Corporate Beneficence and COVID-19

This article explores the motives underlying corporate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis begins with Thomas Dunfee’s Statement of Minimum Moral Obligation (SMMO), which specifies, more precisely than any other contribution to the business ethics canon, the level of corporate beneficence required during a pandemic. The analysis then turns to Milton Friedman’s neoliberal understanding of human nature, critically contrasting it with the notion of stoic virtue that informs the works of Adam Smith. Friedman contends that beneficence should play no role in corporate settings. Smith, by contrast, emphasizes the need for prudence, beneficence and self-command in all human endeavours. The article then uses these competing frameworks to reflect on a published survey of 145 corporate responses to COVID-19. In many of these responses, the benefit to a non-financial stakeholder is clear, while the financial consequence to the firm remains nebulous. This supports the contention that during a pandemic, beneficence provides a more complete explanation of many corporate actions than the profit motive alone. The article contests Friedman’s Chicago School profit imperative and goes beyond Dunfee’s SMMO by endorsing the more full-throated embrace of beneficence and stoic virtue found in the works of Smith.

Interest Groups on the Inside: The Governance of Public Pension Funds

New scholarship in American politics argues that interest groups should be brought back to the center of the field. We attempt to further that agenda by exploring an aspect of group influence that has been little studied: the role interest groups play on the inside of government as official participants in bureaucratic decision-making. The challenges for research are formidable, but a fuller understanding of group influence in American politics requires that they be taken on. Here we carry out an exploratory analysis that focuses on the bureaucratic boards that govern public pensions. These are governance structures of enormous financial consequence for state governments, public workers, and taxpayers. They also make decisions that are quantitative (and comparable) in nature, and they usually grant official policymaking authority to a key interest group: public employees and their unions. Our analysis suggests that these “interest groups on the inside” do have influence—in ways that weaken effective government. Going forward, scholars should devote greater attention to how insider roles vary across agencies and groups, how groups exercise influence in these ways, how different governance structures shape their policy effects, and what it all means for our understanding of interest groups in American politics.

Pavement Management System Based on Financial Consequence

One of the biggest challenges for any public organization is how to prioritize projects to maximize existing funding. With so many programs competing for the same funding, it is especially important to optimize pavement rehabilitation programs to allow for funding for other programs, such as safety, capacity improvements, and environmental improvement projects. This report describes how the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) optimized its available funding while improving pavement condition by using an eight-step pavement management system based on financial consequence. This eight-step procedure includes administration support, contract database implementation, roadway system division, performance models, project prioritization, and strategy selection. This procedure can easily be adopted by other states. A nominal amount of information is required to initiate this system, and the reward can be exceptional. NDOT saves $42 million a year with this methodology. An advantage of a pavement management system based on financial consequence over a conventional network optimization system is that process allows engineers to communicate with top administrators in a nontechnical way. Administrators can understand the concept and make good roadway funding choices without needing a great deal of technical input from engineers. For example, administrators see that the cost of delaying a 10-mi roadway section on an Interstate system by 2 years can cost the agency an additional $6 million for rehabilitation; but that delaying a 10-mi roadway section on a relatively low-volume road can cost only a few thousand dollars.