Nate Silver on Agency

The Blogora: The Rhetoric Society of America

Submitted by Jim Brown on March 21, 2009 - 9:13am

So, yes...I am a Nate Silver fanboy. I'm willing to admit this. I got to see his keynote at SXSW Interactive, and it reminded me of how jealous I am of his career path (from baseball statistics to political analysis). Silver has the ability to make statistics not only understandable to the layman but also relevant. One of his latest FiveThirtyEight posts about the AIG "bonuses" is worth a read for any rhetorician interested in our ongoing disciplinary conversations about agency.

Silver explains how the AIG bonuses were not really bonuses. In their original iteration, they were performance-based bonuses. But after AIG (and everyone else) started tanking, the company made this money guaranteed. So, the money was no longer tied to performance. It was now going to be paid no matter how badly AIG or its employees performed

The thing about these 'bonuses', however is that they're not really bonuses, which we usually think of as incentive-based compensation. On the contrary, they are something the opposite of bonuses: they took compensation that had been incentive-based and guaranteed it. It's precisely because that compensation was guaranteed -- not incentive-based -- that it is difficult to undo.

The fundamental issue here what I call asymmetrical agency bias. We as human beings tend to attribute our results to skill when we are performing well, but (bad) luck when we are performing poorly. Thus, AIG was willing to pay its Financial Products employees plenty when their trades were going well (assigning them agency for their profits), but was willing to make plenty of excuses for them ("the severe liquidity crisis", "the effects of rating agency downgrades") once things began to unravel. The employees, likewise, may have felt entitled to some large fraction of the incomes that they had "earned" before, and probably didn't regard themselves as culpable for the losses their trades had begun to take.

In our own discipline, a parallel logic seems to play out. Am I responsible for the "successful" persuasion that happens as a result of my text? Am I responsible for all the (mis)readings of my text? Rhetoricians answer these questions in various ways. But as Silver points out (rightly, I think), you can't claim responsibility for only one sub-section of the results.

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agency

Submitted by Byron Hawk on March 24, 2009 - 3:41pm.

Ya, I like this note about agency. I think human agency exists, but it is somewhere in the murky complexity between these to points. The problem comes when we want to assign agency in evaluation--do we evaluate intent or effects? I think in law we try to find a balance between the two, but it is often examined at too high of a level of scale. What's going on is way more distributed than an individual. Make ethics fairly messy. Problems I'm still trying to sort out.