The Games We Play

I intend to carry on that last post into a discussion on power (shocking, I know) but I wanted to cover something else first.

My family played a lot of cards growing up.  Mostly Euchre and Canasta, though we had our own family version of  two-person solitaire - contradiction though that may be.  I've played card games with various other people throughout my life, and I remember playing with someone whose family basically taught them how to catch cheating.  That is, family members would try to cheat...but part of the point was to see if everyone else could catch them at it.  Which, when you think about it, probably makes each family member far better at spotting card cheats then I would be. 

I brought that up because when everyone in a group shares an understanding of the rules in play, they can generally play happily and well with each other.  Sort of like when a group plays BS, and part of the point of the game is to lie about what cards you have and try to catch others when they lie.  If, however, a group of people sat down to play cards and two of them expected an honest game and two expected cheating to be part of it, then you have a recipe for trouble.

In sports, sometimes people cheat.  Soccer, in particular, is known for it.  Leaving aside the moral judgements (I do think cheating is bad, of course), what's interesting is that it changes the nature of the game.  See, without cheating a game of soccer is about which team is better at putting the ball in the goal, and defending their goal from the other team.  On a more meta level, it's also about who can recruit the most talented players and who can train them the best.  So it's about athletic skill and team coordination.

Once you add cheating in the mix, however, it changes into a competition over who the best cheater is.  (Or stops being a true competition at all, as teams deliberately lose for various reasons.)

People have different comfort levels for the different types of play.  In Dominion, for example, certain cards attack other players in the game.  At the beginning of each game the cards in play are randomly selected, and attack cards may or may not be a part of the game.  If I'm playing with my father and one of my brothers, we generally just choose not to use the attack cards at all.  If one of my other brothers is playing, he may decide to use them.  If a friend of my first brother is playing, you can practically guarantee that any attack cards will be in play.

All of which changes the game considerably.  With my first brother and my father, our games tend to be more relaxed.  (We tend to prefer cooperative games anyway, like Pandemic.  And although euchre and canasta are competitive, it's teams of two competing with each other.) In Dominion, we can focus mostly on building our own strategy however we want.  (We're still competing, we just have an unspoken agreement to limit what sort of actions we take while we play the game).

When the attack cards are in play, we have to think about defense, as well.  About how to win when someone might randomly force you to discard the cards in your deck, or force you to trade with them, or force everyone to swap random cards.  That's part of why some players will deliberately use the attack cards.  They think a winning strategy should take the attack cards into account, and that limiting player options by convention doesn't truly lead to winning strategies. (i.e. how can it be considered a winning strategy if you didn't have to plan for setbacks and opposition action?)

Tbh, they have a point.  (Which is why I play regardless of whether the attack cards will be in use or not, though I do enjoy the less competitive gameplay when it's just family.)  And again, if people are expecting to play one way and encounter someone playing another it can lead to trouble.

In some ways, the rules we choose to play under shape the game in business as well as card games.  That is, businesses are 'supposed' to be about who comes up with the best widget at the lowest price.  People focus a lot on who comes up with the best widget, but the lowest price has a huge impact and expands the scope of the competition in all sorts of ways.

There's a lot of debate over whether the best widget wins out, in the first place.  For example, when I was younger, there was this thing called the videotape format war.  Home videos were a new thing, and two competing companies were offering different products - VHS and Beta.  When I first heard about this, it was in the context of someone discussing a market failure.  A shoddier widget coming to dominate the market.  The argument was that Beta was the better technology, and that it lost out to VHS because VHS was essentially better at dominating the market.

More recently, I learned that Beta might have had superior resolution, sound, and image but that these advantages were offset by a shorter recording time.  So maybe it wasn't a market failure, maybe VHS really was the better widget in the first place.  Either way, it raises some interesting questions about whether businesses are truly competing along the lines of "making the best widget", the way a soccer team competes on "scoring the most goals"...or whether the competition is along slightly different dimensions.  Like who can make their sales the fastest, who can come to dominate the market the fastest, and who can grow largest and take advantage of their large size the fastest.

Okay, one more.  John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil back in the 1870s.  This is a very rich topic that people still debate today, so take what I say as a very brief overview that may not contain all the facts.  In other words, if it interests you read up on it further.

You could say that the oil industry competes to provide the right kind of fuel to it's customers in a reliable fashion.  Oil at the cheapest production and transportation costs.  That is, since the industry involves exploration (to find the oil), transportation, refining and marketing it's pretty much the entire supply chain.  To us it doesn't make a big deal which gas station we fuel up at (though I still refuse to fuel up at BP because they don't seem to care enough about preventing oil spills).

When Rockefeller created Standard Oil, the price of oil was fluctuating dramatically, which had serious consequences for anyone trying to start a business.  Much like with shale oil today, a business might seem profitable while oil prices were high...only to be in danger of bankruptcy when oil prices dropped and the business could no longer produce oil at a low enough cost to compete.  It's one of the ironies of economics, I think, that we humans are incapable of dealing with the instability a 'true' market economy would operate under.

So anyways.  Rockefeller took steps that ultimately reduced some of that uncertainty.  His domination of the industry made costs, in some ways, predictable.  And businesses love predictability, it makes it much easier to plan. 

At the same time, his efforts to dominate the industry may have involved lowering his prices until his competitors went bankrupt or sold out (who were generally too small to last long if they tried to lower their prices in order to compete).   

He did definitely get deals that smaller companies couldn't hope for (like transportation costs for railroad shipping, which he could get a better deal on given the volume of business he provided.)  So his size conveyed an advantage, since he could afford to sell gas at less than production cost for long enough to drive his competitor out of business.

Should a larger size lead to a competitive advantage?  Does the business that makes the best widget at the lowest cost truly win, when some businesses are able to take advantage of their size and resources to compete in ways that have nothing to do with producing a widget in the first place?  That is - if one of Rockefeller's competitors had the same supply costs as he had, had the same railroad transportation deals, then would one of his competitors have actually been better?  Or are we supposed to judge companies by the whole picture - product + supply chain?  (which we do, since all we really know when we buy is the asking price and perceived quality of the product.)

In this day and age, producing a widget at the lowest cost also takes into account corporate financial practices.  That is, hedge funds, cash flow, foreign exchange rates...all of these can reduce how much a corporation ultimately is spending and play a factor in which company has the lowest costs...

and none of them directly tie into which widget is the best quality, nor are they strictly related to production costs.

I brought all that up to point out that businesses compete over a much broader scale than just "produce the best widget".  The rules we expect our economic players (i.e. businesses) to abide by shape the sort of business world we have.  In addition, some businesses will tolerate different types of actions as they compete.

So what sort of game do we want to play?

Hard-heartedness

I wanted to discuss a couple things that seemed only distantly related at first.  Upon further reflection, however, I think both have to do with the human tendency to harden our hearts.  And so I kind of want to begin with a Bible quote instead (for those of you who aren't very religious, please take this as coming from someone who had a religious upbringing and finds it easier to talk about this by drawing on those experiences.  It's not meant to proselytize or convert anyone.)

"Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning." Matthew 19:8-9

Most people discuss this one, rather obviously, when they want to talk about divorce.  Yet I want to discuss the concept of a hard heart more.  So much of the politics of today seem to require hardening your heart in one way or another.  Mostly in self-defense, I think.  After all we've all seen people begging on the streets, and most of us find some reason to ignore them.  (For me, personally, I would rather support a homeless shelter or food pantry that will hopefully be more involved in their lives and make sure my donation is used well.  In other words, I don't really trust the people asking for money on street corners.  Everything I know about the world says that's probably a good thing, yet there's an inner voice that says being able to ignore suffering when it's right in your face is not really what God asked us to do.)

I wanted to tie this in with two different topics.  The first touches on a strain of thinking I've noticed on the right.  I dated someone over a decade ago who once said he thought we should nuke the entire mid-east and turn it into glass.  At the time I ignored it, because I didn't think he truly meant what he was saying and I also knew he was not in any position to actually make it happen.  In other words, idle words by someone expressing an emotion rather than a real policy.  He was condensing an entire region down to a shallow and superficial caricature that he considered a threat, and indulging in wishful thinking.  In reality, any such plan would be horrible.  

Every region of the world has families.  Children.  Women.  Men.  Some people who may be cruel or a threat, and others who are just trying to raise their families in some semblance of peace.  There's an entire field of thought focused on what would make a 'just war', what's considered a reasonable and proportional response, and what he was suggesting was so clearly out of proportion that it wasn't even worth taking seriously.

And yet I hear comments like that, still.  Even worse, we have a presidential candidate who seems to believe the same thing.  What was almost laughable in someone with absolutely no power to make it happen becomes pretty scary when it's said by someone who could.

I understand, to a certain extent, why we harden our hearts like that.  You can't serve in the military, can't make peace with what you are being asked to do (to other human beings, albeit from an opposing force), without finding some way of closing off your empathy.  Hell, I hate terrorists so much sometimes that it kind of scares me.  The things they do are horrible.  I understand why people choose to do so, and yet I think it's in some ways a mistake.  I suppose in some ways I'm influenced by a book I read some time ago, in which the author talked about how prisoners of war were not affected by PTSD the way soldiers were, despite both dealing with awful and traumatic events (with the exception of Holocaust victims).  That part of the reason soldiers were affected was because of the things they did during the fight.  In other words, we harden our hearts to fight a war...but it has consequences.  A part of us knows that what we are doing is done to people who in other circumstances are just like us.  

I, personally, don't like to forget that.  Not because I think we should stop fighting, because if I believe it's worth fighting even knowing that, then it's truly important.  I sometimes wonder if that explains some gender differences I've heard of off and on.  No scientific studies of it, of course, and I hate to say there's a gender difference for sure.  Yet even though men do the bulk of fighting and spying I've heard that the women who get involved are often even harder and more dedicated than the men.  Spying, for example, involves lying and betraying people you are spending a lot of time with.  Time that generally leads to some sort of sense of fellowship.  That's actually really hard to do.  But if you've convinced yourself it's worth doing, worth fighting for, then it's a little easier. 

And so I can say that jihadists are human.  They have feelings, and are trying to do what they think is right.  If they gave up fighting and chose to live a quiet life in peace and security somewhere, I would be okay with that.  Maybe even pity them.  But as a movement, as a belief system that justifies murder, torture, rape and slavery...they are worth fighting against. (And we'd better make sure our own belief system doesn't justify the same sorts of things.)  And that is also why I oppose overly simplistic beliefs that justify hardening our hearts and lead us to say inhumane, stupid, and poorly thought out things like "let's nuke the middle east".

The second, related, topic goes back to my question on modern slavery.  "How can anyone justify doing that to another human being?".  Clearly, the managers and business owners that are dependent on debt bondage and control have hardened their hearts to the people working for them.  Sometimes it's necessary.  Hell, I manage people, I know exactly why and how it's necessary.  You get someone who isn't performing well, and who isn't a good fit, and who isn't really improving despite your attempts to train and develop them, and you have to let them go.  It sucks to know what sort of trauma doing so causes.  The job loss, the uncertainty, the pain of not having any money.  And if they have a family, you know it will cause all sorts of difficulty for them as well.  For children, even.  All you can do is hope that they find a better fit somewhere else, some other place where they can excel and succeed...because they clearly are not doing so where they were. 

We have this image of the good businessman as someone who makes the tough decisions - and yet to make those tough decisions, they have to harden their hearts and ignore the very human costs to the people under their responsibility.  And yet I think there's another way.  I tried finding an article I read years ago, unfortunately all my search terms come up with other studies.  It was a company that ran into trouble and had to downsize.  As my search terms indicated, there are a whole bunch of problems that come when a company lets people go.  The ones who stay are more afraid of losing their jobs, morale suffers, the company as a whole suffers.  So much so that some people debate whether downsizing really pays off.  The article I read said that this company managed to avoid most of the backlash, and they did so by opening up the decision on who to let go to their employees.  The employees met in groups, and their recommendations didn't always have to do with who was the best worker.  Sometimes it was "so-and-so has a family of four that would suffer more if they lost their job".  Yet allowing the employees that level of engagement and control meant the ones that the company as a whole did not suffer as much when they did downsize. 

And so a parallel seems apparent.  Just as a soldier hardens their heart to the enemy, and yet can probably be an effective fighter if they don't (I would even argue a 'more effective fighter', except that the type of fighter I envision won't fight for unjustified reasons...which can cause problems with discipline if you've got leadership that doesn't appreciate that), so a business man or woman hardens their heart to their employees, and yet might possibly be an effective business leader if they don't.  Perhaps even a more effective business leader. 

It goes against the grain, goes against a lot of cultural beliefs.  Just consider the pressure Costco gets for paying higher wages.  Or the backlash against that company that decided to pay it's employees $70,000 a year.

Yet what if the hard-hearted business leader is actually a bad thing?