  Government is singularly ineffective at responding to problems with timely solutions.  There is a simple reason for this.  Government is force; it can only deal with problems that have got beyond mere disagreement.  It is the agency for imposing solutions, not working them out.

Modern conservatism has build an intellectual system that experiences government as a force that needs to be limited to the problems that really need force, like Commies on a world-wide expansion or single young men on an urban rampage.  But liberals won't listen to us.

So what do we do?

First of all, there is good news on the ideas front. In the last 50 years, many left-wing writers have given us ideas that confirm and validate our conservative instincts.  Horkheimer and Adorno said that the much vaunted Reason of the Enlightenment is a force for domination of Nature and other men.  Juergen Habermas has extended their analysis and called for the development of the person-to-person "lifeworld" of communicative discourse as against the dominative "system" world of instrumental reason.  Now we have professors like James C. Scott taking the ideas of Michel Foucault--originally intended as a critique of bourgeois capitalism--and applying them to "high modernism," the rigid bureaucratic systems of Le Courbusier and Lenin.  We have Jonathan Haidt discussing the various different ways in which moral discourse is developed and how liberals are deficient.  We have the Relational Model of sociality developed by Alan Fiske and the ideas of civil society developed by Lawrence E. Cahoone.  They all show how the bureaucratic centralism of the welfare state is ineffective and fails to conform to mankind's nature of social animals, and they are all ready to blossom when we get into a situation where the Liberal Ascendancy starts to totter.  These thinkers tend to be "esoteric" in the Straussian sense.  They are careful not to offend the educated ruling class, but anyone can take their ideas and apply them directly at the cruelty and injustice of the liberal welfare state.  

Meanwhile we have the conservative movements of resistance.  The notion of "resistance" is another left-wing concept, usually applied to their favorite victims and as often as not used to describe movements that are not movements at all but AstroTurf rent-a-mobs organized by community organizers.  The other day I wrote quickly about three conservative movements of resistance: the pro-life movement, the Second Amendment movement, and the Tea Party.  You will notice that these are all movements that are actively scorned and marginalized by our liberal friends.

But there are other movements of resistance.  There is the home-school movement.  There is the anti-global-warming movement.  What do these movements have in common?  They are all focused in different ways on resisting the centralizing power of the educated ruling class.

A friend once asked why Americans were anti-intellectual.  The answer is that Americans dislike the power of the intellectual ruling class.  They understand that the the intellectual ruling class is a force opposed to them and their way of life.  So they know they must fight it.  Nothing personal, of course..