The Importance of Doing (versus Being) Earnestly

From Being Is Not a Substitute for Doing by Jonah Goldberg.  

Let’s say you are a left-handed, asexual, acromegalic immigrant from Burkina Faso with a profound fondness for Japanese body pillows. Let’s also say you run for mayor of Chicago. A big part of your messaging—not always explicit, but nearly always implicit—is that you would be the first giant southpaw Burkinabe-American Dakimakura-enthusiast mayor of a major American city. And you win! Take that glass ceiling!

Not long after getting elected, however, it might occur to you that for all the good you’ve done in being a role model, none of these attributes actually equip you for the tasks normally associated with the job of being mayor.

Sure, at the margins there are some advantages. Body pillow paramours rarely make a lot of claims on your time the way corporeal families do. Having extremely large hands would let you wield those giant scissors at ribbon-cutting ceremonies one-handed! But in general, none of those incidental attributes give you special advantages when it comes to negotiating with labor unions or solving massive debt issues. Sure, being 7 feet tall might make it easier for you to personally intervene in some petty crimes (“That’s right! You better run!”). But at the policy and managerial level, your personal distinctiveness is not going to come in handy for fighting crime.

Now, I don’t bring this up to denigrate the importance of role models. All things being equal, it’s great that Lori Lightfoot was the first African American lesbian to be elected mayor of Chicago. But as Noah Rothman—now at National Review—notes, these identity politics bonus points weren’t enough to outweigh the failures of her tenure. Crime went up; arrests went down. The flight of major business accelerated. Academic performance in schools cratered.

But Noah observes that for a lot of folks in the press, the major news was, in the words of the Associated Press, that “Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who made history as 1st Black woman and 1st gay person to lead city, loses reelection bid.”

That was also the takeaway Lightfoot wanted. “I’m a black woman in America,” she responded when asked by a reporter if she had been treated unfairly. “Of course.”  

Let’s pause here for just a moment. Yes, she’s a black woman in America. But the relevant jurisdiction isn’t America, it’s Chicago, a city where Joe Biden got nearly 9 out of 10 votes and whites make up just 31 percent of the population. The Chicago City Council has 50 seats, 46 of them held by Democrats. The other four are held by independents. William Hale Thompson, the last Republican to serve as mayor, left office in 1931, 11 years before Joe Biden was born. Lightfoot had fights with the Chicago Teachers Union, which is run by an African American woman, Stacy Davis Gates. The chief of police is an African American male. Lightfoot lost in a primary against two Democrats, because that’s how primaries work. One of them is a white guy, Paul Vallas, who ran to her right. The other is an African American, Brandon Johnson, who ran to her left.

So who, exactly, was treating her unfairly? And how did that amorphous unfairness lead to her failures and her ouster? Would a heterosexual white male have had an easier time fighting crime and dysfunction? How so?

I ask because these are good questions. But I also ask because I think one of the problems afflicting politics these days is the assumption that “being” something is more important than, or a substitute for, doing something—specifically doing your job.

The whole piece is worth a read.  

In process improvement, it is not an uncommon problem for corporations and teams to accidentally become confused and focus on improving inputs instead of focusing on the actual outputs.  This is most frequently manifested by discussions centering on Lack of.  We don't have enough talent, we don't have enough money, we don't have enough widgets, we don't have enough control, etc.  That is why output quality and attributes are inadequate.

If it were as easy as increasing inputs, it would have been done already.  The reason it hasn't been done is that there are other calls on that time, those resources, etc.  The whole point of process improvement is to reengineer the process to take into account the constraint on inputs.  

In reality, you have to focus on all three things - the quality and attributes of inputs, the quality and attributes of outputs and of course the quality and attributes of the process which transforms inputs into outputs.  

If you are unwilling to look at the problem as a whole, you are inherently a coward or ignorant.  And profoundly unserious.  You are not actually trying to solve the problem.  You are going through the motions of appearing to solve the problem.  Or, in a different way of putting it, you are focusing on being rather than doing.  

Identity is not, in most circumstances, a critical input.  As Goldberg is pointing out, virtually none of the popular Left identities are relevant to problem solving.  They are attributes of being not doing.  

And any party or ideology that is unserious enough to focus only on identities and not on doing the heavy lifting of making life better, is not a party or ideology long for this world.  It is on a road to ruin.