The Stop & Shop strike

The Stop & Shop grocery stores around me have been striking, asking for higher pay. Inspired by a Vox story, which wondered what would happen if Walmart's CEO gave his entire salary to his employees, I decided to do something similar.

First, I Googled "CEO of Stop and Shop" and found a dude named Kevin Holt who is CEO of Ahold Delhaize USA, which manages several grocery chains, including Stop & Shop, Giant Food, Food Lion, Hannaford, and others.

So I went bigger. Ahold Delhaize a Dutch company owned by president and CEO Frans Muller. According to Bloomberg, his net worth is €4,989,000. Acoording to Google's currency converter, that is $5,585,335.

Then I found Ahold Delhaize's total employees, which is 375,000 associates across 11 countries. So if we split Muller's entire salary among all his employees, that would give them each a whopping ... $14. (I found another site that puts Muller's total compensation at around $9 million, which seems more accurate. That would give each employee $24.)

According to this statement from their union rep, there are 31,000 Stop and Shop employees in New England. What if Holt, who manages these specific workers, split his total compensation of $4,025,500 among just those employees, ignoring the fact that the other grocery chains he oversees would probably not be happy with that? That would net each Stop and Shop worker ... $129.95.

Okay, so let's ignore CEO compensation and just look at profits. According to the union rep, Ahold Delhaize had profits of $2 billion last year.

Where does that money go? Someone on Quora used Walmart as an example. Of their $14.694 billion in net income (revenue minus expenses), $6.294 billion was returned to shareholders. That's 42%. Assuming Ahold Delhaize uses the same ratio, that would return $840 million to its shareholders, leaving $1.16 billion. If they took half of that it, $580 million, divided it by their 375,000 employees worldwide, it would equal $1,546 per employee, or an extra $128 a month.

Maybe they decide to be super progressive and split all of the $1.16 billion in net profits that don't go to shareholders among their 375,000 employees. That would equal $3,093 per employee, or $275 a month.

Can we figure out how to just address Stop & Shop employees? The 31,000 workers represent 8.26% of Ahold's 375,000 total work force. So what if we take 8.26% of the leftover $1.16 billion and divide that by the 31,000 employees? $3090 per employee, not much different than our figure above.

Not a bad raise, especially for someone on minimum wage, which is about $25,000 a year in Massachusetts (about a 12% increase). But I don't know if it's enough to cover increased wages, benefits, and a pension that the union demanded. Not to mention that this assumes every single profit not returned to shareholders goes to employees.

So who's paying for the increased compensation? Probably the consumers, many of whom are poor and minorities. That is, until robots who can stack shelves and check out items for a cheaper cost and replace all those jobs. Might as well fight for your wages now while you can.

Asymmetric Virtue Points

Here would be an interesting study. You get an email from someone you don't know. In their signature you see the following: "Responds to she/her." Knowing nothing more than that she lists her preferred pronouns, do you now like them more, less, or the same?

My guess is that progressives would like them more, conservatives less, and most people the same.

Here's the thing about calling people by their preferred pronoun: the incentives to do so aren't the same for each person. In fact, they are heavily favored toward progressives. When done in a public setting, progressives have the added benefit of accruing virtue points from their ingroup. "Look how progressive I am. I'm creating a safe space for trans folks!"

Conservatives get no such benefit and, in fact, might be ostracized by their ingroup. (As I'm typing this, I'm realizing that this is actually an argument for making it a law to call someone by their preferred pronoun since some people are incentivized not to do so. *shudders.)

One of the best things that progressives can to do advocate for trans folks would be to create an incentive for their outgroup to use use people's preferred pronouns. I have no idea what that would look like, I just know the current system is not designed to be helpful to anyone.

What James Damore got wrong

James Damore, author of the Google Memo, got fired for writing a screed about why he thought gender disparities in tech was due to biology. That's the short version anyway.

The intention of the memo was a response to Google asking employees for feedback based on some diversity training. It was not an attempt to change minds, But if it was, here are my thoughts on how it could have been more impactful.

Don't Bring a Knife to an Identity Politics Fight

As a stated libertarian, Damore's outgroup to persuade is progressives. Their telos is advocacy for victims. So if you're a white, straight, cis gendered man; playing the victim card immediately disqualifies your credibility. So I would leave out the part about being discriminated against by Google, even if it's true.

Validation

Second, he should have spent more time validating the harassment women experience. He did talk about how implicit bias couldn't explain everything. But I think he could have spent more time talking about the harassment and discrimination that exists, before talking about how eliminating it won't be enough to close the gender gap since it is caused by multiple factors, including biology.

Be careful with language

Calling someone "neurotic" and saying one sex has "high levels of neuroticism in the aggregate" are not the same thing. But unless someone is well-versed in the big five personality traits, they are not going to know the difference and will assume you are patronizing them.

Damore should have anticipated this. The one critique I read the most was people accusing Damore of being a misogynist by claiming all women were neurotic. Neuroticism is a scientific term that most people misinterpret. Even if the term and science are valid, it's not useful in terms of persuasion.

Likewise, when he writes about how women are more prone to anxiety, he misses a chance to engage with his outgroup (progressives). Even though his intention was to improve the work environment to be more conducive to women and uses science as the foundation for his belief, he only managed to ostracize progressives.

He could have written "women report higher levels of stress at work. Here is how we can provide a more supportive environment for them." This allows people to draw their own conclusions about the source of the stress and anxiety and actually listen to what Damore has to say. When he attributes the anxiety to women's biology, it's insulting to all those who experience discrimination and harassment that causes their anxiety.

Focus on outcomes we all agree on

Damore makes a good suggestion about offering more part-time work to attract more female employees. But he should have left out his perceived reason for what causes this. Instead of linking to a study about how women seek more work-life balance than men, he should have engaged the reason progressives offer for that disparity.

In addition to more part time work, he could have suggested onsite daycare and longer paid maternal leave so women don't have to choose to stay home.

Ideology is a Pair of Sunglasses

Jonathan Haidt talks about how viewpoint diversity is important in academia because people's biases will cancel each other out, but I've never heard him describe what that looks like. So I have an idea using my false positive/negative lens and the ideas of Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics.

Social Justice activists, who view the world through the oppressor/oppressed lens, are overtaking higher education. Their claim is that marginalized groups have a unique lived experience and should be leading the discussion into the fight against oppression.

I complain a lot about social justice warriors, but here's the thing: They're right. People who don't view the world through that lens are prone to oppression false negatives, not seeing oppression taking place. Progressives' value is in bringing these instances of oppression to light. Think of it like putting on a pair of oppression sunglasses.

Here is where they are wrong: they conflate their unique view with truth. An insider lens allows you to see false negatives but you need an outside lens to see false positives, perceived oppression that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Otherwise the purple dots will start looking blue. (In theory, if people could take their lens off, they would see truth. But I'm not sure that's possible unless you can completely wipe out your identity, in which case you would be a boring soulless Bran Stark.)

Conservatives (barbarism vs. civilization lens) and libertarians (coercion vs. liberty lens) have less emotional attachment to oppression and can more easily identify false positives. However, they are prone to their own false positives. (Are cops really being killed en mass, or perhaps are you just overreacting?)

We need our outgroups to show us what our sunglasses are filtering out and we need to tell them when they are seeing hallucinations.

But a system like this cannot work without mutual respect. We have to understand that none of us see truth, only what our sunglasses filters through.

We have to feel safe enough to challenge other ideas and vulnerable enough to accept when we are wrong. That is why timeless traits like integrity, charity, respect, and civility are more important than ideology.

The best homilies are online

My wife, who is Catholic, and her mother, who is also Catholic, were having a discussion about preferring one church in town to another because they like the priest who gives good homilies.

It made me think of all the Masses I ever attended, all the homilies I ever listened to, even when I was really into religion. I never once heard a homily that I responded to in a way that they respond to homilies. It never scratched me where I itch.

Later that day, I was reading a Slate Star Codex column (Against Murderism, if you must know), and I remember hoping that no one would come into the room and interrupt me so I could finish the lengthy column.

And I also remember how much I liked the column, how much it scratched me where I itch. And I thought: this must be what it feels like for Catholics to hear a good homily.

If church provides people with meaning and an ethical framework to live by, then I guess I'm just looking for the same thing.

It made me think of the David Foster Wallace line about how "In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism." And if Scott Alexander is my pastor, I guess that makes rationalism my religion.

One thing this "faith" cannot replicate is the built-in social infrastructure that churches have. I don't get the benefit of regular face-to-face interaction with a community of like-minded believers.

Using Nature to Influence Nurture

I've written about this idea before. I suggested that solving the problem of toxic masculinity should take into account that most of the behavior is biologically driven. 

I've suggested Thaler and Susstein's ideas about libertarian paternalism for solving societal issues.

I also think about the reduction in teen sex, drug, tobacco, and alcohol use. Was it PSAs and lectures from adults that finally got teens to stop doing the things they enjoyed doing? Or, as Jean Twenge asserts, was it changes to their environment?

The iPhone was release in 2007. Following a decades long trend of helicopter parents not letting their kids out of site, now teens could communicate with peers from the comfort of their room. It's hard to experience sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll when you don't leave your house.

Recently I've read something similar in Slate Star Codex:

"There were two hospitals, Hospital A and Hospital B. Both, like all hospitals, were fighting a constant battle against medical errors...

"Hospital A took a very right-wing approach to the issue. They got all their doctors together and told them that any doctor who made a minor medical error would get written up and any doctor who made a major medical error would be fired.
"Hospital B took a very progressive approach...

"Then they made sweeping changes to what you might call the “society” of the hospital. They decreased doctor workload so physicians weren’t as harried. They shortened shifts to make sure everyone got at least eight hours of sleep a night. They switched from paper charts (where doctors write orders in notoriously hard-to-read handwriting) to electronic charts (where everything is typed up). They required everyone to draw up and use checklists. They even put propaganda posters over every sink reading “DID YOU WASH YOUR HANDS LONG ENOUGH??!” with a picture of a big eye on them. You can’t get more Orwellian than that.

"And yet, mirabile dictu, this was the hospital that saw their medical error rates plummet.

"The administrators of this second hospital didn’t ignore human nature. Instead, they exploited their knowledge of human nature to the fullest. They know it’s in human nature to do a bad job when you’re working on no sleep. They know it’s human nature to try to cut corners, but that people will run through checklists honestly and effectively. They even know that studies show that pictures of eyes make people behave more prosocially because they feel like they’re being watched." 

It's interesting to me that Alexander calls one a right-wing approach and one a progressive approach. One it comes to campus rape culture, the labels to the approaches are inverted.

It's progressives who think they can prevent harm to women by telling men to stop being so rapey. It's conservatives who still preach things like celibacy until marriage, sex segregated dormitories, and frown upon hookup culture. They are the ones who understand human nature and suggest making changes to the environment.

The only question is: which approach works? I guess it still bothers me that we don't use our large built-in infrastructures like colleges as laboratories for testing theories. If hospitals can do it, why not colleges?

Is the latter too ideologically driven and unwilling to test theories for fear they might prove wrong? Are the stakes not high enough, since hospitals deal with literal life and death situations? It seems to me that the safety of women is pretty significant, so I'm leaning more toward the former.

If what Jonathan Haidt said is true, the increasing telos of colleges is becoming social justice and not truth. If that's the case, you would not have an interest in testing theories in the pursuit of truth.

Edit: I've recently realized that James Damore's Google Memo was basically an attempt to make changes to the tech environment to increase gender diversity. Instead, it was a good object lesson in how tact is important in influencing people in emotionally-charged topics. Good idea for a future column.

We can't have both

We can either have a multicultural, pluralistic society (like the US). Or we can have a homogeneous society with high levels of institutional trust and a top-heavy,  authoritarian government (like those Nordic countries). But we can't have both.

Norway, Sweden, and Finland are tops in levels of trust. They also have low levels of immigration. The US, with lower levels of trust and higher levels of immigration, ranks highest in tax avoidance. It's difficult to fund universal programs when you don't trust your national government. (This isn't a call for white nationalism or smearing social assistance. It's a call for finding where trust lives; it's a call for localism.)

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam writes:

"If we consider state differences in social capital, per capita income, income inequality, racial composition, urbanisn, and education levels, social capital is the only factor that successfully predicts tax compliance." 

Social capital even predicts who fills out their census surveys.

We can either have a highly regulated economy that minimizes risk, or we can have a low cost of living. But we can't have both.

We're either a society that attracts immigrants of various ethnic backgrounds and religions from numerous countries who come here because it is the land of opportunity. Or we're a rigged system where only white men with old money can succeed. But we can't be both.