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Margaret Levi on institutional design and communities of fate

Episode 19 30.03.2021

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Season 2021

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Why do some people sacrifice their income, freedom, or even their lives for strangers who can never repay them? Political scientist Margaret Levi unpacks the concept of “communities of fate” and reveals how institutional design determines whether collaboration produces solidarity or exploitation. Subscribe for more episodes on the science of real-world collaboration. Margaret Levi, director of Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and one of the most influential scholars of institutional governance, brings decades of research on labor unions, citizen-government relations, and organizational design to a conversation about what makes collaboration durable under pressure. Her central concept, the community of fate, describes groups where members willingly bear personal costs for the benefit of distant others they will never meet. Levi’s research on labor unions revealed that certain organizations achieved this extraordinary level of solidarity while others, structurally similar, did not. The difference was not ideology or charisma but institutional architecture: the rules, norms, and governance arrangements that either enabled or blocked collaborative behavior. The conversation explores how institutions shape collaboration without determining it. Levi draws a critical distinction: institutions do not directly shape behavior in a behaviorist sense. Instead, they create conditions under which certain norms can arise through social interaction. When a government credibly delivers on its promises and punishes free riders, citizens find it easier to act on their ethical commitments. When institutions fail to enforce reciprocity, even well-intentioned people retreat into self-preservation. Trust emerges as the mechanism linking institutions to collaboration. Levi describes “contingent consent” , the willingness to comply with collective demands when you trust that others will do the same and that violators will face consequences. This is not blind trust but rational trust grounded in institutional credibility. When that credibility erodes, as it has in many democracies, collaboration collapses from the bottom up. The discussion addresses the tension between self-interest and ethical commitment directly. Levi rejects the idea that humans are purely self-interested or purely altruistic. Everyone carries both impulses; the question is which institutional environment activates which tendency. Her research shows that well-designed organizations can expand the circle of concern far beyond what individual psychology would predict. On the question of changing humans to improve collaboration, Levi refuses the premise. She argues that the task is not to change human nature but to understand it accurately and design arrangements that enable people to be the best version of themselves rather than the worst. The answer lies in institutional design, not genetic engineering. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.

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communities of fate institutional design Labor Unions Trust

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Both the triumphs of humanity and its most evil deeds have resulted from collaboration. In a time where humanity is required to aspire to the former and minimize the latter, the question arises of how collaboration arises and why it fails. Surprisingly, this phenomenon, so central to who we are, is not well understood. Hence, a collaborative effort is required to understand collaboration in its full biological, psychological, sociological, cultural, and economic complexity and to translate this understanding into operational impact. This series of podcasts is one step toward achieving these complementary goals. The Collaboration Podcast presents interviews with people who are central orchestrators of collaboration in various domains including business, government, science, art, health, sustainability, and the military. The discussions were conducted by Prof. Dr. Paul F.M.J. Verschure and members of the Program Advisory Committee of the Ernst Strungmann Forum on Collaboration (https://www.esforum.de/forums/ESF32_Collaboration.html) during 2021 and had the goal to sketch a map of opportunities, challenges, and obstacles in human collaboration. The forum took place in May 2022, and now we would like to share this series of interviews with a broader audience. The full report of the Forum will be published in 2023 by MIT Press. The podcast was produced by the Convergent Science Network (https://www.convergentsciencenetwork.org/). Context: The stability of social systems depends critically on realizing sustainable methods of “collaboration,” yet how and by which means collaboration is achieved is not clearly understood; neither are the conditions or processes that lead to its breakdown or failure. Collaboration can be understood as cooperation between agents toward mutually constructed goals. Part of the reason for our lack of understanding is that the phenomenon of collaboration is, by nature, a highly multidisciplinary problem, and effective research into its complexities has been difficult to achieve across the broad range of scientific and technical disciplines involved. The need for a fundamental understanding of collaboration, however, has become increasingly important. Not only does humankind demand answers as it attempts to address critical challenges at multiple scales (e.g., climate change, migration, enhanced automation, social and economic inequality), but ever-increasing technological and economic means of interconnecting people and societies are disrupting long-established, familiar patterns of how we interact. Radical technological changes that are ongoing have the potential to reshape collaboration in ways that are currently hard to predict or influence (e.g., by altering configurations in interaction, information creation, and modes of communication). On one hand, such changes could disrupt hitherto stable forms of collaboration by affecting critical communication channels and traditional roles, as can be observed in the rapidly changing patterns in governance, commerce, and social interaction. Conversely, technology could lead to the emergence of novel, successful forms of collaboration that deviate from traditional “hierarchical” architectures. Evidence of this can be seen in areas as diverse as highly automated manufacturing plants, the open science movement, collaborative software repositories, user-centered services, and the sharing of economy-based modes of organization. Without a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms, processes, and boundary conditions of collaboration, it is not possible to evaluate or predict which of these possible scenarios are sustainable or even plausible. The Forum “How Collaboration Arises and Why it Fails” (May 8–13, 2022, Location: Frankfurt am Main, Germany) Chairs: Andreas Roepstorff and Paul Verschure Program Advisory Committee: Jenna Bednar, Julia R. Lupp, Bhavani R. Rao , Andreas Roepstorff, Ferdinand von Siemens, and Paul Verschure

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00:00:03 - Hi, I'm Paul Vershoorn, together with my colleague Jenna Bednar.
00:00:08 - We're speaking in this episode with Margaret Levy about how people with conflicting
00:00:13 - interests manage to find ways of working together.
00:00:16 - As a director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and
00:00:21 - professor of political science at the Woods Institute for the Environment at
00:00:25 - Stanford University, Margaret Margaret has worked extensively in the fields of labor politics.
00:00:32 - Margaret, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much.
00:00:38 - So before we really delve into the questions around collaboration and what that
00:00:44 - means, could you situate us a little bit in your career path that brought us to today?
00:00:52 - Well, it's been a long career. I mean, I've been around for a while,
00:00:57 - but I've always been interested.
00:01:00 - I mean, my dissertation was called Conflict and Cooperation.
00:01:04 - So I've always been concerned with issues of how people who often have countering interests.
00:01:13 - Manage to find a way to work together and develop a cooperative strategy or
00:01:19 - collaborative strategy.
00:01:20 - Strategy so whether i've been working at
00:01:23 - looking at unions which i've done at multiple
00:01:27 - times over my career labor unions or whether
00:01:30 - i've been looking at the relationship between citizens and
00:01:34 - government or members of an organization and their leadership um and with others
00:01:39 - that they have to work with which has been a large part of my career um those
00:01:45 - have been central questions to me is how people cooperate and collaborate and
00:01:49 - the reasons why they don't.
00:01:52 - And I think one of the things to emphasize about that is that a large focus
00:01:57 - of mine has been about the governance or institutional arrangements and rules
00:02:01 - that manage an organization or a group that make that easier
00:02:08 - or harder, that create boundaries or create openings to work with others.
00:02:15 - Right. And so currently you are at Stanford, right?
00:02:22 - Do you have always been at Stanford or you made also a tour through different institutions?
00:02:27 - I was for 40 years at the University of Washington. I'm retired from the University
00:02:33 - of Washington because I took the job at Stanford and I was of the age where
00:02:37 - it was advantageous to retire rather than to just leave.
00:02:41 - So I have been at Stanford since 2014 as the director of the Center for Advanced
00:02:48 - Study in Behavioral Sciences, an old and important organization.
00:02:52 - That encourages collaboration, which is where Jenna is now a fellow.
00:02:57 - And I'm also a professor of political science and a senior fellow in the Woods
00:03:03 - Institute for the Environment.
00:03:06 - Okay, great. Well, so then, Margaret, now that we know a bit of background,
00:03:13 - what is collaboration and what is it good for?
00:03:21 - We're starting small.
00:03:48 - German, which we weren't quite aware of when we started writing this,
00:03:51 - but it has multiple meanings in German.
00:03:53 - So we can go with the positive one as opposed to the sort of Nazi variant.
00:04:00 - And what we were really interested in is why it was that certain unions that
00:04:05 - we observed were able to build,
00:04:08 - and this is the answer to your question, really, were able to build a collaborative
00:04:12 - process that allowed them and made them willing to actually make costly sacrifices,
00:04:20 - if need be, sometimes giving up income,
00:04:23 - sometimes going to prison, possibly even losing their lives or their jobs,
00:04:28 - in order to act in ways that would assist far distant others who could never reciprocate.
00:04:35 - So for me, collaboration is not only about the cooperation between people who
00:04:40 - know each other and have face-to-face or the potential of face-to-face interactions.
00:04:45 - But my interest is really increasingly, I mean, I've studied that a lot,
00:04:49 - but my interest really increasingly is how do you create collaboration across
00:04:53 - distances and geographies and differences that are really much harder to surmount?
00:05:01 - And if we want to answer and address and get some progress on dealing with things
00:05:09 - like climate change or social justice,
00:05:12 - really big issues that matter to us as a world, then we have to think about
00:05:17 - collaboration in that much larger sense and not just in the ways in which small
00:05:22 - group members interact with each other.
00:05:26 - Even slightly larger, in Jenna's case, federated groups interact with each other.
00:05:31 - So I'm even going beyond that and thinking about how do you create collaboration
00:05:35 - with those you'd never meet, you wouldn't interact with, you're not part of
00:05:39 - the same structure as in a federated system you are. Right.
00:05:45 - But then what would you see as, let's say, the defining features of collaboration?
00:05:54 - What are the necessary ingredients to be able to speak of a collaboration?
00:06:01 - Well, Paul, I'm not sure I'll answer your question quite the way you mean it,
00:06:05 - because I haven't been, unfortunately, part of this conversation,
00:06:10 - so I may not understand collaboration the same way.
00:06:13 - But as I said, what I really emphasize is institutions, both formal and informal.
00:06:20 - So the rules of the game that govern a group, as well as the norms that govern the group.
00:06:29 - So both the formal and informal institutions
00:06:31 - are absolutely the critical ingredients to me of collaboration.
00:06:35 - And the issue is that we know a lot about what those formal rules and norms
00:06:43 - look like in a variety of settings,
00:06:47 - but we don't know how to scale them or we have difficulty scaling them.
00:06:52 - And so I think the really big, as I said,
00:06:55 - my interest in collaboration is with those who you might never get to know,
00:06:59 - can never reciprocate, but who you have to act in a cooperative way with and
00:07:04 - about as if their interests are your interests,
00:07:08 - because they are.
00:07:10 - Yes. But how do you get people to recognize that is, for me, the crucial thing.
00:07:16 - To recognize common interests and then to be able to act on those common interests.
00:07:21 - Those are the two crucial ingredients for a collaboration.
00:07:24 - Recognizing common interests and acting on common interests.
00:07:28 - But now I could argue that that is like a facilitator of the collaboration.
00:07:34 - Like, we might have a common interest, let's say, to contribute to the discussions in our forum.
00:07:41 - But not collaborate in contributing to becoming a success because,
00:07:47 - let's say, I go out for a run, even though I still share your interest, right?
00:07:52 - And the same for institutions, I could argue, well, rules and norms are like mediums,
00:08:00 - or procedures that shape the collaboration, but they don't generate the collaboration itself.
00:08:10 - So would that be correct? So if so, then... Only partially, because what I hear
00:08:16 - you asking is two different things.
00:08:17 - And I said, I've not been part of the conversational collaboration.
00:08:20 - So I had a suspicion that you meant something different than what I was talking about.
00:08:26 - But Margaret... So part of what you're talking about are free riders.
00:08:30 - And I do think the institutional rules can help with free riders, the norms and the rules.
00:08:36 - The other part is actually giving your full contribution.
00:08:40 - So it's one thing to keep somebody in the room and not have them go out for a run.
00:08:45 - It's another thing to get their active participation and their full contributions
00:08:51 - to the collective process.
00:08:53 - And so it's hard for me to talk about that in the total abstract.
00:08:58 - Can I resort to an example?
00:09:01 - Because I really would like to go back to the unions that John Alquist and I
00:09:05 - I studied and then talk a little bit about the problems of scaling that because
00:09:10 - we really did observe, I think, what creates collaboration in your sense,
00:09:15 - but then how to get that to a larger community because it was based on the fact
00:09:20 - that people sort of knew each other who were collaborating even though they
00:09:23 - were cooperating with people far distant than themselves.
00:09:28 - So, Margaret, I know we're going to want to talk a lot about your experience with the unions. And,
00:09:37 - So I want to pause for a moment and make sure we're all understanding,
00:09:42 - as you think about collaboration,
00:09:45 - how is that distinct from other
00:09:48 - kinds of human interaction toward a common goal with a shared interest?
00:09:55 - When you use the word collaboration, this is part of what we're interested in.
00:10:00 - People have different definitions of it. So we want yours.
00:10:05 - When you use the word collaboration, how does that define that activity from
00:10:11 - other kinds of human interaction?
00:10:14 - And if you want to describe it in that union context, that would be terrific.
00:10:20 - Well, in all honesty, we never used the term collaboration.
00:10:24 - It wasn't the term of art for us. We used the term cooperation,
00:10:27 - you know, if there was a term to be used in that way.
00:10:32 - Um so but i hear what paul
00:10:35 - is asking about about this additional sort of
00:10:38 - i think there's an additional ingredient beyond cooperation
00:10:41 - which is simply everybody sort of contributes money or contributes time or is
00:10:48 - in the same room and isn't free riding um so i do think there's another dimension
00:10:53 - there and and if i think about our example i can see collaboration in that sense was created,
00:11:01 - but not on the other end, not with the far-distant others who couldn't reciprocate.
00:11:07 - They weren't collaborating.
00:11:09 - They were receiving the effects of collaboration.
00:11:14 - So I think it's a complicated question. One, you want to create a collaborative.
00:11:20 - Process that gets people to engage in actions that they might not otherwise engage in.
00:11:26 - But on the other hand, it's very hard, I think. I can't even imagine how to
00:11:30 - create the collaboration on the other side.
00:11:34 - I mean, I think that would be a very interesting thing to think about.
00:11:37 - So let me get concrete because this is sounding very abstract.
00:11:41 - So in our union case, which was the longshore workers on the west coast of the US and in Australia.
00:11:49 - So we were looking at unions in the transport sector.
00:11:53 - So we also had longshore workers on the East Coast of the US,
00:11:57 - very different, very economistic, narrowly focused only on economic interest
00:12:02 - and the teamsters of the US.
00:12:04 - So those who drive trucks, longshore workers are, you know, what longshore workers are.
00:12:10 - So they're the ones who load and unload ships.
00:12:13 - Okay. So in these two Two unions of many that one could look at,
00:12:19 - they were able to create this expanded community of fate where they saw beyond
00:12:25 - their immediate members or their immediate interest as union members.
00:12:30 - And several things created that.
00:12:32 - One is they had a constitution.
00:12:35 - When the unions were formed or reformed in the 1930s, they were formed around a constitution,
00:12:43 - the leadership, the sort of Philadelphia moment, as we say in the U.S.,
00:12:47 - the founding, created a constitution which was based on participatory democracy
00:12:53 - and based on relatively easy recall of the leadership.
00:12:59 - So there were a series of arrangements that were already put in place,
00:13:03 - very different from the other unions, which were much more top-down.
00:13:08 - Two, the unions recognized, the leadership recognized that if it was to achieve
00:13:12 - anything, it had to be effective as union leaders, right?
00:13:16 - So it was satisfying people's material needs.
00:13:19 - The union had to do that. It had to get the improved wages, working conditions,
00:13:24 - benefits that people join unions to get. I mean, that's what they get.
00:13:29 - The other thing I should point out about these unions is that they were not,
00:13:34 - you know, all the even though they were all white working class men,
00:13:37 - they had very different political positions.
00:13:39 - It was a very heterogeneous group in that sense.
00:13:43 - Some were communists, some were very right wing, but they somehow managed to work together.
00:13:48 - And how that happened was not just the participatory democracy,
00:13:52 - but educational processes that existed in the union, both to socialize members,
00:13:58 - but also for them to have means of learning about the world around them.
00:14:02 - What it was really like to change their beliefs,
00:14:06 - if you will, about what the world, how the world actually worked,
00:14:11 - who was doing what to whom, and other parts of the world,
00:14:15 - Which became very important when they were asked to stop loading ships that
00:14:23 - were taking scrap iron to Japan because of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
00:14:31 - Taking it to China because of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s
00:14:37 - or the Australians refusing to load ships.
00:14:40 - Indonesian ships, sorry, Dutch ships that were going to put down the uprising in Indonesia.
00:14:47 - They had to know about those things, enough about them.
00:14:50 - But equally important was that when any decision was made to engage in a costly
00:14:55 - action, there was real debate and discussion about it and challenge of the information
00:15:00 - that they were We're receiving.
00:15:02 - So the leadership or whoever was initiating the action may say,
00:15:06 - look, those ships are being loaded to go to Indonesia and they're going to put
00:15:10 - down the rebels. And somebody would say, how do you know that?
00:15:14 - They'd have to discuss it, and they'd have to provide sources,
00:15:17 - and they'd have to convince each other of what the reality was,
00:15:21 - so that when they decided to act, which they did by a vote,
00:15:25 - so it wasn't just that the leadership told them that they did it,
00:15:28 - most of them believed what it was that they were acting about,
00:15:33 - and they believed it was unjust and unfair, and this was the last part.
00:15:38 - They had some agency, so they could do something about it.
00:15:42 - Now, whether they really I mean, I don't think the longshore workers stopped
00:15:47 - the Dutch attack on the Indonesian rebels or stopped Japan from inhabiting Manchuria,
00:15:57 - but they felt that they could act on their feelings about what was unjust here
00:16:04 - and could do something for people that were distant from each other.
00:16:07 - And part of what motivated that was the feeling and the belief,
00:16:13 - if you will, that if it could happen to them, it could happen to us.
00:16:17 - If you don't stand up now, then this could come back to haunt us later.
00:16:22 - And we need to do this because someone else will have to help us when we do that.
00:16:28 - Is this actually not an important defining feature, which is the idea of a common
00:16:34 - goal? So there is a commons at stake, and actually also a common value in this case.
00:16:41 - So isn't it a common goal to group together around achieving a common goal that
00:16:47 - turns cooperation into collaboration?
00:16:50 - Because for cooperation, this might be also more opportunistic,
00:16:53 - right? We transiently work together, but we still pursue different goals,
00:16:59 - but there is sort of an alignment in the sub-goals.
00:17:02 - But when there's alignment on an overall, an overarching goal of the collective,
00:17:07 - we start to speak of a collaboration. Would you agree with that?
00:17:12 - Why not? I mean, I think that's, I mean, I think people are learning from each other.
00:17:18 - It's more than simple cooperation, like we're all paying our taxes.
00:17:22 - It's more than compliant cooperation.
00:17:24 - I mean, there's an engagement here between the leadership and the members and
00:17:28 - among the members themselves, which is an important ingredient in all of this, for sure.
00:17:32 - However, you know, I'm not in your... Just a footnote, Margaret,
00:17:37 - because I think, just a footnote, The enlightenment of our forum is still in the future.
00:17:44 - So it's not that we're in any way representing some consensus view on anything.
00:17:49 - We're really trying to find our way in the dark here, and we hope to figure
00:17:54 - it out also in our dialogue with you.
00:17:56 - Just to be clear about that. Got it. Okay, Jenna, go ahead. Margaret,
00:18:02 - in your work with John Alquist, you use this phrase, and you've introduced it
00:18:07 - already into our conversation, of community of fate.
00:18:11 - F-A-T-E, let's be clear. F-A-T-E. F-A-T-E, fate.
00:18:17 - And I think it would be wonderful if you could share with us why you chose that
00:18:23 - particular phrase, rather than just say that they have a common interest.
00:18:27 - Interest what is it about the phrase community of
00:18:30 - fate that what is it
00:18:33 - that you were observing in this collaborative process
00:18:36 - that caused you to want to use that phrase as opposed to just they have they
00:18:41 - share a common interest well actually the first time i used the term was in
00:18:46 - an earlier paper with david olson um on uh the wto protests the protest against
00:18:54 - the world trade organization in Seattle in 1999,
00:18:57 - in which we both were involved with the longshore workers.
00:19:02 - And what we saw there was some very interesting developments where groups were
00:19:07 - coming together whose economic interests were divergent.
00:19:13 - Some of the industries and some of the unions around the common goal,
00:19:18 - if you will, of dealing with the environment.
00:19:23 - So some of the workers who who were working for Kaiser and Kaiser, were coming together.
00:19:30 - And that fascinated us. And what was driving that was a recognition that on
00:19:36 - these larger set of questions,
00:19:39 - their fates, their destinies were entwined, that there was a larger set of issues about the world.
00:19:47 - Where there really was a common destiny that was at stake, which was beyond
00:19:53 - their immediate economic interest of, you know, how do we distribute the profit?
00:19:58 - What's the share between the company and the workers?
00:20:01 - Right. That's one set of interests. But this was something that was even bigger
00:20:05 - where they could recognize that they had to ally in some way.
00:20:10 - Um, where, and, and what we saw at the, uh, protests were the people that were
00:20:16 - the environmentalists and some of the unions coming together around these kinds
00:20:21 - of common issues, as well as some of the unions working with some of the companies.
00:20:25 - So we reintroduced that term, uh, John Alquist and I, when we started looking
00:20:31 - at these questions, because again, we were looking at, so there are lots of
00:20:35 - questions you could study about unions and we weren't studying the question, which many have.
00:20:40 - And done well, on under what conditions can you create collective action and
00:20:45 - therefore an effective union around winning wages, working conditions,
00:20:51 - and benefits from the employer.
00:20:53 - That's one kind of common interest.
00:20:56 - We were looking for things where there really was this larger sense of entwined
00:21:02 - destinies around big questions.
00:21:06 - Jenna is involved with a program at the Center for Advanced Study on the Moral Political Economy.
00:21:14 - And you can see how these ideas become the moral political economy idea because
00:21:19 - it really is about these big, socially significant questions and how we create,
00:21:25 - whether we call it cooperation or collaboration.
00:21:28 - Around these larger issues.
00:21:31 - So I often exhort Martin Luther King talking about exhorting us to wrap ourselves
00:21:38 - in a single garment of destiny around social justice issues.
00:21:43 - And it's really that kind of question where we're coming above the common interest
00:21:48 - where we could create a collective action process to really think about these
00:21:53 - larger sets of questions and how that could be achieved.
00:21:56 - But now if you speak of a community of faith, which is extremely interesting, thing.
00:22:01 - Still, from a prospective point of view, fate might look very different as from
00:22:09 - a retrospective point of view.
00:22:11 - In a retrospective point of view, you have seen the convergence,
00:22:15 - you know the endpoint, and you can interpret what came before as some complex
00:22:19 - self-organizing process.
00:22:21 - But once that self-organizing process is still running, it might be actually
00:22:27 - more difficult to predict what it will converge towards, right?
00:22:31 - So in that sense, isn't the community of fate creating an interpretational risk?
00:22:37 - Is this by necessity a retrospective point of view?
00:22:45 - Yeah, I think there's always a risk. I mean, you could get you could get it badly wrong.
00:22:51 - I mean, community of fate, as I mentioned, is, you know, we don't want to create fascism.
00:22:55 - Um so we've increasingly called
00:22:59 - it an expanded and inclusive community of
00:23:03 - fate in order to sort of speak beyond
00:23:06 - the kinds of communities of fate that we
00:23:08 - all have with our families or with certain
00:23:12 - others and we're not you know they're that a community
00:23:15 - of faith can be negative or positive i mean so our interest is in creating one
00:23:20 - that has the potential we believe you know Where we're really thinking about
00:23:26 - issues where all of us as humans are engaged and could be hurt or could be affected,
00:23:33 - even if not everybody recognizes that, like climate change.
00:23:37 - Right. Now, earlier you mentioned key features, which are psychological features,
00:23:43 - such as to reciprocate or to share interests or to recognize the interests of others.
00:23:50 - So in some sense, we start to look also at the psychological side of collaboration.
00:23:56 - So what would you see as the key psychological processes that make collaborations happen?
00:24:05 - Well, I want to parse that question a little bit because some of it is psychological,
00:24:10 - but some of it is informational, and some of it is just understanding,
00:24:15 - reaching a common understanding about facts.
00:24:20 - And I think that in our current world, that's a crucial thing to do.
00:24:25 - And I think the mechanism for that, which may have a psychological piece to it,
00:24:29 - is really allowing challenge and discussion in a relatively civil way and structuring
00:24:35 - that so we can hear each other and we can hear what people's objections are
00:24:39 - to a particular set of truths or facts or interpretations of the world.
00:24:45 - The psychological piece of it really has to do with, I think, a couple of things.
00:24:51 - One is establishing enough competence among the group that is trying to collaborate,
00:24:56 - trust, if you will, among the various members.
00:25:00 - So you have confidence, one, that you trust them to be telling you as close
00:25:06 - to the truth as they understand it.
00:25:10 - Always room for debate and challenge. Two, that there will be some civility in the process.
00:25:16 - And three, that if you lose, you have a chance to win in the future,
00:25:19 - that it's not all set up against you.
00:25:21 - And that's both institutionally protected, but that also depends on the people
00:25:25 - who are engaged that they're not going to try to take advantage of the situation um in that regard,
00:25:32 - okay so those are things that are internal to the group in a sense the other
00:25:37 - thing that i think is really crucial here and i often um cite elizabeth wood here is about uh.
00:25:48 - The passion and the emotion that comes from feeling effective,
00:25:53 - that there is a real emotional benefit from feeling that you can act on what
00:25:59 - you think is the right thing to do.
00:26:02 - And we see that in all kinds of social movements as well as all kinds of actions,
00:26:09 - that people need to feel like they can act and that that's a crucial part of
00:26:15 - trying to achieve a goal and getting them to move beyond their immediate self-interest.
00:26:21 - So, but would you then, are you suggesting that there is also an intrinsic motivation
00:26:27 - to collaborate beyond self-interest?
00:26:31 - Absolutely. But that doesn't necessarily, people don't necessarily know how
00:26:36 - to access that intrinsic motivation.
00:26:39 - So I think the structure helps to create a setting in which it's comfortable
00:26:44 - to, you You know, if you feel like you're going to be, you don't want to be,
00:26:48 - you don't want to have people free riding around you.
00:26:52 - You don't want to be treated like the weird one.
00:26:56 - You know, so you need to feel comfortable to express your intrinsic motivation
00:27:00 - within a group like a union, which is focused or a country,
00:27:05 - which is focused on the economic self-interest and well-being of its members
00:27:10 - and not necessarily on evoking those intrinsic motivations.
00:27:15 - So a lot of my work has been on intrinsic motivation and on how to,
00:27:19 - so probably my best known piece of work is A Rule in Revenue,
00:27:27 - which talks about how citizens,
00:27:29 - how the state evokes from citizens compliance with extractive taxes and why
00:27:38 - different kinds of tax systems develop over time.
00:27:41 - What I learned from that book is a crucial part of the story was really about states,
00:27:47 - but I really learned that a crucial part of that story was motivating citizens
00:27:51 - to want to contribute to government and then putting them in situations where willing compliance.
00:27:59 - Was a good thing to do and not a stupid thing to do,
00:28:03 - so that their ethical motivation or intrinsic motivation or whatever you want
00:28:08 - to call it, but I think it's also an ethical commitment was allowed to be an
00:28:13 - important part of and a recognized and rewarded,
00:28:17 - in some sense, part of their behavior.
00:28:20 - I then went on to study the way in, because the tax thing, I could only look
00:28:26 - really from the state's perspective, because it's hard to know who's really
00:28:29 - complying and who's not.
00:28:31 - So I then went on to look in consent, dissent, and patriotism at military service
00:28:37 - and the conditions under which citizens did actually,
00:28:41 - actually comply with extractive demands of government, like volunteering or
00:28:46 - being conscripted into military service, where you're going to pay a very high cost for it.
00:28:53 - And it became, you know, and I was trying to show or understand the conditions
00:28:57 - under which it was simply a question of coercion or material benefits,
00:29:01 - as we know is true in some voluntary military circumstances,
00:29:07 - circumstances and even in conscripted ones.
00:29:09 - And when it was a commitment to the collective good and yes,
00:29:13 - I'm willing to sacrifice myself because we'll be protecting the country or whatever.
00:29:18 - As I wrote in the foreword to that book, I just have to say this.
00:29:22 - My father willingly served in one war and my husband refused to serve in a different war.
00:29:28 - And both of them are among the most ethical and moral people that I know.
00:29:32 - Right. But that's also an interesting example
00:29:37 - because in some sense there
00:29:40 - if you want willing compliance got shaped
00:29:43 - into opposite decisions correct
00:29:47 - right and so so how do you explain that well because it is a relationship between
00:29:55 - government and citizens and if citizens believe that the war is just the common
00:30:02 - the goal the entwined destiny is at stake.
00:30:06 - That's one thing. If they think it's violating that, that's another thing.
00:30:11 - So I think that context really matters in these cases. You could not get the
00:30:16 - longshore workers to close the ports for absolutely anything.
00:30:19 - I mean, it had to be something they were convinced that there was an actual
00:30:23 - community of fate involved, that it really mattered to the world.
00:30:27 - But now we see two processes, right? So on the one hand, there is an individual
00:30:33 - process of intrinsic motivation, of a willing compliance to also,
00:30:38 - if you want, identify with the collective and pursue,
00:30:43 - if you want, a common good, however that is defined by the government.
00:30:48 - But in parallel to that, we have institutions and rule that also try to shape
00:30:56 - that individual process.
00:30:57 - And in some sense, if you want, these institutional mechanisms are also put
00:31:03 - in place to, if you want, shape the collective,
00:31:06 - to make the collective move in a certain direction that, if you want,
00:31:11 - the nation state might choose as being a priority.
00:31:17 - But to what extent do you see these processes as competitive or even conflicting?
00:31:28 - Well, I think they can be both.
00:31:32 - So one of the things in the book on military service that I saw and documented
00:31:39 - had to do with conscientious objectors.
00:31:46 - So when the costs of being a conscientious objector are extremely high,
00:31:50 - which is an institutional decision, you see a lot fewer of them,
00:31:55 - no matter, even if you see the same ethical distribution in the society.
00:32:00 - So for example, in the, just to take the US, well, I'll take France as an example.
00:32:05 - In World War I, I believe I found one.
00:32:09 - Conscientious objector. It's not that French aren't moral or ethical or aren't
00:32:15 - concerned about war, and it isn't that there wasn't a strong left wing that
00:32:20 - was arguing that this was a capitalist war, et cetera, et cetera.
00:32:23 - But the cost of being a conscientious objector were unbelievably high.
00:32:28 - I mean, that person wrote a book, right? Because he was in prison for almost
00:32:32 - almost his whole life until he was finally let out at some point.
00:32:37 - As the rules changed, you saw more conscientious objectors, and who were seriously
00:32:42 - conscientious objectors.
00:32:43 - So I think the institutions shape in two different ways.
00:32:48 - One is they affect the cost of certain kinds of behaviors.
00:32:53 - You can see that with the unions. You can see that with governments,
00:32:56 - as I'm giving in this example.
00:32:58 - The other way they shape it is, as I said, with both information and with education.
00:33:06 - So getting people aware of the world, getting people aware of the social injustices
00:33:11 - that exist in the world, framing those.
00:33:15 - I mean, I think the unions that I studied that were, and one of the reasons
00:33:20 - I admire them so much is they really, it was not a top-down imposition.
00:33:25 - It was shaped, but people really argued about that and what they thought was
00:33:31 - worth making sacrifices about varied over time as the group changed.
00:33:37 - And it wasn't just leadership didn't always get its way on this.
00:33:41 - And sometimes things were bottom up.
00:33:44 - Now, our governments tend to be more top down, and that's often been a problem.
00:33:49 - And don't really allow, I mean, think about the Iraq war in the United States.
00:33:54 - We were given terrible information. Right.
00:33:58 - And then people thought they had to act.
00:34:01 - They thought that was the world. So not allowing a challenge of that information is also shaping.
00:34:08 - I thought Jenna was about to jump in there. It was.
00:34:12 - So this is so interesting, as you know.
00:34:18 - So how is it that, so we're talking about institutions as things that shape
00:34:24 - incentives and also the information that's flowing, but you also said that people
00:34:29 - need to be in a position where they believe the information.
00:34:32 - And part of believing that information, and this is, I'm inviting you to tie
00:34:36 - together the extrinsic motivation with the intrinsic in the sense that you need
00:34:43 - to believe not the information guiding your action,
00:34:46 - your own action, but also that others are going to be in the same place, right?
00:34:50 - So there is this sort of social element to it getting us back to the community of faith.
00:34:56 - So the question is, what role do institutions play in building that community of fate.
00:35:06 - Well, that's where the scaling is hard for me because I can see how the unions did it.
00:35:12 - First of all, people were members of this organization because they had common economic interest.
00:35:20 - So there was already a commitment to cooperate with each other around those
00:35:26 - common economic interests.
00:35:27 - So that gives them a baseline of confidence in each other, trust in each other,
00:35:32 - working together with each other. Also, the work, at least in the 1930s before
00:35:37 - the containers came in, required cooperation.
00:35:43 - So there were multiple, and there were water coolers, and they have a hiring hall.
00:35:48 - I mean, there were all kinds of things that enabled the workers to engage with
00:35:53 - each other and to learn enough about each other to feel somewhat comfortable
00:35:57 - with each other and with their leadership who was not distant from them.
00:36:03 - That's harder to achieve in government
00:36:06 - and that's part of what the institution did was
00:36:10 - to shape those all of those were
00:36:12 - institutions the hiring halls an institution the you know the bargaining is
00:36:18 - an institution the relationship between the governed and the governed is an
00:36:23 - institution in my terminology so all of those things were there and shaping
00:36:28 - it and we can pay attention to those and think about how to scale that.
00:36:32 - The piece that I can't figure out how to scale is this social connective tissue
00:36:38 - that comes from being part of this other common enterprise and interacting with each other.
00:36:44 - I mean, the longshore union in most parts of the West Coast has refused to allow
00:36:51 - cell phones to be used instead of coming to the hiring hall.
00:36:57 - To get your assignments because they want people to know each other.
00:37:01 - They see that as part of the glue there.
00:37:04 - Well, we're living in a world where that's going to become harder and harder to do.
00:37:08 - So we really do have to find other ways of creating connective tissue.
00:37:13 - And that connective tissue then helps people
00:37:16 - come to at least listen to each other about
00:37:20 - the information that's being provided and about their disparate
00:37:23 - views about that information and encourages them
00:37:27 - to engage with each other until they reach some kind
00:37:30 - of you know one persuades the other or they see
00:37:33 - a third way they're about what's actually going
00:37:36 - on in the world julia all of
00:37:39 - information is very important because just as you say they're they're not allowing
00:37:46 - um hiring via by a telephone they want people in the hall itself to engage with
00:37:52 - each other the role of information be it on social media,
00:37:57 - et cetera, et cetera, is going to have to affect the participatory process by
00:38:03 - which they make their decisions, by which they decide what is important,
00:38:08 - not only from the pragmatic point of view for their own material gain,
00:38:11 - but in this global identity of what you gave the example of the Dutch and the Indonesians.
00:38:18 - How is that going to be, or how is it managed today with information, information flow and.
00:38:27 - Yeah, I can't really fully answer that.
00:38:31 - I mean, I could for the unions, I guess, but for the society as a whole,
00:38:35 - except that one of the great, we focus a lot now, as we should,
00:38:40 - on the problems that social media is creating.
00:38:43 - But there are also some great advantages that social media is creating.
00:38:48 - It does make information much more accessible.
00:38:50 - What we haven't figured out is the right ways to curate that and manage it so
00:38:56 - that we're actually encouraging this kind of civil debate and challenge.
00:39:00 - Challenge i mean there are a lot of as as we all
00:39:03 - know there are a lot of people working on that problem right now
00:39:06 - and we have to find a solution to it
00:39:09 - because that is going to be a major source of information for a
00:39:12 - lot of us and we all deal with in the classroom like it drove me crazy when
00:39:16 - a student would come up and say i don't believe what you're saying because i
00:39:19 - found on this website which is some weird you know some piece of information
00:39:24 - that was totally wrong and then And I would try to get them to look back to
00:39:30 - see where that information came from.
00:39:32 - But, you know, hopefully we're past that now. That was 10 years ago.
00:39:36 - But we still have those problems.
00:39:38 - Oh, yeah. But I feel there is something hidden in the point where we are in
00:39:46 - the discussion that has not been sufficiently articulated.
00:39:49 - Articulated, because we speak about institutions and about also the structuring
00:39:54 - role of institutions in the end as an information architecture, if you want.
00:40:00 - This is actually what we're implicitly talking about. But then we jump to very
00:40:05 - concrete implementation examples, no telephones in the hiring hall.
00:40:09 - But that's not really defining the protocols and the representational formats
00:40:16 - of information that actually is then supporting and shaping this complex collaborative process.
00:40:24 - So, for instance, that means indeed a union has rules and these rules you have
00:40:29 - to just obey in order to be a member.
00:40:31 - As a member, you have certain incentives that it actually is to your benefit to be a member.
00:40:40 - So these are all elements of an informational architecture that makes that union
00:40:46 - effective in allowing people to collaborate in that context.
00:40:51 - But I'm not sure we have articulated that sufficiently from the perspective
00:40:57 - of the institutions that you really put in the foreground of shaping collaboration.
00:41:03 - So what do you see as the key protocols for organizations and also governments in that sense?
00:41:13 - Well, as I said, I thought, but let me reemphasize. I'm just slow.
00:41:19 - Don't worry about it. No, no, no.
00:41:21 - I just said I was throwing a lot of stuff at you and you're asking it in a slightly
00:41:26 - different way. So, you know, what is really crucial to these unions that has
00:41:31 - to do with the information flow that we're talking about are a couple of things.
00:41:35 - One is that they have all kinds of educational processes and socialization processes
00:41:40 - within the union, and they're not necessarily required. There were all kinds
00:41:45 - of, you know, some of it comes from what's in the union newspaper.
00:41:50 - Who knows if everybody reads it? I doubt it, but a lot do.
00:41:54 - Some of it comes from various kinds of schools that they provide,
00:41:59 - which people can choose to be in or not.
00:42:03 - Some of it comes from, I don't, the Australian dock workers had a film unit that.
00:42:09 - Which they produced all kinds of material, which told the history of the union
00:42:13 - about certain struggles and ultimately about the world around them.
00:42:19 - There are various mechanisms of educating people and trying to figure out how
00:42:24 - they hear stuff and how they learn and what's attractive to them.
00:42:30 - It's not making it required. It's making it available in an attractive form
00:42:35 - so that people want to consume that kind of information.
00:42:40 - And then the other critical piece of it was this debate, that it is really a
00:42:46 - deliberative process and people are challenging each other about the information that they have.
00:42:51 - And I think that's a critical piece of it.
00:42:54 - We really do come to these questions with different sources of information that's been made even,
00:43:00 - that's even stronger now than it was in the 1930s through 80s or 90s or whenever
00:43:06 - social media became so big, right?
00:43:10 - But in your example of the French conscientious objector in the First World
00:43:17 - War, that was not the case of education and joining in the education program or not.
00:43:24 - That was also very strongly directed top-down propaganda to create a common
00:43:33 - national identity and objective, for which it was very difficult to escape, I would assume.
00:43:38 - That's why, Anita, you only found one example. No, it wasn't.
00:43:41 - It wasn't. It wasn't difficult to escape at all.
00:43:45 - There were so many debates during World War One. I mean, Rosa Luxemburg ended
00:43:49 - up in the canal after World War One. I mean, because they had in the Germans,
00:43:54 - as you know, had been arguing about World War One.
00:43:57 - That was true in the Western, you know, in the other countries as well that
00:44:02 - were engaged in that struggle.
00:44:03 - There were debates going on. But there were rules that government had.
00:44:07 - So let's separate out the incentive rules from the informational process.
00:44:13 - The incentives of governments were very tough on conscientious objectors.
00:44:18 - They did not accept that as a reasonable reaction to citizens.
00:44:24 - That took a campaign to change that.
00:44:27 - And it changed in all of the countries. All of the
00:44:29 - countries that were engaged in World War I ultimately changed
00:44:33 - their rules about conscientious objection and made it a little easier for people
00:44:38 - who were of a dissenting religion and ultimately people who just really hated
00:44:44 - a war to try to become conscientious objectors.
00:44:50 - So you know the the the the difficulty of becoming a conscientious objector
00:44:56 - had nothing to was not the informational structure architecture it had to do
00:45:01 - with rules that punished people who were,
00:45:04 - conscientious objectors the informational structure you know.
00:45:09 - Is a different problem. And that is really,
00:45:12 - it's hard to figure out how to do that with a country with multiple sources
00:45:16 - or a world with multiple sources of information coming at us and no deliberative,
00:45:23 - no adequate deliberative forums to challenge that information and to allow those
00:45:28 - alternative perspectives to come through.
00:45:31 - I mean, in principle, parliaments and legislatures are supposed to do that.
00:45:35 - But we've seen them failing at that tremendously from, let's take World War I on.
00:45:42 - Well before that, but World War I on.
00:45:45 - I understand. Can I follow up on this? So I'm hearing two things.
00:45:52 - On the one hand, in building the community of faith, information plays a role
00:45:58 - in coming to a shared understanding.
00:46:01 - And so we would want to highlight elements of the institutional structure that
00:46:06 - would build common knowledge.
00:46:08 - That is not just the personal receipt of information, but witnessing the receipt
00:46:13 - by others and their agreement.
00:46:15 - So you have a shared understanding. And then on the other hand,
00:46:19 - you're talking right now about the importance of divergent perspectives.
00:46:26 - So, to what extent do divergent perspectives, does diversity play a role in
00:46:35 - helping to build a community of faith?
00:46:39 - Yeah, I'm not sure I've thought that well enough through to give a very good
00:46:44 - response, Jenna. I think it's a really important question.
00:46:47 - And certainly, I'm thinking about, so even though the unions that we studied
00:46:52 - were heterogeneous politically, The members were not so different from each other.
00:46:59 - There were fisticuffs at times, just as there have been in other settings,
00:47:05 - but they were also bound by the cooperation around winning good contracts. Right.
00:47:14 - So there was already a baseline there. What happens when there isn't a baseline,
00:47:19 - but there is a lot of diversity and divergence of views?
00:47:22 - And how do you bring that together in a way that really, I mean,
00:47:26 - I think it was incredibly important, even in the union setting,
00:47:30 - that there was diversity of views, that not everybody felt exactly the same way.
00:47:35 - Um but where they agreed was on some fundamental principles which i think we
00:47:41 - could so maybe this is a way to
00:47:43 - get at it i'm not sure i'm i'm talking trying to figure it out as i go um.
00:47:51 - That there were some fundamental principles that were appealed to.
00:47:54 - You know, is there something big at stake here that really trans goes above our differences?
00:48:02 - That was one. Two, is what's being done fair? Is it just?
00:48:08 - And do we all agree that it isn't?
00:48:12 - I think those two things really were what ultimately people relied on to make a decision.
00:48:18 - So, the kind of information they needed was,
00:48:22 - you know, they weren't debating over whether this particular piece of the infrastructure
00:48:27 - bill would actually work or would cost too much or, I mean, it wasn't at that level.
00:48:34 - It was really, is this really an instance of injustice?
00:48:39 - And is this really something that matters to the world, that you better take
00:48:45 - a stand here because, God forbid, it could happen to us?
00:48:51 - But now, Margaret, I also feel that regularly you're pushing towards this current
00:48:58 - challenge you look at of scaling, right?
00:49:00 - How do we scale it in a more complex, large-scale form of collaboration?
00:49:06 - But before we get there, maybe it's also relevant to really understand why the
00:49:12 - kinds of collaborations that we know today, as your union example,
00:49:17 - under what conditions would they fail?
00:49:19 - Do we know that? Do we know the limiters in that process that are really the
00:49:25 - critical nodes in the process that can disrupt it?
00:49:29 - So sorry paul i i that so where the unions would fail or where the larger well
00:49:36 - as an example you could take the union but just collaboration as such where
00:49:41 - are the brittle the brittle breaking points.
00:49:46 - When does it fail? I think there are a couple of brittle breaking points.
00:49:52 - And this is just, you know, even thinking about the union example.
00:49:57 - One is that the one is the Constitution could change.
00:50:02 - So leadership could decide to be more authoritarian, less participatory.
00:50:07 - I mean, that happens. That happens in governments, says a member,
00:50:13 - a citizen of the United States.
00:50:14 - Um, so we know that that's a real danger,
00:50:18 - uh, no matter how you set up the constitution that people, that there can be
00:50:22 - leaders and cadres that are counter the norms that we thought we had established
00:50:29 - about what, how you govern,
00:50:31 - um, and are fundamentally changing the constitution.
00:50:34 - So that's a, that's a brittle, that's a place of brittleness.
00:50:40 - Another is we've been talking about really,
00:50:43 - which has to do with the information and how we actually create a process where
00:50:48 - people can come to share some common views about what reality is and what truth
00:50:55 - is and what's really going on in the world.
00:50:58 - And that's proved to be very difficult in this current world because of the
00:51:04 - multiple sources of information and the ways in which people create echo chambers
00:51:08 - and other kinds of things.
00:51:09 - Always been a problem, I don't want to say, and it's always been a point of
00:51:14 - tension in creating collaboration.
00:51:17 - But it's gotten, if anything, worse. And if we don't solve that one, it's going to eat us.
00:51:28 - I think another point of brittleness is that for collaboration to work,
00:51:34 - I think you have to feel that it's that your engagement with each other can
00:51:39 - actually lead to an action that could could possibly make a difference.
00:51:45 - And I think that's another thing that is very hard to achieve in our world.
00:51:53 - In all worlds. i mean the
00:51:56 - the lab you know we discussed we didn't study the longshore
00:51:59 - workers because they had an effective way to
00:52:02 - act but that became apparent that actually all of these transport workers have
00:52:08 - a way of stopping trade they can just stop it and that gives them a kind of
00:52:13 - an effectiveness um or a sense of effectiveness and efficacy that uh,
00:52:21 - you know, lots of people don't have. So finding those ways for people to be
00:52:26 - feel efficacious, I think is another place where we really have to think hard
00:52:31 - and it can be a brittle place and place of fragility.
00:52:34 - Right. But now in scaling.
00:52:38 - So I feel a tension in, in the way you described the two processes,
00:52:44 - because in the, can I add one more? I just, sorry.
00:52:48 - And then come back, Which goes back to Jenna's point about diversity.
00:52:51 - I think that divergent views can be both healthy and unhealthy.
00:52:56 - And what's happening, we have not figured out mechanisms for turning those divergent,
00:53:03 - extremely held views often, and often for good reasons.
00:53:08 - I mean, we had an argument the other day, I think Jenna might have been there,
00:53:12 - at lunch with one of our fellows who wanted to frame racial and the racial structure
00:53:20 - issues as white supremacy. Supremacy.
00:53:23 - And I took exception to that because I was willing to admit I was a racist in
00:53:28 - the United States because we all are because of the nature of the racial structure.
00:53:32 - But white supremacist had a whole nother meaning to me.
00:53:36 - And it wasn't clear she and I, though we were very civil and friendly,
00:53:40 - we're going to ever come to an agreement about this.
00:53:42 - Now, that was a divergence that I think could be productive,
00:53:47 - but it also could be, you know, it just could block us from talking. Yeah, exactly.
00:53:55 - So, you know, how to deal with those things, I don't think we have good,
00:53:58 - I mean, there are really good reasons why people have those divergent views,
00:54:01 - is what I was trying to say.
00:54:03 - I think you gave the answer to that earlier by saying, well,
00:54:07 - there's actually two parallel structures. There's an information process,
00:54:11 - and there's an incentive process.
00:54:13 - And the incentive process can also be used to then shape.
00:54:19 - The collaboration information process, because it starts to put boundaries.
00:54:24 - It starts to move the collective in one direction or the other.
00:54:27 - Would that not be the way to solve these kinds of conflicts by saying action?
00:54:33 - No, because I don't think so, because I think what we're confronting… So,
00:54:38 - here's a big difference between the unions and a society.
00:54:41 - The unions, you know, have… One, they have the same basic social class,
00:54:47 - the members, They're fighting for the same economic things.
00:54:52 - They have a mechanism to do that.
00:54:54 - When we're looking at a society, we have people with different social classes,
00:54:59 - different levels of poverty, different life experiences,
00:55:03 - which are really, those are really hard boundaries, particularly where in a
00:55:08 - country like the United States and maybe increasingly in Germany too,
00:55:11 - I just don't know the data, people are geographically segregated.
00:55:16 - They know what their neighbors are like. Like they don't really understand,
00:55:20 - you know, the kinds of conditions that other people are living in,
00:55:24 - whether they be coal miners in Appalachia or poor blacks in Chicago.
00:55:29 - Earlier, you said you made a statement in this participatory process discussion.
00:55:36 - If it could happen to them, it could happen to us, meaning these unions were
00:55:40 - interested in making decisions that would reinforce the well-being of other
00:55:47 - people because they could see a connection,
00:55:49 - even long distance over to wherever across the world, they could see a connection to these people.
00:55:56 - Looking at the situation you've just portrayed with how to manage diverging
00:56:01 - views is one of the problems that we have a problem with understanding identity,
00:56:08 - meaning whether it is of us as an individual versus the collective,
00:56:15 - us as a regional person within a context of a region versus in a global context.
00:56:21 - Is the information flow or the divergent views, is that standing in this way
00:56:27 - of connecting to other people in this identity that you mentioned earlier?
00:56:37 - That's obtuse. I can see it in your eyes. No, no, I'm trying to think it through.
00:56:41 - It's not obtuse at all, Julia. I'm just trying to think it through because,
00:56:46 - you know, talking about it in the union setting is so different because you can.
00:56:52 - So, one of the things that the
00:56:54 - longshore workers were able to do was to overcome these racial divides.
00:56:59 - Minds um and it
00:57:03 - was in part because some of the white leadership in
00:57:06 - the unions would say like harry
00:57:09 - bridges who was the president of the longshore workers in the west coast u.s
00:57:15 - said you know if if they're only two after containerization if there are only
00:57:20 - two workers left working for loading and unloading ships, one of them will be Black.
00:57:27 - And the leadership of the union refused to put into trusteeship,
00:57:32 - believe it or not, Portland, which you think of as a liberal city because of
00:57:37 - its racist practices within the union and its refusal to hire Black workers.
00:57:42 - So they showed in a variety of ways, and the Black workers really appreciate
00:57:47 - it, They showed in a variety of ways their commitment to racial justice,
00:57:51 - and the president of the union right now is black.
00:57:55 - I mean, so it continues, and their constitution continues.
00:58:00 - In Australia, the leadership there has made that kind of commitment to Aborigines,
00:58:05 - which was unheard of, as well as to Asians, which if we're thinking the 1930s
00:58:11 - and 1940s, you can just imagine how extreme that was.
00:58:15 - So in those kinds of situations with those kinds of arrangements and where you're
00:58:21 - seeing actual workers who are affected by this on both sides and where you're
00:58:26 - having to deal with those so that's where there was not clearly homogeneity
00:58:31 - in the views there were some very racist workers,
00:58:35 - and there were people with very different views so they managed to pull it together
00:58:40 - because of strong leadership, strong membership commitment, for the most part,
00:58:46 - willingness to go along with this or even encouraging it, this kind of racial
00:58:50 - integration and understanding and engagement.
00:58:54 - It's harder to figure out how to do that, as I said, in a country,
00:58:59 - because this somewhat depends, it depends on a quality of leadership,
00:59:03 - something we haven't really addressed, but which I think is quite important
00:59:07 - in creating cooperative and even and collaborative arrangements and different
00:59:12 - mechanisms of leadership, but the quality of leadership matters and its commitments.
00:59:16 - And that's been a problem. But we also have,
00:59:22 - no means of getting people to really confront each other's differences in a
00:59:29 - way that can lead to a constructive outcome.
00:59:33 - Seems to lead to hatred and riots and reactive politics or overly, you know.
00:59:45 - Noblesse oblige politics, which is equally bad in some ways,
00:59:49 - maybe better, but also has a problem.
00:59:51 - And then when we're talking about, at a global scale, building a global community
00:59:55 - of fate to manage our two huge crises, the pandemic and climate change.
01:00:02 - So let me ask you this, Margaret, what hope do you see for that?
01:00:07 - Well, you know, I hope that during the pandemic, a community of fate would develop.
01:00:11 - And here's why I did emphasize leadership in part.
01:00:15 - Because if you have leadership that undermines that, as we did in the United
01:00:18 - States and happened in Britain and some other countries, not in Germany so much,
01:00:23 - it really undermines the community of faith.
01:00:28 - Because what our leadership was doing, as we all know, was creating divides
01:00:33 - rather than commonalities. So we weren't all in it together.
01:00:36 - Different groups were in it in different ways and have different,
01:00:39 - the differences in interests were emphasized rather than the difference in,
01:00:44 - you know, a common and entwined destiny.
01:00:47 - So leadership can matter there. So that was very disappointing.
01:00:51 - And I think we're still suffering. I know we are still suffering the consequences
01:00:55 - of a series of very problematic actions by not just our president,
01:01:01 - but by other political leaders as well in this country and in other countries.
01:01:06 - Um the climate crisis i'm a little more am i optimistic or pessimistic i am hopeful.
01:01:17 - That we can find a way and
01:01:20 - i i certainly see it happening with the young people so
01:01:23 - hopefully they can get us us older guys to act fast enough to save them um so
01:01:31 - i think there's There's an intergenerational expanded community of faith that
01:01:36 - we really need to keep in mind that you're working for your grandchildren, not just for yourself.
01:01:42 - And I think that's where the hope is, to try to create that understanding that our world.
01:01:49 - Is about the future, not just about whatever present injustices there are.
01:01:55 - So, I think that's the other fillip to the expanded and inclusive community
01:01:59 - of faith that we have to really think through.
01:02:01 - But, you know, looking at the
01:02:02 - young people, I am somewhat optimistic that somehow this will be solved.
01:02:08 - We may all have to get out of the way, but that's okay with me.
01:02:14 - I'm ready to do that i'm ready for the next generation to try to move this forward
01:02:18 - but margaret what i before we really go to the finish line there's in your analysis
01:02:27 - i feel there are two opposing.
01:02:31 - Models of of the human agent involved and i cannot reconcile the two so maybe
01:02:37 - maybe you can help me with that because on the one hand or not early on early
01:02:41 - on you you were very firm about saying that institutions with their rules and
01:02:46 - norms are shapers of the process of collaboration.
01:02:50 - And if that is true, that is also more a behaviorist perspective on how human
01:02:55 - behavior can be formed through external incentives and information, right?
01:03:02 - Then the intrinsic features of the human agent doesn't really matter.
01:03:06 - But on the other hand, you also put a lot of weight on this notion of discussion, debate,
01:03:14 - interaction, which is more an enlightenment-informed view on how human progress might be instilled.
01:03:23 - But I cannot see how I can bring these two together.
01:03:26 - I need to clarify something because, one, I don't think institutions totally shape behavior.
01:03:33 - I'm not at all arguing that. I would never argue that. But they make it easier
01:03:40 - to act in some ways than other ways.
01:03:42 - And they make it easier or harder to act on your intrinsic motivations and your ethical commitments.
01:03:49 - So one of the things that I have argued for a long time is that to evoke willing compliance.
01:03:56 - Or quasi-voluntary compliance with extractive demands of government requires
01:04:02 - not only some kind of promise-keeping and contract,
01:04:07 - if you will, between the government and the citizens And that is shown to be actually operating.
01:04:14 - I mean, that there's actually delivery by the government on its side of the
01:04:18 - bargain, but that there is also, and therefore some trust and confidence in
01:04:25 - the institutional arrangements,
01:04:28 - but that also there is confidence that government will punish the free riders.
01:04:33 - So, that makes it easier for me to act on my commitments,
01:04:39 - my ethical commitments, if I know that those who will be trying to take advantage
01:04:44 - of me will be likely caught and punished and restrained from engaging in that.
01:04:52 - I mean, you know, it's much then it makes it much easier for me to act on my ethical commitment.
01:04:58 - So I see institutions not so much as shaping as enabling or blocking,
01:05:05 - which is a little bit different than shaping. Okay, clear.
01:05:10 - And I do think that they make it possible for certain kinds of norms to arise
01:05:21 - within an organization, a government.
01:05:26 - A larger polity maybe, that are shaping.
01:05:31 - I mean, I think the norms are shaping because they come from a social set of
01:05:36 - interactions among people, not just a top-down set of rules telling people to
01:05:41 - walk this way or not walk that way.
01:05:43 - So I'm not just talking about institutions that tell us to drive on the right
01:05:47 - or the left side of the road. Those do shape our behavior, yes.
01:05:50 - And that's very very behaviorist, but for very good reasons.
01:05:54 - But we don't really have commitments one way or the other there.
01:05:57 - I mean, that's just helping to regulate the way the society,
01:06:01 - making sure that we don't bump into each other with our cars and kill each other.
01:06:07 - Very different kind of thing, that kind of institution than the ones I'm talking about.
01:06:12 - Sure. But in the meantime, with your own example, I could also say,
01:06:15 - look, look, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and that's terrible.
01:06:20 - And everybody believes that. And with that, you've shaped their behavior to
01:06:24 - support a certain course of action.
01:06:27 - But that's the information flow, not the institutions, right?
01:06:32 - So you were talking about the, I'm not seeing a total conflict between the two.
01:06:37 - I mean, what I see as what humans are is that all of us have some self-interest.
01:06:44 - That's self-preserving.
01:06:46 - That often involves our children, not just ourselves, but it's still self-preserving.
01:06:52 - And all of us have some ethical commitments and some passions and other things
01:06:57 - that we care intensely about, which will be enabled or disabled.
01:07:01 - And some of those we want to disable some of the really nasty things.
01:07:06 - I mean, we don't want young men running around with guns, shooting others because
01:07:11 - they decide they don't like their tattoos or their politics or their color.
01:07:18 - Following up on that, last question,
01:07:20 - Margaret, unless Jenna or Julia still want to bring something up.
01:07:27 - If you had the ability to change one thing in humans to make them more effective
01:07:34 - in collaborating and solving these crises that are right in front of us,
01:07:39 - What would this one thing be that you would change?
01:07:43 - I don't think I can change anything in humans, frankly. I think we have to learn
01:07:50 - what humans are like and create arrangements that enable them to be the best
01:07:57 - of themselves rather than the worst of themselves.
01:08:01 - All right, Margaret Levy, thank you very much for this conversation.
01:08:05 - You're very welcome. It was enlightening to me. Now I know a lot more about you.
01:08:10 - Hi, you listened to one of our podcasts in the series on collaboration produced
01:08:15 - by the Ernst Trommel Forum and the Convergent Science Network.
01:08:19 - You can find more episodes on our website.

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Margaret Levi on institutional design and communities of fate

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