"Not My Job"

"In the spring of 1988, I visited the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command based in Omaha, Nebraska... Our military guide led us into the underground headquarters and showed us how one could communicate with every missile silo and bomber base in America. At the end of our visit, he took us on board the giant aircraft that the U.S. president would use during a nuclear attack... The plane was jam-packed with communications gear and trailed a huge antenna so that the president could communicate even with a submarine commander submerged in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Everything was planned down to the last detail -- and a trained crew of eighty stood ready to take to the skies at any time of the day or night."

"When our guide paused for questions, I raised my hand. 'Not to be presumptuous,' I asked, 'but if I were in the president's shoes in the middle of a nuclear crisis, the first person I'd want to talk to would be the Soviet premier so that we could figure out how to stop the war. Do you have a communications link on this plane to the Hot Line and a Russian translator on board?' The Department of Defense official looked me straight in the eye and answered, 'Communicating with the Russians is not our job. It's the job of the State Department.'"

This somewhat long quote is from the book, "The Third Side"by William Ury, which I'm almost finished with. There are a lot of interesting stories in this book that I'll relate over time, but this particular episode is early in the book and is related to stuff I was thinking recently about.

When Ury tells this story, he's trying to motivate the reader to act and assume an active role when they encounter conflict, particularly when they are not one of the directly involved parties. This message rings particularly true for me because I've always been distressed/annoyed/frustrated when I encounter the "not my job" attitude where necessary actions are identified but left deliberately undone, supposedly excused by some unclear chain of responsibility. Or, even worse, realizing that identification may create responsibility, some choose to remain deliberately blind in order to avoid unearthing a need whose fulfillment might fall into their lap. This kind of behavior is so frustrating to me, that it's easy to categorize the people who do such things as degenerate, and dismiss both them and their actions. But upon closer inspection, this behavior is much more complex and not necessarily irrational. Let's go back to Ury's story from the top.

In a situation like the one posed, when the stakes are so high, Ury wants it to seem self-evident that any party with knowledge of a problem, regardless of their pre-existing level of involvement, should take action. But there are often compelling reasons why this happens. Take the relationship between the Defense and State departments in this story. Should the military "take the initiative" and start handling the issue of communication with the Soviets, the State department would probably be far from pleased that a "rival" has intruded on their prescribed responsibilitys, and an inter-departmental turf war would result. In the end, the President might need to break up the fight and remind each side of their boundaries. Nothing will have changed and taking initiative would become even more difficult in the future. A few rounds of this sort of thing would dissuade any rational person from straying far from their paper boundaries.

But the madness doesn't end here. Identifying a problem can create problems of its own when one is paralyzed from acting. Recall all the 9/11 intelligence "scandals" about analysts who identified the terrorists and the precise risks they posed yet whose reports went nowhere. It's easily plausible that upon seeing the level of interdepartmental collaboration necessary to utilize their intelligence, those in more executive positions weighed the risk as not great enough to pay the political cost of taking the bold initiative necessary. Only in the aftermath of a problem turned into a crisis do these things come to light and blame placed. Now, the identification itself has become a liability. Better to just be blind.

Well, okay, that's a pretty cynical view of things, but not entirely unrealistic. Sure, government is a often cited as a protyptical example of bureaucratic dysfunction, but it seems like this kind of thing could strike almost anywhere as a function of basic human nature and organizational behavior. It seems like smaller organizations with flatter hierarchies and more flexible areas of responsibility would be less likely to fall into this "not my job" syndrome. But still, I've seen it happen in structures so small and so flat that there must be other forces at work here as well.

Part of it may be the qualities of individuals, especially in smaller places. Would those who have been personally burned after taking the initiative or those who have never tasted a personal victory as a result their own actions be more likely to try to absolve themselves of responsibility rather than take charge of results? How contagious is personal initiative or "not my job"? Can organizational structures be built that filters for certain characteristics while supressing others? Can organizational structures emerge that inadvertently select for less-desirable characteristics?

Econ is cool but...

Read this article today in the New York Times titled "The Opportunity Cost of Economics Education" (If you know me and the link has expired, it's NYT-EconEducation.pdf in my private stash.) This gist of the article is about how most students learn little from introductory courses in economics because there is just too much material packed into a short space of time and because such courses are too geared towards the small population who will become professional economists compared to the larger population of people who will not, but will benefit greatly from increased economic understanding. The problem may even be worse than students just not learning much, they may learn the wrong thing as illustrated by this quote about a simple question about opportunity cost:

"When they posed their original question to a large group of college students, the researchers found that exposure to introductory economics instruction was strikingly counterproductive. Among those who had taken a course in economics, only 7.4 percent answered correctly, compared with 17.2 percent of those who had never taken one."

That's kind of bleak. I hope that didn't happen to me when I was taking all that econ in B-school. Well, fortunately I had actually heard of this study and this point of view before, because two of the microeconomics courses I took were taught by Robert Frank, the author of this article, who mentioned the topic several times. He clearly articulated the overarching goal of his courses: To have us exit the course with the economic intution of the average economics PhD. The goal was succinct, and, unlike so many other goals set in classroom and organizational environments, Prof. Frank stayed focussed on this goal throughout the course. He periodically restated the goal to make sure we remembered where we were going, and all of his lectures, assignments, and tests were aimed at this goal. We zeroed in on a number of key concepts (without another course, I can't say if it's small or large), analyzed them in enough detail for them to make intuitive sense, and then were tested on the topic. We made use of "prototype" examples, stories and illustrations of concepts that would boost retention. Even if I didn't remember the precise answer or equation, I could walk through the story and rebuild the concept from first principles. Despite one embarassing circumstance in his intermediate course, where I was unable to articulate the efficient markets theorem when he called on me in class (having recognized me as a student in his previous class), I feel I retained a surprising amount of knowledge from that class, especially in comparison to undergrad courses.

In many ways, I feel that Prof. Frank's observations hold true not only for introductory courses in economics, but across most introductory courses, especially ones in engineering (although my "Intro. to China" course was also packed to the gills with historical details of which I have no recollection). I remember TAing for CS100 (introductory computer science, really programming for people who have never programmed before) and watching the assignment difficulty grow from println() to having to invent recursive depth-first-search and memoization in a matter of weeks. (Students were given an assignment to write a maze solver, not having acutally learned data structures and DFS formally yet. Similarly, there was a follow-up assignment where they were given this slow recursive fibonacci generator and had to "make it run faster," forcing them to discover memoization on their own.) Yeah, this kind of thing really separated the boys from the men, I suppose. The ones who were of the "super hacker" variety thrived while everyone else struggled. But is gearing an "intro" course like this, which is sold as being widely accessible to all backgrounds, to only the top 5% of the class (many of whom probably should've placed out of the class anyway since they've obviously seen the material before) really a good idea?

In matters CS, I've always been somewhat endeared to this kind of "sink or swim" methodology since I've often thrived in courses like this. Well, mostly the ones that involved programming... but... I've been programming since I was 10 years old. Surely my background is atypical of the average introductory CS student, and, while it's nice to have a course specifically targeted at me, is that really the best course of action in general? No, the norm is the experience of being buried by facts in Asian 212, cobbling together these crappy papers, which were supposed to allow me to integrate all the historical context learned in class, but really were an exercise in avoiding the vast quantities of material that I had not absorbed.

Gah... This has drifted way off the topic of economics. Anyway, Prof. Frank's courses were awesome, and I also really liked the textbooks we used. They weren't the kind of dense anthologies that these things often are, but were very entertaining to read on their own, actually.

• "Principles of Microeconomics" by Robert Frank and Ben Bernanke. A very easy and worthwhile read that focuses on intuition rather than math (this is still a textbook). Bernanke is one of the governors of the Federal Reserve and is currently one of the contenders to replace Alan Greenspan.
• "Microeconomics and Behavior" by Robert Frank. A somewhat more comprehensive and more advanced textbook, with a fair amount of overlap with the previous one. It's a denser read though.
• "The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us" by Robert Frank and Philip Cook. This is not a textbook, just a normal format nonfiction book. I haven't read this yet, but from the amazon.com excerpt, definitely want to. I highly recommend reading the excerpt.