The Captured Perspective

In a recent article in National Affairs, University of Chicago finance and entrepreneurship professor Luigi Zingales maps out the following distinction between pro-business and pro-market and its relationship to entrepreneurship:

When the government is small and relatively weak, the way to make money is to start a successful private-sector business. But the larger the size and scope of government spending, the easier it is to make money by diverting public resources. Starting a business is difficult and involves a lot of risk — but getting a government favor or contract is easier, and a much safer bet. And so in nations with large and powerful governments, the state tends to find itself at the heart of the economic system, even if that system is relatively capitalist. This tends to confound politics and economics, both in practice and in public perceptions: The larger the share of capitalists who acquire their wealth thanks to their political connections, the greater the perception that capitalism is unfair and corrupt.

In other words, when the government is constrained, but with a pro-market orientation, entrepreneurship can flourish because there is some link having the right idea and the right initiative and market success, however tenuous. In contrast, with greater government involvement, market success is primarily facilitated by government support, thus giving greater weight to having the right connections, having the right financial support, etc.

In the United States, a system which Zingales calls highly pro-market without being pro-business until recently, 1 in 4 American billionaires were self-made in 1996. In contrast, in many other countries with a capitalism mix more pro-business than pro-market, “the wealthiest people tend to accumulate their fortunes in regulated businesses in which government connections are crucial to success… energy, real estate, telecommunications, mining. Success in these businesses often depends more on having the right connections than on having initiative and enterprise.”

Zingales

As of late, I have been thinking a good bit about this idea of systems that enable or constrain entrepreneurship, and its application to specific social sector markets. Take health care as an example. Stripped down to the basics, health care quality is jointly a function of 1) access, and 2) quality of care. Debates on the merits of different systems center on the right or wrong mix of these two factors, with people seeing overall quality by differently weighing one factor over the other. “People can’t get care!” scream those calling for health care reform, to which the opposition says “but we have the highest quality services out there, and our innovation is off the charts.” Other countries are praised for their universal coverage, but criticized for lower quality of care, treatment, and services.

David Brooks recently framed the trade-off as such:

Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.

Apart from the contrast in values, the question still remains how the system enables movement towards (or away) from each of these goals. Put simply, the question remains how each of these systems enables or constrains the emergence of innovation related to the goals of access and/or quality.* For an organization like Partners in Health, who works in Haiti, Peru, Russia, USA, Rwanda, Lesotho,  and Malawi, are there specific aspects of certain markets that allow innovation to flourish over others, and if so, what are these, and towards what end do they allow growth?

Starting with Zingales’ guiding framework (pro-market, pro-business as related to ease of entrepreneurship), in the next post I will attempt to map out some thoughts on what such a framework might mean for entrepreneurship and innovation related to health care access and quality.

* By systems, I mean the mix of government, culture, incentive structure, etc that all might influence the ability of a system to improve in health care access or quality.

“we moderns not only continue to be animals who make stories but also animals who are made by our stories.”

-Christian Smith “Moral, Believing Animals“

In a recent op-ed in the Georgetown Hoya, Professor Patrick Deneen makes the following claims about the personal impact of studying economics:

Much of the explanatory strength of economics rests on a narrow and even unrealistic understanding of human behavior, particularly an understanding of the human creature as a utility-maximizing rational actor. Stripped of conflicting devotions, shorn of history and culture, reduced to a few basic motives (especially fear and greed), economic man became highly analyzable data point, but arguably only insofar as he has ceased to be truly human.

Far from being merely “descriptive,” the basic assumptions of economics – that human beings are acquisitive individual utility-maximizers living in a world of scarcity – deeply shape modern humanity’s view of itself.

Stories and theories do shape us, and they profoundly shape our action by making certain actions more plausible, or certain routes more appealing. Such stories shape what type of work we want to pursue, the priority we give to relationships, what we see as the value of place, or whether we primarily see necessity or limitations in rootedness of various forms. A student who studies political science, or literature, or philosophy might arrive at a different set of assumptions about the ‘goods’ of life than those who study economics. To fit in with a certain guiding narrative, we often homogenize, muting aspects of ourselves which do not as easily cohere.

But if we acknowledge the problems of this, and desire to be ‘authentic’ to something deep in ourselves, how do we live into different narratives, build into our lives a different set of stories?  I deeply believe that such changes only happen when we root ourselves in certain traditions and routines, and cultivate a sense of awareness of the ways in which our actions and stories do not leave us untouched.

Take cell phones as an example. I love having my blackberry, and especially the way in which it adds convenience to my life in being connected with, and connecting with others. But what are my actual physical behaviors with this phone? I constantly check my pocket for emails. I wait patiently for text affirmation, often sending out a note and judging its worth (my worth to others), by the speed and content of their response.

Consider as well the pursuit of self-development in education. How does buying into the notion of building a brand to distinguish oneself on the market shape the way I see and interact with the world. For the past several years, I have been trying to pursue the  right set of activities in high school, the right set of leadership opportunities in college, being at the ‘right school,’  pursuing the ‘right graduate degree at the right institution. And while this has obviously set me up to do interesting things, can I really claim being untouched with regards to what I deem as interesting and worthy of pursuit?

I agree wholeheartedly with the quote from Christian Smith on the way the stories we tell shape us and our understanding of the world. I doubtlessly clap my hands in approval of Deneen’s assertion that certain stories, namely economics, radically simplify the complex and conflicting set of desires that we hold, making us self-improve frameworks that conceivably limit such our ability to see what is worth experiencing in life. But I know from personal experience that ‘ratioal-emotive’ therapical approaches have sometimes fallen short with me. Telling myself to be a better person, or to pursue things that matter, or to be more vulnerable in relationships (or any other number of things), often leaves me feeling the post New Years Resolution of failed goals and similar behavior.

But stories are deeper than words we embody them within. Being different and living different narratives requires rooting oneself not only in certain tales, about also concrete sets of behavior which help cultivate in us a posture towards the world that is deeper than theoretical knowledge. In my previous post on Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” I noted philosopher Jamie Smith’s characterization of humans as needing and being formed by such quasi-litergies. I then brought up one such moment in the book where the father physically pursues keeping his son safe:

He kicked holes in the sand for the

boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat

holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it.

All of this like some ancient anointing.

It is these actions which shape us, these behaviors which orient us desired ends, and cultivate in us a posture towards what matters. These behaviors, these rituals are more forming than reading a book about how ‘parenting is important,’ or conceptually realizing that “love is difficult.’ It is a deeper kind of knowing/feeling which, though potentially spoken or theorized about, must be felt, must be lived, must be embodied in routines. To use McCarthy’s words, we must “construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them,” a breath which acknowledges the transcendence of the everyday, of the profane, of the mundane.

This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating interview with Cormac McCarthy, the author most recently known for his book “No Country for Old Men” made in the award-winning film by the Coen Brothers. Among other things, McCarthy also wrote “The Road,” set for release in film version of November 25th. If you are not familiar with “The Road,” it is a post-apocalypic story of a father and son journeying towards the coast, their only potential place of survival in a world nearly destroyed by some past, yet rarely spoken of cataclysmic act.

The Road is a poignant, heart-wrenching tale.  It pulls out emotion that are severely unpleasant in experience: specifically, the dull sense of loneliness and the profound experience of potential loss. While these are not emotions we actively seek out, it’s fair to say we are better from their experience. Recalling a recent conversation with Krista Tippet of NPR’s “Speaking of Faith,” my good friend Dave expressed that one of the most important things Tippet expressed was the sentiment that we are limiting ourselves when we seek a narrow version of ‘happiness.’ Rather, she suggested that we ought to seek a type of flourishing that encompasses a wider set of emotions and experiences, all which speak to the varied experience of humanity in both its good and bad forms. Cormac pulls you into these moments, highlighting the importance of relationships and the ways in which we often experience them most profoundly with the potential of their loss.

In the interview, McCarthy suggests that the story comes in large part out of his own attachment to his young son. And yet, the love between father and son in the book is different than often portrayed in traditional Hollywood love stories. For example, in The Road, the father and son never explicitly say “I love you.” About this, McCarthy states:

“A lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. I mean just that when I say he’s the co-author of the book. A lot of the things that the kid says are things that John said. John said, “Papa, what would you do if I died?” I said, “I’d want to die, too,” and he says, “So you could be with me?” I said, “Yes, so I could be with you.” Just a conversation than two guys would have.”

Similarly, McCarthy’s complex relationship with religion comes out in the the way his characters wrestle with the notion of god the seeking of transcendence, even while not ‘stating’ religious words, or calling to mind a ‘religious’ book or film. But like the love never stated, religious imagery and themes pervade his work. For example, near the end of The Road, the narrator states that the father, “knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.’” While not traditional religion in the sense of sitting in mass, reciting creeds, or experiencing prayer, there is something spiritual in how the father feels a certain duty to his son’s protection, and acknowledges of the beauty in the world admidst the ugliness of the post-apocalytic setting of the novel.

Cormac’s own religious committment has seemingly adjusted over time, even if it appears his connection to religious orthodoxy was never very very strong. In the interview, speaking about his Irish Catholic upbringing, and religion in his life today, McCarthy summarizes:

I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person.

It seems that the type of spirituality that interests McCarthy is profoundly about an existential commitment to living out love in the world, all the while acknowledging his own impotence in this matter. Cormac, like the father in the novel, feels a certain pull of duty, and desires to see the transcendent in the profane. For McCarthy, this duty and transcendent comes in relationships and his desire to find in narration transcendent relationships in contexts typically narrated devoid of them. This posture towards life commits McCarthy to writing novels that, “take years of your life and drive you to suicide.”

It is this existential relationship to all things religious that ultimately makes McCarthy’s novels so profoundly gripping. He calls up religious questions, but doesn’t feel confident in the traditional institutionalized answers. To use the words of philosopher/ theologian Miroslav Volf, McCarthy is reacting against the ‘thin’ view of religion that often rely on cliches, acknowledging the importance of a thick meaningful framework, all the while simultanously doubting its existence.

But isn’t this in itself a TYPE of thick religious understanding, even if not orthodox in the traditional sense? In a review of the book, philosopher Jamie K.A. Smith weaves together the actual practices of father and son and what the mean for the characters, ultimately suggesting that they participate in a form of world-building through the nearly litergical nature of their interaction. Smith writes that, “the book is suffused with ritual and thus a kind of sacramentality. Quasi-liturgies both make and hold together the remnants of a “world” for father and son.” For two men depending on each other in a severely broken world, they needed a way to construct meaning, and live into a ‘reality’ not yet present. Smith highlights one such moment of life re-narration, recast in liturgical form:

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not

topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the

boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat

holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it.

All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the

forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out

of the air and breathe upon them

Perhaps it is such ‘quasi-liturgies’ that we, as the religious and non-religious alike, need more than anything.

I have a good friend who is doing his final interview for this year’s Rhodes scholarship next week. The other day over coffee, he told me that one of last year’s final interview questions was ‘what is beauty?” Imagine answering that on the fly, in front of 7 former Rhodes Scholar, all with a full-ride to Oxford on the line…

Given the recent dabbling into the philosophical/ existential on this blog, I want to take this question a step further… specifically, what makes for a beautiful life? What does it mean to be a beautiful person?

Though it is a hard question conceptually, I think we often know beauty of this type when we see it, don’t we? We know people whose lives seem worth living, who we want to know better and be around? Isn’t this is some sense a beautiful life?

At the core, maybe beauty is constructing, finding, and building a story with one’s life, a story worthy of the title beautiful. The late French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote: “The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.” For example, is it not beautiful when we see someone hop out of the normal logic of give and take, or transaction and transaction costs, to pursue something virtuous, however defined. Is that not a beautiful life? As Wendell Berry writes: “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” Maybe it is those narrative arcs that give us potential of beauty.

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Given this discussion, it’s interesting to look at the forthcoming NY Times Magazine article on the rise of Megan Fox. In this profile, Laura Hirschberg chronicles the following quotes of the sex-symbol of Transformers fame:

“When I sit down to talk to men’s magazines, there’s a certain character that I play. She’s not fully fleshed out — she doesn’t have her own name — but she shows up to do men’s-magazine interviews. There’s something so ridiculous about always being in your underwear in those magazines, and you know the interview is going to run opposite those pictures. So, there’s a character that talks to all of them.”

“All women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. You’re sold, and it’s based on sex. That’s O.K., if you know how to use it.” Fox paused. “It’s been a crazy year. I’ve learned that being a celebrity is like being a sacrificial lamb. At some point, no matter how high the pedestal that they put you on, they’re going to tear you down. And I created a character as an offering for the sacrifice. I’m not willing to give my true self up. It’s a testament to my real personality that I would go so far as to make up another personality to give to the world. The reality is, I’m hidden amongst all the insanity. Nobody can find me.”

Fox is clearly living out a narrative which plays to the masses, but one that she clearly is aware lacks a certain kind of beauty worth pursue whole-heartedly (ironic given the ‘beauty’ these magazines celebrate). The rest of the article goes onto show how Fox’s real life constrasts with the images she plays in the magazines (she is relatively mild, she has a long-term boyfriend, etc.). This is a distinction Fox believes she can maintain as seen by the final quote, feeling
“nobody can find (her),” this true self.

I can’t help but wondering whether is it really possible to forever remain distant from the stories we live in, from the world-views we swim deep within? In our own lives, do the roles we play and the narratives we buy into leave some type of lasting imprint on our lives? If these stories are not worthy of a beautiful existence, are we are clearly able to shake them off when we want to pursue such ends?

*               *               *

My favorite song on The National’s 2007 “Boxer” album is Fake Empire. The song ends with the following lyrics:

Turn the light out say goodnight
no thinking for a little while
lets not try to figure out everything at once
It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

I do not know what the artists were intending lyrically with this song, but I read it as an indictment of the way we often live half-heartedly with stories not worth living for. With our actions, we buy into stories that we only half-heartedly believe, because we think they are the stories that matter to others. They are stories whic we fear, in the depths of our souls and the in the moments of profound vulnerability, do not hold the promise that we ascribe to them. We’re half-awake in fake empires…

It’s an indictment worth letting reverberate deep and long if we desire living lives of beauty.

Lately, I have thinking a good bit about the relationship between the words we speak and the realities we attempt to describe. Not being a trained philosopher, I am not really interested in delving into whether we can be accurate in describing the look of a chair, or the movement of a small animal; rather, I am interested in understanding the way which this dilemma affects our lived experience with complicated and ambiguous realities. So, before you click onto ESPN.com because of having just witnessed the most boring opening paragraph of a blog post EVER, try staying with me for a bit through two more concrete examples.

Let’s start with something like religion, or really any sort of ideological commitment. This weekend, I listened to an old interview on National Public Radio with the late religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan. Pelikan is famous in history circles for his work on religious creeds, and the way such documents have encapsulated religion traditions over the generations. Specifically, he chronicles the way in which religious creeds in the Christian tradition arose historically (often through argumentation, and making a statement in contrast to another interpretation), and the relationship these have to the faith of the modern believer. This relationship can become a point of existential tension for the modern religion person when there are significant differences in understanding across time. For example, while the writers of the creed had a clear three tiered view of the universe where one can descend into hell, and ascended into heaven, much like “a lift in a small building,” the modern believer (and unbeliever) often finds this notion confusing at best, and implausible at worst. So how does this person reconcile their own personal feelings with the historical nature of creeds that they consider and recite at mass or some religious service? How does one reconcile the personal existential faith of a sunday afternoon with friends and the historical rigid faith of orthodoxy?

Or consider something like love. What does it mean to say you love someone, especially when ‘feelings’ and ‘sentiments’ can be hot and cold, hitting high and low points? Imagine an old married couple and the way their relationship and feelings have changed over the course of their committment. Is love in this relationship infatuation in the same way that it was when they first laid eyes on each other? And is it inauthentic for this couple to say “i love you” when they are frustrated with the personality traits of the person they chose to spend their life with, or upset at a set of actions this person portrayed? Was it inauthentic in earlier times?
In both cases, there is a distinct difference between one’s feeling at specific moments, and the limited supply of words which capture their feelings. What does one do in these situations? The person of faith must either move long in reciting this statement, or they could not state their creed, move away from tradition, and attempt to forge their own existential path forward. Similarly for the couple, they must either state their love and feel the tension, or state the feeling as it is at the moment (“my love is contingent on your being a certain way”).

The interview with Pelikan rang home on this dilemma range true to me for several reasons, but I want to address two in particular. First, sometimes asserting something is more about showing your commitment and belonging to a certain community, or a certain person, than it is about perfectly accurately describing one’s sentiments. So for the person of faith, reciting the creed is not so much as asserting what they think at one specific moment in time (though it could be this), but rather about aligning oneself with a complicated community, deep tradition, and specific way of being, even when there is dissonance. And for the lover, asserting love is about rehashing a commitment, and speaking to something that ideally transcends the conditionality which we most easily fall into when living. In making such statements, we are compelled to moving beyond statements which hedge feeling and belief. This is the ‘absurd‘ at the core of faith for Kierkegaard, a point which one should note does not pull him away from such tradition even given some unorthodox interpretation. On the love front, we resonate with love stories in their assertion of (implausible, improbably, beautiful) statements such as “I will love you no matter how you look someday, or how you change,” even if we struggle with these sentiments ourself. Perhaps we say these things because we believe in the power of language to transform, and its formative role in our own dispositions. The couple grows in love by asserting it. The person grows in faith by aligning himself with a community and an (absurd?) statement of belief.

The second clear take away from Pelikan’s interview is that certain things require an enmeshing in words, no matter how limited that language is. Saint Augustine, at the end of his long treatise on the foundation of the trinity and its relationship to the human soul, states “we have said this, not in order to say something, but in order not to remain all together silent.” Similarly, with love, though it brings up potentially inaccurate connotations at both deep (unconditional commitment) and shallow levels (infatuation), in some ways it is the only way two people can assert their feelings, and assert their commitment. And though there is risk and vulnerability in such statements (what if I am wrong, what if I am not ready, isn’t there something between like and love), they must say something so that they do not remain silent, and that they can forge a path to move forward in vulnerability.

In this way, both situations bespeak to the acute concern of people in our generation of the ‘vulnerability’ and felt ‘inauthenticity’ by a lack of alignment between language and reality. It is a tendency which draws us to the sciences and makes us uncomfortable (or uncertain) with the way in which poetry can speak of truth. This is not to say that when there is enough of a misalignment we shouldn’t move away from such traditions (for the person that loses faith) or such relationships (for the person who falls out of love), but reality is sometimes complicated and thus requires traversing ambiguity, and living with the risks involved even if a lack of perfect correspondence. I think CS Lewis said it best on the role of vulnerability in living and loving in the following quote:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

Language, though limited, is all we have, and as such it stands as the most frightening and beautiful tool we could possibly hold.

David Brooks recent op-ed in the NYTimes is provocative in arguing for a link between the growth of text-messaging and the decline of committed love. Specifically:

Technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.

People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.

The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.

It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.

A few bloggers have taken issue with Brook’s analysis. Matthew Yglesias writes that love really hasn’t changed that much, and in the ways it has changed has not necessarily been for the worse (cue reference to love and relationship in Mad Men). He also cites the attached visual on the growth of cell-phone use and sarcastically points to the absurdity of arguing for a direct relationship between love’s decline and technological growth (0 bad relationships -> 95% over the last 15 years?).

Ezra Klein takes a different rebuttal approach in pointing to how technology played a role in the development of a committed relationship with his current girlfriend:

Columns like Brooks’s irk me because they demean not only my lived experiences, but those of everyone I know. To offer a slightly more modern rebuttal, Sunday was my one-year anniversary with my girlfriend. A bit more than a year ago, we first met, the sort of short encounter that could easily have slipped by without follow-up. A year and a week ago, she sent me a friend request on Facebook, which makes it easy to reach out after chance meetings. A year and five days ago, we were sending tentative jokes back-and-forth. A year and four days ago, I was steeling myself to step things up to instant messages. A year and three days ago, we were both watching the “Iron Chef” offal episode, and IMing offal puns back-and-forth, which led to our first date. A year ago today, I was anxiously waiting to leave the office for our second date.

In general, I like Brook’s article, but don’t have to take it the whole way to see its general point. Technology does allow us to connect with a greater quantity of people (send out mass twitters, be followed by a multitude of people on facebook, text multiple people at the same time), but along with such potential comes less accountability between our digital profile and the actual way we interact with people. Technologies like texting and twitter create a potential to navigate multiple budding relationships at once in a way that was more difficult in previous years.

At the same time, taking Yglesias’ point the actual correspondence between technology and relational decline will obviously not be linear, and to Klein’s point, technology is somewhat neutral in that it might be used for either good or bad (see: Einstein’s role in the development of nuclear technology…)

The kernel of truth in Brook’s article is his assertion that cultivating a posture of openness to options, in this case enabled by technology, can be detrimental to investing in a particular person. Think of it with careers… leaving oneself open to multiple options is a great hedge strategy, but at a certain point one has to open a specific door, move through it at the expense of others, with all the risk that comes along with such choice. Brooks is right that these technologies allow people to hedge in relationships for a longer period of time. In reality, this might be a good thing seen by lower rates of divorce for people who marry later. Nevertheless, its more than fair to ask whether hedge strategies are ineffective for building commitment once one is in a relationship, and whether such approaches carry-on with inertia from singleness to the time when one is in a relationship. In other words, can the guy who spends years texting to hedge in the relational market quickly drop such habits when he enters into a committed relationship?

ADDENDUM- For the nerds among us, there might be a few questions that would be relevant to this debate from a sociological perspective:

1. Does the availability of texting lead to increased a) hedging strategies/ behavior, and/or b) hedging mentality in relationships
2. Do hedging strategies prior to relationships correspond with greater hedging mentality once in a relationship (e.g. does this mentality hold with inertia)?
3. Does a hedging mentality negatively influence relationship development/ lead to destructive relationship outcomes (e.g. divorce)?