?? The Rich Get Richer… ??

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” -Aristotle

Does it matter if Jewish organizational life is “fair”?

I’ve wondered this question for most of my life.?For those in the United States, we live in a time of incredible wealth inequality, minimal antitrust enforcement, and frequent corporate consolidation.?And if these trends affect the United States, it’s reasonable to assume that the Jewish world will be similarly affected.

But let’s say that the answer is “yes,” that Jewish life is unfair and is akin to an Ayn Rand fever dream of radical individualism and an unrelating free market that chooses winners and losers.??Is that a bad thing?

In all likelihood, your answer to this question will closely align with your political beliefs.?But I am more interested in what all of us can learn about the kinds of forces that cause certain ideas to catch fire, and others to fizzle.?Sometimes, these are driven by mental biases, and other times by replicable case studies.??In either case, we need to get to work and learn.

The Matthew Effect

This newsletter liberally uses the terms “science” and “scientific.”?While I want people to understand that there are concepts that can make our organizations better driven by rigorous, peer-reviewed science, I never want to pretend that this newsletter represents anything other than my own explanation.?In fact, I remain impressed at how the scientific world strives to address the inherent biases of scientists in the supposedly objective world of science.

Sociologist Robert K. Merton recognized this conflict when he observed how the scientific community gave credit to research based on a scientist's pre-existing reputation, observing that, “eminent scientists get disproportionately great credit for their contributions to science while relatively unknown scientists tend to get disproportionately little credit for comparable contributions.” Famous scientists become more famous because they are?already?famous, and those scientists who are not already famous struggle to get notoriety because they are not already famous.?

Merton identifies this phenomenon as “the Matthew Effect,” where the apostle Matthew states in the Parable of the Talents that “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Today, the frequently used expression that “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer” is a modern formulation of the Matthew Effect.

On the one hand, reputation is essential in any profession, and seeing the name of a famous scientist on a paper should be worth a certain amount of reputational credit.?However, Merton argues that the Matthew Effect can be an “idol of authority,” where science is more a “matter of anecdote and heavily motivated gossip” than who does the best research. In a later paper, Merton also calls the Matthew Effect “cumulative advantage,” where certain “initial competitive advantages…[become] successive increments of advantage…[that] widen until dampened by countervailing processes.”

Anonymous peer review is an essential method employed in academic research to dampen the forces of accumulative advantage.?But most professions are not so lucky…just ask hockey players.

Consider how cumulative advantage might be one of the powerful, yet least discussed, ills facing the Jewish nonprofit sector.?Do you feel that certain Jewish organizations are consistently favored in terms of funding, branding, and attention??I know I do.?In some cases, the organizations are actually far more innovative than the competition, and it would be wrong to ignore the possibility that these organizations consistently succeed because they are consistently excellent.?But is that always the case????

The Matthew Effect suggests that we would be foolish to assume that the organizational “winners” in Jewish life are always winning because they are always innovating.?If anything, we need to be asking tougher questions about moments where we simply assume that an organization is the best because it has amassed so much power that the power becomes self-reinforcing.?

Voltage

Lest anyone assume that I think that all success in the Jewish world is an accident driven by prejudice, allow me to introduce you to John List’s?Voltage.?List is a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, and has been the chief economist for both Uber and Lyft.?And?Voltage?offers a careful analysis of what distinguishes ideas that scale from those that don’t.

On the one hand, great ideas are usually the product of many bad ideas.?At the same time, List wants us to recognize that there are many ideas that are good or even great but are not scaleable (i.e. they lack “voltage”).??To separate the scaleable from the unscaleable List identifies “five vital signs”:

1. False Positives:?The idea?never?had voltage, in the first place
2. Slice of the Pie:?The idea might be great, but the market size is small
3. Unscalable Ingredients:?The idea is successful, but what made the idea successful can’t be replicated
4. Spillover Effects:?The idea creates spillover effects when scaled that actually work?against?the original purpose of the idea
5. Cost:?The idea is great, but trying to scale it will cost too much

I will let the reader decide which great ideas have successfully scaled in the Jewish community, and which have not.?But I find List’s analysis particularly helpful when thinking about how to teach leaders about strong case studies to help their organization.??

1. If I am the head of a day school, synagogue, camp, etc. in a small Jewish community, the last thing I want to hear when searching for a great idea is something employed by a massive institution in a large metropolitan area.?Population growth cannot be replicated…
2. If a Jewish organization’s success appears largely driven by the presence of a single charismatic figure, how useful is it to learn about his/her/their “secret sauce”??Telling someone “find a generational talent” is not a strategy…
3. And most importantly, before worshipping at the altar of the latest popular trend in Jewish life, be sure to ask whether or not there are negative externalities to one system’s growth.?If one organization flourished at the expense of every other organization in the same sector, the spillover effect may not be worth it…

Leaders in struggling organizations suffer a mental toll that is hard to quantify, and many professionals work every day to try and help struggling organizations turn around their fortunes.?But it is demoralizing when the only stories of success people hear are ones that cannot be replicated at scale.??We all owe each other greater sensitivity.

Weekly Links

1. Bonjour, Stupid!:?Consider this my ode to Judy Blume.?I’m more into?Superfudge?than?Are You There God??It’s Me, Margaret, but to each his own.??Here is?one article?in?Tablet?and one?in the?Religion News Service?on the religious themes in Blume’s work, and a?great profile?of Blume in?The Atlantic.
2. The Two-Minute Burnout Checkup:?One of the saddest things about burnout is that most people who are burned out are too tired to ask if they are burned out.??Please, do a quick checkup.
3. Social Media Drains Your Brain, and Then Makes You Buy Stuff:?I suppose that this is not a surprise, but it’s amazing to read?this research?on how social media usage impacts impulse purchases.
4. What Makes Someone Forgettable?:?Adding to our discussion of cumulative advantage, we can train our minds to think about who we are leaving out of important conversations.??Here’s a take on how.
5. Not All Philanthropies Deserve Our Respect:?In the end, a nonprofit is a legal structure, not a statement of an organization’s value.?As a result, organizations whose missions we love have the same legal status as organizations whose missions we hate.??Read more here…