Cruelty and power

By On July 7, 2012 · 15 Comments · In Current Events, Economics, Libertarianism

I’m mostly offline for a while so I won’t be taking part in the labor discussions for a while yet. I haven’t had time to properly think about Kevin Vallier’s attempt at resolution at the level of the moral order– and I still haven’t read Gaus’ Order of Public Reason, which I suspect would help in that task. But, as Kevin knows, I tend to think at both a very different level of abstraction and in a mood that’s more about things going wrong than about things going right.

Accordingly, as much as I like John Holbo’s post on freedom and coercion (a post which has earned John a mention in my book manuscript for a point he makes about Hayek), in this context I’d especially like to recommend two of the other replies in this conversation: Belle Waring and djw.

I indicated in my initial contribution that, as far as I’m concerned, one of the key merits of unions– whatever their other demerits– is their protection of procedural fairness against managers, their protection against personalized forms of abuse and domination in the workplace. If we’re going to import political concepts into the workplace, this is more like the rule of law than it is like liberty per se.

I also said there that a lot of workplace abuse can’t be collapsed into action by the firm or the employer. The separation of ownership and management, and the dispersal of managerial supervision all through a complex organization, mean that in a big firm there are countless local, specific opportunities for one higher-ranking person to abuse one lower-ranking person. Something gets lost in these discussions when we imagine that abuse as some kind of general, publicly acknowledgeable term of employment. This is why a serious discussion has very close to nothing to do with the question of whether prostitution should be legal. Firms don’t, and wouldn’t be willing to, post ads that said: “duties include typing, filing, and submitting to your supervisor’s sexual advances at his sole discretion,” and the thought experiments about wage-vs-sex tradeoffs are entirely misleading.

Bertram et al say that the open-ended character of the employment contract means that this kind of distinction will not be able to do everything that needs to be done; bosses will always have a lot of discretionary authority over employees and no amount of careful enumeration of duties will ever suffice to rule abuses out. I hope to develop something to say about that. But I think this kind of distinction between publicly-acknowledgeable hard terms that it would make sense for the firm to endorse and the phenomenon of managerial abuse and domination has to be the place to start, and I wanted to resurface long enough to recommend Waring’s and djw’s posts on the latter. Libertarians should be especially interested in the moral psychology of power. We understand that the man with a uniform and a gun isn’t just a stand-in for laws we may or may not like, he’s also a human being with human flaws, which all too often include too much love of dominating others. (The job both selects for and reinforces that trait.) Indeed, we treat it as a criticism of some laws that we don’t like that they unavoidably put a lot of power into such people’s hands. But it’s not only state laws that do that, and not only state offices of power that have those effects. We can and should draw distinctions, but we shouldn’t apply different methodological and psychological rules in our analysis of the state and our analysis of the rest of society. If “power corrupts,” we shouldn’t imagine that the moral psychology of that corruption just happens to stop at the public-private divide.

While I’m here and linking, I’ll also link to these comments (38 and 39) by Jim Henley. They make a broader claim than the one at hand about employment, so I think it’s a topic for another day. But Henley is someone I suspect a lot of us BHL bloggers have learned from and admired over the years; his criticism of (if I may put it this way) the BHL project or mindset is not the kind that comes from a hostile enemy but the kind that comes from a self-aware friend. I hope that at some point we return to it for a separate discussion.

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  • http://twitter.com/dL_1337 dL

    Well, I know what liberty is not . And it is not the overlapping consensus between BHL and freakin Crooked Timber. lol…

    Btw, some of us have had their lives destroyed by the drug war. it is not a projection,. Jim Henley is the one who needs to quit projecting himself and his own motivations onto others…

    • Aeon Skoble

      Yeah, I actually found those comments off-putting. Ad hominem armchair psychologizing. Why you charatcterize this as friendly escapes me.

      • http://profiles.google.com/jtlevy Jacob Levy

        I didn’t call the criticism itself friendly. I said that Henley is a friend (ideologically, not personally)– he’s not out to get us, and he implicates himself in the criticism.

  • Sean II

    I’m surprised no one has said this yet (so far as I’ve noticed), but leaving aside debates about the psychology that makes managers want to abuse employees, it seems pretty clear that they are able to get away with abusing employees chiefly because of artificial scarcity in the job market.

    That scarcity has many causes, some of which arise directly from prior attempts to protect workers from abuse or exploitation. The minimum wage, family & medical leave, the disability act – those are a few obvious examples that, whatever their other merits, have indisputably raised the cost of hiring people and thereby reduced the available supply of jobs.

    So, in that sense, shouldn’t the debate questions be: “How can we pursue freedom at work without making work even more scarce than it already is? What protections can workers seek, that won’t have the unintended effect of further increasing the reserve army of the unemployed, and thereby by giving even more power to the firm.”

    For my money, that question seems a lot more interesting than trying to argue over the precise extent to which bathroom breaks are a problem in the labor force.

    In other words: let’s talk a little more about artificial scarcity, and little less about artificial anuresis.

    • R

      Yes, but it strikes me as highly selective to blame this scarcity (ie. unemployment) solely on the rigidity created by protections like minimum waye, job security, etc. It is not as if there was full employment before there were worker protections. So you are correct point out that full employment is a greater source of liberty than protections gained by union struggles, but it is not clear that the latter is the main break to the former.

      • Sean II

        Actually there is good reason to believe we did have full employment for much of the period 1860 – 1930, in part because pre-1930s data is so hard to come by. If no one bothered to measure unemployment, that suggests a rate persistently at or below 5% – functionally the same as full employment, since it is hardly unusual to have 1 in 20 workers between jobs at any given time.

        And remember, artificial scarcity doesn’t just push people out of work altogether. It also pushes many into under-employment vis-a-vis their real potential – as for example, there are many people who could be nurses today who cannot gain entry thanks to a medical license raj. That harm now goes totally unaccounted for, because for market incumbents it’s considered a feature, not a bug.

        • r

          Hi,
          Perhaps this is the American anomaly–opportunity of expanding West, no ‘reserve army’ of the unemployed, etc., though I highly doubt that was the case in the development of the northern industrial base. Some historians have started piecing together the US experience of unemployement pre-1930 see A Keyssar Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts. Certainly persistent, massive unemployement was a standard phenomenon of urban industrial Europe throughout the late 19C. (Hence the availability of ‘scabs’ to take starvation wages and undermine organized labor.)
          You’re quite right, however, that the phenomenon like the ‘licence raj’ can cause great harm to mobility of labor, but each of these cases needs to be evaluated on its own. You wouldn’t want nurses who did not know the difference between the medicines they administer. One would want to know whether the harm to labor mobility is made up for by the benefit to patients.

  • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

    I like this post alot, Jacob. I think it’s right, and important, to distinguish between the actions of “firms” (or the actions of shareholders, or of BODs) and the actions of mid-level management. And to point out that principal-agent problems might account for some economically irrational cruelty on the part of the latter. Perhaps that goes some ways to addressing the puzzle I raised in my last post.

    But even when abuse is not an official company policy, the puzzle I raised still arises. Because “no policy” is still a policy. Or, more aptly, a policy of allowing mid-level managers to act on their abusive whims is still a policy. And it’s a bit of a puzzle as to why firms would adopt it. Perhaps the answer is simple ignorance – no real ‘policy’ at all because no one’s aware there’s a problem that calls for one? That works for isolated cases of abuse, but probably not widespread abuse. Or maybe the firm judges (correctly? erroneously?) that it’s better off allowing managers to do what they want?

    Also, while I agree with the point that the psychology of cruelty doesn’t change between the worlds of business and government, the incentives of cruelty almost certainly do, and that’s a crucial point. Firms have a strong profit-based incentive to do something about managers who satisfy their own personal whim for cruelty at the company’s expense. The police captain whose subordinate abuses lacks that incentive, and it’s not clear that any of the alternative incentives he does have are powerful enough to compensate.

    • Sean II

      Apart from the difficulty of writing and enforcing a “no abuse” policy that would not be hopelessly vague, I think there’s a simple explanation for why so many firms (especially large firms) seem to tolerate abusive managers.

      1) Once a firms opens an effective channel for employee complaints, it will be flooded with good ones and bad (ask anyone from a company that does 360s or skip-level reviews). Some workers will claim abuse legitimately. Some workers will claim it falsely. And to further complicate matters, some workers will not complain even when they have been abused.

      2) Somebody has to sort through these complaints and try to adjudicate them, and that someone is going to be a member of the management group. So right away you end up with a bit of class bias built into the system. But more importantly, the complaint process involves a lot of work, of a type that doesn’t directly contribute to the productivity of the firm.

      3) Over time a cost-benefit calculus evolves, such that the only complaints that get serious attention are those involving legally actionable claims, or those involving credible threats of mass resignation.

      In other words, the complain system ends up giving workers what they already had – the right to be told “If you don’t like it, then leave.”

    • http://voodothosting.com/23/ Lorraine Lee

      Matt Zwolinski: “Firms have a strong profit-based incentive to do something about managers who satisfy their own personal whim for cruelty at the company’s expense.”

      Jim Henley: “The only method of ameliorating the condition of some poor people they can countenance is the one that lowers costs to rich people.”

      Something is a problem (an expense) for business, therefore something is a problem…

      • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

        I at a bit of a loss as to how you got from my (quite modest) claim about incentives, to that.

  • Kevin Vallier

    Jacob, I’m pretty tired of not being able to apply simple labels to your views. I can rarely predict what you’re going to say. That makes me mad! But I think I may have found a label that works: “modus vivendi classical liberal.” How’s that?

    • http://profiles.google.com/jtlevy Jacob Levy

      Heh. Well, both halves of that label are things I’ve committed to in print, so their conjunction seems fine to me, but I’m not sure that they’ll help with the prediction problem, and if I were trying to specify and label myself that’s probably not where I’d go. To me their conjunction still seems to leave an awfully broad space. It may be that you’re looking for a box within Gaus’ or Tomasi’s frameworks and that “modus vivendi classical liberal” adds up to a fairly specific concept in one of them– but to that degree I may not be committed to everything you’re associating with those labels. I’ve been me for longer that Gerry and John have carved up the ideological world in their respective ways…

  • The Red Queen

    ”
    The separation of ownership and management, and the dispersal of managerial supervision all through a complex organization, mean that in a big firm there are countless local, specific opportunities for one higher-ranking person to abuse one lower-ranking person.”

    Exactly, and can’t you see that this is a perfect environment to bring out the worst in human nature and to suppress the best aspects of what we are? Your system that says it values freedom, but really values selfishness and greed and false pride, which are all the qualities of our species that do not need to be encouraged; they are easy to produce.

    It is the ‘other’ values generosity, humility and restraint that a society needs to value and emphasise to create ‘good’ people.

    Surely, it is the example our ‘betters’ set for us that really impresses us proles and is the only thing that would convince me that the ‘jahb creators’ do have something that makes them better than we proles or moochers.

    But the reality is sadly very different; the rich from all I see, read and experience tend to be stupid, arrogant, complacent and, lets face it most of them are arseholes.

    Read the psych literature on how modelling positive behaviours and attitudes is far more effective in creating change in people than slapping them around for being stupid and lazy.

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