Let's get the government out of the marriage business . . .

I am saddened by the California State Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8 outlawing same sex marriages. But the decision highlights something more fundamental, in my opinion: Government should not be in the business of saying anything about marriage, period. My argument proceeds with a discussion of what the government gets out of having people be married, of the incentives that the government provides to encourage being married (and discourage not marrying or divorcing), and of the way in which the focus on marriage means that the government misses some significant opportunities to benefit from the commitment of adults to each other. I end with proposing a better system, one that is more just and that may provide more benefits to the state and society.

1. What does the government get out having people be married?

A husband and wife, living together and caring for each other and possibly for their children is a social unit that is likely marked by a degree of stability: people living together (even if not in the same place) can rely on each other to weather the minor irritations of daily life and can lean on each other for support when crises of more tragic magnitude come along. Affection makes this association a pleasant one: people want to help those they love. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services,

A focus on the most rigorous recent evidence reveals that marriage has positive effects on certain health-related outcomes. These studies find, for example, that marriage improves certain mental health outcomes, reduces the use of some high-cost health services (such as nursing home care), and increases the likelihood of having health insurance coverage. In addition, an emerging literature suggests that growing up with married parents is associated with better health as an adult. Marriage has mixed effects on health behaviors — leading to healthier behaviors in some cases (reduced heavy drinking) and less healthy behaviors in others (weight gain). For other key health outcomes — in particular, measures of specific physical health conditions-the effects of marriage remain largely unaddressed by rigorous research (Source).

Even discounting some of these claims (this report was, after all, written during the Bush II Administration), it seems likely that marriage provides some health and social benefits that are likely to save the government money.

2. What incentives does the government provide to encourage being married (and discourage not marrying or divorcing)?

The government provides incentives directly as a result of marriage (joint tax filing; social security for spouses, etc.), plus it provides legal protections for spouses in other settings (allowing family leave to care for an ill spouse and securing the right to visit a spouse in the hospital, for example). A list of marriage benefits provided by the government and laws benefiting married people can be found at here.

By making divorce a fairly complex legal procedure the government demonstrates that marriage is a commitment that, once made, should be difficult to disentangle. The fact that getting oneself into marriage is only encouraged by the government and is (for heterosexual couples) quite easy to accomplish provides some evidence to suggest that the government wants heterosexual couples to marry and stay married. (Making it easier to get a license to marry than to get a license to drive a car seems unwise to me.)

3. How does the focus on marriage result in the government missing some significant opportunities to benefit from the commitment of adults to each other?

By creating incentives for marriage rather than for the commitment of adults to each other, the government mistakes a private religious sacrament for a public contract that has a positive social value. In the United States, the state should not pretend to any religious aim, but only to what provides a secular benefit to the state. The aims of the state should be limited to reducing public costs by having adults and children in living conditions that are conducive to their wellbeing. A formal relationship of contractually binding commitment among adults to care for each other fulfills the state’s aim. Marriage, a fundamentally religious arrangement, can be that kind of formal relationship, but it need not be the only kind.

Two sisters – never married, divorced, or widowed – who choose to make a formal commitment to care for each other and live together provide a benefit to the community and to the government. As they grow old together, the likelihood that they would need significant government services is lower than for similarly situated people without such a relationship. They should be allowed to file taxes jointly and have other benefits if they take on a formal commitment above and beyond what is normally expected of sisters.

These two sisters, a heterosexual couple, and a gay couple provide the same kind of benefit to the state and should be rewarded with the same kind of incentives to form formal commitments and to maintain them. The bar for entry into any kind of a government-recognized and rewarded formal commitment should be high, as should the bar for exit (dissolution of the commitment).

From what I have read, I believe that there is sufficient evidence out there for the benefits of paired committed relationships to make this claim about how such relationships are good for the state and society. (Anyone out there have citations?) A provocative question, one that requires empirical evidence to evaluate, would be that committed relationships of more that two people (a polygamous marriage would be an example) could provide the same kind of positive benefits to state and society as a relationship between two people. On the one hand, my bias is to see polygamous relationships as inherently bad for women: one woman is always going to be the less favorite and she will be the one who is in the weaker position vis-à-vis the others. On the other hand, I don’t recall seeing any credible studies of the social dynamics of polygamous relationships. But whether formally committed relationships among more than two adults count as something the government ought to reward with incentives for entering into that contract and disincentives for exiting should not rest on how well or poorly the relationship corresponds to the majority’s belief about the sanctity of marriage as being “between one man and one woman.” Instead we ought to take an evidence-based approach: Do such relationships create a net benefit for state and society?

4. What should our state governments in the United States do about marriage?

In a word: nothing. Leave marriage to the church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or whatever self-organizing group wants to create what they call a marriage.

The government should be in the business of encouraging adults to commit formally to care for each other and any children that come of their relationship. These commitments should be real contractually binding – the committers must promise to support each other financially and care for each other’s physical and emotional wellbeing. If this is to be a relationship in which children do or may play a role, the committers must promise to jointly raise and care for those children. It would be advisable to require witnesses who know the committers to come forth and swear that they believe that the committers are mature enough to make this commitment and that the committers are making the commitment in full cognizance of their responsibilities to each other and to the community. Only after a serious, state approved contract would committers be granted the privileges the state now reserves for the married. And like today’s marriage, the state would require significant efforts to be undertaken to dissolve the commitment.

Such a policy change would place marriage back in the hands of clergy. Whether a clergyman performs gay marriages is going to depend on his or her faith. That’s fine. Anyone can shop around for an appropriate officiant. Some formal committers will have only the state commitment (two sisters being an obvious example); others will have both a formal commitment and a marriage. It’s even possible that some will want a marriage without a formal commitment. Perhaps the difficulty of dissolving a formal commitment would be enough to dissuade these hypothetical people. That would be fine by me: the state should only give those benefits to people who are truly committed to caring for each other for the long haul.

5. Concluding comment

Our current policy in the majority of states of the Union is that the government rewards people for having a religiously approved sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex. Why? The government should instead reward people for being in committed relations that provide benefits to state and society. It’s the commitment to care for one another that matters to the government. Such commitments should be rewarded with government provided and protected benefits; such commitments should be hard to enter and hard to dissolve. Getting the government out of the marriage business would be good for committed people and good for society.

March 13 (Reuters) - Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg all sought ways on Friday to fend off a global crackdown on tax evasion by making concessions on bank secrecy. . .

The three countries agreed to fully adhere to the OECD's Model Tax Convention's Article 26. . .

The changes go some way towards more cooperation with foreign tax authorities, even though they still fall short of the G20's and EU's key demand -- automatically sharing foreigners' account information.

I was just talking about the issue of banking secrecy in my Transborder Flows course on Wednesday. The subject was money laundering, and the issue of tax evasion overlaps. With both money laundering and tax evasion, the perpetrators want to park their gains in someplace safe and private.

I’m assuming that threatened “global crackdown on tax evasion” would be the kind of blacklist that was successful in getting non-compliant countries and territories to become compliant with the anti-money laundering/counter-terrorist financing provisions of the Financial Action Task Force’s Recommendations.

None of the countries that had been placed on the list of Non-Cooperative Countries and Territories (NCCT) remain on that list. No new countries or territories have been added to the list since 2001. Does that mean that we’ve made great strides in international cooperation to fight money laundering and terrorist financing? I don’t think so.

J.C. Sharman (2008) provides an interesting analysis of the way FATF used discursive power to compel compliance: direct coercion (If you don’t comply, we’ll place you on the NCCT list and then you’ll be subject to financial shunning), mimicry (We’ll help you develop institutional practices and expertise to comply just like we do), and competition (You better be even better at complying than that other country because companies will make investment decisions based on who complies best). Sharman finds that “the costs [of complying with FATF rules] substantially outweighed the benefits for each country” (639). Furthermore, “there has been little evidence of [AML] policy effectiveness. This is true whether effectiveness is taken in absolute terms, as success in disrupting criminal finance and the underlying illicit activities, or in terms of cost-effectiveness, that is whether the regulation produces benefits for society greater than the costs of the regulation itself. This latter approach is advanced by the OECD as constituting best international practice in assessing regulation” (641).

So, we have a situation in which compliance is now widespread but effective mechanisms of action are pretty much wholly absent. Just because you cross the t’s and dot the i’s on the legislation doesn’t mean that you’ll have an effective means of combating money laundering and terrorist financing. Instead, and ironically, having the system in place absolves you from the responsibility of it not working: But we’re doing everything you told us to do!

A big part of the problem, I think, is that the prescribed mechanisms for fighting money laundering and terrorist financing don’t work all that well. Sure, they catch incompetent criminals (like Elliott Spitzer) who are too dumb to outwit the fairly predictable computer algorithms that pop up suspicious account activity. But it would not be too hard to get around those rules. And it would be fairly easy for bad guys to coerce or bribe bank tellers, car dealers, and others to not file reports that could trigger police inquiry.

Another problem is that the implementing the recommendations requires a substantial commitment of funds. Though the rules might be on the books, and minimal implementation might have been undertaken, making these flawed rules work probably requires a more sustained allocation of cash than many countries can or are willing to expend.

And finally, the rules may not fit the cultural context in which they are imposed. The mimicry of rules that fit the US and the UK can create a cultural disconnect that undercuts the legitimacy of those rules.

Are there lessons to be learned from the AML/CTF story for the extension of the regime governing secret bank accounts and international collaboration on the prosecution of tax evaders? Perhaps. One huge difference is that with Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Austria as the targets of the OECD efforts, the disparity of power isn’t that great – not at all like what you saw when FATF ganged up on Sao Tome and Principe.

But still, here are the potential problems:

• The tax evasion detection rules simply might not work all that well. There are so many available ways to hide money that requiring banks to give account information might be insufficient for really finding the bad guys.

• Although these three countries certainly have the funds to conduct investigations of suspected tax evaders, the banks themselves might use their resources to litigate and invoke administrative procedures to drag their heels to avoid disclosure.

• This second point might just work because the sympathies of the citizens of these countries may be on the side of the secrecy-seekers. Since these countries, especially Switzerland and Luxembourg, have traditions of bank secrecy, people might simply not believe the new rules are needed, or they might believe that the rules undercut an important national tradition. They may be less willing to be forthcoming about disclosing names and complying with rules that they don’t think are legitimate.

But the extension of a regime on taxation is interesting. The fact that it happens at this time of financial crisis is not surprising. While I don’t like the erosion of privacy – and eliminating this kind of privacy could be said to contribute to that erosion – I don’t really have any sympathy for those people who want to hide their taxable income in offshore, secret accounts. I pay my fair share of taxes. They should too – or be prosecuted. So, good luck to the OECD! I hope that these changes in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Austria’s policies are not just a sham.

--------------
Sources:
Q+A-Tax havens' moves to avoid blacklist (2009). Reuter’s, March 13, on-line at http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USLD62339020090313

Sharman, JC. 2008. Power and discourse in policy diffusion: Anti-money laundering
in developing states. International Studies Quarterly 52 (3): 635-56

Facebook's about face

http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/privacy/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=214500795&cid=iwhome_art_Priva_mostpop

Scene 1. Facebook quietly changes its privacy policy to own all our information in perpetuity. Big Shock. (Not.)

Scene 2. Viral protest spreads.

Scene 3. Facebook recants and opens a communal conversation to allow stakeholders to voice their concerns.

So, what's wrong with this play?

1. FB's revised privacy and terms of service statement seemed to state that the company owned any content you posted. I don't think that that was FB's intention, but the clunky writing made that difficult to understand. Subsequent clarifications can be found at http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever.

2. Protesters (not without reason) took the plain-text meaning and panicked that FB was claiming ownership of all their content, in perpetuity. On the other hand, the panicked response certainly got FB's attention!

3. What's ignored here is that "ownership" of information is a squishy concept. To own has three meanings: to have (possess), to be able to use, and to be able to alienate. Concepts of ownership work best with tangible objects. I have a book. I can read my book. I can sell my book or give it away. Some things I can use, but someone else has: I am allowed (by easements) to walk on a certain path, but I don't own that property. Some things I can have and use but I am not allowed to alienate: No ethical physician would remove my heart from my healthy body (killing me in the process) to give it to someone else. I can give away one kidney. I can't give away two.

Owning information is even more complex, however. I cannot both have my heart and give it away. I can, however, have information and give it away. I'm doing that right now with this blog. Legally, I still maintain copyright to the content, but if you learn anything here, it's yours to keep. (And, by the way, following Creative Commons procedures, I give anyone permission to copy the actual words of this blog as long as credit is given to me and as long as it is used only for noncommercial purposes.)

Even more importantly, if you learn something here, there is no way that I can force you to unlearn it.

So, if I own information:

* I have it, but once I share it I can no longer control who else has it.
* I can use it, but if I have shared it with you, you can use it too. (Depending on what it is, laws like copyright might prevent you from copying it.)
* I can give it away or sell it, but even if I give it away or sell it, I still have it and can use it.

To put this in jargon terms, information is not rivalrous. (You don't use up information when you use it.) If you share it, it is not excludable. (You can't really stop others who have access to your information from sharing that information. Don't believe me? Try telling someone a secret.)

Furthermore, we reasonably have expectations that communication taking place via some kinds of media is protected. If you send a letter in the mail or make a telephone call, the usual expectation is that neither the mail carrier nor the operator will intercept your message. (Patriot Act notwithstanding.) But FB is NOT a private medium of communication.

FB is cross between a billboard and a nosy neighbor. When you post something to FB, you broadcast -- to how many people depends on your privacy settings. But then, they can easily rebroadcast it (without your careful privacy settings) to anyone they want. Or to everyone. And FB keeps that information for its own commercial purposes. When you sign up, you give FB permission to do so -- it's how they stay in business.

No, FB should not use its customers' content without their consent for further distribution and money-making. Any information posted by customers who subsequently delete their accounts should not be circulated or used by FB after the deletion. But it's impossible to get all those FB friends and friends of friends to give up the information received from the now-deleted account.

In that way, content we share on FB is no different from information we share and then later regret having shared. Retrieving one's secrets and embarrassments is as impossible as catching the dandelion seeds carried in the breeze.

PS: More on this topic can be found in my book, Knowledge Power: Intellectual Property, Information, and Privacy, which is available from Lynne Rienner Publishers, at http://www.rienner.com

"If we are not practicing good science, we probably aren’t practicing good democracy. And vice versa"

(Dennis Overbye, New York Times January 27, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/science/27essa.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink).

Discuss.

Ok.
If not A, then probably not B. (An inverse of some assumed statement)
If not B, then probably not A. (A contrapositive of some assumed statement)


Overbye gives the example of China's persecution of a free-thinking scientist as evidence of "if not good science then probably not good democracy." Yes, whenever the state (or the Church) intrudes to place limits of free scientific inquiry, we probably don't have a good democracy. And whenever democracy is poor and the state erodes all those civil liberties we hold dear, it's likely that free investigation in science is limited, as well.

But maybe it also is worthwhile to look at the assumed statement and its converse (leaving out the probabilistic element):

If A then B: If good science then good democracy.
If B then A: If good democracy then good science.

Do these hold true?

Good science is about a good process of scientific inquiry, and not necessarily about getting the right answer. Overbye also seems to be claiming that the habits of mind (to borrow a phrase from my son's teachers) of scientific inquiry -- skepticism, empiricism, etc. -- lead to the same kind of self-critical analytical stance that is necessary for good democratic governance.

In my view, this may be necessary, but it's not sufficient. The key element needed for good democratic governance not included here is empathy. For a democracy to function well, citizens must empathize with others. The strong must be able to put themselves in the metaphorical shoes of the weak, and vice versa. Without empathy, self-interested individuals will end up creating what de Tocqueville referred to as the "tyranny of the majority." And science without empathy can lead to Dr. Mengele.

And then the converse: Do we see good science in good democracies? Sweden and Denmark are good democracies, and they probably have some good science, but they are not known for their leading edge science. This may be a contributory, but not necessary or sufficient condition. Having a strong democracy might help science, but it's not enough.

But I like good democracy, and I like good science. Whether or not one leads to the other, I want both.

It's time to say something about Gaza

The situation in Israel and Palestine is just so sad that I don't really want to blog about it, but there is so much over-simplification going on that I really think it's time to talk about the complexities. So here goes.

1. Countries that are attacked have a right to defend themselves by attacking back. Hamas lobs rockets into Israel. Israel has a right to defend itself by attacking back.

2. Attacking back should be done in a commensurate way -- not with, for example, force that leads to total annihilation. Whether Israel is attacking back with measured force as opposed to excessive force is unclear.

3. Fighting a just war was a much easier concept when armies lined up opposite each other on battlefields, wore uniforms, and generally separated the civilians from the combatants.

4. Dropping leaflets to warn civilians to get out of harm's way could be a just action, but if the civilians have no where to go, then the humanitarian-inspired effort gets turned on its head and becomes malign.

5. Fighting the terrorist organization that has taken control of Gaza is really hard, but doing so is necessary (but certainly not sufficient) for Israeli national security, at least for the short term.

6. Unfortunately, though, destroying supply tunnels that bring arms into Gaza and weakening the Hamas leadership is likely to have only temporary positive effects for Israel. In the short run, fewer missiles will hit Sderot and Ashkelon. In the long run, the effect my be negative as the military action wins more hearts and minds for Hamas -- not only among the Palestinians, but also in the world at large.

7. Using the civilian population as human shields by intentionally placing military posts, rocket launchers, and other materiel in neighborhoods and in places where there are likely to be a lot of civilians ought to be considered a war crime.

8. "Winning" a war does not necessarily mean that peace has come.

Someone really ought to write "Just War Theory for Guerilla Warfare and Terrorism." Not me, though.

A response to David Broder

David Broder, in an opinion piece in today's Washington Post, quotes Jim Hunt, the former governor of North Carolina, who says that to bring education costs down. "We have to look at productivity measures for college faculties," he said. "The course load may have to increase for some professors" (Hunt, quoted by Broder).

There are lots of reasons why simply increasing the course load won't solve the problem. See the articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, here, here, and here. (Sorry, these are by subscription.)

But I want to address the unspoken implication in David Broder's column: That faculty aren't working very hard and that we have lots of free time so that we can, without much inconvenience, simply take on more students. If I could reply to Mr. Broder, I would say . . .

Good evening, Mr. Broder,

Well, if you have your way and I end up teaching more students while still keeping up with my obligations of scholarship (not to mention those other obligations of "service" that are expected of faculty), perhaps you could help.

You could start now. It's 11:20 pm. I still have 9 more papers to grade by tomorrow so that the students will have feedback before they start working on the take-home final. (I have spent my weekend grading the first 20. A good paper can take 10 minutes. A bad paper can take an hour or more.) I'll give you the reading list and the paper requirements. I'm sure that you could help me by grading. (Throwing the papers down the stairs to see where they land is NOT an approved method.) Just remember that it is not OK just to put the grade on the paper. You must write comments on them, showing them where they have made conceptual errors, grammatical errors, and stylistic errors. Also, it is really empowering to tell them where they have made excellent points. Final comments should always be constructive, never cutting. Use this as a guide:

"Suzie, I see that you read some of the scholarly literature on the global political economy of basket weaving. Unfortunately, you have confused Adam Smith with Karl Marx. Instead of conducting a literature review, you have simply summarized some articles. Misunderstanding what those articles said was a definite negative. Also, you need to work on proofreading skills. Perhaps you should go to the Writing Center and ask for help on commas, as well. Grade: D."

OK? Should I send you the papers? Surely you don't have anything better to do tonight! When you're done with these, we can go over the grading of the doctoral students' seminar papers. They are more interesting, but still take a lot of time to go through.

The bloat in universities is not at the level of the professor. Our salaries do not go up as quickly as student tuition -- not nearly as quickly. I don't know enough about university finances to say where the money is going, but I suspect it's in health care costs, beautiful dormitories and gym facilities, and other non-teaching, non-research areas.

I think, though, that you have fallen into the trap of thinking that teaching two courses a semester is a breeze. That's two courses a semester plus preparation time plus grading time plus keeping up with the field time plus advising students, writing letters of recommendation, serving on University committees, and -- oh, yeah! -- fitting in time for our own research. (And a few million other tasks, as well.)

If you want faculty at major research universities to teach more, research will suffer. If the purpose of a research university is the production of "knowledge for the world," as my University's fund raising campaign claimed, then your plan will further exacerbate the weakening of American intellectual capital. Shouldn't our engineers and scientists be taught by people who know the cutting edge research because they are doing the cutting edge research?

But what about other fields that are less directly tied to practical things like R&D? At least the profs on the softer side of the university, you might suggest, should teach more. Perhaps you don't think that research into literature, ethnomusicology, or my own field of global political economy is particularly important. That these areas of study are fundamentally important to how we are an educated people, how we see ourselves in the world, and how we preserve and enhance our culture is, I'm afraid, something of an article of faith for me.

I'll say one thing for my own area of study, though. For the past 22 years, all students in my global political economy course should have learned one thing that Alan Greenspan didn't: Markets work efficiently and fairly only when government provides an appropriate regulatory structure that governs the market. Extreme deregulation and governments' abdication of their responsibility to govern markets brought us to what Susan Strange referred to in 1986 as "Casino Capitalism" -- with disastrous results.

Scholarship is worth producing, whether the result is something practical like a better software algorithm; possibly useful, like a more nuanced way of looking at world events; or just enriching, like the life lessons we learn from great literature. That's what research universities are supposed to do.

Dumbing the university down by making it a glorified high school will, in the end, have a negative effect on our collective store of knowledge.

Susan Strange was right

Susan Strange had a crusty personality, and she liked to tell truth to, well, if not power, then at least to the self-satisfied. And with her gravelly voice, she did it oh-so-well. And I liked her very, very much. Even though Susan passed away in 1998 -- 10 years ago -- she is much on my mind nowadays.

I have been rereading some of her work, Casino Capitalism (1986) and Mad Money (1998). She warned that we were heading for financial collapse for the very reasons that the financial system did collapse: "a monetary system cannot work efficiently unless there is political authority to say what money must be used or may be used; to enforce the execution of agreed monetary transactions; and to license, and if necessary support, major operators in the system" (1986, p. 25). She argued that through a series of decisions and non-decisions, the leading states of the international monetary system (particularly the US) have failed to govern the system.

The result is madness: wild volatility that makes everyone, even those people who never wanted to engage in risky behavior, gamblers in a global casino. Here, again, Susan speaks in 1986:

"For the great difference between an ordinary casino which you can go into or stay way from, and the global casino of high finance, is that we are all involuntarily engaged in the day's play. A currency change can halve the value of a farmer's crop before he harvests it, or drive an exporter out of buisnes. A rise in interest rates can fatally inflate the costs of holding stocks for the shop-keeper. A takeover dictated by financial considerations can rob the factory worker of his job. From school-leavers to pensioners, what goes on in the casino in the office blocks of the big financial centres is apt to have sudden, unpredictable and unavoidable consequences for individual lives. The financial casino has everyone playing the game of Snakes and Ladders" (p. 2).

We, the willing and the unwilling gamblers alike, have been living in a world in which the speed of "innovation" in financial instruments has outpaced the ability of governments to regulate, the ability of firms to realize what, exactly they are buying and selling, and the ability of anybody to figure how risky a transaction is. Moreover, Alan Greenspan's "incorrect ideology," Milton Friedman's one-dimensional thinking, and the seductiveness of the libertarian myth of perfect markets resulted in governments, particularly the US government, abdicating responsibility for governing. It wasn't just Reagan and Bush who failed to regulated. Clinton was quite guilty of this, too.

Now I do believe that overregulation is a bad thing. It decreases efficiency and leads to suboptimal outcomes. But under-regualtion or -- worse! -- failure to regulate at all leads to the mess we have right now.

So, what's the answer? Do we bail out Detroit or let them go bankrupt and try to restructure? What do we do with mortgages? What do we do with retirement, pensions, etc.? I teach my students that the economy functions on liquidity, stability, and confidence. Government has a role in each of these. The Fed, in particular, can help with monetary stability and liquidity. Liquidity can also be helped by infusions of cash by Congress to cash-strapped industries, but only if that cash ends up being used correctly. Overly high compensation for executives is a big negative. Confidence, though, is a psychological state. Confidence might come back if people believe that the government really is taking on the responsibility of governance. Leaders help change psychological states, and that's the promise of an Obama administration. I hope it works.

I really hope it works.

One more word about Susan Strange. (This is, after all, my blog.) Years ago, as a fairly junior scholar, I was sitting in a business meeting of the International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association. The section chair was asking for volunteers for various section offices (executive board or whatever). Susan was sitting behind me. She certainly didn't know me well. But she leaned for and shoved me in the shoulder and said, "You should volunteer." And I did. And that mattered in my career. Thank you, Susan.