Belief (in) Systems (Part I)
Over the last few weeks, I've had to review what I know about belief systems while cobbling together a model for systems of educational change. The two kinds of systems run headlong into a third phenomenon known as 'systems engineering'; all three are vastly different and yet tangentially related.
Without doubt, one of the most unusual and perturbing phenomena in the modern globalised world is that of the synchronous and inexplicable (except in retrospect, in which direction everyone sees more clearly) disruption of an otherwise semi-stable and relatively prosperous range of institutions. This disruption (and in some cases, near-fatal immolation) is often glossed over with a few familiar phrases: 'tipping point', 'domino theory', 'pyramid scheme', 'inevitable meltdown', and so on. It is like sticking tiny plasters (Band-Aids) over a huge and ugly fracture that has torn a hole in the overlying muscle and skin—these terms don't quite cover it, and they don't help in the analytical or physical reduction of the problem.
The problem really is that people are greedy and self-serving; that is all there is to it. The degree to which people are greedy and self-serving varies, but wherever there are quantitative (or to be a little bit more accurate, point-scoring) mechanisms in place for benchmarking or rewards, these will override other considerations. The overriding may be subtle or immense, but it will be there.
This is not just idle theorising; some examples are found in places like Ivan Png's 2008 paper on how giving more incentives for blood donation actually reduces the amount of voluntary blood donation. The relevant theory is summarised here; essentially, it is a phenomenon in which competing drives (for altruistic behaviour and for engaging in a reward-based system) crowd each other, to nobody's optimal benefit.
This is why you cannot actually say that rewarding ministers or teachers financially will make them better people. At a certain point, the vocation becomes a job simply because you are being paid for it. No matter what, the reward system makes you want to evaluate your performance in terms of 'whether it is worth the points', and not 'whether it is good regardless of points'. There is a difference there, and anyone who can't see it will confuse the good/evil axis of with the profit/loss axis of socio-economic behaviour.
What the research seems to say is that the human animal still believes in the unknown, in the complexity of the world, in doing good for others despite the lack of reward. At the same time, since the Age of Enlightenment began, the human animal is being educated to think in a logical, and then a mathematical/statistical, and then a point-scoring way. The two kinds of belief systems clash and tangle each other up; this makes people think that by creating dubious financial instruments and channeling wealth to the top 1% of the population at the expense of the bottom 55%, they are honouring God or their own altruistic principles.
It is the same thing which makes powerful CEOs (or those who think they are powerful) put their own well-being first while honestly believing that it is for the good of all. I saw this in the media the other day: some unbelievable jerk was saying that CEOs should receive much larger compensation and benefit packages than President Obama was willing to give. His argument was that if the financial sector didn't provide these things, the CEO types would go elsewhere for their goodies and the people would benefit less in the long run. It is the most amazing kind of self-delusion.
It happens in altruistic institutions too—hospitals and schools are not immune. The politics in the antiseptic and academic corridors are just as rife with germs and miasmas as the corridors of political and financial power. Since hospitals and schools pay less than other institutions, they used to have more professional courage and altruistic tendencies. Nowadays, however, the hospital superintendent has been replaced by a CEO; the school principal likewise. These birds have hardly or never treated a patient nor taught a student in the way and settings that the true doctors and teachers have.
So how did they get to be in charge? Simple: point-scoring systems. You make such a person boss because he has proven that he can deliver numbers which you like. You never employ a CEO for the stuff he can produce which you either a) don't want or never knew you wanted to know about, or b) cannot define clearly enough to write an unequivocal job description. Or at least, you aren't supposed to, going by modern conventions in most systems.
If you hire a CEO to execute policy and set clearly defined, time-based benchmarks and all the rest of it, you can count on it that any altruism he may once have professed will drain away within five years or so. He might still think he has it, but the quantitative data parasites will have eaten it away and replaced it with their own RNA or DNA, much like some sort of memetic virus.
The only way out that I can see, after reviewing a wide range of papers, is that you can actually make the CEO so rich that money becomes a sort of gaseous fluid. He breathes it, lives it, and has no more idea of counting it than a fish has of counting water molecules. At this point, the top 5 richest people on earth begin to give it away in well-considered and altruistic chunks. They probably will never be able to give it all away personally and still be responsible human beings, so they set up funds and trusts and other institutions. And so the cycle begins again.
This is not to say that paying your CEO $2m a year or $30k a month or (like certain football players) £130k a week will make him regain his altruism. Firstly, you need much more than that—perhaps $1b a year or something. Secondly, it's not so much altruism regained as quantitative perception lost. When you can't count the loot, it becomes meaningless. Thirdly, there are other proxies which may be more alluring: the £130k a week football player might only find life meaningful if he is also made team captain, for example.
Which leads us back to institutions such as hospitals and schools. I've realised that the #1 corrupter of senior doctors is the type of incentive scheme known as the 'points system'. Doctors get points for doing procedures. The more points, the more bonuses. See where that goes? Meanwhile, the #1 corrupter of senior teachers is either administrative power (or tenure, in some systems) or giving them results-based bonuses. I have a ton of research to show that this is true, sadly.
The outcome of such corruption is that the altruistic institution declines. Its vigour has been turned to a quantitative purpose. While such an institution might still have the trappings of its vocation and its hallowed past (like having murals with the Hippocratic Oath in them, or mottos extolling the benefits of holistic education and the primacy of holiness) all over the place, it is a whited sepulchre as far as its original mission is concerned.
Without doubt, one of the most unusual and perturbing phenomena in the modern globalised world is that of the synchronous and inexplicable (except in retrospect, in which direction everyone sees more clearly) disruption of an otherwise semi-stable and relatively prosperous range of institutions. This disruption (and in some cases, near-fatal immolation) is often glossed over with a few familiar phrases: 'tipping point', 'domino theory', 'pyramid scheme', 'inevitable meltdown', and so on. It is like sticking tiny plasters (Band-Aids) over a huge and ugly fracture that has torn a hole in the overlying muscle and skin—these terms don't quite cover it, and they don't help in the analytical or physical reduction of the problem.
The problem really is that people are greedy and self-serving; that is all there is to it. The degree to which people are greedy and self-serving varies, but wherever there are quantitative (or to be a little bit more accurate, point-scoring) mechanisms in place for benchmarking or rewards, these will override other considerations. The overriding may be subtle or immense, but it will be there.
This is not just idle theorising; some examples are found in places like Ivan Png's 2008 paper on how giving more incentives for blood donation actually reduces the amount of voluntary blood donation. The relevant theory is summarised here; essentially, it is a phenomenon in which competing drives (for altruistic behaviour and for engaging in a reward-based system) crowd each other, to nobody's optimal benefit.
This is why you cannot actually say that rewarding ministers or teachers financially will make them better people. At a certain point, the vocation becomes a job simply because you are being paid for it. No matter what, the reward system makes you want to evaluate your performance in terms of 'whether it is worth the points', and not 'whether it is good regardless of points'. There is a difference there, and anyone who can't see it will confuse the good/evil axis of with the profit/loss axis of socio-economic behaviour.
What the research seems to say is that the human animal still believes in the unknown, in the complexity of the world, in doing good for others despite the lack of reward. At the same time, since the Age of Enlightenment began, the human animal is being educated to think in a logical, and then a mathematical/statistical, and then a point-scoring way. The two kinds of belief systems clash and tangle each other up; this makes people think that by creating dubious financial instruments and channeling wealth to the top 1% of the population at the expense of the bottom 55%, they are honouring God or their own altruistic principles.
It is the same thing which makes powerful CEOs (or those who think they are powerful) put their own well-being first while honestly believing that it is for the good of all. I saw this in the media the other day: some unbelievable jerk was saying that CEOs should receive much larger compensation and benefit packages than President Obama was willing to give. His argument was that if the financial sector didn't provide these things, the CEO types would go elsewhere for their goodies and the people would benefit less in the long run. It is the most amazing kind of self-delusion.
It happens in altruistic institutions too—hospitals and schools are not immune. The politics in the antiseptic and academic corridors are just as rife with germs and miasmas as the corridors of political and financial power. Since hospitals and schools pay less than other institutions, they used to have more professional courage and altruistic tendencies. Nowadays, however, the hospital superintendent has been replaced by a CEO; the school principal likewise. These birds have hardly or never treated a patient nor taught a student in the way and settings that the true doctors and teachers have.
So how did they get to be in charge? Simple: point-scoring systems. You make such a person boss because he has proven that he can deliver numbers which you like. You never employ a CEO for the stuff he can produce which you either a) don't want or never knew you wanted to know about, or b) cannot define clearly enough to write an unequivocal job description. Or at least, you aren't supposed to, going by modern conventions in most systems.
If you hire a CEO to execute policy and set clearly defined, time-based benchmarks and all the rest of it, you can count on it that any altruism he may once have professed will drain away within five years or so. He might still think he has it, but the quantitative data parasites will have eaten it away and replaced it with their own RNA or DNA, much like some sort of memetic virus.
The only way out that I can see, after reviewing a wide range of papers, is that you can actually make the CEO so rich that money becomes a sort of gaseous fluid. He breathes it, lives it, and has no more idea of counting it than a fish has of counting water molecules. At this point, the top 5 richest people on earth begin to give it away in well-considered and altruistic chunks. They probably will never be able to give it all away personally and still be responsible human beings, so they set up funds and trusts and other institutions. And so the cycle begins again.
This is not to say that paying your CEO $2m a year or $30k a month or (like certain football players) £130k a week will make him regain his altruism. Firstly, you need much more than that—perhaps $1b a year or something. Secondly, it's not so much altruism regained as quantitative perception lost. When you can't count the loot, it becomes meaningless. Thirdly, there are other proxies which may be more alluring: the £130k a week football player might only find life meaningful if he is also made team captain, for example.
Which leads us back to institutions such as hospitals and schools. I've realised that the #1 corrupter of senior doctors is the type of incentive scheme known as the 'points system'. Doctors get points for doing procedures. The more points, the more bonuses. See where that goes? Meanwhile, the #1 corrupter of senior teachers is either administrative power (or tenure, in some systems) or giving them results-based bonuses. I have a ton of research to show that this is true, sadly.
The outcome of such corruption is that the altruistic institution declines. Its vigour has been turned to a quantitative purpose. While such an institution might still have the trappings of its vocation and its hallowed past (like having murals with the Hippocratic Oath in them, or mottos extolling the benefits of holistic education and the primacy of holiness) all over the place, it is a whited sepulchre as far as its original mission is concerned.
Labels: Altruism, Economics, Qualitative Research, Social Sciences
etched with acid at 11:47:00 am
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