February Mailbag

On the spirit of liberty, regulatory consolidation, parenting, productivity, and pedagogy

Photo by Kristin Jarvis on Unsplash

I asked for your questions, you answered with your questions. Let’s get to it.

1. As a historian, do you see a future path (or historical precedent) to restore the benefits of bipartisanship? Or will we continue to oscillate between ideological extremes? Would open primaries or ranked-choice voting solve this? If so, how do you make the case for them given their recent defeats?

I am very skeptical of historians who predict the future, so I can’t say with any confidence whether we will see a restoration of the principle that people who belong to different teams and believe different things can once again work together. There are an awful lot of structural incentives—from intense gerrymandering in the House, the increase of partisan shibboleths on the left and right, the one-state-two-Senators rule giving California and Wyoming equal representation in the upper chamber of Congress—that entrench this view.

So I don’t know the answer. My former PhD adviser and close friend Julian Zelizer has just written a fascinating and provocative book In Defense of Partisanship that readers should consider.

If readers are like me, however, and do not feel at home marching behind partisan banners, I would say take comfort. There is a place in our political landscape for us. We can reward candidates who do not play these games should those candidates appear.

Perhaps much more importantly, we ourselves do not have to play these games. The great judge Learned Hand—history’s greatest tribute to the theory of nominative determinism with the potential exception of Usain Bolt—deeply influenced my views here. Here he is in an important speech right before the end of World War II:

What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

And so I say: let that Spirit of Liberty, that spirit which “is not too sure that it is right” be a watchword, even if the rest of the world descends into partisan chaos.

2. What are your perspectives on regulatory consolidation in banking? Do other jurisdictions divide banking regulation like we do? What are the pros/cons of our system, opportunities for “efficiency”, and subsequent risks that come with our current system?

In the United States, banks are regulated and supervised by many different entities. These entities are nominally divided into different lanes of “primary” versus or “backup” regulation and supervision. At the federal level, the Federal Reserve has primary responsibility over bank holding companies and state-chartered banks that have opted into the Federal Reserve System. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has primary authority over banks with a national charter. And the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has primary authority over state-chartered banks that have opted not to join the Federal Reserve System. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has authority over all banks (but not credit unions) with assets above $10 billion.

That’s just at the federal level. The states have over 100 other such entities.

Lately the Trump Administration has floated the idea of consolidating some of that authority. This is not the first such conversation; one scholar counted over 30 such serious efforts. No country in the world operates their bank regulatory system in this way. Surely there are ways to consolidate with efficiency.

Here’s the thing, though: this system has worked remarkably well. The US banking system is a rather extraordinary set of institutions, both public and private. I marvel at what it has been able to do. My colleagues and I in the academy never tire of pointing out other problems, and some view these problems as existential (and the system as a whole as deeply broken). I don’t share that pessimism, even as I admit for potential for reform.

I say, then, let’s focus on other problems first. I would not remove supervision from the Fed, which is one popular idea that makes sense to me on some level. I would not abolish the OCC, which has been tried many times before. I would not abolish the state chartered system, though that has been contemplated. And I think having a separate unit focused on deposit insurance is good.

In other words, two-and-a-half cheers for the status quo.

3. How did you and Nikki develop your list of family values and how do you advise others to develop their own list?

This question came from two of my favorite former students who ended up marrying each other and are being deliberate in what I call in my business ethics course “cultural engineering”: that is, the steadfast and focused effort to create new webs of significance that can sustain an individual or organization’s well-articulated, non-obvious, non-universal goals.

When we were first married, we adopted—stole, in fact—two family mottos. The first, which we heard in church, was “Conti-Browns can do hard things.” I repeat this to myself almost daily. Yesterday was leg day; I have a very long torso and short little legs that are best described as “adorable.” Squatting is my least favorite of the power lifts, but the most important since it creates so much stability for the others (and for life). I repeated this over and over again as I worked my way through this routine. The dopamine never came, which is a bit uncommon even for squats.

Our kids I think like this less. We repeat it to them, and it alters behavior, but we have not yet nailed a way to reinforce this idea without sounding like we are hectoring them.

Our other motto is “Never let anyone be humiliated in your presence.” We stole this from Elie Wiesel (paraphrased here). It has been incredibly helpful as parents. As the zeitgeist has shifted in the twenty years since we first adopted it, we have had to accommodate difference here. Humiliation experienced subjectively in the absence of a bully is a different problem, harder to solve, and not obviously what we want our children (or ourselves) to sustain as their focus in social relationships. But in terms of standing up and pulling people in, to avoid piling on or following the crowd without consideration, it has been an important guide.

We have many others. Church has made a huge difference to us here. Last weekend for example we had what is called “stake conference” in our church, which is a gathering of the nine local congregations in Philadelphia for a single set of meetings. In these meetings, using the epistemologies, scripture, and traditions of the Latter-day Saints, we build each other up with insights of all kinds. This time, I learned (or taught, since I am one of the volunteer church leaders in Philadelphia): “always be a mentor”; “joy and suffering are not opposite”; “pray not only about what to say, but also about what not to say.” In one of the most meaningful “talks” given at this conference, a 16-year-old young woman preached with the wisdom of the ages. I got hand cramps from taking notes about how she understands our tradition and what it requires of us. Any weekly church meeting is filled with this kind of soft institution making, one reason why this community means so much to me.

That doesn’t do much for people who lack a church community, I know. What I would say for those so inclined is to find one, or something like it. One of the gravest errors we have made in the last fifty years in this country is to make disaffiliation from community organization the default in the face of conflict. But to quote economist Albert Hirschmann, in the face of such conflicts we can Exit, raise or Voice, or exercise Loyalty. I think there is a place for all of these.

4. How have you and Nikki worked together as a team to raise your children? What compromises have you made, what decision-making processes/heuristics have you developed, and how have you balanced raising a family with your individual lives?

From my same students, a much shorter answer to the much harder problem. Here I’ll channel my inner Virginia Woolf. Make sure you maintain “rooms of your own.” In any marriage or family, there is the work for partner 1, the work for partner 2, and the joint work of the family. All three cannot be prioritized in every moment; conflicts will arise. The question I have: is everyone on board with the way that priorities get stacked? And are they always stacked in the same way? If no to the first and yes to the second, I worry about those priorities.

5. How are you so productive? What advice would you give to scholars who want to be more productive while still maintaining high quality work?

This reader question came on a day when I needed to read it. Truth is, I often feel like I have one nostril above water. My book on bank supervision went under contract in 2017, with an expected publication of 2019. It will finally come out six years later. True, I have published a lot of articles in the mean time, but nowhere near what I hoped to do. I almost never feel differently. Almost every day I go to sleep thinking about the work I did not get done.

I also have a pathological confidence in Future Peter’s capacity for work, such that I often commit (to co-authors and editors) to deadlines that I simply cannot meet. My only hope there is therapy.

With that context in mind, the first piece of advice I would give is to check outside of your own head about what the standards of productivity are and whether you are, in fact, meeting them.

The second piece of advice is to assess your days and understand how they fit together with your broader goals. Make those assessments concrete. I strive to write 1,000 words a day on articles, 1,000 words a day on books, and, time permitting, 1,000 words a day on other stuff (this blog, mainly). I hit that target about 50% of the time. I track it all on a spreadsheet.

The last piece of advice I have is to establish a quality bar below which you will not dip and then focus relentlessly on quantity. Some truly terrible advice I received early was that I would be judged if I published too much. I think that advice came from a place of concern from a mentor whose work was cited thousands of times, but it was the wrong advice for me to internalize. The right advice was what I just gave. Forget the haters, write at the pace that fulfills you. Restyle “publish or perish” as “if you do not publish, this idea will perish” and go from there. Don’t publish dreck, but don’t become the proverbial sculptor wasting and wearing out your life polishing the gargoyles that no one else will ever see.

6. For a professional school, do you think your and your peer schools weigh teaching and research talent or emphasis “appropriately” from a student’s perspective? Is this dynamic more of an issue with law schools as opposed to business schools (or the other way around)?

Wharton prides itself as a “research business school.” This means that scholars are hired, promoted, and evaluated for raises largely, almost exclusively, based on their research impact. I am told by people who have been around longer than I am that excellent and poor teaching records can make a difference in that evaluation but only at the margin, and most cases by the time they reach evaluation are no longer at that margin.

The result is that teaching is uneven at business schools (the only context I know well). There are teaching resources available for those who are motivated toward self-improvement, but that self-improvement will largely be a personal preference. One senior colleague told me once that becoming a great teacher is like taking up the guitar, something you should do if you are intrinsically motivated for it. There are few professional rewards for good teaching.

This sounds like a scandal, perhaps. But I don’t see it that way. Full disclosure, I have won almost every teaching award the school offers and have won the annual teaching excellence award every single year that I have taught; I take this stuff very seriously, but mostly for personal reasons.

I don’t think this is a scandal because the value of the professional credential that MBA students attain is more of a function on the prestige of the institution relative to peers than it is on the quality of learning that occurs inside the classroom. If I do my job as a scholar and, hypothetically, write a big book on the history of bank supervision that has never been more timely or important and is received with rich accolades etc etc etc, then Wharton students receive a marginal benefit because Wharton did that. The ineffable causal chain that roots a school’s reputation in the world and gives value to the credential is linked to the prestige of its faculty more than the quality of its teaching.

That is at least the theory. It’s a pretty good one.

How to then take these brilliant professors and ensure that they are razzle-dazzling in the classroom is another matter. I have close to no insights there. I know that I stress each minute of my teaching and work hard with my TAs to reformulate syllabi to keep them fresh, propose new courses to keep up with the times, watch my own videos to see how the pacing of my classes is going, and read my evaluations carefully for ideas.

I don’t know why I do that, if I am honest. I think it is a part of my moral identity. I can’t say that every scholar-teacher should do the same.