Okwaisie: In considering society’s structure, how much credit can you take for success?

There is a little tale that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been spreading…There is a little tale that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been spreading around for a while now and, to paraphrase Mitt, it goes something like this: In America, if a kid makes the honor roll, I realize that he got to school on a bus, and the bus driver got him there. But I don’t give the bus driver credit for the honor roll. I give the kid credit for the honor roll, because in America we celebrate individual success.

This symbolic story, fully imbued with the chime of American exceptionalism, has accompanied the presidential candidate on the road ever since his incumbent challenger rather clumsily tried to make the point that success is interplay between society’s collective effort and an individual’s hard work. Predictably, in this charged political environment where campaigns are lurking to attack any gaffes, the president’s remarks culminated in a firestorm on the right with T-shirts and banners being embroidered with the words “you did build it” in an attempt to convince business owners that the president does not believe they should take credit for their own businesses. Though this dishonest misconstruction still persists, America can be proud that some more commendable fellows decided to return that remark to its context, arguing that it appears much worse in that light.

Evidently Romney believes that the president’s remarks are worse in context. However, the Republican nominee’s bus driver story typifies the straw-man arguments being made to support that point. Appreciation is not a zero-sum game where giving one side some recognition means the other becomes insignificant; saying the societal framework in which a person functions plays a role in individual success does not mean the credit has been stripped from the individual’s initiative. For instance, if I said the crowd at a Pirates game was phenomenal and helped Andrew McCutchen play a stellar game one day, it wouldn’t mean McCutchen deserved no credit for his performance. Similarly, recognizing that the bus driver plays a role in the kid’s being on the honor roll — which Romney himself has — does not invalidate the kid’s good work. There is enough credit to go around.

Zoom out of Romney’s story though. The truth is that politicians and economists have now taken on a debate that psychologists have been having for a century or more. Do we succeed primarily because we are born with inherent qualities, or is success more related to our environment? If a Pell Grant funds your education and you stay up until 2 a.m. churning out information from books, how much credit would you give yourself for any consequent success? Of course there are probably a lot of people on Pell Grants who would not turn out to be as successful, but if there were no grants, you probably wouldn’t have the opportunity to sit up into the wee hours for a bachelor’s degree. So would you say it’s 50-50 between the two?

Success is some combination between nature and nurture, which makes it difficult to understand why people like Romney are bent on redefining the “nature” part of that argument by tearing down government. Indeed, Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute libertarian think tank and a libertarian writer, argues that individuals should realize that collectiveness is important, but what makes President Barack Obama think people should have that realization through government? Sanchez wonders: Why can’t the appreciation for the societal framework be through our golf clubs, book clubs and other civic organizations? That argument would probably carry more weight if book clubs started building roads, schools and parks all over America — but they don’t, so that argument is nonsense.

It is one thing to say you don’t trust in modern governance and a different thing to say you don’t believe in the concept of government. If people like Sanchez are willing to be honest, they will admit that government has a lot more to do with the surroundings they were born into than the golf club they joined some 20 years later. Romney’s story preys on the convoluted idea that practical government cannot perfectly align itself with what it is supposed to be in theory. But that is the task he is asking America to trust him with — to make government as close as possible to its theoretical goal of looking out for the welfare of all.

Having said that success is some combination between nature and nurture, there might be an inclination to claim that this column has centered too much on supporting the collective framework through government, and indeed it has — because individual initiative is not under attack. That happens under despotism. Rather, it is the collective framework through government which is under attack because that is what happens when a bunch of self-serving ideologues get into positions of influence and try to pull up the ladder behind them. What would you say the nature-nurture combination of success is? Is it 50-50, 60-40, 15-75 or 100-0?

Contact Daniel at dno2@pitt.edu