Tag: diversity

Head or Heart Again

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Before the election in 2025, I wrote a political post about head and heart and the role each played in our choice at the ballot box.If you speak Myers-Briggs, you might call it Left Brain/Right Brain, T or F for short. No,. that’s not true/false, it’s another dichotomy, thinking/feeling. Or sometimes reason and emotion. We could take on all of he four Myers-Briggs binaries–introvert/extrovert, Intuition/Sensing, and Judging/perceiving, and judging/perceiving, but let’s save those for another day..

We use both halves of our brains, sometimes one more than the other, although we tend to have a preferred first response. A classic example is being at the scene of the accident. The T, left-brained person sees it as a problem to be solved. Everybody out of the car? Police? Do we need a medic? Meanwhile, the right-brained F is feeling empathy and compassion and trying to offer comfort..At our best, we humans try to cover both bases. But if not, we can pair up, the left-‘brained person (more likely a man but not necessarily) can problem solve while the right-brained persons offers consolation and hope.Ultimately, everyone at the scene will engage both halves of the brain.

Challenging the assumed superiority of thinking or reasoning or logic over empathy or affection or compassion led to some useful answers to bothersome questions in multiple fields of thought. I am mainly aware of the the effect of this challenge to my own academic discipline, economics, but I am sure it has influenced other and ethics.( Or as one of my economist friends said, shouldn’t that be economics or ethics?)

The standard textbook in economics introduced the young scholar to homo economicus (economic man), the basis of a simplistic model of how we make economic decisions about money, spending, working, marrying, having children, investing, retiring. and so forth. Homo economicus has two sterling qualities. He is a fully informed master calculator who can do cost/benefit analysis in his head, or occasionally on a spreadsheet. And his sole goal is to maximize his personal self-interest, to get as much out of life as he can with the least expenditure of effort or money.or both. I personally find this person to be rather obnoxious, but I have encountered people who do seem to conform to that model much of the time….

There has always been an undercurrent in economics suggesting that the average actual human does not exactly conform to that model. That undercurrent can be traced from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (a precursor to his Wealth of Nations) through Keynes’ animal spirits to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman’s work earned him the only Nobel prize in economics awarded to a psychologist. Back in the 19th century, Charleston Dickens satirized economic man in his novel Hard Times, in which a paterfamilias subjected his family to cost-benefit analysis of every decision and couldn’t understand why his wife gave up and his children left home at the earliest opportunity.

What were those challenges to homo economics? First of all, most of us can only acquire a limited amount of information about all the details of all t he choices we have to make every day. There goes the assumption that our hero is fully informed. In fact, we make better choices when we employ what is called bounded rationality, limiting our options to a small number.. Second, we often lack the complex calculation skills to determine which choice would most meet our needs an desires. Finally, many of us feel that there is more to life than narrow self interest. There is family. There is culture. there is community. There is play. There is being in nature. Some of the best things in life really are free! We care with and for others and they do the same. It’s called altruism, and it messes up those tidy one-person decision models concerned only the decider’s self-interest..

There are lessons in this rethinking of our model of human choice that impact public policy choices as well as our personal choices.If we rep;lace Homo economics with homo not so sapiens, we find that we may need to revise the way we present choices to citizens and taxpayers. The first Medicare drug coverage programs offered way more choices than sick people and their caregivers could adequately evaluate. People often need a default that can make a decision for them if they forget or can’t decide. Usually the default is the one that works best for the average person. Making wise choices is itself a demand on our scarce resources of time and attention that might be better–or more joyfully!–employed elsewhere

A 20th century British philosopher, Mary Midgeley, applied the same challenge to to the practices in many fields ofdeveloping “universal”;explanations, including philosophy, history, biology and ethics–even physics in its evolution from Newton to Einstein! These theoretical models must be qualified by the diversity of context and circumstance, diversity and complexity, that challenge overly simple explanations to life’s complex questions.

Lie my blog? You may like my book. Passionately Moderate: Civic Virtues and Democracy. Available from amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

~ purplesage41 ~ 3 Comments


In 1967, I was a 26-year-old newly hired part-time assistant professor of economics at a southern state university. I just happened to be in the neighborhood because my husband was a new faculty member in the physics department. Part-time was my choice: I had two daughters, ages three and one, and a dissertation to finish.
I sat down for a chat with my department head. Holley, he said, you know that you are the only woman among six men. I nodded, and he went on. “You are liberal, we are conservative. You are a Yankee, we are Southerners. Your degree is from a Northern University, we ae all products of southern Universities.” He paused, and I waited. Finally, he said, “You know, if you were just black, you’d be perfect.” I wasn’t a “DEI hire,” as far as he was concerned. I was just a blessing that had dropped unexpectedly into his domain, and he was grateful.
In the late 1960s, acceptance of diversity as a desirable situation was widely affirmed, especially in colleges and universities. What went wrong? What made DEI the official abbreviation for highway to hell?
Diversity is a fact, something that can be described and measured. Equity is a value, an affirmation that as a society we believe that everyone should have a fair chance at opportunities. Inclusion is an act, an effort to make everyone welcome in the candidate pool. Later came measurement and with measurement, quotas. What percentage of your faculty/staff/student population is nonwhite? Female? How do you accommodate people with disabilities? DEI became a slogan for governments, firms, and organizations. Look, we have a black CEO! You can trust us.
Then it became a game, and beyond that, a backlash. Many years after that chat with my department head, I had another conversation late in the evening with a younger male friend who felt that DEI had shortchanged him. He said, I wanted to go to Princeton, and I had a1300 on my SAT, but they gave that place to some woman instead. I paused for a moment and said, “I really wanted to go to Yale in 1959, and I had 1500 on my SATs, but Yale was not admitting women until ten years later.” There is no easy way to counteract the effects of past discrimination. Life is short, and changing attitudes, beliefs and misconceptions is slow work, with a temptation for governments to respond with mandates and measurements.
My own education was enriched by learning from professors and colleagues of a different culture (southern), gender (men), age, and political values. It was also enriched by student diversity, especially in the last 15 years of my long career when I was teaching students from all over the world in a Ph.D. program in Policy Studies.
The backlash against DEI has been a long time in coming, but today it is in overdrive. For those of us who believe that equity is a value that addresses the fact of diversity that is best served by efforts to include a more diverse array of employees, customers, investors, colleagues, etc., what can we do?
First, we can share our own positive experiences of diversity, and I do whenever there is an opportunity. What stories do you have to tell?

Second, as an economist, I believe in the power of money. We can shop with and invest in firms that are intentionally inclusive. The president administration has done us a great favor by making clear who is and who is not on board with DEI so that we can direct our dollars accordingly. We know that Target, Walmart, amazon, the Washington Post and Lowe’s do not share DEI value and have in fact deleted the ones that were once part of their corporate credo.

On the investing side, there are three kinds of positive signals from companies, mutual funds and other investment instruments> DEI, ESG, and B-corporations. ESG stands for environment, social, and governance—a commitment by the form to minimize environmental damage in their work, to be attuned to the needs of communities, minorities, workers, and suppliers, and to practice transparency and accountability in their governance. A B-corporation actually has environmental and social goals written into its corporate charter and is required to account for them annually to their shareholders. If you are interested in the investment side, google socially responsible investing and see what you can find. A number of mutual funds offer socially responsible investing in both their own management activities and in choosing what firms to invest in.

Third, there is money that we give away. Some of it can go to organizations who do good work among the “outcasts”—immigrants, former convicts, impoverished families, victims of domestic abuse, global giving to help people in other countries. Charity Navigator can help you evaluate which nonprofits to support. Other nonprofits like ACLU will direct your funds toward resisting the backlash, as will your campaign contributions to candidates who represent or support e inclusion as an action that acknowledges diversity and values equity.

Sexism, racism, xenophobia, ageism, and other forms of targeting marginalized groups is not new. It has been around at least since the Greeks referred to all non-Greeks as barbarians. But the facts of life can be changed by the determined efforts of good people who care about the world we are handing off to future generations. DEI backlash is only a symptom of a much deeper malaise, but for me, it is a good place to strengthen and deepen my work for The Resistance. I hope the same is true for you.