An unsentimental education

Organizing the unaligned and their theories of inequality.

Gustave Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education.”

I’ve spent much of my past decade as a journalist as a organizer, trying to deal with collective problems no one can solve on their own: first, persuading other journalists to unionize across many newsrooms; more recently, persuading the news world and its friends to collaborate on public subsidies or market reforms to support news production.

My experiences haven’t always been positive. But they’ve always been educational, particularly about human nature: when we cooperate, and when we don’t.

For any given collective problem, the first question is whether it makes sense to cooperate at all. This is a competitive world. We compete for jobs, attention, social status, market share, philanthropic funding, etc. Dealing with other people can be hard and annoying, and it’s not always a given that cooperation will pan out. An improved outcome seems more predictable if you work harder, network more, draw favorable attention to yourself, undermine competitors, so on. Aligned selfishness has its collective uses, as Adam Smith first deduced: Competition is often destructive, wasteful and unfair, but also creates abundances with surprisingly broadly distributed benefits. This is the premise of our entire economic order.

The other alternative to cooperation in response to a problem is to just quit. Change careers, leave the industry, move to another city, so forth. The real opposite of collaboration isn’t even competition, it’s exit. (See: Hirschman, Albert O.) Competitors and cooperators alike are putting in an effort; quitters think “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.” What’s more, competitors facing failure are often likelier to quit than to cooperate.

So far, this account of human behavior sounds like game theory, a story of people making rational tradeoffs on a dry-erase board to maximize outcomes. If we aren’t cooperating when it seems like we ought to, perhaps you can persuade and win through clearer diagramming: Explain your premises, show the paths and possible outcomes, and logically demonstrate that cooperation is the most rational choice. Voila. People will use their brains and see it’s better to work together. All you need to do is write the manifesto, make the speech, and the masses will follow.

Ha ha, okay.

One of the first mistakes of a novice organizer is to assume people are ignorant and just need to be cajoled into joining arms for the beautiful or rational cause. Although people can be misinformed, tired, and distracted, they have spent their entire lives calculating whether to compete, collaborate or quit when facing one of a million problems. Accordingly, people tend to have well honed bullshit detectors located somewhere in the deep recesses of the gut. People are well aware of what their own problems are. They have sharp instincts for when a solution for those problems might be harder or riskier than it sounds. After all, if the fix was so easy, the problem would have stopped existing a while ago. (Problems, like countries and peoples, have their own irrevocable and contradictory histories.)

That’s why pros know your single most important organizing tool isn’t your mouth but your ears. The most effective organizers get organized by the people they set out to organize.

The more challenging problem is intellectual, moral, emotional: Everyone lives under a theory of inequality, an invisible constitution by which financial inequities are justified or adjudicated.

People aren’t just selfish utility-maximizers. They care about where they stand in relation to others: up, down, equal. When invited to think about the problem collectively, they care tremendously about whether distributions are just. Seekers of justice will make sacrifices even when it’s not convenient. But this pursuit of justice is always contextual, prismatic and not always predictable.

High earning members of a trade union will, from time to time, choose to forgo pay and go on strike for a contract that will disproportionately benefit much lower-profile coworkers. Having learned about their peers’ struggles, their natural intolerance of injustice has been aroused, and they answered the call to do something heroic, not just for this generation but the next. The sense not just of reciprocity but solidarity can create an emotional depth inaccessible in most other settings of modern life.

But in those other contexts, if people think a counterparty will get a reward they shouldn’t, they’ll happily punish the counterparty as well as themselves — because punishing a peer has become more important than personally benefiting. Take the classic ultimatum game:

People react strongly when they are victims of inequity, and often protest or incur costs to reduce inequity within partnerships. Reactions to inequity are frequently studied using the ultimatum game, a standard tool for testing fairness and inequity aversion in empirical studies and in theoretical models. The ultimatum game is simple: a proposer offers a division of a sum of money to a responder. If the responder accepts, then the money is divided as offered. If responder rejects it, neither receives money. Standard economic theory predicts that responders will accept any non-zero amount, and proposers will offer the minimum non-zero amount. However, this result is not typical in any society studied. Instead, responders often reject low offers, and proposers offer considerably more than the minimum. This striking divergence from game-theoretical predictions is puzzling, and is often taken as evidence for humans’ natural sense of fairness.

Cooperation, in other words, often requires an agreement on a theory of inequality. But unlike the ultimatum game, the players don’t both start from zero: Many people struggle with agreement in an increasingly unequal world, especially in the absence of a common enemy. There are brilliant exceptions. Futures are built with these exceptions.

When you can’t agree on shared assumptions, you can still proceed on shared interests, provided there’s the presence of a democratic pragmatism about the need for everybody to just slog it over this next hump. Progress can involve papering over the irreconcilable differences within an unstable coalition; a kind of vagueness needs to set in, a benevolent mist for mutual misunderstanding, often abetted by disposable buzzwords (“abundance,” “affordability”).

Nothing new about this dynamic. This week I read Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education,” set amid the ferment of the French revolution of 1848, which colorfully depicted one effort to canvass the factions of Paris:

They visited them, or nearly all, the red and the blue, the furious and the tranquil, the puritanical and the licentious, the mystical and the intemperate, those that had voted for the death of kings, and those in which the frauds in the grocery trade had been denounced: and everywhere the tenants cursed the landlords; the smock was full of spite against the tailcoat; and the rich conspired against the poor. Many wanted compensation on the ground that they had formerly been martyrs of the police; others appealed for money in order to carry out certain inventions, or else there were plans of phalansteria, projects for village bazaars, systems of universal happiness; then, here and there a flash of genius amid these clouds of folly, sudden as splashes, the law formulated by an oath, and flowers of eloquence on the lips of some soldier-boy, with a shoulder-belt strapped over his bare, shirtless chest. … On the pretext of good sense, it was desirable to be always criticizing the lawyers, and to make use as often as possible of these expressions: “To carry one’s stone to the building,” “social problem,” “workshop.”

Though France is maybe a bad example. Failing to make one republic, they made another, and another, and another…