The Ruminathans

What shape should you give your life: Single-minded, uncompromising dedication to a calling or dabbling in several areas at a slightly-above-average level?

My last Ruminathan began discussing the ethics of the division of labor, raising the same question, but from the point of view what we owe each other. Provisionally, I gave the pat answer: Specializing allows us to be more productive, giving us all a better chance of meeting our needs and desires as long as everyone plays by certain rules. The pat answer doesn’t do it for me, but that is another subject for another Ruminathan. In the meantime, I am interested in the same question from the perspective of choosing the good life.

At my age, I have pretty much placed my bets on dabbling. But it’s still a burning question as I raise my children. They will, of course, choose however they choose. But I can help them recognize that it is a choice.

There are different ways to specialize. The workers in Adam Smith’s nail factory divided up the nail-production steps, and by specializing, they became more productive. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that specialization always involves the separation into simpler and simpler tasks that require less and less skill. That kind of specialization can lead to productivity gains. But it also leads to the worst kind of drudgery. If that were the only variety of specialization it would clearly be a bad choice, offering neither intrinsic rewards, nor good pay, nor job security. We wouldn’t choose that specialization. We’d have to be forced into it by circumstance, as many have been and are forced.

That is one of the most powerful ethical arguments against a Social Grand Bargain built on a relentless division of labor. Whether that argument has been defanged by outsourcing drudgery to machines and programs is an important question that I won’t pursue for now.

But what about the “interesting” specializations, the ones that take years to develop, that involve a winnowing, both of contenders, and of the individual contender’s habits? Where – even when mastery is achieved – you have to spend an enormous amount of time just to maintain your level, never mind hone your skills further. Where you truly have to sacrifice at the altar of your dream. Professional musicians and athletes are examples, of course, but the same goes for most creative work, and wherever commanding a vast and evolving body of knowledge is essential. Is the single-minded pursuit of these specializations a good choice in the game of life?

I’m not concerned with recognition per se. And in any case, recognition and remuneration will not occur until after you’ve made your choice. Probably long after. I’m concerned with what questions will haunt life’s second half, after the die has been cast. And I don’t believe the only important questions are “If I had taken the other path, would I have received more recognition? Would I be wealthier?”

Nor am I concerned with “happiness,” whatever that may be. Maybe the best way to frame the question is: “Assuming that we have only one life to live, did I make the most of mine?” 

You might think natural talent plays a role in the decision. But it’s not like we can measure raw talent reliably before we put in the hours. In winner-take-all fields, you probably need both exceptional talent and practice, yet there are many fields where you can make a living on an average talent endowment, provided you put your nose to the grindstone. And then, if you don’t make it to the very top of your field, you may always have to ask yourself if it’s because you’re missing that secret sauce or because you could have devoted another half-hour a day to your calling: You may never know for certain that you are truly talented, to which “imposter syndrome” testifies. So the question of whether or not you have talent is separate from what shape you choose to give your life.

And of course, there are people who achieve excellence in more than one area. My own favorite is an astrophysicist and historian/practitioner of stereophotography who is also a musician of some repute. Often, these Renaissance people attribute their success in each to cross-pollination between their interests. But that probably just means the lucky bastards were endowed with many talents and can dabble at a superior level. The question remains: Would they lead a more fulfilled life if they pursued a single calling?

As an inveterate dabbler, I can always rationalize some ways to recommend the dabbling way of life: Single-mindedness is, in any event, always a matter of degree. Some time every day needs to be devoted to needs up and down Maslow’s hierarchy. But for the single-minded, any individual indulgence – the carefully prepared meal instead of the scarfed-down takeout, the late night with friends followed by the unproductive, hungover morning, the palette-cleansing fantasy novel read instead of slogging through Kant in the original – has to be not just a guilty, but a remorseful pleasure. At least from my outside dabbler’s perspective, it seems that the single-minded pursuit of a calling can’t help but overlay everyday joys with anxiety. 

Or maybe it’s the very theft of those moments that renders them truly exquisite in a way that a dabbler can never appreciate?

What’s for sure is that our Social Grand Bargain exerts pressure to specialize, so it’s at least possible that the voice inside you telling you to pursue a calling is nothing other than that social pressure, internalized. Then the persuasive force of that call is grounded in the argument that we owe it to each other to specialize: Single-minded specialists are the ones who cooperate fully in the social game, devoting all their energies to the domain in which they are the most productive. Dabblers are exploiters who fritter away their energy in less productive ways, while enjoying the surpluses produced by the specialists. If we buy that argument, and if we believe that participating in a society – in the sense of living according to its rules and expectations – is at least a necessary condition for the good life, then maybe specialization is the way to go. But those are very big ifs.

What if we’d all live fuller lives if we made music ourselves, even if we sing out of key; if we spent more time cooking, even if we boil noodles into a soggy mess; if we told each other stories, even if they aren’t as epic and plot-twisty as Breaking Bad; and if we put our kids in childcare for half a day while we work half a day at any old job, instead of paying someone to take care of them all day while we pursue a high-powered career?

A colleague of mine just announced he is leaving his current job to go to SpaceX, having dreamed all his life of working in space exploration. Pursuing his dreams involves uprooting his family and moving halfway across a continent. His is a choice I’d make very reluctantly, but it raises the question: Do I have a “dream” at whose altar I’d make that sacrifice? Does the good life require that intensity of worship?

Having written this, I admit I’m no closer to a conclusive answer. I may return to the question in a future Ruminathan, but I feel like I need to go back and read Kierkegaard first. And what dabbler has time for that?

My main preoccupation for several years has been the question “why is it possible to earn money for no other reason other than already having more than you need in the first place?” I’m not satisfied with the standard stories, and that is what motivated the Ruminathans. But lately, I have been thinking about another element of the way we’ve organized our economic relations: the division of labor.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations opens with his famous description of a nail factory. Its workers are collectively more productive when they split up the steps than they would be if each worker took a nail through the whole process, from beginning to end. By specializing in just one step, a worker can become enormously productive at it, and if the collective work of specialists is well-organized, a factory of ten specialists produces many more nails than ten generalists working individually.

As at the nail factor, so in society. Collectively, so the story goes, we are much more productive and much better at meeting our individual needs if we specialize rather than trying to live autarkically. Of course, at the nail factory, it is somebody’s specialized skill to design and manage the overall production process. While that may work at the scale of nail mass production, no single person can coordinate the specialized contributions of teeming billions. Luckily, just a few basic rules can generate self-organization in complex systems, as long those basic rules are allowed to operate uninhibited. Although some individuals may not be able to meet their needs perfectly under those rules, the emergent self-organizing system meets individual needs better than the two alternatives: everyone living autarkically, or the central organization of the workflow of billions of specialists. The all-important rule is simply that each person should maximize their “utility” where utility is the aggregation of an individual’s preferences. And, according to some, this rule just happens to coincide with our natural inclinations.

In fact, even if those aren’t our inclinations and we set others’ utility above our own, according to this view, we should still follow the basic rule, even though it appears selfish. Two reasons: a) applying the rule is what allows self-organization to work, and b) we’re usually pretty clueless about others’ utility anyway, and we should let people just work things out for themselves. The latter will ring true for any couple who has ever tried to agree on what movie to watch when both partners try to put the other’s wishes above their own.

That’s the summary of the argument for free markets. Even shorter: We’re more productive when we specialize, but then we need to coordinate, and the best way to coordinate is to follow a few simple rules that allow self-organization to emerge in a complex system.

Put in terms of first great question of ethics (“What do we owe each other?”): We owe each other to specialize ever deeper, getting more and more productive so that we can meet everyone’s needs better, collectively. But by specializing, we throw ourselves at each other’s mercy: Giving up the ability to meet our needs on our own is a big risk. To manage that risk we also owe it to each other to put systems in place to ensure that everyone holds up their part of the bargain and that, amidst all this specializing, we don’t leave big gaps in the supply chain.

That is society’s Grand Bargain. We don’t individually find food, water, and shelter. We break down delivery of goods into ever longer and more ramified supply chains, let prices fluctuate freely in order to signal what stuff we need more of and what we need less of, and hope for the best.

We don’t just outsource our provisioning of water, food, and shelter. To focus on that one little sliver of the Great Supply Chain we actually get good at, we need to clear our schedule: We send our children to childcare and education specialists, pay cleaning specialists (trash collectors at least, if not housekeepers), and let restaurants and consumer goods companies take on food preparation. Rather than make music and tell stories ourselves, we pay specialists to do so for us. After all, by specializing they get much better at making music and movies than we ever could.

So much for the division of labor and the first great question of ethics. I’m not satisfied with this story, but that’s a larger topic worthy of many a Ruminathan. In the meantime, what has caught my conscious attention in the last few months is the second great question of ethics: “What is the good life?” Does focusing on one thing and doing it extremely well constitute a life well-lived? I know how I have chosen to live my life, and in the “About the Author” sidebar you can see that I have resisted specialization. But did I choose well?

A future Ruminathan will explore that question. One thing is for sure: I won’t settle quickly for a flabby “do whatever works for you”-type answer. That is the last refuge after trying like hell to find the good, the beautiful, and the true.

For most of us, the way we communicate with each other is where we make our true moral choices.

Ink has been spilled, pixels coded, and stone tablets chiseled about the right and wrong of sending signals. Knowingly asserting falsehoods (aka lying) is usually frowned upon. Formulas of courtesy – please, thank you, how are you, have a nice day, etc. – are recommended.

Less has been said about the ethics of receiving. When it comes to my responsibilities as a receiver, I try to live by this rule:

Attribute to others the same motives that you wish others would attribute to you.

This is, of course, similar to the Golden Rule, as well as to the Principles of Charity and Humanity, but this formulation focuses on motives or “intentions” or whatever you prefer to call them.

It goes without saying that, a lot of the time when I assume the best motives in others, I will be fooling myself. And if I know that I am, why should I?

The first reason is humility: recognizing the limits of knowledge. It’s a simple fact I that we rarely know our own motivations. Nor can we figure out which of our many and conflicting motivations provoked us into action. If our own minds are opaque to us, how can we possibly read others’ minds? At the very least, we need to refrain from guessing at people’s motivations. But why not leave it at that? Why go a step beyond and attribute motivations we would endorse, the ones we consider right and proper?

When it comes to sending signals, we can convey truth or falsehood, or something in between. A falsehood can be slander, but it can also be a white lie, or just an empty nothing to signal friendship. On the flipside, a truth can convey helpful information but can also be wielded to belittle or sow discord. How we interpret the sender’s intentions determines how we judge their actions as right or wrong, and ultimately their character as nice/not nice, good/evil, friend/foe.

Foes are people from whom we have to protect ourselves. Self-defense is a motivation that permits actions normally considered unsavory. In the playing-field of the everyday, I’m not talking about actions like physical violence. I’m talking about the ordinary negotiations we call economics and politics. So we’re discourteous to cold-calling salespeople we believe are trying to sell us snake oil. We are cagey to people who we think are purposefully misleading us. We ignore and insult people whose political views we interpret as personal attacks. And of course, our reactions lead to spiraling communicative warfare and a breakdown of trust and civil discourse.

Hand-wringing about the disintegration of civil discourse is easy and trite. What can we do about it? My answer is the Golden Rule of Motivation. It sets a limit on what I will permit myself to say and do. If I recognize my counter-party’s motives as good, I cannot easily appeal to a need to defend myself, and therefore I limit the range of behaviors I permit myself. My charitable interpretation on the receiving end of communication interrupts the spiral of bad communicative behavior.

We don’t need to attribute good motives blindly. If someone tells me he means to harm me, I do him the courtesy of believing him. In fact, that’s actually an application of the principle: Taking what others tell us about their intentions at face value means to assume they have no desire to mislead us.

What does the Golden Rule of Motivation look like in real life? Here are some examples:

• When your favorite tree-hugger collects petitions to block further development in your neighborhood, don’t assume she’s mounted a high horse the better to look down on you. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. Assume it isn’t and that instead she’s trying to maintain local property values. See what conversations that opens up. 
• When your favorite abortion-opponent expresses his position, don’t attribute it to his desire to control women’s bodies. He may have such a desire, but he may not and instead genuinely believe that abortion is the taking of innocent life. So assume the latter, and observe how that shapes your interactions with him.
• When you read a blog whose author strikes you as an insufferable mansplainer, assume instead that he’s just a poor lonely soul desperately trying to find connection, any connection… Well, you get the idea.

Here’s a fun exercise: Read critical public opinion pieces closely and see how often arguments and criticisms are not framed in terms of what the critique’s target said or did, but in terms of motives attributed to her. Energy companies advertising their first steps towards sustainability are accused of greenwashing. Politicians are accused of seeking electoral advantage over pursuit of the public good. Activists are just attention-seekers.

The point isn’t that these judgments of motive are necessarily incorrect. The point is that we cannot know one way or another and that the target of the criticism my not know her own motives just as we rarely fully understand ours. In the face of this uncertainty, the way to pursue win-win solutions and the least awful win-lose solutions is to take a pragmatic leap of faith: Attribute to others the same motives that you wish others would attribute to you.

A lot of moral philosophy is focused on edge cases: where the everyday give-and-take between people has broken down. Classic examples are the Trolley problems or ticking time-bomb scenarios. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. You want to explore the limits of ethical theories just as it makes sense to start a puzzle at the corners and edges.

But I’m more interested in the banal stuff in the middle. The stuff we actually apply in marriage, family, and work. I’m interested in ways to navigate daily life, not only because that’s what I actually do – as opposed to interrogating terrorists – but because I think that’s the useful model for what we do in larger communities that are at peace, when the basic rules of engagement are in place and generally accepted. In politics and in economics, in other words.

Conflict erupts in everyday situations all the time, but we don’t immediately resort to violence to sort it out. We try to find win-win solutions where all parties are happy with the outcome. That’s economics. When we can’t find win-win solutions we sort out who wins and who loses using a pre-defined set of rules. That’s politics.

Finding win-win solutions, finding the least awful win-lose solution… that happens through negotiation. Through communication. So the everyday playing field of right and wrong, good and evil, is how we converse with each other.

The ethics of negotiation is an ongoing preoccupation of mine: I aim to talk about it, but just as much to practice it in how I write. A blog, like any published writing, is part of our social negotiation.

Obviously, there are more ways to communicate than speaking, writing, and body language. Our actions also send signals. But right and wrong behavior is not just about what signals we choose to send and how we choose to send them. It is also about how we choose to receive them. An upcoming post will be about our responsibilities on the receiving end.

Economics is about values, and values are about economics. 

When I say I value something, I mean that it is important to me, more important than something else. When faced with a choice I would choose the valued thing over some other thing. That is equally true of pizzas and ideas. When I’m hungry, I part with a few slips of green paper to get a pizza: the pizza is more valuable to me than the green paper. If I say “I live for my family” that means that, given the opportunity of a high-powered job in a different city, I would turn it down if I believed it would disrupt my family life. 

Economics is the systematic study of what people value: An economist observes the tradeoffs people make and concludes something about what they value, individually or in aggregate. 

But economists don’t just observe from an external, privileged vantage point, like a biologist observing what goes on in a Petri dish. And not only because economists are economic actors themselves. We learn what is valuable from each other. We influence each other’s values. The more aware we are of what tradeoffs other people are making the more we shape our own choices accordingly, whether to conform to social expectations or to rebel against them. As the economist reports out her findings to the world she shapes the world she observes.  

This is all the more true when it comes to the values that govern our choices about the rules of the game, the game of exchanging and sharing resources with each other to achieve our goals. Economists observe the game and its rules, but their observations influence how we perceive the game and what values we bring to it. That reshapes the game.

When economists build a model on the assumption that more of something is always better – that having six scoops of ice cream is always better than having just five, even if only marginally so – then that assumption creeps into our belief system through a thousand different channels. University professors pass that idea on to their students, who become teachers, journalists, legislative aides, parents, who pass that simple idea on in turn. The self-reinforcing loop embeds the idea deeply in our culture. Then behavioral economists can go out into the field and survey what people believe and find confirmation for the model they learned in Econ 101.

Never mind that the eight scoop makes you vomit and the 13th can put you off ice cream for a lifetime.

Do economists make markets? Yes, they do. And their observations shape the values they observe. Economics is world of irony and self-fulfilling prophecy. 

---

“Capitalism” is shorthand for a whole cluster of ideas about how to organize our economic relations. The free market is one of those ideas. But what puts the “capital” in capitalism? What does it mean to own something called capital and why is earning a capital return right and proper? Or bluntly:

Why is it possible to earn money simply by having more than you need in the first place? 

Capitalism’s detractors and its defenders have yet to come up with an answer that I find convincing. I want a clear answer before committing to capitalism as the solution framework for the 21st century’s problems, or kicking it to the curb. 

We’ve hit a global impasse as we muddle through a host of issues, from inequality to the tension between economic development and environmental preservation. These disagreements – not to mention the toxicity with which we express them – have many causes. But one of the biggest problems is that we’re talking past each other. Whether we’re fans or haters of the capitalist status quo, none of us really understands it.  

This blog is for all those who share my desire to understand.