Tom Hirons is an industrial sociologist who teaches, researches, writes, lectures, and consults about human resources information technologies, adult learning, and social intelligence. His work explores the possibilities of organizational transformation and effective-social change through electronic interactions.

He holds faculty appointments at Portland State University, Linfield College, and Marylhurst University. At the University of Phoenix he serves as a lead faculty member, faculty counsel, and was awarded the honor of Distinguished Faculty Member for the state of Oregon.

He serves as director of college relations on the Oregon State Council for the Society of Human Resource Management, and is chair of Human Resources Information Technology group. Hirons is a certified applied sociologist and lectures widely on the evolution of human resources information technologies, organizational culture and social intelligence. He holds a B.S. in sociology from Fitchburg State College, B.S. Degree in social science from Portland State University, MS in organizational Design and Effectiveness from the Fielding Institute, and Ph.D. in industrial sociology from LaSalle University, he also holds professional certifications in human resource management form Portland State University, and electronic business process management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tom and his wife Kathleen have two children, Tip and Katie. His hobbies are long walks, socializing at the Newberg coffee shop, reading, and following the Boston Red Sox.

Human Nature Redux
By DAVID BROOKS

Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don’t even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness.
This belief, most often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, begins with the notion that “everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Human beings are virtuous and free in their natural state. It is only corrupt institutions that make them venal. They are happy in their simplicity, but social conventions make them unwell.
This belief had gigantic ramifications over the years. It led, first of all, to the belief that bourgeois social conventions are repressive and soul-destroying. It contributed to romantic revolts against tradition and etiquette. Whether it was 19th-century Parisian bohemians or 20th-century beatniks and hippies, Western culture has seen a string of antiestablishment rebellions led by people who wanted to shuck off convention and reawaken more natural modes of awareness.
It led people to hit the road, do drugs, form communes and explore free love in order to unleash their authentic selves.
In education, it led to progressive reforms, in which children were liberated to follow their natural instincts. Politically, it led to radical social engineering efforts, because if institutions were the source of sin, then all you had to do was reshape institutions in order to create a New Man.
Therapeutically, it led to an emphasis of feelings over reason, self-esteem over self-discipline. In the realm of foreign policy, it led to a sort of global doctrine of the noble savage — the belief that societies in the colonial world were fundamentally innocent, and once the chains of their oppression were lifted something wonderful would flower.
Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded. It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science.
From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists. As Steven Pinker has put it, Hobbes was more right than Rousseau.
Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We’re tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups.
This darker if more realistic view of human nature has led to a rediscovery of different moral codes and different political assumptions. Most people today share what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision, what Pinker calls the Tragic Vision and what E. O. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. This is based on the idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don’t understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other’s throats are valuable and are altered at great peril.
Today, parents don’t seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach and instruct every element of their lives. Today, there really is no antinomian counterculture — even the artists and rock stars are bourgeois strivers. Today, communes and utopian schemes are out of favor. People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts and jaundiced about revolutionaries who promise to herald a new dawn. Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state.
This is a big pivot in intellectual history. The thinkers most associated with the Tragic Vision are Isaiah Berlin, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Friedrich Hayek and Hobbes. Many of them are conservative.
And here’s another perversity of human nature. Many conservatives resist the theory of evolution even though it confirms many of conservatism’s deepest truths.

Who’s Afraid of the New Economy?
By DAVID BROOKS

Once, there was a bridge to the 21st century. But no major Democrat today speaks as confidently about globalization and technological change as Bill Clinton and Al Gore did a decade ago. No major Democrat today speaks as optimistically about free trade as Gordon Brown does in Britain.
In the Democratic Party today, neopopulists and economic nationalists are on the rise. The free-traders are on the defensive. The Democratic view of the global economy has grown unremittingly grim. When John Edwards talks about the economy, you think he’s running for the Democratic nomination of 1932.
Which is why the report to be released tomorrow by the Democratic activist group Third Way is so remarkable. Here is a group of Democratic economists and strategists who are taking on the rising neopopulists.
The first thing their report, “The New Rules Economy,” does is challenge the neopopulist depiction of economic reality. Neopopulists are good at describing the suffering in towns like Mansfield, Ohio, and Flint, Mich. But they act as if they’ve never been to Charlotte or Phoenix, where office parks are shooting up.
The authors of this report, Anne Kim, Adam Solomon, Jim Kessler and Stephen Rose, try to blend all the diverse pieces of American reality, and to expose what they call “the myths of neopopulism.”
The first myth, they write, is the myth of the failing middle class. It’s true there are more households headed by young and old people, who tend to have lower incomes. But if you take households headed by people in their prime working years, 25 to 59, you find those people are not failing. Their median income is $61,000. If they are married, their median income is $72,000. Those are decent incomes in most parts of the country.
Moreover, their living standards are not stagnant. Between 1979 and 2005, the percentage of prime-age households making over $100,000 in current dollars rose by 12.7 percentage points. As Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, said last week, incomes at all levels are rising; it’s just that incomes at the upper end are rising much faster.
The Third Way authors also dispute recent warnings of wildly increasing income volatility. The main reason incomes have grown more volatile over the past decades is motherhood, they write. As women play a more significant role in the economy, their movements in and out of the labor force to care for children increase volatility.
The report goes on to challenge the direst warnings about rising credit card debt (household assets have risen faster than debts), rising corporate profits (they are cyclical and pretty much normal for this stage in a recovery) and American decline.
The Third Way authors are not saying everything is hunky-dory — far from it — but they are saying Democrats tend to lose when they are relentlessly grim and when the reality they describe is detached from the reality most Americans experience.
Moreover, they are restating the truth neopopulists are loath to admit: that no nation on earth is better positioned to take advantage of an ever-more-open economy, and today’s challenge is not to retard openness but enable more people to take part in it.
The second half of the report describes how government can help people adjust to the new economic rules. Frankly, I wish the authors had been a bit more creative here, asking, for example, why so many people don’t heed the huge incentives to finish high school and college. There are deeper mental and cultural processes in play than can be dealt with by the usual mix of tax credits.
Still, the significance of the report is that at least some Democrats have the guts to take on the neopopulists, who are masters of vilification.
In fact, their political method is based on vilification over explanation. They vilify unpatriotic executives, but the vast majority of job losses are caused by technological change, not outsourcing. They vilify overpaid C.E.O.’s, even though their pay packages have nothing to do with the stagnant wages of the unskilled. They vilify foreign governments for not living up to the rules of “fair trade,” even though developing countries could enforce every labor and environmental regulation under the sun and their workers would still be cheaper for low-skill tasks.
The neopopulist caucus in the Democratic Party is like the anti-immigrant caucus in the Republican Party. Both speak for loud and angry minorities who have been hurt by globalization. But the party that mistakes their experience for the central reality will doom itself for years to come.

Outsourcing expands to cover all but the core

By Robert Weisman February 11, 2007

There's a new calculation taking hold in corporate suites: Identify a company's core competencies. Outsource everything else.
Businesses once agonized over the risk of compromising quality and customer service by moving internal functions like software programming and call centers to outside contractors. Today such moves are commonplace, and the vendors more competent. Cost-cutting executives are combing their operations for new categories of work to farm out.
The trend is likely to accelerate in coming years, even as critics complain the practice is taking a toll on the American workforce.
"Companies are extending the logic of outsourcing," said Joseph B. Fuller , co founder and chief executive of Monitor Group, a global consulting firm in Cambridge. "Over time, if you assume they're going to be under permanent, unrelenting pressure to improve their financial performance, more and more of their time, effort, and discretionary investment will go into activities that are core to their strategy. They'll look for third-party vendors for other activities."
Vendors have sprung up from Boston to Bangalore to Belarus to take the handoff of business processes, and the industry is attracting private equity. Last week, Charlestown's Keane Inc., a pioneer in an earlier era of domestic outsourcing, agreed to be acquired for $854 million by a smaller California company with the bulk of its employees in India. The transaction was financed by Citigroup Venture Capital International, which sees the pace of outsourcing picking up.
In its first incarnation, outsourcing revolved around services like building maintenance and food preparation. Then companies began casting off business processes such as payroll and claims management. These were data-intensive operations that, in the age of the Internet, could be sent not only down the street but outside the country. In the latest wave of outsourcing, businesses are parceling out a raft of activities that was traditionally performed in-house.
Pharmaceutical giant Wyeth has contracted with Accenture for offshore clinical research. Consumer product companies like Procter & Gamble Co., Unilever NV , and Kimberly-Clark Corp. have sent parts of their product development to outside parties. Dozens of companies have shut down their human resources departments and turned over health benefits administration to vendors like Towers Perrin, EDS Corp., and Hewitt Associates Inc., while others, including automaker General Motors Corp., have even outsourced some internal financial auditing functions.
Not everything is going out the door, though. CEOs will hold on to activities they see as defining their businesses. "Liz Claiborne's not going to give up developing the next generation of women's apparel," Fuller said, "and GE's going to develop the next MRI or jet engine."
Still, the advance of outsourcing, and its spread to new arenas, will have vast implications for the economy. In the most benign projections, Fuller and others believe the trend will spawn a flowering of business creation and entrepreneurship to handle all the operations companies are contracting out. But there are plenty of people, in technology and politics, who see a grimmer scenario unfolding.
"Over the years, Americans have been told, rightfully, they would have to move up the ladder on education," said Norman Matloff , computer science professor at the University of California at Davis. "The problem is there's nowhere to move up the ladder anymore. Once you have the ability to offshore intellectual activities such as software development and financial auditing, education isn't going to help."
Among the factors driving the trend are the globalization of business and a wealth of cheap technology talent in emerging countries like India and China, which have younger populations and graduate far more engineers than the United States, said Peter A. Allen , partner and managing director at TPI, a Houston consulting firm that advises companies on outsourcing. For efficiency-minded executives, Allen said, the value proposition of outsourcing is "moving from just decreasing costs to increasing capacity, speed to market, and quality."
But the parceling out is accompanied by pain that does not always show up in economic statistics. Despite government-funded retraining programs that have sprouted across the country, workers displaced by outsourcing frequently end up in lower-paying jobs where their core skills aren't utilized, said Matloff, citing laid-off software engineers in Silicon Valley who have become real estate appraisers.
"You're going to see more and more of that," he said.
"This may have a positive impact on the gross domestic product. The question is to whom is this positive impact going to go. It will be a boon to top executives and stockholders, but not to the US middle class."
Fuller, however, sees outsourcing as part of the same evolution that expanded the economy in earlier generations, even as it idled agricultural and manufacturing workers.
"This type of activity has some episodic negative effects for some people," he conceded. "And it creates lots of opportunity for new business creation. People have been scared of automation and economic dynamism for hundreds of years. But the shift to higher-value activity has always advantaged the US."

February 4, 2007

Children of Polarization
By DAVID BROOKS

Last fall, I taught a political theory course at Duke University, as part of my lifelong quest to teach at every college I never could have gotten into out of high school. I asked my students to write a paper defining their political philosophy, because I thought it would be useful for them to organize their views into a coherent statement.
When I look back on those papers (which the students have given me permission to write about), I’m struck by the universal tone of postboomer pragmatism.
Today’s college students, remember, were born around 1987. They were 2 or 3 when the Berlin Wall fell. They have come into political consciousness amid impeachment, jihad, polarization and Iraq. Many of them seem to have reacted to these hothouse clashes not by becoming embroiled in the zealotry but by quietly drifting away from that whole political mode.
In general, their writing is calm, optimistic and ironical. Most students in my class showed an aversion to broad philosophical arguments and valued the readings that were concrete and even wonky. Many wrote that they had moved lately toward the center.
Remington Kendall, for example, grew up on a struggling ranch in Idaho. His father died when he was young and his family was poor enough at times to qualify for welfare, though his mother refused it. Duke, with its affluence and its liberal attitudes, was a different universe.
Kendall arrived deeply conservative and remains offended by people who won’t work hard to support themselves. But he now finds himself, as he says, cursed by centrism — trapped between the Pat Robertsons on the right and the Democratic elites on the left, many of whom he finds personally distasteful.
He has come to admire the prairie pragmatists, like Montana’s Jon Tester and Brian Schweitzer. In a long conversation with his brother Sage, who works on the ranch, Kendall decided that what the country needs is a party led by “entrepreneurial cowboy politicians” with a global perspective.
Jared Mueller grew up in a liberal enclave in Portland, Ore., and like Kendall is able to afford Duke thanks to financial aid.
He came to Duke with many conventional liberal attitudes, but he’d seen the failures of the schools in his neighborhood, where many of his smartest friends never made it to college. He’s a big fan of school vouchers and now considers himself a moderate Democrat: “I’m a Democrat because I think the Democratic Party is a better vehicle for the issues I care about: balancing the budget, checking President Bush’s foreign policy and curtailing global warming. However, I’ll switch to the Republicans in a heartbeat if I believe my ideas are better received in the G.O.P.”
For many students, the main axis of their politics is not between left and right but between idealism and realism. They have developed a suspicion of sweepingly idealistic political ventures, and are now a fascinating mixture of youthful hopefulness and antiutopian modesty.
They’ve been affected by the failures in Iraq (though interestingly, not a single one of them wrote about Iraq explicitly, or even wanted to grapple with the Middle East or Islamic extremism). But they’ve also seen government fail to deliver at home. A number wrote about the mediocrity of their local public schools. Several gave the back of their hand to the politics of multicultural grievance.
Many showed a visceral distaste for people who are overly certain or unable to see some truth in the other side. One student, Meng Zhou, quoted one of our readings from Reinhold Niebuhr: “A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” Another, Kevin Troy, cited a passage from Max Weber’s essay “Politics as a Vocation”: “Politics means slow, powerful drilling through hard boards, with a mixture of passion and sense of proportion.”
If my Duke students are representative, then the U.S. is about to see a generation that is practical, anti-ideological, modest and centrist (maybe to a fault).
That’s probably good news for presidential candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, whose main selling point is their nuts-and-bolts ability to get things done.
But over all it’s bad news for Republicans. While the G.O.P. was once thought of as the practical, businesslike party, now most of my students see the Republicans as the impractical, ideological party — on social and science issues as well as foreign and domestic policy.
That’s not the way to win the children of polarization.

One Latte, Hold the Milk

By STACY SCHIFF
Published: February 3, 2007

If you believe, as I do, that darkness shrouded the Earth until someone thought to brew coffee at breakfast, at which time the stupor lifted, the neurons engaged and the Enlightenment dawned, then Robert Bohannon may be your new best friend. Dr. Bohannon is the North Carolina molecular biologist who six years ago sat down before a glass of milk and a doughnut and had the audacity to think that there was something wrong with that picture. Why not add caffeine — to the doughnut?
A normal person would stop right there and call out for a latte. Someone who had been chewing coffee beans since he was 8 would call out for a kilogram of food-grade caffeine. With the help of a local baker, Dr. Bohannon set about attempting to create what he had already named: the Buzz Donut.
The early results were disappointing; “they tasted like aluminum cans,” he says. Grainy versions followed. As of this week, perfection has been achieved and a patent filed. Dr. Bohannon is now waiting for Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts — do trans fats somehow impair the ability to spell? — to call.
If you have a timelier idea, I’d like to hear it. Could we be where we are today without a tidal wave of caffeine? A 24-hour news cycle does not require 24-hour news. It does, however, require a 24-hour caffeine drip.
Tea is said to have fueled the Industrial Revolution; caffeine has been credited with modern physics and chemistry. “A mathematician,” the prolific, nonsleeping Paul Erdos liked to say, “is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”
Small wonder then that the elixir of efficiency and inspiration should prove to be the blogger’s best friend, the CrackBerry’s companion, the spirit of social networking. It is difficult to believe that we could be wired without having been wired — you are to be forgiven for thinking that Howard Schultz invented the Internet. The inconvenient truth is that when Mr. Schultz founded Starbucks, he focused on the romance and ritual of a newspaper culture. So far as business history goes, this is a little like being Andrew Carnegie when the telegraph clattered to life.
In an innovative world, we congregate over coffee rather than over a beer: that’s why the “Cheers” decade gave way to that of “Friends.” The point of a bar, after all, is turning off the brain. The point of a cafe is switching it on. From an age that was arguably as taken with the sound of its own voice and as fixated on information as we are, the coffeehouse comes down to us with an illustrious intellectual heritage. It supplied Adam Smith and d’Alembert with office addresses. Coffee was Beethoven and Voltaire’s primary source of nourishment. Samuel Johnson was a 40-cup-a-day man. Balzac, the champion caffeinator, was a coffee-eater, like Dr. Bohannon.
An addiction like ours needs no excuse, as you know well. Is that your second cup already? Caffeine sparks imagination, stimulates conversation, accelerates thought, enhances mood, increases endurance and activates memory. It allows us to beat the clock; how anyone managed to build a cathedral before the advent of espresso is beyond me.
For better or worse, caffeine also accounts for the tenor of the times. Balzac was brilliant on the sparks to the brain as well as the cost to the nerves: “One wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque and ill tempered about nothing.”
Did road rage exist before 20-ounce cup holders? I assure you that “door dwell” — that eternity required for an elevator door to close, regardless of how many times you jab the button — postdates the double espresso. Coffee makes everything crystal-clear, which makes me certain that I am right. What happens to a society in which everyone feels lucid, infallible and empowered? I believe Fox News would be your answer.
Naysayers credit coffee with a disproportionate number of marital spats, but no one has yet been able to make a sturdy case for a risk to our physical health.
This comes as a blessing and a relief — the more so as we have seriously upped the 18th-century ante. Then it was said that no seamstress as much as threaded her needle without her morning coffee. From Jeff Bezos of Amazon comes the secret of 21st-century success: “In Seattle you haven’t had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it’s running.”
Make that a cappuccino and two Buzz doughnuts, please.
Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.” She is a guest columnist.