I see a society characterized by inequality of wealth, power, privilege, opportunity, and respect.
I see a society where we do not routinely have the ability to consent to things that effect us, where decisions are made for us and through non-participatory chanels. Instead of being left alone to do whatever we want, as long as we’re not hurting anyone, formal and informal rules we did not choose ourselves continuously constrain our behavior.
I see a society where we end up with coordination failure after coordination failure - where we make choices that are best for us in the moment, but these choices aggregate to effects none of us would have chosen, like environmental degredation.
I see a society where, due to inequality of power, some of us are insulated from the costs of our actions, making it impossible for us to make fully informed decisions. On a micro level, affluent people do not feel the majority of environmental costs of their actions and pollute more than they would most likely choose to do if they had to feel those costs. On a macro level, the American people have not yet felt the costs of the war in Iraq, and this keeps many people in this country from feeling a push to oppose the war.
By the same logic, this is a world where some people are able to appropriate the benefits produced through the actions of others – where poor farmers in Bangladesh are not rewarded for preserving bio-diversity, where poor people working in factories create many times the value of their wages in goods that they can not afford.
I was taught, and teach others in turn, that these two things make for a lack of justice – justice is when we experience the benefits and costs of our own actions.
I see a world where caring labor is taken for granted and undermined by our economic system, even though we all need to be cared for, to different degrees at different points in our lives.
I see a world where people are continuously making choices, and updating their preferences and understanding of the world based on the results of those choices, in a complex institutional environment that we did not ourselves create – and I see a co-evolutionary process where the institutions influence individuals, and individuals influence the institutions, over and over again.
I see these things because my eyes were opened by brilliant professors, especially by Jim Boyce (inequality), Sam Bowles (coevolutionary processes and coordination failures), and Nancy Folbre (the importance of caring labor). My eyes were also opened by Kent Klitgaard and Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo, professors who, most importantly in my life, know how to and have devoted their lives to teaching young students to critically examine the world around them and to question everything. My mother has also opened my eyes, raising me as a Quaker, nurturing my urge for rebellion, and teaching me about consent.
The question remains: what should we do about this? I have an innate aversion to revolutionary dogma that seeks to create a new world in some set vision, as if some revolutionary can clearly see everything and construct a perfect system, and we should fit ourselves into that vision. Sam Bowles’ ideas about coevolution hold the key, I believe: people change, and institutions change, and people change again (etc, etc). Change at the micro and macro level are both important. In my life, this has translated into a focus on youth as a locus of change, and as the embodiment of energy and potential – something I also learned from my mother.
more on this to come…
Wednesday, sick as a dog at my mothers
