by Tom Corbett
I cannot forget one undergraduate student who constantly complained about my ‘Intro to Social Policy’ course, how demanding it was, and about how much she had to study for it. She appeared sufficiently stressed that I considered getting her some counseling. Her name stuck with me back then, at least, a very rare occurrence. Perhaps I feared one day coming across an article saying a certain young student had jumped to her death in despair over this course taught by some diabolical, uncaring professor.
At a conference several years in the future, an economics professor from Johns Hopkins University asked me if I recalled a certain student. It was her. It turned out that he was her stepfather. I winced, thinking that he would next tell me she had been in therapy for the intervening decade or so and that I had ruined her life. This revelation would be followed by a demand that I pay the full cost of her rehabilitation. But no! To my amazement, he went on about how much she loved my course and, amazingly, that she had kept her class notes from those many years ago. Again, go figure!
I have always been shocked by unexpected feedback coming directly from former students. Years after being in my class, one masters-level social work student emailed the following:
I remembered thinking, when you described your convictions and philosophy in seminar, that those ideas were something I would aspire to. It made me so much intellectual, spiritual, and emotional sense. It makes the same sense today and I am proud that they have become my heartfelt convictions and philosophy. You made and continue to make a difference in my life and worldview every day…
At the time, I thought I was failing them miserably, mostly because I felt I was doing everything haphazardly, and on the run. But eventually, I realized something. You never really know what kind of impact you are having. Those undergraduates apparently asleep in the back rows might well have been absorbing my brilliance, at least that is the story I am sticking with. The comatose figures slumped over their desks, whose inert forms had me on the verge of calling in EMTs to check for signs of clinical life, might really have been in the throes of inspiration. Not bloody likely, but you never really know. Guess what, the same is true for doing social policy. You seldom can measure your impact in any visible manner. You might make a point, perform an act, or develop a proposal that might change the course of a debate or the character of a decision, a small step toward significant effects down the line. You just never know.
It was also during this period that many of my more treasured policy initiatives were languishing. The ideological and political winds had begun to blow in a different direction. The governor of Wisconsin at the time, renowned welfare reformer Tommy Thompson, attacked me in a public forum in Chicago because, I suspect, some of the many interviews I gave to the media seemed critical of his reform efforts, at least in his eyes. Even more depressing, a working relationship I had painstakingly helped develop between the Institute for Research on Poverty at UW and the state of Wisconsin was on life support, and in danger of totally falling apart.
Worse, the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), where I served as associate director at the time, was in crisis. IRP had been a federally funded, university-based research entity since the onset of the War-On-Poverty (WOP) in the mid-sixties. Over the subsequent three decades, it had generated full-throated and sophisticated research and analysis agenda as well as trained or supported a generation or two of talented researchers.
Once, when I testified before U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the avuncular and sometime irascible welfare expert in Congress, he noticed that I was from the institute. He announced to those assembled that IRP was just about the best thing that had come out of President Johnson’s WOP. But now, in the midnineties, possibly because of the personal animus of one external reviewer of the institute’s refunding proposal, IRP tottered on the verge of extinction.
Those, indeed, were trying times. Most mornings, I would spring awake at 4:00 AM, only to be met by overpowering feelings of dread and anxiety. Too many Friday nights I would be stuck in O’Hare airport—surely the armpit of the American air transportation system—waiting for a connecting flight to Madison, Wisconsin, amid a milling mob of weary and anguished travelers. I could never escape the feeling of being behind, the specter of never being able to catch up, the sense that doom and failure were everywhere. The policy headwinds were pushing against me and threatening much of what I had worked on over the prior two decades. My Irish sense of perpetual gloom surely was in full bloom during those days.
Where was the fun in this? I often asked myself. I recall watching as my parents labored at real jobs in dirty, dangerous pre-OSHA factories, or waited on tables for crabby patrons. Their experiences taught me an invaluable life lesson—never take a real job, particularly one involving heavy lifting. Early on, I devoted myself to avoiding such a fate. Now, however, I began fantasizing about jobs like roofing houses, tilling fields, life on the road as a long-haul truck driver, or perhaps doing some mindless, repetitive task on an assembly line. Maybe I could work the night shift in one of those highway tollbooths. That seemed mindless enough that even I could handle it. Damn, I thought to myself back then, if I had been smarter as a kid, I could have had a career doing a job with real value to America, like serving up ice cream cones at Dairy Queen.
And yet, here I was, hawking a career of doing social policy to impressionable young students who really could not be expected to know any better. Was I a sadist, a perverse ghoul? I don’t recall wandering around my neighborhood as a young boy, pulling the wings off butterflies, and kicking stray dogs. Perhaps I had repressed those memories. At a minimum, I could not escape the sense that my efforts to pimp social policy careers would make me guilty of malicious indifference to human happiness.
And yet, at the end of the day, I had to admit that I loved it all. Despite all these downsides, the pervasive sense of not doing enough and surely not doing it well, I did love it. Have I ever told you I loved doing social policy work? What I probably enjoyed most was flying around the country to work with the best and the brightest from academia, research firms, think tanks, the philanthropic community, the government at all levels of authority from local sites to Washington, D.C., and from human service providers of all stripes. With these bright and talented men and women, I was fortunate enough to engage many of the most vexing social issues of my generation, and at a time when these issues also consumed national attention and concern.
Given that I was considered an expert of some sort, I always had access to the newest ideas and reform initiatives. This enabled me to see change as it happened; up close and personal, as they say. I could always keep abreast of what was happening in the social policy world on a real time basis. Not bad for a kid from a lower income working-class family, whose parents’ fondest hope was that I stay out of jail, at least until I was old enough that they could legally boot me out the door.
One set of questions from my social work students would stump me more than the others. It usually went something like this: What does it take to do policy? I know so little, so how can I do something like that? I mean, really, isn’t it all about numbers and boring technical stuff and incomprehensible mathematics? What kind of person do you have to be to do this crap well? And the final kicker went something like this: Do I really have what it takes?
I never knew what to say at this point. Any reasonably intelligent person can learn the technical tools associated with doing policy work, though some of the advanced estimation techniques are daunting indeed. With some diligence, you can absorb the skills essential to creating data sets, drilling down into those data to elicit useful information, developing policy alternatives, advocating for specific options, and implementing or managing those new policies and programs. But it is quite another thing to do the more subtle and demanding aspects of policy work. That takes place on a different level.
I discovered that you could always find others to do the boring technical work. Doing policy in a more complete sense, however, involves many subtle human qualities
and capacities not always present in those pursuing this avocation. You must possess a capacity to work well with people of diverse backgrounds and perspectives. You should be able to engage in what we think of as lateral thinking, where you integrate seemingly disconnected facts in new or clever ways. You must stay with the course when all seems desperate and lost. And there are other demands!
I believe you need a set of softer skills and personal strengths since doing policy in the real world is a bit like going to war. Often, there is a fog of confusion and a distinct sense of conflict. In the real-world values and interests clash, ends are difficult to agree upon, and competing theories of how the world operates confuse even well-meaning observers. Data can be manipulated and massaged to defend numerous conclusions. Values and ideology subvert rational discourse. Power trumps the public good. In effect, the most interesting policy challenges can be thought of as “wicked social problems.” They defy easy solution.
It took me a long time before I realized I could do policy well, even without the advanced technical skills. It took me even longer to understand that I brought something essential and unique to the policy table. It took me a lifetime to comprehend the nature of the less obvious attributes and skills that are essential to taking on society’s more wicked problems at an advanced level. Want to know what they are? Well, you will have to read the whole book before I tell you. One teaser attribute I will reveal now is that you must be just a bit of a masochist. As I have said, doing this stuff is damn hard.
I am reminded of the scene from the movie A League of Their Own, a delightful movie about a professional girl’s baseball league that was created during World War II when there was a danger that men’s baseball might be closed for the duration of the conflict. The scene in question involves the character played by Geena Davis, who was the star of the team managed by Tom Hanks. When her wounded husband returned from the war, she decides to leave the team just before the start of the new league’s playoff series.
Jimmy, the Hanks character, tries to change her mind. “Baseball is what gets inside you. It’s what lights you up, you can’t deny that.”
“It just got too hard,” Dottie, the Davis character, responds.
Jimmy glowers for a moment before spitting out a memorable line. “Baseball…is supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It is the hard that makes it great.”
Similarly, it is the very fact that doing policy well is hard is what makes it worth doing. It also means that not everyone can do it, at least not well. I would look at the (mostly) young students across from me, looking so earnest yet uncertain. Who could tell if they had the right stuff? Not me. So, I would typically end my conversation with them with something like the following:
At the end of the day, no one can tell you whether this is the right choice for you. You must look within yourself for the answer to that. Policy is about the large questions…about the rules and protocols that regulate and shape societal and human interactions. If you look around and don’t like what you see, then maybe you have a chance at making a difference. But you must possess a certain fire inside, a passion to change the things about you. You not only need to make individuals better, but also make communities better…make society work better. It might be easier, though not much, to change one person or one family at a time, but tackling the big problems promises change through a more macro-set of programs and policies that will impact many people, few of whom you will ever know personally. If you can pull that off, the potential rewards are inestimable. The challenges, however, are equally as daunting.
Then I might throw out a few facts about the American challenge to cement my argument. If I were talking to them today, I likely would point out the following.
We talk easily about American exceptionalism, but the raw reality is that we are doing exceptionally poor relative to other advanced countries. For example:
We have poverty rates in the U.S. that are the highest among our peer countries. And our child poverty rates have run four or five times that found in some Scandinavian counties, inexplicable in such a wealthy country.
The so-called “American dream,” a term first used by historian James Thurlow Adams in 1931, has faded. Income and wealth inequality in America is as high now as it was just before the onset of the Great Depression in the late 1920s. The six Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 41 percent of all households.
Children born in Denmark in the bottom quintile of household ranked by income are twice as likely to rise to the top quintile as adults than American kids. In fact, class mobility in America is now less than virtually all our peer nations, so much for that part of the American dream.
We spend far more than any other advanced country on health care, yet our health outcomes are about average, ranking just above Romania. Our amenable mortality rate (deaths that could be prevented by timely and effective medical intervention) in 2007 was 103 per 100,000 people, which put us 21 out of 25 countries examined. France, by comparison, had a measured rate of 55 per 100,000. In a recent study, the U.S. ranked dead last among 11 rich countries on the value, efficiency, and effectiveness of its health care system.
In another example, American women are twice as likely to die in childbirth relative to our neighbors to the north (Canada).
Our rate of early childbirths is embarrassingly high while our non-marital birth rates in the U.S. are among the highest among advanced countries. The rate of births to teens in the U.S. has fallen by half since 1991, a rare bright spot.
We incarcerate our citizens at the highest rate anywhere in the world, and still execute some prisoners, a practice outlawed in most (but not all) countries. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prison population. Yet, we still have 80 to 90 gun-related deaths per day whereas such deaths in our peer countries run about 80 to 90 per year and often sometimes fewer.
We have inordinately high rates of child abuse and neglect.
We have the best colleges in the world. But the cost of going to college is far outpacing the ability of the middle class to cover these expenses. Thus, many young people start out in life with crippling student debt. Most of our competitor countries subsidize college costs more than we do, sometimes footing the entire bill.
Our young people (ages 16-24) rank poorly relative to comparable peers in other advanced countries in numeracy and scientific knowledge, suggesting a comparative disadvantage for our economy in the future. In science and math, our kids do far worse than better performers such as Finland, Singapore, and Poland.
This list could go on, but the point is clear. We make choices as a society that determine who wins and who loses. Those rules can provide opportunities for all or build in unfair advantages for the few. Between the onset of the Great Depression and the early 1970s, inequality in America fell sharply and opportunity increased dramatically. After World War II, real incomes doubled over the next generation with all income quintiles participating in that growth. Since the early 1980s, trends have moved in the opposite redirection…the middle-class ideal that defined the American dream has faded.
Rising inequality is found everywhere. But the American story has been bleaker than almost anywhere else. The truth is that there will always be winners and losers in society. Not everyone is born with the same intelligence, motivation, character, or ambition to be a success. Nor can government equalize social or economic outcomes across individuals or groups without damage to the aggregate economy. At the same time, inequality today approaches levels that easily can destabilize the social fabric of our society. Research being done at present appears to confirm that extreme inequality slows economic growth by reducing consumer demand and thwarting opportunities for the less fortunate. We can do much to ameliorate these imbalances threatening our futures. We simply need the will.
Thus, the rules governing society do matter…a lot. That is why economic elites and other interest groups spend outrageous sums on tilting the rules in t
heir favor. That is how indefensible tax policies such as the “carried interest” provision are enacted. This permits hedge fund managers to pay less proportionately in taxes than working class stiffs trying to get by in life. Skewed tax policies are just one way for the top 1 percent of the population to accumulate as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Billionaire investor Warren Buffet has complained that he pays less (again proportionately) in taxes than the secretary that works for him. “Yes,” Warren has pointed out many times, “there has been a class war going on, and my class has won.”
I am retired now, and no longer send young idealists off on policy careers. But maybe I can do the next best thing, put down what I learned and experienced over some four decades of fighting in the trenches…well, maybe mostly in the rear lines. It is not much but better than nothing. Besides, it might be the best I have to offer. I do share many of my better academic and intellectual thoughts in another of my literary masterpieces titled The Boat Captain’s Conundrum, well worth the price. The truth, however, is that I spent most of my professional life in academia without fully embracing the culture of an academic. That didn’t mean I did not have many great thoughts or develop innovative ways of looking at things. I am very clever indeed. But my first love was always policy. I was, alas, a wayward academic but a first-class policy wonk. There is, therefore, an upside to my professional misadventures. I have much to share about the policy arts which rather explains why this book is so damn long.
In the end, however, no book or classroom lectures can adequately communicate what doing social policy really entails. I am reminded of my days as a Peace Corps volunteer so long ago. Our training was long and arduous. When our group gathered together four decades after completing our service, we recalled how transformative our training and Peace Corps experience had been. To a person, we all agreed that Peace Corps had profoundly changed our lives. At the same time, we all recognized how unprepared we were for the rigors of living in the alien culture of rural India. No matter how well we were trained, the reality of being in an Indian village was a shock.
