Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being [Hardcover]

I loved this book. I decided to read it after skimming its Table of Contents and discovering that it would probably be a good companion book to another book I recently read and reviewed: Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher's Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap. And I suspect a good companion book to the instant book would probably be Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. As a collective unit, all three books seem to indicate that people can be successful but the roadmap to get there is not clear-cut. Some people can take the bull by the horns and overcome obstacles. While others will just go with the flow or do what is expected of them and simply exist. By reading these three books one can probably get a better handle on how to plan and strategize their own roadmap to success.

I found "Identity Economics" to be well outlined and written. And I agree with everything it says. People are born into socio-economic classes. They are either male or female. They have parents and family with existing identities. And they live in communities with certain norms and rituals that further provide them with identities. All in all, people are trapped in the identities they SEE THEMSELVES having. And they are trapped in the identities OTHERS SEE them having. The good news is that these "cages" can be opened if a person puts his or her mind to it. But they have to know the cages exist in the first place. By reading this book you will understand that cages do exist.

The book covers race, sex, and economic status. And these things play out in both a person's schooling, and later on in work life. For example, how is a kid growing up in a slum neighborhood of NYC supposed to take school seriously, get good grades and SAT scores, and go to an Ivy League college if his identity is inconsistent with doing these things? He has to live among his peers in his urban school, and those peers will think of him as "less than" if he takes school seriously. A movie that exemplifies this point is Finding Forrester where Jamal Wallace was a serious reader and could score very high on standardarized tests, but he was a C student in school so his friends would not think less of him.

It's unfortunate that a person's identity is so critical in everything to do with life (school, work, and socially). But it is. And this book does a wonderful job explaining just how important identity is, and how important it is for someone to understand how to develop that identity so they can do what they want to do in life. 5 stars!

PS. Take a look at the Search Inside feature Amazon provides for this book. There you can see the Table of Contents.

This book is a solid five, and one of those instances when brevity adds value. While I was concerned to see no discussion of "true cost" economics and the book is overly fawning on Goldman Sachs (written before Goldman Sachs was exposed for its multiple fiscal crimes against both investors and governments), the superior References, Notes, and Acknowledgements balanced this out. This work began in 1995.

This is an engrossing book and it immediately overcame my general disdain for economists, most of whom have only recently discovered information asymmetries and most of whom refuse to recognize that corruption in the US government and cheating across the US economy is fully the equivalent of transnational organized crime in cost to society.

Overall I consider this book very useful as both an overview (with most impressive "by name" citation of prior art on every page) and as a critique of conventional economics. This book is an excellent complement to the book I just reviewed, The Hidden Wealth of Nations and will be complemented by the book I will review next week, Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs. See also my review of Nobel-worthy The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits.

Core concept: IDENTITY is actualized psychological norms within a social context.

QUOTE (page 8): Identity economics restores human passions and social institutions into economics."

Bravo. See my reviews of Radical Man and The Manufacture Of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System as well as 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. We are on the verge of a socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic revolution, and I know of no government that "gets it" although I consider the Nordics to be gifted in the areas needed to create what I call INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability.

The book is extraordinary in part because the authors, one of them a Nobel laureate, take pains to identify and respect all those who have made intellectual contributions, and especially Gary Becker, who coined the term "Social Economics" and has many superb books to his credit.

This book is at the intersection of social economics, ideo-cultural value definitive, and techno-demographic leveraging. All of these represent "what people care about" and ultimate give me two bottom lines:

1) We know next to nothing about what George Will calls Statecraft as Soulcraft; and

2) Identity can be monetized--identity is the ultimate "intangible" value only it is actually very tangible.

The book offers a number of observations that I would think need to be read and reflected on more than once.

+ Cultural training *will* lead to individuals making choices harmful to themselves (those of us who have served in the military know the culture that leads one to jump on a grenade to save others)

+ Internalized norms fall apart when one person cheats--this is the "broken window" in the cultural framework and I cannot help but think of such books as The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead; The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back; and my own Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography).

+ BIG INSIGHT: Monetary incentives are counter-productive in team environments that succeed in creating a culture of identity that fosters teamwork, where mission understanding and commitment are core to performance.

+ The authors do a fine job of focusing on the mis-direction of schools, points out that despite what Carnegie and Rockefeller intended, schools should NOT be factories, they should be social institutions with a socialization role, helping every child BELONG. I see my own three teen-agers in how they describe the nerds and jocks as accepting of authority, the others (Goths plus) as not. I am especially impressed by the discussion of schooling that offers many choices while demanding independent thinking and avoiding insider-outsider fissures.

The discussion of the military is disappointing. Neither of these individuals has a visceral understanding of this culture, they are weakest here.

+ The discussion of the division between management and men being counterproductive is a good one. See Lionel Tiger above. When management thinks the men are commodities, the social value, the intangible value that this book speaks to, is lost.

+ The quality of teachers is emphasized by this book and I am again forced to recognize that too many school districts accept mediocrities because that is what the teacher schools are putting out. The quality of the teacher makes a HUGE difference as described by these authors, and I feel a sense of despair in realizing there is no one at all in Washington or any other national capital that cares about this.

+ Gender segregation is an area where the authors teach me. I had no idea two thirds of our work force (in the USA) is separated by gender, or that gender "norms" sabotage the effectiveness of the "outside" gender seeking to work.

+ HARRASSMENT LOWERS PRODUCTIVITY. I am fascinated by the authors' discussion of how some businesses choose to forego diversity as a means of keeping a more contented "red neck" workforce that costs less, versus striving for diversity and paying the extra wages needed to make it stick.

The authors are compelling and most interesting in refuting all notions that the "market" might solve social inequalities, and state with assurance that a combination of government intervention and a broad social movement are necessary to overcome the pervasive obstacles to achieving equality.

Although I have read a number of books on poverty, I am surprised to learn that two thirds of black children in America are living with a single mom, and that three fifths of the mothers are living in poverty--and if one looks at books such as An Atlas of Poverty in America: One Nation, Pulling Apart 19602003, the draconian concentration of wealth at the top is matched by the unnerving increase in the numbers of those in poverty in America. See also my review of Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy.

I am deeply impressed by the discussion of residential uplift programs that mix white and black, rich and poor, and have a vastly greater effect because the uplift programs by being residential (full time) are teaching more than job skills, they are teaching social skills.

The authors focus overly much on the insider-outsider model of understanding, and do not address information asymmetries as much as they could --the term appears only twice.

The other negative is the lack of any reference to Open Money, which does assign value to everything, most of it intangible value vice "hard cash" value.

The authors conclude that there are five ways IDENTITY changes economics:

1. Individual actions (e.g. body art and giving)

2. Externalities (e.g. getting along or not, free riders or not)

3. Creating and leveraging categories (e.g. politics, religion, advertising)

4. Identity & regret (buy the book)

5. Choice of identity (mothers versus managers, school choice, immigration with or without assimilation).

This is a serious book, a substantive contribution, at least for a non-economist such as I, and I ended my reading by examining every single reference in the bibliography, which is extensive.

Five stars, no question at all in my own mind.

I have a note, "Ethnography as foundation for economics of intangible systems of system valuation."

NOTE: Amazon limits me to ten hot links, which I do not understand. I have learned how to preserve all the links, my review with all links active can be found at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, where you can also browse all my reviews easily sorted into the 98 categories in which I read.

Economics has been going through an exciting transition. It was once known as the emperor of the social sciences back when the hyper-rational school of neoclassical economics was ascendant. Then psychologists and other more empirically-minded social scientists began to look at how real people make their choices and they found that, surprise, surprise, the emperor of the social sciences had no clothes.

But economists seem to have taken this criticism seriously and economists are developing new, more general tools based on game theory. They are also shameless ripping off the ideas of other disciplines. Economists are better with mathematical tools, game theory, and the (still sound) core of rational choice theory. These tools are letting them colonize other social sciences once again, and this time they will not be so easy to fight off.

That is what happens in this book. Neoclassical economics does not have much to say about how people form their preferences, nor did it have a vocabulary to discuss how people are socialized. That is changing with identity economics. The gist of identity economics is explained in a story that Akerlof and Kranton tell about children on a carousel. The toddler ride on their parents laps. The four and five year old children ride alone and wave to their parents on the sidelines. These children had a sense of identity which told them they were older and did not need to ride with their parents. They took great pleasure in riding alone, unlike the babies. The next older batch of kids were more daring. They'd switch positions, ride one-handed and no-handed, and find other ways to make the ride more exciting.

The thirteen year olds were the most interesting. They genuinely enjoyed the carousel but a part of them - their identity - told them they were too old. Carousels are for little kids. So they rode but pretended to be bored and indifferent. Eventually the cognitive dissonance got to be too much and they'd simply move on to something else. They show the key point: we have preferences for what we subjectively like, but we also have preferences based on our chosen identity. Sometimes they are in conflict. Think of the intellectual who reads "chick lit" or the Christian who listens to secular music.

One of the most interesting applications is for work effort. A firm is a little bit like a commune in that it only succeeds if everyone works hard for the common good. That means that firms suffer from the free rider problem because each worker has an incentive to shirk. There are a lot of market solutions but they tend to backfire. You can use monitors, but monitors only have an incentive to do a good job if they are the residual claim holder who gets the profits. Otherwise doing a good job as a manager won't benefit you, so you run into the "who will monitor the monitors" problem. You can try to pay people based on output, but that can't be easily quantified, so people will game the system to increase their performance in the things that are measured but slack off in the things that are unmeasured. Moreover, workers worry that if they do well, the bonus will be reduced. So workers punish fellow employees who work too hard with social scorn and ostracism and even sabotage. Instead what you get is a situation where people create workplace identities, which in turn sets the norms for work effort. Firms would be well-advised to put their energy into fostering high moral and cohesive workgroup identities than into trying to create incentive schemes or strict monitoring.

The authors then go on to push their model even further, into the realm of race and gender. Overall the walk a delicate balancing act. On one hand, they point out that blacks have identities that lead to creating an "oppositional culture" against whites, and punish good students for "acting white". On the other hand, they do not want to let whites "off the hook" so they take pains to frame this in a way that is consistent with the view that racism and other structural problems lead to this identity. For example, they approvingly cite William Julius Wilson theory about the loss of manufacturing jobs hurting the black community and leading to unmarriageable men, but this has not held up (see Poverty and Discrimination by Kevin Lang and The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families by James Q. Wilson). In another section they approvingly cite the research on stereotype threat, but blacks in college actually have grades that are even lower than what you would expect from their SAT's (see No Excuses by Abigail Thernstrom). In another unpublished study, it turned out that the stereotype threat is created by a publication bias - studies of a stereotype threat that do not produce a significant result are not published, so their are many unpublished studies on the stereotype threat.

I think that also leads to my greatest criticism of the book, which is that its view of identities is somewhat incoherent. In their treatment of identities and gender the authors implicitly champion the blank slate view of human nature, which holds that people are infinitely malleable. We could raise boys to be nurturers who love babies and women to be aggressive and competitive. That view is simply wrong; there are biological constraints on our identities. Women are more nurturing than men in every known human society, regardless of how primitive. If nurturing were socially constructed then you'd expect some isolated tribe in Papua New Guinea to have nurturing men. (See
The Blank Slateby Steven Pinker who a good take down of the blank slate theory of human nature). One of the main reasons why women choose different jobs than men is because "pink collar" jobs are relatively friendly for leaving the workforce on an extended basis. It is easy for teachers to exit and enter the workforce, but engineers will have to learn many new skills as computers and technology change.

On the other hand, when the subject is racial identities, the identities no longer seem to be social constructs except in the weak sense that blacks chose their identities in response to the identities chosen by whites. It ignores the fact that there is a lot of wriggle room in human nature. In some parallel universe the 1960's never happened and out of wedlock childbirths in the black community didn't increase from 10% to 65%. The upshot is that this book ends out being a much weaker champion for identity economics than it could have been. I'd like to see the authors show that identities are their own engines of human destiny, and more than mere structural explanations for things we already know. My conclusion is that I found the book more valuable than the authors themselves!

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