So I’m looking to hire a campaigner for my online progressive group. What does a campaigner do? Well, the basic process looks like this:

1. Read the news and look for a political fight that might interest people.

2. Think of a way that ordinary people can get involved.

3. Write an email briefly explaining the issue and persuading people to take action on it.

4. Channel those actions into a wider impact, e.g. by informing the press, delivering petitions, running ads, etc.

People who might be a good fit for this include political bloggers, who have a lot of experience with 1 and 3, and people who have run campaigns on local issues, giving them experience with 2 and 4. It’s also helpful if you have experience with web design and HTML.

But the most important thing is just being creative and persuasive and passionate about the issues. Every campaign is different and each one has to be run differently to seize people’s attention. Someone who can think outside the box and try something new each time is going to be more successful than someone who’s an expert at the standard way of doing things.

Having done it myself, nothing competes with the thrill of running a campaign. Instead of just getting upset about the news, you get to do something about it. You get to rally people to action, explain the story to the media, and really get into a fight with the bad guys. And every once in a while you actually win a victory that improves the lives of millions of people. It’s ridiculously exciting, fun, and rewarding.

If you’re interested, send a resume and a short note persuading me to take some action to me@aaronsw.com with “campaigner” in the subject.

From the right, Gary Becker writes:

Keynes and many earlier economists emphasized that unemployment rises
during recessions because nominal wage rates tend to be inflexible in
the downward direction.

From the left, Matt Yglesias writes:

…the Keynesian prescription is not only for the government to run deficits in response to recessions, but to run surpluses in expansions. Thus, the Clinton administration’s fiscal policies were arguably “Keynesian” but the Reagan and (especially) George W Bush administrations were implementing an agenda that flew in the face of Keynes’ ideas much more clearly than anything Angela Merkel’s ever done.

Neither of these are true at all. Pretty much the very first thing Keynes says in the general theory is that downwardly-inflexible nominal wage rates (sticky wages) are a good thing. And he spends a large part of chapter 8 denouncing the practice of saving surpluses (sinking funds).

So where do they get this stuff? While these aren’t the views of Keynes, both these views are held by the so-called “New Keynesians” — people like Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw, who have tried to shoehorn a moderate version of Keynes into classical economics. These proponents are rather more prominent than more traditional Keynesians like Jamie Galbraith, so political commentators hear their view and assume it’s a faithful representation of Keynes’ own.

Perhaps Keynes was wrong — after all, we shouldn’t slavishly follow the scribblings of some defunct economist. But if so, we should tell the truth and admit we’re disagreeing with Keynes, not expounding his ideas. (Both Yglesias and Becker have not run a correction, despite my emails.) Furthermore, we should actually engage with Keynes’ argument.

On sticky wages, Keynes says that if nominal wages could fall, then nominal costs would fall, which would mean that nominal prices would fall, which means that real wages would end up staying the same.¹ But, even worse, if there was no stickiness at all, nothing would stop nominal wages from falling further and further until eventually everyone was paid zero.² I have never heard the New Keynesians respond to this argument.

On the question of surpluses, Keynes criticizes them as a pointless reduction of aggregate demand. They create unemployment because they take money out of circulation for no real purpose. It’s just supposed to sit around until a “rainy day” when the economy isn’t doing so well. But when that rainy day comes, the reason the economy isn’t doing well is because people are out of work. If that’s true, you can simply print more money to get them back to work without any ill effects. (Printing money only causes inflation at full employment.) You don’t get any benefit from having taken the money out of circulation earlier.³

Both these seem like strong arguments to me. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to pretend they don’t exist.

1. Chapter 2:

   …if money-wages change, one would have expected the classical school to argue that prices would change in almost the same proportion, leaving the real wage and the level of unemployment practically the same as before, any small gain or loss to labour being at the expense or profit of other elements of marginal cost which have been left unaltered.

   ↩

2. Chapter 21:

   If, on the contrary, money-wages were to fall without limit whenever there was a tendency for less than full employment, the asymmetry would, indeed, disappear. But in that case there would be no resting-place below full employment until either the rate of interest was incapable of falling further or wages were zero. In fact we must have some factor, the value of which in terms of money is, if not fixed, at least sticky, to give us any stability of values in a monetary system.

   ↩

3. Chapter 8:

   We must also take account of the effect on the aggregate propensity to consume of Government sinking funds for the discharge of debt paid for out of ordinary taxation. For these represent a species of corporate saving, so that a policy of substantial sinking funds must be regarded in given circumstances as reducing the propensity to consume. It is for this reason that a change-over from a policy of Government borrowing to the opposite policy of providing sinking funds (or vice versa) is capable of causing a severe contraction (or marked expansion) of effective demand.

   […]

   Or again, in Great Britain at the present time (1935) [thanks to] the principles of “sound” finance [sinking funds are so large] that even if private individuals were ready to spend the whole of their net incomes it would be a severe task to restore full employment…The sinking funds of local authorities now stand … at an annual figure of more than half the amount which these authorities are spending on the whole of their new developments. [footnote giving the amounts] Yet it is not certain that the Ministry of Health are aware, when they insist on stiff sinking funds by local authorities, how much they may be aggravating the problem of unemployment.

   ↩

On the advice of several people, I started reading Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. I haven’t gotten very far, but it seems to me to be a horribly muddled book, wrong on just about every point. So perhaps this will be an ongoing series where I debunk the book in sequence. I apologize to my readers if these posts seem obvious and not very interesting. That’s because I think the situations Parfit discusses are actually quite simple and it’s only his muddled terminology that makes them seem tricky.

Let’s clarify Parfit’s discussion of self-defeating theories, which really comes down to a discussion about credible commitments. For simplicity, imagine there is no interest or inflation and your only goal in life is to maximize how much money you have. Thus an act is rational iff it contributes to that goal.

Case 1: There are two buttons. SUBTRACT removes $1000 from your bank account, ADD adds $5000 to your bank account. Obviously it is rational to press ADD and irrational to press SUBTRACT.

Case 2: There is one button, BOTH, which does both at the same time. Obviously it is rational to press BOTH, since it results in a net gain of $4000.

Case 3: There is a different button, DELAY, which adds $5000 to your bank account today and then removes $1000 in exactly one week. (DELAY is a weird button — to prevent you from using it twice at the same time, it stays down for the whole week and only pops back up once the $1000 is removed.) Obviously it is rational to press DELAY since it too results in a net gain of $4000.

Case 4: There are two buttons: DELAY, which is the same as before, and EVADE, which changes your bank account number so that none of the other buttons work. You can only press each button once and they have no other consequences. It is rational to press DELAY and then EVADE, for a net gain of $5000.

When is it rational to press EVADE? Only when you don’t expect to be able to press DELAY ever again. (EVADE gains you at most $1000, while DELAY gains you at least $4000.) If you could press DELAY twice, would it be rational to hit EVADE after the first press? Of course not, it’d cost you at least $4000. But Parfit seems to suggest one is acting rationally irrationally by not pressing it. The notion seems nonsensical.

Case 5: Same two buttons, except after you press the DELAY button it engages a little impenetrable metal cover that physically prevents you from pressing EVADE. It’s rational to press DELAY. Then it’s rational to press EVADE, but that’s kind of irrelevant, because it’s also impossible.

Case 6: Same as 5, except it injects you with a serum that prevents you from pressing EVADE. Again, it’s rational to press DELAY and then rational but impossible to press EVADE.

I don’t see a big difference between these two cases, but Parfit seems to think the difference is vital.

Perhaps it’s the fact that another person is involved that leads to the complications?

Case 7: Same as 4, except the $1000 goes into Bob’s account and only Bob can press DELAY. Bob has the same notion of rationality as you and thus will only press DELAY if he believes you will not press EVADE. You could promise not to press it, but it would be irrational for you to keep that promise so Bob rightly does not believe it. However, it would be rational for you to engage the impenetrable cover or take the serum that prevents you from pressing EVADE.

There is no rational irrationality. Your goal of maximizing your money is not self-defeating. This all seems like the most obvious, unarguable stuff in the world. So I don’t see why Parfit is so confused about it.

Management is art of getting people who work for you to accomplish things. It’s a subtle and fascinating art, the applied version of my great intellectual love, sociology. It’s usually practiced badly, but even when done badly it can accomplish incredible things. One person can only do so much on their own—their time, their powers, their creativity are all limited. But even an incompetent manager, who uses only a fraction of the powers of her employees, is capable of accomplishing tasks far beyond the range of any single person.

Organizing is the art of getting people who don’t work for you to accomplish things. Many of the underlying concepts are the same but the execution is vastly more difficult. You don’t really get to pick your people. The people you get don’t simply follow instructions, they must be persuaded and cajoled and made to understand your vision. But when it works, they accomplish great things you never would have allowed them to try.

Organizing has many forms. The obvious one is where you take a batch of volunteers and try to shape them into a manageable force. The best are selected, developed, promoted, and taught to do the same. It is like traditional management in reverse: instead of starting with the top of a hierarchy and building down through hiring, you start with a bunch of people at the bottom and try to build them up through training and promotion.

But organizing also means finding other leaders, people embedded in management structures (organizations) of their own, and using them toward a common goal. Sometimes this means explicit direction of their efforts, as in a coalition, where you get the heads of various groups to all work on a common project, or sometimes it’s simply having them lend their name or knowledge to the cause. A great organizer of this sort develops rich networks they can quickly call upon in need. (Journalists can be good organizers in this sense, developing connections with sources and experts they can leverage to create a story.)

Organizing is most prevalent in my own field of politics, where the work I tend to do is often called “online organizing.” This term usually means the kind of stuff you see on the MoveOn mailing list: emails asking you to call your senator, host a house party, attend a vigil — but mostly tell your friends and give us money. Since I got into this business, cranky old-timers have been yelling at me that organizing people over the Internet is impossible, that you have to organize people face-to-face. This struck me as a ridiculous claim (and still does), but I think I now see the truth these critics are reacting to.

Online organizing is a huge misnomer. Sending emails to millions isn’t organizing, any more than writing company wide memos is managing. It does not teach people new skills or persuade them of a larger vision or get them to continue the work themselves. It takes people where they are and gives them small things they can do from there.

Mobilizing can be done thru any medium. The folks who knock on your door to ask for your vote (or donation) are face-to-face mobilizers. You can do the same by telephone or television (call now to contribute!). It is, however, a one-way relationship. You are simply a number on a list.

But this doesn’t mean online organizing is impossible, just that it isn’t often done. Obviously it’s much harder than mere mobilization—and much more complicated—but it’s much more rewarding as well. It is what makes for a successful open source project, or a thriving online community. The problem is one of scale — and that’s true when it’s done through any medium. IAF and ACORN never had five million members. Still, this seems to be the genuinely important question: whether the scaling power of the Internet allows for a revolution in the scale of real organizing. I don’t know, but the first step toward answering it is being clear about what it means.

When you’re writing laws, changing the smallest details can have huge effects. But I’ve never seen anything as big as what happened this week, when the White House gutted an entire section of financial regulation by removing the letter s.

Right now, shareholders of big companies vote to decide who will be on the board of directors by filling out a mail-in ballot called a proxy card. But currently the corporation’s CEO gets to decide who’s on the card! The result is a board hand-picked by the CEO — and they return the favor by providing CEOs with exorbitant salaries.

The current financial regulation bill — in a provision passed by both the House and Senate — would change that by allowing shareholders with 5% of the stock to come together and propose additional names for the ballot. But the White House is trying to gut this proposal at the last minute, and they’ve done it in an incredibly sneaky way — they removed the letter s from the end of the word shareholders.

Now instead of shareholders whose stock adds up to 3% coming together, you have to be a single shareholder with 5% of the stock all by yourself. And for most big companies, there just isn’t anyone like that. Take GE, for example — its biggest shareholder only owns about 3.4% of the company.

So by removing a single letter, they managed to make this provision completely useless.

The White House is being barraged by major CEOs begging them to keep fighting for this provision — after all, no CEO wants to see their lavish salaries cut! As Barney Frank put it, “I think there are some people in the White House who think, ‘Well, we’re fighting the financial institutions, but why fight with some of the others, you know, the other corporations?’” Apparently they’re so scared of a fight, they’re willing to gut a provision passed by both the House and Senate.

If you’re interested in fighting for real corporate reform, please sign our petition to the White House:

“Stop lobbying against shareholder power in corporate decision-making — and against protections that would finally rein in CEO pay. That’s not change we can believe in.”

Add your name: