Do Incentives Motivate?

Dan Pink offers some insights into what science tells us about when incentives work, and when they don’t. Interesting that this talk was given in 2009, but I don’t think I’ve seen marked improvement in the use of incentives since then. Possibly because to admit that incentives don’t work the way we usually think would require business leaders to not only stop giving them, but to stop receiving them! This also has implications for those of us who teach. How we motivate our students should reflect this reality, as well as the way we schedule our time and motivate good teaching.

(HT: Corey Andreasen)

What a View!

Loved this from Onion Sports (HT: Heather Martin):

ST. LOUIS—With the ball on their opponent’s 45-yard line last Sunday, the Rams allowed the game clock to expire during first down so they could take in the unusual sight of their rich, beautiful field position. “Wow, it’s gorgeous around here,” running back Steven Jackson said while running his hands through the artificial turf and inhaling deeply. “It’s a shame we hardly ever get this far. Just look at the view—you can almost see the other end zone from here! I really wish we got to do this more often.” According to sources, the team was so excited they took second and third down off as well, evidently just choosing to lie down and relax.

"What a view!"

A Tough Quiz

Today’s quiz of the day: can you tell the difference between a college professor and a hobo? If you think you are up to the task, go here and try your hand (the quiz is created by a someone at the University of Toronto). Here is an example of one of the men on the quiz:

Is this a Hobo, or a College Professor?

I Think they Need to Work on their Marketing Budget

Maybe a Messiah College marketing grad could come up with some way to improve this video. Surely it wouldn’t take a huge budget to improve the current advertising!

A Response from Dr. LaGrand

Dr. James LaGrand

In amongst the relative uproar about Frances Fox Piven’s October talk here at Messiah College, some rather slanderous things were lobbed at Dr. Jim LaGrand and the choice of the College Republicans to rescind an invitation to a scheduled speaker. (See the comments section on this post.) Dr. LaGrand is co-advisor for the Messiah College Republicans, and certainly has the conservative credentials to warrant that position. With his gracious permission, I am sharing a stock letter that he has sent to the numerous inquiries (to put it gently) about the decision. It is lengthy, but I think he deserves to be quoted in full, and not have his words twisted. (I commented on another angle of this situation earlier today.)

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Dear [Sir/Madam],

I appreciate your concern for this issue.  Unfortunately, Mr. Mattera’s article has misstated the facts, and so misled people about what happened at Messiah College.

Mr. Mattera misstates the facts when he says there was “pressure” to cancel the speech he was originally scheduled to give.  Rather, it was a decision made unanimously by the 4 student leaders and 2 faculty advisors (including myself) of the College Republicans on our campus.  We reached our decision after studying and discussing every bit of available information about his two most recent speaking engagements—at Kalamazoo College and at the Values Voter Forum.  I very clearly told Mr. Mattera when he contacted me by phone that I watched “every available video recording” of him speaking, including a small portion of the Q&A session at Kalamazoo College.  I also communicated with first-hand witnesses to his recent performance the Values Voter Summit.  From the evidence we compiled (all the evidence available to us), we all became convinced that Mr. Mattera would not effectively communicate conservative ideas for our audience.  The administration had nothing to do with this decision.  It was made by the College Republicans, acting in the best interest in the College Republicans.  I’m sure this was hard for Mr. Mattera to hear.  And I regret that it happened so late after new information came to light.  But none of this justifies him lying about the facts of the matter.

He also misleads regarding the players involved.  Neither I nor the College Republicans (obviously) had anything to do with Frances Fox Piven’s recent visit to our college.  That was a college-wide event.  And likewise, the once-planned Mattera presentation was not overseen by the college—only the College Republicans.

One matter I find particularly astounding is Mr. Mattera’s willingness to characterize me as a “liberal” after charging that I’d insufficiently studied his work.  Anyone who knows me would laugh at his charge.  I’ve written for two publications published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a well-known conservative think tank.  I’m a well-known conservative on my campus—well-known enough to be asked by students to serve as one of the faculty advisors and well-known enough to be asked to serve as a panelist after the Piven event where I systematically critiqued her presentation, including her long-time links to violence.  This fact I relayed to Mr. Mattera when he spoke to me by phone yesterday, but he conveniently left it out of his story.

I teach U.S. history at Messiah College, where my conservative views are often in evidence.  In my U.S. History survey course, I just oversaw a student debate on the merits of the New Deal.  Some of the readings I provided introduced them to the argument about parallels between FDR’s National Recovery Administration to fascist governments’ use of state cartels.  Would a radical or liberal or even middle-of-the-road professor plan such an activity?  I have my students read Margaret Sanger to help uncover the awful links between eugenics and the early-20th-century progressive movement.  And I could go and on….  I’d simply ask you to believe me – I’m no liberal or radical.

Mr. Mattera has for his own selfish purposes twisted this story—even to the point of lying.  It’s not a question of conservatism vs. liberalism/radicalism or free speech vs. repression.  It’s a question of wisdom, of effectiveness, of growing the conservative movement where each of us is placed.  And it became apparent in the past week to all those involved with our chapter of College Republicans that Jason Mattera would not help us reach grow the conservative movement.  Judging from every bit of evidence from his two most recent speaking engagements, we had every expectation that he would turn off more people than he attracted through his deliberately inflammatory, juvenile, and outrageous language.  And then it would be left for us to clean up the mess and the try to rebuild what was broken.

As we conservatives are fond of saying—It’s a free country.  We’re not stopping or discouraging any other organization from hosting Mr. Mattera.  But for our audience at Messiah College, which we’re familiar with, this would have been harmful, and so we canceled the event.  We are in the process of making plans to bring a speaker on campus who would successfully broadcast conservative ideas in our community.

But I would end with a request to you—speaking as a conservative to a conservative.  Let’s not believe everything we read, especially that which would have us devour one another in an emotional frenzy.  And let’s not miss or squander opportunities to effectively and persuasively spread the message of conservatism.

Yours,

Jim LaGrand

Messiah College Students Can Think, Really!

Frances Fox Piven Speaks at Messiah College

A few weeks ago Messiah College hosted Frances Fox Piven on our campus. While I had nothing to do with her appearance, and can’t even tell you definitely who invited her, I’ve certainly heard a lot of reaction to her appearance, including in the comments section of my piece about Dr. Peter Kerry Powers defense of her appearance in the Harrisburg Patriot-News. In light of the uproar, I wanted to post two additional responses from the Messiah community that counter misconceptions I have heard. Later today I’ll post a response to accusations that the liberal establishment at Messiah (which begs the question of whether there is such a thing here) forced the cancellation of a conservative speaker. This post is to highlight a letter to the editor posted on Lancaster Online (affiliated with several Lancaster, PA newpapers, so I am not sure which print editions it may have appeared in). Here is the letter from Messiah College trustee Kim Smith (find the original here):

TO THE EDITORS:

As a trustee of Messiah College, I wanted to publicly affirm the respectful manner in which Messiah students, educators and community guests demonstrated a core principle of a free society — the civil and active exchange of ideas — during the college’s American Democracy Lecture with Frances Fox Piven on Oct. 11.

Despite the intense controversy surrounding Piven, the audience engaged in spirited, thoughtful conversation with both Piven and each other — even in the midst of clear and passionate disagreement. Refuting the premise that college students are empty, easily influenced vessels, the Messiah students who attended asked well-informed, critical questions of Piven regarding her views.

This modeling of effective public engagement and civil discourse is central to preparing students to fulfill Messiah’s mission “to educate men and women toward maturity of intellect, character and Christian faith in preparation for lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in church and society.”

Students and parents who do their homework on Messiah College will find that it is an authentically Christian campus community that is effectively educating and equipping future leaders who will bring respect and discernment to all corners of our increasingly polarized society.

Kim Smith

Manheim Township

Personally, I think this characterizes well what I would hope for. Students can think and engage ideas without being indoctrinated. They can ask speakers hard questions and disagree strongly with someone without becoming hateful. The irony here is that the outcry about Fox Piven speaking at Messiah has given her way more press than the talk itself would normally have received. Thanks to the many voices speaking vehemently against her appearance, she gained more press and notoriety than someone who has been out of the spotlight for so long should probably have received. Had there been no uproar, students would have engaged her, challenged her views, and walked away with a potentially valuable educational experience. As it is, students likely still got that part, but much time and energy has been wasted defending the very idea of listening to someone who has said some rather radical things.

Thanks to Ms. Smith for standing up for the ability of our students to think. I really think that Messiah does something much, much better here by offering these chances to engage the other than we would should we choose to shelter our students away from the reality that such views exist. Maybe some students will be persuaded by her views, or those of others like her. If they are so easily persuaded, I would say that these students were never doing anything other than pretending to be conservative in the first place, so she has not won converts, she would simply have revealed the true views of our students. In that case, wouldn’t having her here have done the students, and all of us, the service of having the truth come out?

Long story short, if anyone (including parents) really think our students are that naive and gullible, I feel insulted. I give our students much more credit than that, and certainly hope that my kids are able to think well enough for themselves that I don’t feel threatened by them engaging new ideas with a critical mind.

Herman Cain vs. John Wesley

Presidential Candidate Herman Cain

An interesting article on Tony Campolo’s Red Letter Christians blog. This piece was written by Morgan Guyton (who I’m not familiar with), but it is an interesting look at the tempting American perspective of personal responsibility. His piece is so good I’ll copy it here in its entirety. You can respond in the comments below or on the original post here.

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“If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Thus says Herman Cain to the unemployed Wall Street protestors. I understand why he said it. He wants to live in a world where the American Dream works, where being optimistic and entrepreneurial and hard-working guarantees success. Cain wants for blame to be something that is distributed neatly and perfectly between individual people. This could be described as an ethic ofindividual responsibility.

In a different context, Cain credits God’s grace for his fortune: “As you get older, your faith gets stronger because of your own personal experiences where you know the only way you could have made it through some of those personal experiences was by the grace of God.” This way of understanding our dependence on God’s grace is often termed the doctrine ofdivine providence.

The question is whether these two belief systems are compatible. Can you say at the same time that people are individually responsible for their success or failure but then credit their success to the grace of God? I would argue that the humility of knowing your dependence on God’s grace ought to keep you from saying something like “If you’re not rich, blame yourself.” If you really believe that you stand on God’s grace, that means your work ethic, intelligence, and creativity are to God’s credit, not yours, which disqualifies using these qualities as a soapbox from which to judge other people. A lot of Christians want to get credit for the humility of believing in divine providence while retaining the right to judge others based on an ethic of individual responsibility.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, lived in a very different time than ours. He framed his entire theology around the concept of divine providence. His understanding of our dependence on God led him to believe that the rich were supposed to take care of the poor. Instead of saying, “If you’re not rich, blame yourself,” Wesley said, “If I die rich, blame me.” Here’s exactly how he put it in 18th century language: “If I leave behind me ten pounds [when I die]… you and all mankind bear witness against me, that I have lived and died a thief and a robber.” Wesley believed that there was nothing wrong with making money as long as you spent all of it helping the poor after “supplying thy own reasonable wants, together with those of thy family.”

In his sermon “The More Excellent Way,” Wesley explains that all wealth belongs to God and is given to those who have it for the purpose of taking care of others:

You may consider yourself as one in whose hands the Proprietor of heaven and earth and all things therein has lodged a part of his goods, to be disposed of according to his direction. And his direction is, that you should look upon yourself as one of a certain number of indigent persons who are to be provided for out of that portion of His goods wherewith you are entrusted.

Wesley assumed that being truly dependent on God’s grace meant seeing ourselves as “indigent persons” (poor). People who have money have the God-given responsibility to help those who don’t. If Christians lived according to Wesley’s vision, none of us would have financial security but it wouldn’t matter because everyone would trust God and lean on each other. When Wesley saw that members of his Methodist movement were adding small luxuries to their life as they increased their wealth, he ripped into them in his “Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity”:

But you say, you can ‘afford’ it! O be ashamed to take such miserable nonsense into your mouths…. Can any steward ‘afford’ to be an errant knave? To waste his Lord’s goods? Can any servant ‘afford’ to lay out his master’s money any other wise than his master appoints him?

Wesley was utterly scandalized that anyone could spend more money than necessary on themselves. He contradicts the views of people like Herman Cain most squarely when heblames the rich among his followers for the plight of their poor brethren:

Many of your brethren, beloved of God, have not food to eat; they have not raiment to put on; they have not a place where to lay their head. And why are they thus distressed? Because you impiously, unjustly, and cruelly detain from them what your Master lodges in your hands on purpose to supply their wants!

Whereas today wealth is supposedly the measure of hard work and diligence, in Wesley’s sermon “The Mystery of Iniquity,” he writes that poverty is the greatest virtue:

As long as the Christians in any place were poor they were devoted to God. While they had little of the world they did not love the world; but the more had of it the more they loved it. This constrained the Lover of their souls at various times to unchain their persecutors, who by reducing them to their former poverty reduced them to their former purity. But still remember: riches have in all ages been the bane of genuine Christianity.

I’m sure that somebody will say Wesley was just an oddball and he certainly was, but his views on wealth and poverty are far closer to the  norm of historical Christianity than our age’s view that wealth shows our virtue. For most of Christian history, poverty was idealized because it meant putting your full trust in God. Part of the difference between Wesley’s vantage point and ours is that he was writing in a time when the values of capitalism were only starting to replace the values of feudalism that had preceded them.

The glue that held the feudal order together was the doctrine of divine providence, the idea that everything in creation belonged to God and everyone had a place within this order. The king’s privilege and power were accompanied by an awesome responsibility for his subjects, each of whom had a certain acreage of land to tend for God and their king. If kings were not so easily corrupted by their power, then this order grounded in divine providence might have worked. Because divine providence was associated with the corruption of feudal Christendom, the presumptions that frame our secular society and free-market economy push in the entirely opposite direction.

The ethic of individual responsibility that people like Herman Cain are trying to make “Christian” is actually the core of the secular humanist response to feudal Christendom’s understanding of divine providence. It is secular to think of our wealth as something we’ve earned and can use how we please instead of seeing it as a gift from God to use for His purpose. It doesn’t mean anything to piously credit your fortune to “the grace of God” unless you really see it as an unmerited gift. So many Christians today want to talk one way when the topic is economics and another way when the topic is religion.

John Wesley really believed that God has given us everything we have to share with others. And while I don’t think we should return to feudalism, I do think that divine providence lays the foundation for a better world than the world of individual responsibility we have now. It’s also more honest. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 4:7, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” Everything that we have ever accomplished is the result of skills and habits that were cultivated in us through the guidance of parents, teachers, and mentors over the course of our life. To falsely individualize our accomplishments is to mock all the people who have made us who we are and the God who has worked through all who helped us because He loves us. We are the product of a community investment in our success ordered by the “invisible hand” of divine providence.

In one sense, Herman Cain is right. As Christians, we shouldn’t blame anyone else if we’re not rich; we should instead thank God for sparing us the treacherous temptations of wealth. The richer we are, the more we should blame ourselves if people around us are suffering because we haven’t shared what God gave us to share with them. In truth though, “blame” shouldn’t be part of Christian vocabulary. Jesus took the blame on the cross so that we could simply be grateful as the foundation for everything we do with whatever God has given us to share.

Princess Bride Fans: Check this Out!

Wonder where some of the less famous cast members are? Check out this pic (click the pic for full size image for easier viewing) of some of the stars now, and see if you can identify who is who! Then, check out the accompanying article and interview video on Entertainment Weekly here.

How to Save Some Energy

If only this blog was about napping, or some other personal energy saving technique. Alas, it is not. This is about a way to save some energy on your computer. A Virginia Tech computer scientist is now marketing a power management software called Granola that is free for personal use, and available for a fee for businesses and servers. I’ve installed it, and haven’t noticed any appreciable difference while it (claims) to be saving me about 20% of my energy usage. The website for the product claims that it can extend battery life on a laptop by up to 10% and desktops can cut energy use by 15-35%.

You can check out the software here, read more about it in a Business Week article here, and watch a video about it below.

Prayer for Scott

Nice video put together by a friend of mine for a close friend of hers who is going through something unimaginable. I’ve met Scott, and he is a young man who was walking with God and learning more about faith. Now he is battling for his life, and walking with God through the process. He faces a long fight. View the video for more information, and join me in praying for Scott’s spirit to be encouraged, for his body to be healed, and for encouragement for his friends and family as they walk with him through the chemo and radiation that lies ahead.