Who Cares About the Public Good?

In the midst of fear and misery, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed the extraordinary extent to which people will show their concern and appreciation for others, not just to family and friends but to medical staff, emergency workers, people serving in shops, cleaners and librarians.   It has been very reassuring for a grumpy curmudgeon like me.  I recently read a letter from an ageing farming couple in Kansas donating their one N-95 mask to charity for “someone in need’.  Despite differences in beliefs, political affiliations, and cultural preferences, there is a deep reservoir of commitment to the common good to reassure us, at least at times like this.

While I haven’t been seen out on the street joining those applauding our essential services workers, I would like to think I am working for the public good, too.  How could I be doing that?  Well, I teach, and by improving peoples’ knowledge, skills and understanding, they can go on to contribute to society.  Yes, but I know there’s a problem with that answer. Over the years, much of my teaching has addressed strategy, leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship.  In other words, I am increasing the skills of many people who will go on to work in business, and most likely will end up working in the vast, often cruel, free-market capitalist system dominating society today.  There, got that off my chest, and yet I don’t feel any better for having said it.

Continuing to defend what I do, I can add that much of the time I stress two points in teaching: first, learn how to think rather than just follow established rules and precedents; and second, be determined to understand what your customers or clients are seeking, rather than ‘selling’ them a product or service you’ve developed.  These make me feel a little less disappointed in what I attempt to achieve.  I also spend quite a lot of time on developing peoples’ entrepreneurial skills.  Much of that is channelled into creating new (and potentially exploitative?) businesses.  I like working with not-for-profit organisations, especially those in the arts.  However, most of what I offer comprises the usual topics that are taught in any business school.  Since I’m still feeling rather defensive, I can only repeat my principal intention is helping people to learn how to think again.  The ability to think, really think, seems to have gone out of fashion.  Using systems, following templates, fitting tasks into established processes, all that militates against asking the questions that matter, including:  “What am I trying to achieve? What do I understand about this?  Is this worth doing?  Will this make things ‘better’?  What is better?  What do I know?”

There was a period years ago when I was first asked to consider these and many related questions, encouraged and supported as I tried to learn and think.  It was a privileged time, as a university student.  Then I started working, and it was more than twenty years later before I was shocked into remembering the range of issues that had been so important back then.  I took part in a series of roundtable discussions exploring the tensions between equality and efficiency, individualism and community, and grappled with how we determine what is good, and how to act. Those two weeks rescued me.  Since then I have tried to make sure at least some part of my life involves talking with other people about important issues, about what makes a good political system, or what makes a good law.  I even try to develop my thinking by writing this blog.

All these thoughts came to mind by returning to a simple question: ‘who cares about the public good?’.  It’s a question that has taken me on a roller-coaster ride for years.  Some of the time I am plunging down, horrified at the self-centred individualism I see on display all around me: not always said out loud, but I can clearly hear, “what’s in it for me?”  In my blackest moments, misanthropy takes over, and I start to bemoan – even hate – the human race.  Then, suddenly, I am swooping up again, noticing all the acts of kindness and consideration I see in everyday life, in the articles I read, in the stories I hear.  People are fundamentally good, caring for friends, colleagues, neighbours and acquaintances, contributing in some way or another to that elusive ‘common good’.  I’m reassured, but am I right?  It might help to take a broader perspective.

We could start with politicians, who are elected to Congress or Parliament to act on behalf of the common good as they see it.  With so many choices before me, I’d like to use as my example one of the two state senators here in North Carolina, Thom Tillis, who will be standing for re-election in November of this year.  The other NC senator completes his term in 2022, and has promised he won’t stand again.  Promised?  We’ll see, but the current scandal over him selling shares based on inside information about Covid-19 might ensure he does retire, or even resign.

I first wrote to Senator Tillis in 2017, following Trump’s election.  Early on, he declared he wasn’t a partisan politician, blindly following the party line:

It’s time to get past the election results, get over it and get to work. It’s time to recognize that real people sent a mandate, but the mandate wasn’t Republican, wasn’t far-right, wasn’t far-left. All they said was produce results. I’m going to produce results. I’m going to expect my members to produce results. I’m going to go into my conference when it looks like we’re going down the path that doesn’t produce a result and I’m going to call them out, and I’ll hold my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to the same standard. …. I want to work with people on the other side of the aisle”

Sounds good?  Let’s see what has happened since those reassuring comments?  When I wrote expressing concern about the confirmation of Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education, Tillis replied: “Although I do not agree with all of her policy proposals, I have spoken to Secretary DeVos at length, and I am confident that she will be a champion for students, parents, teachers and administrators … Please be assured that I will hold Secretary DeVos and the Department of Education accountable to the highest standards. As the Secretary assumes her new role, I am confident the Department will work closely with stake-holders in North Carolina to ensure students receive the educational opportunity they deserve.”

Time for a progress report?  When the New Jersey-based Education Law Center released its latest 50-state assessment of public school funding in November of last year, it revealed North Carolina fared significantly worse than most states. According to the report, it ranks 46th in per pupil funding (more than $4,400 below the national average) and next to last in the nation when it comes to its funding effort (defined as K-12 education revenues as a share of state GDP): the only one worse was Arizona.[i]  Perhaps that what Thom thought NC ‘deserved’! What I do know is in his responses to my many letters, Tillis always includes, “Please be assured I will hold xxx accountable to the highest standards.”  It seems those highest standards are remarkably low.

I wonder how a national senator defines the ‘public good’.  Thom Tillis was the man who wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post early last year opposing Trump’s plan to use military funding to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico.  Was he concerned about the common good, or about supporting immigration?  No, it was, “I cannot justify providing the executive with more ways to bypass Congress.”  You may recall, those bold words led to blatant pressure from Trump and conservatives over his prospects when running for re-election. It took just one week before hevoted in favor of Trump’s declaration.  Who’s good was paramount?

In terms of assessing politicians acting for the common good, what were those four words again: the common good ‘as they see it’.  Right now, what Thom Tillis clearly sees is his re-election on the near horizon, and all of a sudden, he’s sending out a weekly newsletter on Covid-19!  On Saturday 25 April his update was on “some of the things I have been working on” including $919m in grants for 6,906 health care providers in NC to assist with their coronavirus response; $378m to NC colleges, universities, and post-secondary institutions; and for K-12 students.  He has been working on this?  He’s referring to the federal stimulus bill, put together by the Senate’s lead negotiators, Mnuchin, Schumer, McConnell and Ueland, and Rep. Mark Meadows, Trump’s next chief of staff. [ii]  Like the rest, Tillis’ role was making comments and voting in support.

Let me be clear.  It’s not that I think politicians and members of Congress don’t have beliefs or aspirations, however odd they might be.  However, for most on the Republican side it is hard to know what these views include as they turn turtle into the murky depths of Trumpworld.  Tillis is just one example among many, an example of how ‘diligently’ the common good is pursued.

Am I looking in the wrong direction?  After all, this is the land of the free market, the epitome of capitalism.  It was GM CEO Charles Wilson who said, “what’s good for General Motors is good for America”  presumably on the basis companies make stuff and deliver services, and sell it at as low a price as they can manage, given the cut-throat competition that exists.  But that was a quote from a statement with a rather different meaning.  In 1953, President Eisenhower nominated Charles Wilson to be Secretary of Defense.  Asked during hearings if, as secretary of defense, he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered he could, adding he couldn’t conceive of this arising: “because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.” [iii]  A somewhat more modest and realistic view than the impression the abbreviated and frequently used quote suggests.

Where to begin on the private sector and the common good?  For nearly 250 years, we have been stuck with one comment made by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations, a reference to an ‘invisible hand’ seen as guiding market choices, rather than a producer’s intentions.  This invisible hand is used as a justification for the free market, which will deliver what people want at a price they can afford.  In fact, Smith’s comments were about international trade, observing:

“By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.” [iv]

I like Adam Smith.  I like the way he points out the gap between ‘affectations’ and reality.  I like the way he reflects on unintended consequences.  I like the way his analyses examine how those with resources will sell what they have but don’t need, and thereby contribute to some kind of redistribution.  However, Adam Smith was an astute man.  He knew that society depended on governments, the regulations they enforce, and the policies they pursue to ensure the common good.  If he ever entertained the idea of a totally ‘free market’, he didn’t waste much time on it.  Business is business, and the common good is the task of government, not capitalists.

Somehow, all that good sense has been lost over the years.  We now live in a world where the best way to allocate resources, whether they be food, medical care or consumer goods, is to leave this to the market.  More than that, governments, with increasing enthusiasm, have taken goods and services out of the public sphere, and privatised them.  As a result we see: “from Cape Town to Washington, the market system has depleted and ravaged the public sphere – public health, public education, public access to a healthy environment – in favour of private gain.” [v]  That same market has encouraged the ‘gig’ economy,  where “the people who do essential work – taking care of the sick; picking up our garbage; bringing us food; guaranteeing that we have access to water, electricity and Wi-Fi – are often the very people who earn the least, without benefits or secure contracts.” [vi]  So much for the benefits of choice and the free market!  As well as all these changes, the free market also creates bad and sometime strange outcomes.  Consider ‘Internet influencers’, with their millions of followers.  In recent weeks, some have been posting coronavirus conspiracy stories, often promoting what they know are wrong and even dangerous ideas.  Why?  They need to sustain their numbers to ensure continuing advertising income and sponsors.  Like elsewhere in the free market system, it is money first, consequences later.

Is this the time to argue for the opposite approach, the saving grace of socialism?  Surely socialists are concerned with the common good.  Reviewing books on the coffee industry, Adam Gopnik noted, “the evidence suggests that socialist models of production have hardly humanized the demands of agricultural labor. The problem, it emerges, is of a planetary enslavement to a monocrop existence. Agriculture, practiced on a mass scale, is the original sin of modernity.” [vii]  Oh dear, it seems socialists can be as infected by the love of wealth as the rest of us.

These comments inevitably circle back to me.  Like many people I know, I try to do what is right, what is fair, what is good.  We are neither heroes nor failures, just addressing what we can do in our own small way.  Today, I fear we may be a threatened minority, or at least heading in that direction.  Not vulnerable yet, certainly not an endangered species, but a shrinking minority still firmly believing our most important values are those that contribute to the common good.

[i] http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2019/11/06/new-national-report-nc-education-funding-near-the-bottom/

[ii] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/24/congress-coronavirus-emergency-package-146066

[iii] Charles E. Wilson, 1952 Confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, responding to Sen. Robert Hendrickson’s question regarding conflicts of interest.

[iv] Book IV, Chapter II, paragraph IX of The Wealth of Nations.

[v] Dirk Philipsen, Private Gain Must No Longer be Able to Elbow Out the Public Good’, Aeon, April 2020

[vi] Ibid

[vii] Adam Gopnik, The War on Coffee, Books, The New Yorker, April 27, 2020

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