Friday Notes, April 12, 2024
Dear Friends —
I was today years old when I learned that Division I women’s basketball teams are permitted to practice against men, and often do so to increase speed, agility, and competitive drive. The practice squads — male students who played high school basketball but choose not to pursue the sport competitively during college — are integral to the success of elite teams, much like the male hitting partners of highly ranked female tennis players. It’s not that the men are better players, but by virtue of their biology they do have some in-built advantages of size and power. When you’re seeking greatness (or even just better-ness), people who push you hard within the context of the game you want to win can set you up for long-term success.
I have never played basketball, competitively or otherwise, but I did used to work at the World Bank. In that context at the time, there were two teams: male economists trained at a small number of highly selective universities; and everyone else. The unspoken but well established rule of the game was that all problems could be explained, and all solutions could be found, within a one-size-fits-all framework of neoclassical economics. Anything could and should be described in terms of supply and demand: jobs, children, corruption (known as “rent-seeking behavior”), knowledge. All behavior was understood as the result of weighing costs and benefits. If there wasn’t going to be mention of incentives (extrinsic, intrinsic) and elasticities (of demand, supply, price), or an insider joke about opportunity cost, the meeting wasn’t even worth scheduling. Anything that violated the basic mental model was pulled back into alignment by applying the concepts of preferences (“utility theory”!), market failures, and shadow pricing. (In a subsequent development, economists discovered that people aren’t always “rational” and the mental model accommodated that observation by swallowing up 180 types of cognitive bias and rebranding basic human psychology as behavioral economics.)
I’d learned to play a version of the game in graduate school, but the World Bank was a different level. On the court with the dominant team, but on the “everyone else” side, I had to push myself to keep up with the economic fundamentalists. To stay in the game, I had to self-censor questions that revealed discomfort with orthodoxy, like whether the social value of people’s work is really what they get paid in the market, or whether a theory of individualistic human behavior could ever be the foundation for collective wellbeing. To get points across, I not only needed to know the right vocabulary but also the right tone: the Goldilocks place between too passive and too aggressive.
The adaptations were intentional and temporary, not a distortion of values or behavior that stuck forever. I realized that if I was to contribute to progress in that institution at all — on that court or as an outsider — it was going to happen not by changing the rules of the game, but by being as good at the game as possible. There’s no doubt I got better by playing with the boys who had made the rules in the first place.
Those skills permitted me to work for a few years on projects at the World Bank that directed resources to good uses. Even more, what I learned during a relatively short time at the Bank gave me insights about how that part of the system works — knowledge that has been extremely valuable ever since.
Is there something here for the many people who are seeking to make change — to work toward social justice — and start (or continue) their work lives within dominant institutions? There are loads and loads of people like that; I count myself as one, and there are many of us in government, philanthropy, large nonprofits, universities, and the corporate sector. While it’s not the only option, working within “the system” is a sensible choice for many mission-driven early-career professionals. As Saul Alinksy wrote in Rules for Radicals:
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.
Dominant institutions are places that have a lot of influence (i.e., dominant) but where, for the most part, the rules are hard to change (i.e., institutions). In that environment, change rarely comes from trying to bend or break the rules of the game to align with one’s deeply held values and beliefs. But change can be made, in meaningful increments, by those who are very skilled at the game — both while they are within the institution, and after they’ve left with the knowledge of the inner workings.
What’s one way to get very skilled at the game? Like the top-tier women’s basketball players: by welcoming the challenges of playing a tough team.
I cannot stop thinking about what’s going on in Arizona.
Here’s a fascinating map of the United States. The total population represented in red is equal to the total population in orange.
And if you’re looking for a multi-part investigative podcast that will give you a window into the wacky (and terrifying) world of disinformation and misinformation, do not miss Tortoise Media’s Who Trolled Amber? (You do not need to know or care anything about Amber Heard to appreciate this, but you do need to listen to all six episodes. Truly mind-blowing.)
Have a good weekend,
-Ruth