Proof of great prudence

 

Don't quote me on this, but sometimes I think the world might be a better place if more people studied Machiavelli. 

OK, not so much the advice about how a prince who came to power by unusual means might need to seem to be good while doing nasty things. Or the whole means/ends thing.  But there was a lot more to him than that. 

I don't know of any other author who wrote so clearly about the role of fortune in human life and the need to be ready when the floods come, the difficulty in enacting major reforms, and much more.

He was also a supporter of small-r republican government in his home city of Florence and was even tortured for it. The 18th century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said of him that "Whilst pretending to teach lessons to kings, he taught great lessons to the people."

The particular nugget of his that's on my mind these days has showed up here before, but it seems particularly timely advice these days to some major struggles in progress:

"I hold it to be proof of great prudence for men [sic] to abstain from threats and insulting words towards anyone, for neither the one nor the other in any way diminishes the strength of the enemy; but the one makes him cautious, and the other increases his hatred of you, and makes him more persevering in his efforts to injure you."

Early childhood education pays off

 I've often thought that people who are drawn into the struggle for economic justice (and other kinds too) would do well to, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, "read, mark and inwardly digest" three books that may not seem obvious.

These include the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and the Prince by Machiavelli, not that I'm in favor of war or being a ruthless Renaissance condottieri. 

The first is a good working description of the way the world seems to work. The second applies some of the same insights to strategic situations, including nonviolent ones. The third is just kind of fun but also has great advice about responding to things in our power (he called it "virtu") and things that aren't (he called that "fortuna"). 

One thread from the Art of War that I think about a lot is the discussion of direct and indirect actions. Often, directly flinging ourselves at whatever we dislike isn't the best way to proceed, especially if the problem is huge and/or the opposition is very powerful. Head on collisions can be very inefficient.

Sun Tzu put it this way in a translation I like, "Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhaustible as Heaven and Earth, unending as the flow of rivers and streams; like the sun and moon, they end but to begin anew; like the four seasons, they pass away to return once more."

I was reminded of this when I saw this article in the New York Times about how powerful the effects of pre-kindergarten programs, a priority of the Biden administration, can be. Apparently when Boston implemented a public pre-K program in the late 1990s, there weren't enough slots for all the four year olds. So a lottery randomly selected kids for the program. Intentionally or otherwise, this created a perfect opportunity for researchers to study the effects.

The results are in. For people who worship test scores (the educational equivalent of commodity fetishism), there wasn't much of an effect. But that's not everything and certainly doesn't say much about the quality of life of the kids.

It turned out that preschool increased the probability that students would graduate from high school by six percentage points. The same kids were nine percentage points more likely to take the SAT and eight percentage points more likely to attend college. They were also less likely to be suspended or caught up in the juvenile legal system.

The benefits were experienced across the board in terms of race, socioeconomic status and sex, although effects were higher for boys.

The researchers conclude that "preschool can lead to long-term educational attainment gains through improvements in behavior. Furthermore, the observed effects across demographic groups suggest that all students are likely to benefit from universal preschool."

I think other research indicates that even greater positive impacts on  could be realized if this was combined with universal access to voluntary home visiting/early childhood education/in home family education programs in the first 1,000 or so days of life. 

The research of economist and Nobel laureate James Heckman suggests that "comprehensive, high-quality, birth-to-five early childhood programs for disadvantaged children, which  yielded a 13% return on investment per child, per annum through better education, economic, health, and social outcomes."

As Sun Tzu noted long ago, the indirect approach can be a path to victory

Annals of bad tactics

Lots of people in West Virginia are understandably enraged over the Freedom Industries chemical spill and the way it's been handled by everyone from the water company and the governor's office. And this surely has not been Governor Tomblin's finest hour.

Still, when a friend told me that a small group was planning on marching on his office and demanding his resignation, my initial reaction, which still holds, was that this approaches the level of the Platonic Form of Bad Tactics.

One, what do you reckon would really happen? Would the governor say "OK, you're right. I'm outta here"?

Two, nothing is more pathetic than a show of force where there isn't any.

Three, issuing demands is generally useless unless one has the power to enforce them, in which case it isn't necessary.

Four, as my beloved Niccolo Machiavelli observed nearly 500 years ago, insulting or threatening someone doesn't actually do them any harm but it puts them on guard against you and makes it harder if not impossible to deal productively with the person in the future.

He said it much better:

"I hold it to be proof of great prudence for men to abstain from threats and insulting words towards anyone, for neither the one nor the other in any way diminishes the strength of the enemy; but the one makes him cautious, and the other increases his hatred of you, and makes him more persevering in his efforts to injure you."

I think people who want to influence public policy would do well to memorize that verse. While it's not necessarily true that people who are insulted or threatened will hate or try to injure us, it's a sure bet they will be less likely to cooperate at some future point. And in places like WV, people tend to stick around for a good while and they have long memories. It's hard to unburn a bridge.

Virtu and fortuna

Goat Rope has been looking at public policy and how it happens these days. It occurred to me (not for the first time) that the author of Ecclesiastes was right about there being nothing new under the sun.

Some of the wisest words ever written about political strategy come from my old pal and sometime patron saint Niccolo Machiavelli, who admittedly does have a bit of a PR problem.

But let's put in in context. In his book Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy, political scientist John Kingdon looks at how public policy gets made. His most interesting idea--and one that rings true in my experience--is that there are policy windows that open sometimes. When they're open, you have a chance at getting things done and when they close, you don't. (Speaking of which, the jury is still out on the window for health care reform.)

A policy window could be a crisis, a change in mood following an election, the expiration of a piece of legislation that has to be revisited, or any number of things. Sometimes--rarely--you know in advance when a window might open. Most of the time you don't. That means you need to do a lot of preparation in advance to be able to seize the moment when it comes.

In his classic The Prince, Machiavelli talked about virtu and Fortuna. Virtu basically means the voluntary things we have control of while Fortuna referred to the unexpected opportunities that might come along. Machiavelli believed that we could at least anticipate and prepare for these opportunities:

...I think it may be true that fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but that she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us. I would compare her to an impetuous river that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings, removes earth from this side and places it on the other; everyone flees before it, and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it; and yet though it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet, men can make provisions against it by dykes and banks, so that when it rises it will either go into a canal or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous. So it is with fortune, which shows her power where no measures have been taken to resist her, and directs her fury where she knows that no dykes or barriers have been made to hold her.

The key to success, in Machiavelli's day as in our own, is the matching of virtu to Fortuna, which above all means adapting to the needs and opportunities of the moment:

...the prince who bases himself entirely on fortune is ruined when fortune changes. I also believe that he is happy whose mode of procedure accords with the needs of the times, and similarly he is unfortunate whose mode of procedure is opposed to the times....

I therefore conclude then that fortune varying and men remaining fixed in their ways, they are successful so long as these ways conform to circumstances, but when they are opposed then they are unsuccessful.

FORTUNA IS FICKLE. Here's reaction from the AFL to the health care reform goat rope in the Senate.

ANOTHER VIEW. Krugman says pass it.

A STATE VIEW of what reform, especially Medicaid expansion, would mean to WV is given here.

COOL VIEW of an undersea volcanic eruption here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GOING FOR THE GROSS-OUT

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. We're in the middle of the encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus right now. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if one is attempting to make the acquaintance of a possibly cannibalistic one-eyed giant, then breaking into his house uninvited and eating most of his cheese is not the best way to start. For that matter, one would be well-advised not to visit the island of the cyclopes at all unless driven by dire necessity.

As Dylan once sang,

The moral of this story, the moral of this song, is simply that one should never be where one does not belong.

Odysseus, alas, was a little impulse-driven and not given to taking such sage advice. When he and his men are busted in the act, he begs for hospitality:

...we're at your knees,
in hopes of a warm welcome, even a guest-gift,
the sort that hosts give strangers. That's the custom.
Respect the gods, my friend. We're suppliants--at your mercy!
Zeus of the Strangers guards all guests and suppliants:
strangers are sacred--Zeus will avenge their rights!'

Polyphemus is unimpressed and not particularly religious:

'Stranger,' he grumbled back from his brutal heart,
'you must be a fool, stranger, or come from nowhere,
telling me to fear the gods or avoid their wrath?
We Cyclops never blink at Zeus and Zeus's shield
of storm and thunder, or any other blessed god--
we've got more force by far.
I'd never spare you in fear of Zeus's hatred,
you or your comrades here, unless I had the urge...'

And by the way, he doesn't have the urge.

Lurching up, he lunged out with his hands toward my men
and snatching two at once, rapping them on the ground
he knocked them dead like pups--
their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor-
and ripping them limb from limb to fix his meal
he bolted them down like a mountain-lion, left no scrap
devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all!

Not only is he a cannibal--he's got bad table manners! At one point, as his culinary adventures continue, he even gets drunk, passes out and vomits up the remains of his supper. Odysseus and his men would like to kill the monster--but they are locked up in his cave by a massive stone so large that

no twenty-two wagons, rugged and four-wheeled
could budget that boulder off the ground...

This could be a setback... More tomorrow.

NO DIRECT CONNECTION TO THE TOPIC AT HAND, but Massey Energy has been ordered by a federal judge to rehire 85 union workers who lost their jobs in 2004 after the company acquired a formerly union mine.

HOMECOMINGS. One theme of the ongoing series on the Odyssey is the difficulty combat veterans face in going home. The health care injured veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan isn't helping.

ALL IN THE MIND...or at least some of it. Here's an interesting item on the connection between mental attitudes and health.

MACHIAVELLI made the Wall Street Journal recently.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED