Author: George Papaioannou

Right after policewoman Amber Guyger had been sentenced for the murder of a black man in his apartment in Dallas, the judge, Tammy Kemp, walked up to her, hugged her, and handed her a Bible.  In the words of the NYT article, “Some praised it [her gesture] as a rare and much-needed moment of humanity; others criticized it as potentially unconstitutional…”  Unique perhaps among nations, Americans have to live with such contradictory viewpoints thanks to the First Amendment that, besides protecting free speech, states that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” which has come to be known as the Establishment Clause.

Of course, Judge Kemp, a representative of the state, was not making a law by giving out a Bible, but in the hotly contested wars about the intent and scope of the Establishment Clause her gesture could be interpreted as supporting Judeo-Christian beliefs contrary to the intent of the First Amendment.  This is so because court opinions have ruled that the separation of church and state also refers to actions by the government and its official representatives.

Clashes around the Establishment Clause are at the heart of the culture wars in American politics and courts.  To the combatants, secularists on one side and religious adherents on the other, how the Establishment Clause is interpreted and enforced is central to building a national narrative and unifying anchor.  So, I decided to revisit a book I had read more than ten years ago, titled Divided By God by Noah Feldman (then at the New York School of Law and now at Harvard Law).  The historical and legal account of the book is very instructive.

Let’s start first with the historical fact that separation of church and state has never been truly enforced in the US.  From the early decades of the Republic, publicly funded schools inculcated a Protestant viewpoint that glossed over differences across Protestant sects (the nonsectarian approach).  When Catholics came to the country, their requests to allow their pupils to receive a Catholic religious teaching were rebuffed by the Protestant majority.  The result was the establishment of Catholic parochial schools without any state funding.  The same was the treatment of students of other Non-Protestant Christian sects as well as of the Jewish faith.

When the courts and the Supreme Court, in particular, finally started to take up cases regarding the separation of church and state in the wake of the Second World War, the decisions were premised on different legal arguments, often outside the strict purview of the Establishment Clause.  For example, the right not to salute the flag claimed by Jehovah Witnesses was rejected in 1940 as violating the Establishment Clause but the same right was accepted shortly thereafter for different plaintiffs as a right protected by free speech.  This practice of basing court opinions on different legal premises has continued to our day and it is a major reason why the public is so much perplexed as to what is right and wrong under the Establishment Clause.

Over the years, Supreme Court decisions have bifurcated into two approaches.  Incursions of religious teachings and practices, like prayer in public schools, Bible reading, and teaching of creationism in biology courses, have been struck down by the Supreme Court on the ground they favor religion and, thus, violate the separation of church and state.  On the other hand, the Supreme Court has decided in favor of the use of public funds and resources for religious purposes, like vouchers to attend religious schools, or the use of school facilities.  The Court has also ruled to uphold the display of religious symbols in public places as long as not any religious or non-religious group (like atheists) is excluded.  Therefore, the courts have moved to interpret the Establishment Clause to mean not an absolute exclusion of religion from the public space, but rather a fair and neutral treatment of religious and non-religious expressions, the so-called neutrality principle.

At the same time, we have witnessed a realignment in the rival groups and their approach concerning the place of religion in public policy and discourse.  The original movement of Protestant fundamentalists aspired to run the US as a Christian polity while pure secularists demanded an absolute separation of church and state.  Eventually, the Protestant fundamentalists morphed into a group Feldman calls Values Evangelicals.  They advocate that, irrespective of differences, religious people share a common set of moral values which they would like to be at the core of a national unity project for America.  On their part, the pure secularists evolved into a group Feldman calls Legal Secularists.  They espouse religious liberty and freedom of expression for all, secularists and religious people, with the caveat, however, that religious arguments would not inform the establishment of laws or government actions.   Thus, to them the national unity ought to be built on arguments informed by reason.

Feldman finds that neither group has a convincing case.  By demanding that religious beliefs are left behind before entering public discourse, Legal Secularists deny religious people the right to inform their positions by what is central to their thought systems.  But Values Evangelicals also face serious contradictions as they try to build a common base of values for their national unity project.  In such issues as the death penalty and divorce, Protestants and Catholics often disagree.  On abortion and gay rights, Christian values do not square well with values held by adherents to the Jewish faith.  And, Judeo-Christian values do not necessarily align with those of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.

In light of all the contrasting views and legal opinions, Feldman adopts a middle position.  He suggests that religious symbols (like displays) or gestures (like the one by Judge Kemp) be allowed as long as they do not appear to discriminate against other beliefs, but we should walk back from government actions and policies that avail public funds and resources to religious purposes,  which the Framers of the Constitution would find much more objectionable.

What Feldman leaves out is the, by now, unmasked partisanship among politicians and jurists in interpreting the Establishment Clause.  If every citizen should have the right to inform discourse on matters of church and state by secular or religious beliefs, who is to be the honest referee?  Shouldn’t that be those who mediate these debates, our politicians and most critically our jurists?  The public deserves to have an impartial and honest interpretation of the First Amendment from those who have this constitutional duty and responsibility.

Climate and environment; gun controls; use of technology; private wealth and public needs.  These are some of the major issues that bedevil Americans these days.  With the exception of gun controls, the rest are of major concern to the world as well.  All these issues have one common denominator: the rights of the individual versus the rights of the society.  How we decide to resolve these issues in the near future and beyond depends on which side we decide to come down on this very old conundrum, that is, the balance between the interests of the unit, i.e., the individual, and those of the collective, i.e., the society or its political expression, the state.

Within the Western world, this question has been debated since the days of Plato and Aristotle.  Their ideas have been refined, revised, expanded and subtracted by Western scholars and philosophers over the intervening centuries without however coming to a solid guiding conclusion.*  In the words of a writer, when it comes to the individual versus the society, we are all either Platonists or Aristotelians.  Outside the Western world, the same question has been raised but it has been resolved more decidedly in favor of the interests of society.  Under the influence of Confucius and the imperative of social harmony, China, Japan and other East Asian societies prioritize the interests of society, and by extension those of the state, over those of the individual.  India and the Muslim world also put more value to traditional secular and religious customs and norms that keep individual discretion circumscribed.

So, what does it mean to say we are Platonists or Aristotelians.  For Platonists, each one of us attains goodness and excellence if we serve the society in the position we can perform best: as guardians, if we have leadership talents; as warriors, if we have bravery and physical strength; as artisans, if we have talents for business and industry.  As individuals we excel when we take our best-suited station in life and thus help our state to excel.

For Aristotelians, the individual attains goodness and excellence when each one of us fulfills his or her human potential, a potential the way we see it and actualize so that we live happy lives in the world as is.  To this end, the state ought to offer individuals the means and opportunities to actualize this potential.

Both thought systems value the quality of society and state.  And both consider each individual to be critical for the success of society or state.  In Plato’s society, however, the individual has a more prescribed mission.  In Aristotle’s, the individual is more master of his or her course in life.  Both, nonetheless, call on individuals to act as responsible and virtuous citizens that care about the collective good.

It is not difficult to understand, even from the above brief description, that Platonists are willing to live in more ordered societies, societies with a top down organizational design.  Aristotelians, on the other hand, prefer to live in less rigid societies that follow a bottom up organizational design.  Plato’s societies and states have the advantage of social cohesiveness and efficiency.  However, too much of that and Plato’s model can lead to rigid dogmatism and the stifling of individual creativity and expression.  Aristotle’s system can avoid that, but too much of it and it can degenerate down to individual aggrandizement and materialism.

The modern fields of evolutionary psychology and sociology confirm that the human species is selected by nature to live as a being with individual identity and rights to friendship, love and mating within groups that rely on cooperation, as well as learning and teaching from each other in order to survive.  This set of traits is what Nicholas Christakis of Yale U. calls the social suite.**  Research on involuntary communities (like those resulting from shipwrecks) as well as voluntary and experimental communities shows that to restrict too much the individual’s rights or the cooperation among the members of a community most often leads to its collapse.

What makes the whole question of individual versus society so difficult is none else but the heavy emotionality and the fears, rational or not, that surround its polar outcomes.  Those who believe that societies ought to be the sum total of individual rights no matter what will not easily surrender to the calls for collective action at the expense of individual rights.  And those who believe society is more than the sum total of its members’ rights and that by protecting its interests enhances individual welfare will not stop calling for collective solutions.

Societies have oscillated between the two polar ends of individualism and social imperative.  America, for example, was founded on the rights of the individual for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  When, however, economic disintegration threatened the state, Roosevelt did not hesitate to embark on the New Deal which introduced social welfare institutions, like Social Security, and extensive regulations.  Modern Communist China was founded by putting the interests of a collectivist state ahead of the interests of the individual.  But by 1980 China was facing dire economic crises.  So, Deng Xiaoping made the bold move to loosen individual rights to confront the crisis.  The American case was one of moving from unfettered individual rights to greater social solidarity.  That of China was a case of moving from rigid economic order toward individual economic freedom.  Both moves faced ferocious criticism and resistance.  Herbert Hoover decried Roosevelt’s New Deal as socialist and fascistic.  Deng’s economic liberalization also faced criticism by politicians of the old guard.

These and other examples suggest that to reach a better balance between the rights of individuals and society, some crisis is necessary to compel citizens to overcome their emotional and ideological attachment to one or the other polar end.  So, the question then is: what kind of crisis do we need to bear before we decide to do something about gun violence; or about climate and the environment; or about the impact of technology on our lives; or excessive private wealth and neglected public goods?

* Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, 2014.

** Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of A Good Society, 2019.

In his novel “Love In The Time of Cholera” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, unfolds a story of long and unrequited love that takes place in a time people are tested by the fear and devastation of a cholera epidemic.  I find ourselves to be in a time reason and emotion cannot come together in this time of political turmoil.  Unlike Marquez’s novel in which the unrequited lover finally finds reciprocal love, I have no way to know how our story, the story of political emotions and reason, will end.

I have written before about the elephant and the rider.  The elephant is our raw emotions and genetic predispositions that move us in a given direction.  The rider is our reason that tries to make sense of our emotions and balance them with rational analysis of the facts.  In our state as political animals, we seem to be driven much more by emotions than reason these days.  We know who is responsible for this: the china buster who somehow made it inside the china store.  How do you react and rationalize the fact that a china buster is in the china store smashing everything with resolute glee? *

First, we all react with surprise that the china buster made it to the china store.  A lot of us react with exuberance and happiness while many others react with fear and anger – china busters are not supposed to be in a china store.  But before we have time to sort out and rationalize on these initial emotions, the surprise guest smashes one china piece after another triggering more emotional turmoil at a rate any resort to reason has no time to materialize or replace the emotions as a basis for debate.

Some of us feel happy the china buster is in the china store because some pieces scare us and we would feel relieved without them in the store.  If you are a white conservative American your fear is the receding whiteness of the demographic make-up of America.   Your reason should tell you, though, there is nothing anyone can do to reverse this but somehow you feel better if you are told this is possible.  Your fear is a future American culture that is supposedly infiltrated by the culture of “others”.  Your reason should tell you America has managed to absorb and synthesize cultures and always find the joy of life in a melting pot of cuisines and fashions, music tunes and dances, cinema and theater, pop art and high literature.  Your fear is that scientific advances threaten the validity of untested beliefs grounded only in faith.  Your reason should tell you faith should primarily fulfill your spiritual needs, not to stake out explanations as to how nature works.

If you are a Congressional Republican you are dismayed to see a china buster in the china store instead of one of your trusted antique dealers, but you are awestruck by how enthusiastically your party supporters relish the havoc, so you just play along.  Your reason should tell you demographic trends will not add to this party crowd, but fear you may lose it holds you back from inviting in new groups.  Your reason would tell you that the china buster, being just that, has no taste for values, conservative or liberal, but for fear of being primaried you betray your conservative roots.

If you are a working-class or rural American you fear educated elites belittle your sense of nationalism, your blue color life style, and your love for guns so you put your faith in politicians who keep telling you your economic advancement begins with their own enrichment (the trickle-down theory).  Your reason should tell you that being the happy warrior of culture wars will hardly relieve you from social stagnation, insecure finances, inadequate education, and the scourge of opioids.

If you are an Evangelical, you fear atheists and secularists, so you like the china buster to smash their precious china pieces.  Your reason should tell you that when you shred the constitutional separation of church and state your religious rights are also at risk but your fear is too strong to contemplate the wisdom of the first amendment.  You know that besides lacking a taste for values, the china buster doesn’t care much about ethics but again your fear pushes this thought away.  Your reason should remind you, though, that Jesus admonished “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world but forfeits his soul?”

If you are a liberal your fear is the emergence of voices of racial hate, white supremacy and ethno-nationalism that could bring us back to the dark days of history.  But instead of debating and countering such speech with the compelling and convincing arguments you should have, you attempt to push it out of the public space forgetting your motto “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” You fear the erosion of reproductive, gender, sexual orientation and voting rights, but instead of focusing the minds of moderate and liberal voters on winning the Senate, you fight the battles when the “enemy” is already inside.  Because you fear extreme conservative ideology you close your mind to thoughtful and informed conservative thinkers.  Your inclination for healthy skepticism and balanced arguments should have reminded you that you need them as much as they need you.

If you are a Congressional Democrat your fear is the china buster, loose as he is, could break your beloved china pieces, but then you weigh the severity of your restraining him against the reaction of voters and what that might do to your electoral prospects.  Your reason should tell you that accusing your opponents of political calculation for not reigning in the china buster sounds hollow if you also condition your doing this on calculations of your own.  In the middle of so much mayhem, your reason cannot tell you which china pieces to save and which to let go.

By now,  we realize the china smashing has gone too far.  To preserve some common heirlooms still left, the save-the-store crowd has decided to bring in the conservation squad.  Will finally emotion and reason find each other?  Or, as in Marquez’s story, each crowd will tell the captain of its riverboat to sail on and on up the river forever as a way to escape reality.

* The “china buster in the china store” metaphor is inspired by “horse in the hospital” in the standup comedy show Kid Gorgeous of John Mulaney that streams on Netflix.

I recently read that the US Congress plans to pass legislation that will prohibit an $100 million facility, already built in Chicago, to produce subway and train cars.  The reason? Congress and the US government fear the cars will be bugged and could spy on the whereabouts, and not only, of passengers and cargo!  The real reason?  The manufacturer is CRRC Corporation, the biggest maker of trains, which however also happens to be Chinese.  First Huawei, the telecommunication colossus, and now CCRC.  And that’s not all.  Congress and the government also plan to update the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act so that we can block foreign investments deemed risky for our national security.

That’s what started me thinking about capitalism as a cocktail that comes in many degrees of strength and flavors, each with its own appeal for different people and different times.  Here is the basic recipe.  Recognize property rights; let markets work freely; and let owners of capital deploy it according to their own interests.  Goods are produced and bought according to consumer preferences.  The selfish interest of the butcher and candlemaker guides the invisible hand of Adam Smith.  But this cocktail is not without hangovers.  Goods fall out of favor; factories close; jobs are lost.  There is a lot of wealth creation along with a lot of detritus.  But out of the demise of the inefficient and unwanted the new is born.  And so the system churns going through cycles of Schumpeterian “creative destruction.”

Interestingly, this pure capitalism cocktail is not very popular.  It only sells among libertarians.  The rest of us prefer the watered-down varieties.  Start with taxes that favor and disfavor different types of investments and sources of income.  Next pour in some regulations – who produces what; how markets work.  Then add some state enterprising – take individuals out of the production of some goods and give that to the state.

Take the case of the US, the supposed poster child of capitalism.  Start at the 1950s.  Banks cannot branch anywhere they wish; interest rates are regulated.  Transportation industries, like airlines, are restricted in regards to routes and prices; so are telecommunication firms.  Ownership of TV stations and newspapers also regulated.  And, ….. hold on to your seat, the top marginal income tax rate ranges from 92% in 1950 to 70% in 1980!    And yet the US economy is doing fine.  Between 1950 and 1979, that is, during the three decades of high taxes and heavy regulation, the economy grew at an annual real (adjusted for inflation) rate of 4.04%.  The four decades since, when tax rates were dramatically cut and deregulation ruled, the economy grew at only 2.64%. *

Which capitalism cocktail would you order?  It depends who you are.  In the early post-war decades, workers earned close to their productivity gains and the middle class kept growing.  Things changed in the 1970s.  When some commentators claim how, back then, corporate managers followed a social contract that fairly split economic gains between corporations and workers, they neglect to add that this had a lot to do with the prosperity of American corporations.  Generosity thrives in good times.  There were a lot of spoils for corporate and union bosses to divvy up with less acrimony.  All this went out the window when American corporations ceased to be the only or later the biggest game in town and the economy slowed.  In the 1970s the average GDP growth rate declined to 3.3% from 4.46% the previous decade.  As the pickings got slimmer, equity in distributing the economy’s gains declined and so did confidence in the fairness of capitalism.

How America entered this new period and how its mood changed is what the Hauwei and CCRC examples brought to my mind.  Even in the days of high taxes and heavy regulation, America honored two pillars of liberal capitalism; foreign investments and free trade.  To this end, it pushed hard other market economies to liberalize their industrial policies and financial sectors.  I was still living in Greece and I remember how this liberalization push was greeted with suspicion there and the rest of Europe.  But free movement in investment capital and trade was not something new.  It had been the norm during the long years of Pax Britannica only to be interrupted by the two World Wars.  Liberalization in these areas was a return to normal times.  And liberalization did start to come in the market economies in the 1980s and beyond.

But the greatest surprise came in 1980 when the Chinese President Deng Xiaoping, famous for having said “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice,” decided to marry communist rule with free enterprise and markets.  By creating this new and, as time proved, very potent cocktail, Xiaoping took his rightful place as one of the most creative bartenders in the watering hole of capitalism.

But this cocktail, as its other cousins, came with both euphoria and hangover.    China modernized quickly; it reduced poverty; created a middle class larger than the US population; and made a lot of international corporations highly successful and rich.  Back in the American Midwest, however, factories closed, workers lost jobs, towns decayed.  The hangover of Middle America was so mind-numbing that voters would be unable to tell truth from lie, reasonable promise from pie in the sky, honesty from sleight of hand.  But to these voters the alternative was more of the same cocktail that no longer pleased their palate.  Switching allegiance from the earlier American cocktail of capitalism is not limited to working-class people.  Domestic companies are happy to let our growing suspicions about China’s plans restrict competition to their benefit and Republicans look more like Democrats, reluctant to defend the free market advocacy of the Washington Consensus their economic ideology used to espouse. **

I take the recent retreat of American capitalism from its championing of foreign investments and free trade with all their potential risks and losses to be emblematic of our losing confidence in the model we pushed so hard on the world in the days of our undisputed dominance.  That should teach us something about the interplay of ideological purity, pragmatism and self-interest.  We are now applying Xiaoping’s pragmatism in furthering our own economic interests.  Between faith in a more liberal capitalism and preserving our industries and incomes we seem to choose the latter.  That’s why the fearmongering about the coming of socialism sounds so hypocritical.

*My calculations using Standard & Poor’s data.

** The Washington Consensus was a declaration of 10 principles, including free movement of capital and trade, adopted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the US Treasury Department in the late 1980s.  It was intended to restore economic stability and growth to regulated and protectionist economies.  Skeptics equated it to market fundamentalism and a neoliberal agenda while John Williamson of the Institute of International Economics, who coined the term, resented its use to promote unfettered capitalism.

Pardon me if I am not one of those who would rush to thank and congratulate Jamie Dimon and his other 180 CEO buddies of the Business Roundtable (BR) for having redefined the purpose of the corporation to recognize other stakeholders besides shareholders.  My note to them would instead read: “What took you so long?  Didn’t you learn anything in the august business schools where you got your MBAs?”

Okay, I admit we should not sneer when we see a good thing no matter how slow its coming has been.  But the August 19, 2019 new statement on the purpose of the corporation adopted by 181 CEOs, members of the Business Roundtable, needs a lot of perspective.  Echoing my own reaction to the statement, the letters to the editor of the NYT were highly critical, even cynical, of this belated change of heart by America’s corporate chieftains.  So was WSJ’s opinion.

Why the BR statement is belated.  The stakeholder theory (the idea that firms can attain better value for their shareholders by also serving their creditors, employees, customers, suppliers and community) is at least 30 years old.  Theory and empirical evidence have made convincing arguments for its validity.  Recent surveys have shown wide-spread acceptance among investors for environmental, social and governance (ESG) sustainability.  Large institutional investors, in the US and abroad, have already embraced sustainable investment criteria.  According to a Morgan Stanley paper, investors can now select socially responsible investments from assets worth $23 trillion globally!  As of last year, 1,715 institutional investors (aka shareholders) that managed $81.7 trillion worth of assets had signed on the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investing.  As a matter of fact, the main concern and effort of investors, as well as of corporate executives committed to responsible management, is to persuade all corporate managers to jump on the sustainability bandwagon.  I would submit that instead of celebrating the BR statement as a moment of unique enlightenment, we should see it as a welcome, albeit belated, response to the pressure from investors, responsible CEOs, civic movements and politicians.

Why shareholder profits and sustainability are not incompatible.  Multiple studies have found that business profits and sustainability goals are not a zero-sum choice.  For example, a Harvard Business Review study found that over a 20-year period investing in firms with social sustainability policies would produce twice the profit the same amount would generate in firms without social sustainability policies.  Another academic study found that firms with ESG sustainability policies achieved a 3% higher return on their stocks per year versus firms without such policies over a 20-year horizon.  A large review of studies revealed that 80% of them had found a positive relationship between sustainability and business profits.  Thus, the BR statement invites CEOs to do the right thing by their shareholders and the other stakeholders!

Why it is value and not profits that matter.  Despite all the talk about maximizing short-term shareholder profits as the main goal of firms, academics and successful executives and investors recognize that the right goal is value, not profits.  Value is built on the profits (and their uncertainty) a firm is expected to produce over the long run.  Therefore, cutting corners with, say, employee benefits or protection of the environment for a short-term boost of profits does not fool the market.  If short-term profits were the only thing that mattered, we would not have the billions of dollars poured into new business ideas – many with negative profitability for several years.  Consider Genentech (an early biotech firm), Amazon, pharmaceutical start-ups and many more.  Sustainability of all the stakeholders of a firm can produce long-term value even when implementing responsible policies may entail short-term costs.  The bulk of invested capital is held by pension funds, insurance firms and index funds, all of which have long-term value objectives and are disinterested in the daily gyrations of the market for stocks and bonds.  That’s another reason why these expansive and influential investors favor sustainability policies.

Why corporate governance can be at stake.  Although welcome, the Business Roundtable statement can turn out to be problematic if CEOs abuse its intent. Disguising and misrepresenting subpar business performance to look like the result of pursuing the interests of other stakeholders could very easily weaken shareholder rights and CEO accountability.  That’s why the Council of Institutional Investors gave the statement a cool reception and commented that “Accountability to everyone means accountability to no one.”  In other words, our concern ought to be whether CEOs abuse their new sense of the purpose of the corporation to ignore long-term value creation as in the good old days of American managerialism.  We should not be fooled in believing that CEOs are the victims of the demand for shareholder profits that supposedly denies them the means to be socially responsible.  The evidence I cited shows that executives can run firms which are both profitable and socially responsible.  And many do exactly that.  Let’s remember that the excesses around 2001-2002 (Adelphia, Tyco, Enron, Worldcom, etc.) were caused by the greed of executives which destroyed value and whole firms laying waste to the investments and livelihoods of countless shareholders, creditors and employees who had no active role in these criminal or unethical decisions.  Similarly, the debacle of 2008 had little to do with long-run shareholder value and a lot with imprudent executive decisions and perverse incentives that emphasized immediate gains and ignored risks. To run a firm with a ratio of $33 dollars of debt for each dollar of equity, as Lehman Bros. and other financial firms did, was not a sustainable policy that favored the shareholders.

What was omitted from the statement.   The new statement of the BR would carry more credibility if it were not silent on various major issues of our times.  It should have shown concern for the absurdly high ratios of CEO compensation to median employee salaries; the persistent aversion to labor unions; the resistance to a livable minimum wage; the disappearance of adequate pension systems.  The BR CEOs should also call for the restructuring of America’s corporate boards by decoupling the roles of CEO and chairman of the board that places inordinate power and control in the CEO’s hands.

Finally, as I have written in previous posts, the responsibility of steering corporations toward socially beneficial goals rests primarily on us.  The marketplace gives us the opportunity and power to entrust our savings and investments with wealth managers that follow ESG sustainability criteria and to patronize firms whose operations reflect our values.   Politicians can do a lot through laws and regulations but it is ultimately the citizens’ responsibility to set the course toward a responsible and socially fair economic and business environment.

Below I provide links to some related posts you can find on my blog:

https://lets-reason.com/2019/01/19/managers-and-shareholder-culture-part-i/

https://lets-reason.com/2019/01/25/the-purpose-of-the-firm-confusion-and-challenges/

https://lets-reason.com/2019/04/12/business-ethics-markets-and-personal-responsibility/

What we leave behind with each passing day it’s not time; it’s experiences.  Like albums of photographs our lives are collections of experiences – good and bad.  But that’s not all.  Life experiences do not stay in the past.  They carry their aftertaste into the present.  They leave behind memories and lessons.  What we decide to take along for the journey ahead depends on how well we husband the experiences of the past or how many of them we turn into waste.

It’s Tuesday, right after Labor Day, and in America this signals that the summer of 2019 is done; the curtain has fallen and the summer season has taken its final bow.  Several years back that would mean I had to get ready for another semester.  The lives of academics are ruled by the semester cycle.  But now I no longer have to worry about that.  I now need to fill my life’s album with other experiences.  So, what did I leave behind this summer of 2019?

Well, I left behind Providence and Newport, R.I., Prague, Greece and the lake in Canada.  In Providence I learned that the progressive offspring of a local family that made its money by transporting slaves to the Americas founded a very fine college, known these days as Brown University.  In Prague, I learned that one of its creative sons and national heroes by the name Alphonse Mucha became one of the most celebrated artists of Art Nouveau.  Ironically, Mucha was not admitted to the Academy of Arts in Prague and had to study in Munich and make a name in Paris before returning and rising to a national figure in Prague.  I also learned that for my taste the most reliable Czech dish is the roasted port knuckle.

In Greece I learned once more that walking around in 100-degree weather is not a comfortable experience; actually, it’s sort of masochism.  Even Yabanaki beach, the one I introduced to you a year ago, was not pleasant in that heat.  But our American friends would not care less.  From the gyro and tzatziki to the wide vistas of the blue Aegean from a hotel terrace on the island of Aegina, everything was magical.

In the lake in Canada, I learned that catching and killing fish to eat for lunch is not what I want to do any more.  After the first bass I released the rest of my catches.  My son and daughter tried hard to convince me that the underdeveloped nervous system of fish spares them of physical pain, but I had none of that.  Reading Frans De Waal’s book about animal emotions has made me more sensitive to animal killing.  Don’t take me wrong.  I am not turning into a vegetarian.  All I am saying is that from now on, fishing will be only a sport for me.  Catch and release; not catch, kill and eat.  With lots of moral compromise I will still eat somebody else’s caught and killed fish.

Besides places, I also left behind several books I read.  The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt was one of them.  It makes the case of how by trying to protect young people from everything, including uncomfortable ideas, colleges and protective parents prepare a future citizenry that may stifle liberal discourse and be too weak to face the challenges of the real world.  I also read Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Harry Paulson, the three main protagonists who looked into the abyss of the 2008 catastrophe and did all they could, some of it not well received, to pull us back from it.  Despite the heat and all the visual distractions and with very little help from the inadequate shade and the ice coffee (frappe) at Yabanaki, I managed to finish Stories of Our Life and Others by Ted Chiang.  A collection of science fiction stories each of them sending us into the dark world of technology and its ability to take an oppressive possession of our lives.  We struggle to escape it by trying to take control of it but we fail.  There is no exit from what we create.  A cautionary reminder that not all that glitters is gold.  My last read of the summer was Beloved by Toni Morrison who recently passed at a well-advanced age.  Fortuitously, it turned out to be the right book-end to where my summer had started, visiting the home of slave traffickers.  Only in the lines of a mesmerizing and at the same time soul wrenching story, as written by Morrison, one can feel the full extent of dispossession of human dignity and utter deprivation that slavery was and why it has left behind so many social ills.

So, it was a summer of memorable experiences and a summer of new things learned.  And speaking of life as a collection of experiences, let me leave you with these verses by Longfellow:

No deem the irrevocable Past,

As wholly wasted, wholly vain,

If, rising on its wrecks, at last

To something nobler we attain.

And on we go into the second year of the blog.

Next week will mark 243 years from July 4, 1776 when the Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence that marks the birth of America as an independent state.  But it was thirteen years later, in 1789, the Constitution took effect.  Americans will celebrate the day with picnics, barbecues, local parades and fireworks.  But the reality is that although the Fourth of July is when the thirteen colonies formally broke away from the British Crown, it is the Constitution that rules and affects our everyday lives.

Recent political developments, not only those related to Trump’s election and administration, have raised voices of discontent as to how well the two plus-centuries constitution serves the political needs of the country.

Gerrymandering of congressional districts, the circumvention of the popular vote by the electoral college, election rules and procedures left to the states, the over-presentation of states with low populations in the Senate and the Electoral College, and the politicization of the Supreme Court made up of jurists appointed for life are at the center of the discontent.  Although all Americans are impacted by the effects of these realities, it is mostly Democrats who see themselves as the main losers.  But under other circumstances, it could be Republicans.

Add to all that that the Constitution is not always clear or explicit on the boundaries of presidential powers, something that becomes vivid in the case of occupants of the White House willing to push executive power beyond its traditional limits.

But, are the Framers of the Constitution truly responsible?  How could they have predicted the way the country and the individual states would develop in terms of distribution of population and the demographic profile of states over the ensuing centuries?  Their concern was to establish a democratic governance system based on checks and balances.  Fueled by the fervor and enthusiasm of founding a new independent state, they assumed that future generations would also value and protect the institutions that guaranty democratic governance.  Accused of the possibility the Constitution left room for chicanery and shenanigans for political gain, they would retort by saying “We gave you a country and the best government system of our time.  Protect its essential mission and make it work for the common good.”  In today’s political parlance, they would have said that when it comes to the quality of democracy in America, “It’s the people, stupid!”

I have left for last the biggest and most sensitive issue the Constitution did not resolve. It is America’s original sin, that is, the unwillingness of some and the inability of others among the Framers of the Constitution to abolish slavery and give all colonial Americans, black and white, equal political rights.  Despite a Civil War and the Civil Rights Act a century later, we still live with the legacy and consequences of that original sin.  Covert or overt racism still exists and its more or less ugly expressions are a stain on all of us.

Again, it would be easy to blame this on the Founding Fathers.  In some colleges, including Hofstra University where I taught, students demand that statues of slave holder Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, be removed. With the wisdom and sentiments of our time two centuries later we can and do condemn their failure in that regard.  But to ignore that we are all products of our time fails to do justice to them as well.  They lived in a world in which, as hideous and inhumane slavery is, many practiced and profited from slavery.  Those times, religious establishments, Christian and Muslim, accepted it or did not officially denounced it.  Enslaving humans on racial or non-racial grounds, has regrettably existed for millennia.  We find it in the Greek and Roman times and in the Bible.  At its founding, Christianity made all people, including slaves, equal before God but also preached that slaves should obey their masters.

Let’s remember that many years from now, we are going to be judged by history in regards to whether we protected the planet and its endangered species; how we kept treating women and children; how we fed and clothed the poor; and how we nursed the sick among us.  Our only defense will be the same we should accord those flawed, quarreling, and sometimes mean-spirited Americans – understanding and forbearance. They gave the people a guiding document.  It was not perfect, nor was it much for its enslaved citizens.  But it was a beginning.

Now let’s do our part.

In August 2015, I was one of about 10,000 Americans that retired that day.*  For me 42 years of work, 37 of these in academia was good enough.  I had done what I enjoyed.  Academics are like salespeople.  We try hard to sell our students on the idea that reading the class materials and preparing for exams is a good thing for them.  Many resist us to the end.  We try to sell our  colleagues on the brilliance of our ideas on curriculum and other matters in countless committee meetings but winning over a bunch of Ph.Ds, each with his/her grand idea, is like trying to herd wild boars.  For years, I kept my rejected memos as evidence of my futility.  And we try hard to sell our research papers to journal editors but the referees aren’t always in a buying mood.  I published a lot but I also had to lick my chops and nourish my challenged intellect after each rejection.

And then, came the retirement parties.  The three retirement events thrown by my colleagues made me nervous.  I was not sure whether they were celebrating my career or the fact I was not going to be in their hair anymore.  When the speeches of praise and appreciation were over, I told them they had done a great job holding back all this admiration for so many years.  Where were they when my ego needed the comfort of approval?  And what’s with the decorative clocks or watches they give you upon retirement?  Really? We need to keep time lest we missed some important meeting while we are in retirement?  Unless they are given to remind us that time is not on our side and we should expedite whatever we plan to do.  Clocks and watches should be banned as retirement gifts.

But I was not off the hook yet.  Shortly before retirement I had committed myself to co-authoring a book in investment banking, a project I had put off many years.  It took my first two years of retirement to finish it – many days cursing myself for signing the publishing contract.  But when it was done and published, I felt a sense of deliverance.  The thought of an unfinished project would no longer haunt me.

After finishing the book, off I was to my next bucket list item.  That was the blog.  I summoned the help of a former colleague who is good at this sort of thing.  He is a special person.  He is a pancreatic cancer survivor who, lucky to have escaped demise, went on to write a little book about his experience and will to live and then set up a blog Survivingcancerembracinglife.com to tell others that Living Well While Surviving Cancer is very much possible.  I hasten to add the usual disclaimer that any bother the blog might be to some of you it is my sole responsibility not his.

Preparing yourself psychologically to accept the end of your professional life and planning ahead your retirement is important but it eludes many.  Some people are pushed to early retirement after losing their jobs.  Others retire because they hate their jobs.  And others go without much reflection on what comes next.  It’s sad to hear people say “I don’t know what I ‘ll do when I retire.”

A meaningful or otherwise happy retirement is, however, predicated on having the means to live with some basic comfort and dignity.  Things are not quite rosy.  Even in the US, a very rich country, retirees face grave financial insecurity.  Reliance on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is not enough to provide for a comfortable retirement.  In the US, the Social Security fund is reaching the point that it will have to dip into its accumulated capital to pay retirement checks, meaning income on capital and new contributions are not enough to pay the bills.

In 2018, the average Social Security pension was $1,413 per month.  In many places in the US this sum is not enough to cover the basic budget of a retiree.  What about other individual savings for retirement?  The news is worse.  The average savings of Americans 60+ years of age is $172,000.  Experts estimate that one needs a nest egg of $1 million to replace 70% of the average annual salary Americans make during their working years.  But again, averages hind the dire reality for many Americans of or close to retirement age.  One third of these Americans are estimated to have saved only up to $25,000 for retirement.  Some have nothing.

Things are not any better around the world.  Early retirement age while people live longer, inadequate contributions to pension funds coupled with actuarially generous pension packages, and shrinking working age populations have kept pensions down or pose risks to the future retirement benefits for everyone.

Some experts blame the lack of financial literacy in large segments of the population for the inadequate savings.  Thus, they recommend financial literacy classes in high school and college.  My credit union, NEFCU and other financial institutions offer savings and retirement seminars to help people plan for their retirement years.  But a research paper has concluded that financial literacy lessons are not effective unless taken at the time a person has to make a related decision.  How possible is such timeliness in teaching financial literacy?

Basic financial literacy can help but not if personal responsibility is lax.  There are a lot of middle-class people who could save more but don’t do it because they cannot putt off instant gratification.  Consumerism is too much embedded in America and other societies and it unfortunately corrupts saving habits.  What we need to teach people is the difference between needs and wants.  Unless we manage our wants better no amount of current income will be enough to build a secure retirement.  As St. Augustin said: “Rich is not a person of great wealth but a person of few wants; and poor is not a person of little wealth but a person of many wants.

Eight centuries before St. Augustin, Socrates addressing Kallikles who advocated unrestrained giving to pleasures retorted: “Compare the soul of such a person to a sieve, because this kind of soul cannot hold anything and thus can never be full with a finite and limited amount of things.” (From the dialogue Gorgias)

Preparing for retirement must start many years back.  It can be fun and it can be a struggle.  And I haven’t said anything about health issues.  But let’s leave it at that.

* This is an estimate based on the number of people reaching retirement age each day in the US.

The topic of inequality in terms of wealth or income has become central to the political debates in western market democracies, and especially so in the US.  CEOs, star athletes and celebrities are rewarded mindbongling sums of money many times those of an average worker, athlete or celebrity.  We often talk of an “winner take all” culture.  At least in the case of wealth disparities, we know that they can be the product of long periods of favorable tax treatment of certain sources of income.

But what about income disparities?  There is no short supply of explanations and justifications for the lopsided income distribution we observe in various industries.  Hiring agents and compensation consultants as well as academic economists have plenty of answers.  Income disparities though are more difficult to explain if one starts reading what animal ethologists (those who study the behavior of animals) and evolutionary psychologists have discovered through observation and numerous experiments.

Let’s start with animals, and specifically with monkeys and the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans).  Capuchin monkeys keep an eye on rewards received by other monkeys and seem to compare them to theirs.  They don’t seem to mind if rewards are given without asking for some effort.  Once though work or effort is required, those receiving relatively less go literally on strike!  They refuse to execute tasks as a condition of getting the reward.  The same reaction, of refusing relatively less reward from another child that controls the split has been reported for children ages three to five.  Feeling slighted when one receives less than others for similar effort is manifestation of “first-order” fairness.

But we also have evidence of “second-order” fairness as in the case of a dominant female or male ape intervening to redistribute something of value between quarreling apes because of unequal sharing.  Or when bonobos are observed to leave food on the “table” when they are watched by fellow bonobos who receive no food.  Chimps also accept that prey food should go first to the catchers than the most powerful chimps, thus prioritizing incentives over hierarchy. Frans De Waal,* who has studied great apes extensively, proposes that first- and second-order fairness originate with the emotion of envy which then turns into the positive behavior of fair sharing in order to maintain cohesion of the group.  He finds fair rules of sharing are enforced more among chimps and capuchins because these species need collaboration to be successful in hunting.

Michael Tomasello,** who focuses on the social and moral development of young children in comparison to apes, also shows how the natural maturation of children endows them from infancy with the inclination for prosocial behavior grounded on fairness and sharing with others.  After the age of two, children start to develop a perspective of others whom they now consider as equivalent to them and, hence, deserving fair sharing of resources (toys, candy).  Gradually, sharing becomes more reciprocal and is limited to the group of partners.  Interestingly, young children start to avoid sharing with free riders.  By school age, children have expanded their sense of fairness beyond those who collaborate with them.  Thus, fairness is now felt and practiced as a social norm.  Very importantly, in addition to how rewards are split, young children become sensitive to the rules of resource distribution.

The analyses of De Waal and Tomasello reveal several important findings.  First, collaboration and in-group cohesion are important drivers in the emergence of fair behavior.  When collaboration and social cohesion are important for survival the trait of fairness is naturally selected.  Second, what matters is not so much the nominal amount of reward as is the relative amount – what I get relative to others.  Third, the sentiment of fairness relates reward to the effort required.  Young children understand that greater effort deserves greater reward.

These findings show that the construct of Homo Economicus, that is, the rational decision maker, driven by selfish interest, and seeking to maximize resources (income and wealth), is not the human type nature has selected for survival.  Apes sacrificing some of their food and children entirely refusing any reward because of an unfair distribution do not describe the Homo Economicus.  Additional proof of that can be also found in the literature of behavioral economics.  In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shows how cognitive and emotional biases lead humans to decisions that violate the conditions of rationality and the goal of wealth (or income) maximization.

How can we then explain the enormous disparity in income distribution?  I suspect that although we all start with the same nature-given attribute of fair sharing, cross-cultural differences shape our behavior with respect to sharing as we grow older.  For example, in 2014, CEOs in the US earned 354 times the salary of the average worker.  In contrast, in Europe, the ratio varied from a high of 148 in Switzerland to a low of 28 in Poland.  So, what explains this?

My own most likely candidate is the cultural fascination of Americans with individualism and the value of persons in chief positions.  What this culture ignores is the value of collaboration and the value of social cohesion.  It stretches credulity to believe that the fortunes of a corporation rest only on the abilities and decisions of its CEO and not the collective effort of all employees.  It is also dangerous to disregard the resentment of average people as they observe few to capture the lion’s share while themselves pick up the crams.

People do not begrudge rewards earned by superior work efficiency, talent, and industriousness.  But are we certain that the astronomical incomes of some earners are truly due to these attributes?  Isn’t there a possibility that an uncritical and uninformed analysis of relative effort and value of work has hypnotized people into believing that there is a sound basis for the income disparities?  Are we sure we have not degraded the value of collaboration and social cohesion in American society?  How do we square the idealism of the American dream based on work with the observed reality of fellow citizens barely making a living at the minimum wage?

Adam Smith hit the mark when in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments wrote:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

* Frans De Waal, Mama’s Last Hug, (2019).  This is a wonderful book on animal emotions and what they tell us about ourselves.

** Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, (2019).

The philosopher George Santayana famously said “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”  But learning history alone is not enough.  It’s necessary we heed history’s lessons and act accordingly.  Americans may be at or near the point we need to turn to history and reckon with what our future may hold in store for us.  For that exercise, I would suggest we take a look at the historical course of ancient Rome.

Polybius was a Greek historian who lived in 208-125 BCE and recorded the history of Rome from 264 to 146 in his Histories.  He was fascinated by Rome’s quick success that in less than sixty years had led to the defeat of the Macedonian king in 168 BCE and subjugation of Greece and the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BCE.  But Polybius was more than a chronicler of historical events.  He wanted to explain Rome’s success and even more predict its future as a state.

Based on Aristotle’s political thinking, Polybius inferred that the combination of the three types of government, the rule of one, the rule of few and the rule of many was at the heart of Rome’s success.  Roman government rest power to two consuls as commanders in chief, a Senate of selected aristocrats, and the plebeians (the demos) that elected the consuls and other state officials.  The checks and balances these three poles of power could apply on each other were the guarantor of keeping the system from devolving into the tyranny (rule of one) or the anarchy of the many.

But Polybius was also aware of Plato’s dire prediction in the Republic.  In it, Socrates makes the point that when a political system does not live up to its principles it gradually decays and finally collapses.  Irresponsible pandering to the many (read populism) and self-serving behavior by the rich and privileged (read inequality) eventually pit one against the other creating turmoil, thus, opening the way for a strongman to appear as savior of the state.  But the strongman also gets corrupted by power and is overthrown by envious oligarchs.  When their excesses have offended enough the common sense of fairness, the demos rises and restores democracy again.

Although Polybius reasoned that Rome had become successful due to its system of checks and balances, he also concluded that Rome would inevitably fall victim to the cycle of alternating modes of governance.  Following Polybius’s death, Rome continued to expand its power westward to Spain and the Gaul and eastward to Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt.  None of that success would, however, avert Rome’s march toward the fate Polybius had predicted in his Histories.  By the time Julius Caesar had come into the picture, Romans had started to realize their Republic was losing its vibrancy and foundational principles.  Generals and Senators were plotting for power, politics had become theatrical, and political oratory had ceased to communicate ideas and visions about the state but instead was used for personal aggrandizement (does it sound familiar?).

Cicero was the last politician and intellectual to rally to a fruitless attempt to save the Republic by appealing to the value of a mutual respect among citizens and between citizen and motherland.   To no avail though.  He was assassinated five days after Julius Caesar’s murder in the Senate.  What followed was the rapid devolution of the Roman Republic toward tyranny ending with the declaration of Octavianus as Emperor after his victory over Mark Anthony in 31 BCE.  Augustus Octavianus retained the Senate but only as a cosmetic fixture just for appearances.

Rome as empire remained alive for another 300 years but it had lost its original republican soul.  Poets would continue to compose verses, philosophers would expound on their thoughts and science would continue to develop.  But political power and the strings of freedom were in the hands of single rulers and praetorian backers.

The history of Rome as a republic and its inglorious end as decayed empire rotten from inside is instructive for the US.  For one thing, it was the combination of governance systems (the rule of one, the few, the many) that informed the framers of the constitution when they established a President as commander in chief, a Senate and lower House as representatives of the people and an independent judiciary, and declared this government to be of the people, by the people, from the people.  As the ancient Romans intended to do, this tripartite system was supposed to keep the Republic robust and viable though checks and balances.  The Roman Republic was fatally wounded when the checks and balances were no more.

What are the signs that America may be at the same tipping point that Rome found itself in the last part of the BC era?  We have a president who presents himself as the singular savior of the working class and average citizen; uses fearmongering, falsehoods and lies to shape or bend public opinion to his way; breaks norms out of whimsical and self-serving behavior; defies the Congress and rules by executive orders; values his opinion and intellect over the informed views of his own administration; and interferes, to the point of obstruction, in the wheels of justice to protect himself and those he values as relatives or friends.

We also have a split Congress in which Republican Senators and Representatives refuse to exercise their constitutional obligation to check the President, paralyzed by the stranglehold he has on their party base.  The Senate’s leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, may have concluded that the Trumpian era is destined to be short-lived.  But what if this new politics engenders subsequent demagogues with authoritarian impulses?  What if Congress and the Courts become conditioned to acquiesce to future Presidents’ autocratic proclivities?  Don’t we run the risk to slowly slide into a Roman-style decline of American republicanism?

As Socrates, Polybius and Cicero pointed out centuries ago, political systems survive if their foundational principles are preserved.  Our system’s foundational principle is checks and balances.  The moment Congress turns its back to that mission and the judiciary is politically compromised, we are destined to meet our own Emperor Augustus as the Romans did 2000 years ago.

* The insights of Polybius regarding Rome’s success and potential downfall come from Arthur Herman’s The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization (2013).

Correction and Clarification:  A reader of the blog noted that my use of the term illegal immigrants from Central America should exclude those who seek asylum to the US.  She is correct.  The broader point still remains; namely, immigration, whether illegal or for  asylum purposes, will continue as long as the world fails to create the conditions so that the root causes of migration, violence, intolerance and economic, no longer afflict the lives of people around the globe.