Dissent: Cambridge Should Govern, Not Grandstand

The Cambridge City Council has many responsibilities. Conducting foreign policy isn’t one of them.

The Council is considering a proposal to divest the city’s pension funds from companies implicated in Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The Editorial Board endorses the proposal, citing both the moral imperative to oppose the suffering of Palestinians and the importance of allowing residents’ voices to be heard.

We share the Board’s concern about the suffering of Palestinians. But the question before Cambridge is not whether the Israeli government’s conduct deserves condemnation. It’s whether public resources should be used merely to express that condemnation. Government ought to do more than affirm the moral convictions of its constituents. As such, we dissent.

The Editorial Board is quite right that divestment is neither new nor unique. But it’s also likely ineffective and potentially quite costly.

The Cambridge pension fund’s individual investment decisions are extremely unlikely to meaningfully alter corporate behavior, much less government decisions in the Middle East. Studies have reached mixed conclusions about the effects of boycotts and divestment on corporate valuations, finding everything from negligible impacts to more persistent financial penalties. But evidence that divestment can hurt a company’s stock price is a far cry from evidence that it can meaningfully affect the Israeli economy, let alone influence the decisions of Israeli policymakers.

On the latter question, convincing evidence is conspicuously absent. A study of divestment from apartheid South Africa found little effect on corporate valuations or financial markets. A more recent paper found divestment has too little effect to meaningfully change investment decisions.

None of this proves that divestment can never work. But the burden is on divestment’s advocates to demonstrate its efficacy.

Meanwhile, divestment could come at considerable cost. How much? Unfortunately, the evidence is nearly as inconclusive as it is on the benefits.

Estimates of the cost of divestment from Israel range from significantly reduced returns to smaller, mixed effects. More broadly, stocks shunned by socially constrained investors tended to offer higher expected returns.

If divestment is unlikely to accomplish much beyond reducing returns, its principal benefit must lie elsewhere: in the satisfaction of taking a stand. But whether a political gesture is gratifying to those who support it is a different question from whether it is a legitimate use of public resources.

There’s a distinction between pursuing a legitimate public objective and using public resources to express a contested moral judgment. In a pluralistic democracy, public institutions exercise authority on behalf of citizens who disagree profoundly about political and moral questions. That authority carries an obligation to pursue goals that can be justified to constituents regardless of whether they share the majority’s convictions. The satisfaction of seeing one’s political judgments affirmed by the government is not, by itself, sufficient justification for imposing costs on one’s fellow citizens.

The Board also argues that divestment gives Cambridge residents an opportunity to make their voices heard. Fair enough. But the right to petition one’s government is not a right to have one’s government do whatever one petitions it to do.

Nor should the residents who turned out to support divestment be mistaken for the vox populi. Public comment in Cambridge is dominated by a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of the city’s population. More fundamentally, the Board has the causal chain backward. The City Council decides what to put on its agenda; residents decide whether to show up and testify. That a contentious issue attracts passionate advocates once the Council has agreed to entertain it tells us little about whether the issue deserved its attention in the first place.

Indeed, that is precisely why agenda setting is itself an important exercise of political power. Elected officials don’t merely respond to public opinion. They help determine which questions consume the public’s attention and the government’s resources. And they have a responsibility to exercise that power judiciously.

Cambridge has no shortage of problems its elected officials actually have the power to solve. Public schools face serious challenges, municipal finances are under strain, and as of January, there are an estimated 467 Cambridge residents experiencing homelessness. Rather than invite a bitter political dispute over a conflict halfway around the world, the Council ought to devote its attention to improving the lives of the people it was elected to serve.

The business of government is not to tell its citizens what is right, but to accomplish what they’ve entrusted it to do.

Taylor P. Beljon-Regen ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Leverett House. Benjamin Isaac ’27, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Eliot House. Cyrus P. Sarfaty ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Adams House.

Dissenting Opinions: Occasionally, The Crimson Editorial Board is divided about the opinion we express in a staff editorial. In these cases, dissenting board members have the opportunity to express their opposition to staff opinion.