Deane's Personal Blog

Made in America

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I saw a book sitting in a bookstore over the weekend: Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way).

I’m heavy on unread books right now, so I didn’t buy it. But I got to wondering about it later, so I went looking for a book summary.

I didn’t find one, but I did find a review from National Review – a traditionally conservative publication – titled A Flawed Tale of the U.S. Manufacturing Sector. They claim that the book has a Left bias, so they were dismissive of it.

Those looking to confirm their anti-capitalist biases will no doubt find Making It in America a gripping read. More neutral readers searching for a serious examination of the state of U.S. manufacturing are advised to look elsewhere.

However, somewhere in the middle of the review they said something which I can’t get out of my head:

The point of manufacturing is not employment but production, and by that metric U.S. manufacturers are doing just fine. U.S. manufacturing output is only slightly off its 2007 all-time high, while the sector’s value-added – arguably the most important measure of manufacturing’s well-being – is at record levels.

That first sentence: “The point of manufacturing is not employment but production…” – that’s interesting. They claim that producing things in America is not about employing people, but simply producing stuff. How many people are employed to do that is immaterial.

National Review is absolutely right that U.S. manufacturing output is very high. It’s very common to claim that, “America doesn’t make anything anymore!”, but that’s just factually incorrect. We make a lot of stuff.

But here’s key: we do it with drastically fewer people.

In 1970, the U.S. produced just over $1 trillion in annual manufacturing output ($1.9 trillion, inflation adjusted).

In 2024, it was just under $3 trillion.

That’s more than a 50% increase. During that time, the U.S. population increased 67%, which certainly accounts for some of it, but the numbers still indicate that our manufacturing output is very healthy.

However, will production is up, employment in the manufacturing sector has plummeted.

In 1970, manufacturing employed 21.3 million Americans. In 2024, it was 12.8 million. This is a 40% decline in raw numbers. If we take population increase into account it’s worse: we have declined 64% in manufacturing employment, considering where we should be if the rate was stable with a growing population. Then, if we add in the increase in output, the relative numbers go down even further.

The conclusion is obvious: we make more stuff with fewer people, because we’ve automated a lot of manufacturing. Given the advancements in technology, we just don’t need that many manufacturing workers anymore, relative to output.

In 2011, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis released a study about large manufacturing plants. They did a case study of the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, and how 50 years of progress had changed its production.

In 1960, the plant produced 6 million tons of steel.

In 2010, it produced 7.5 million tons – that’s an increase of 25% in 50 years.

In 1960, it used 30,000 workers for that 6 million tons of output.

In 2010, it only needed 5,000 workers for the 7.5 million tons.

That’s an 84% reduction in employment, and a 25% increase in output. It turns out that technology is really good at displacing workers.

Which brings me back to the book and the comments in National Review. What is the point of “bringing back” American manufacturing? (In truth, it never left…) Do we want to bring back American manufacturing, or American manufacturing employment?

I don’t think manufacturing employment is ever coming back. Technology has ensured that those glory days are probably behind us.

So, again, why do we want to bring American manufacturing back?

Here are some possible reasons –

Having manufacturing inside our borders gives us some supply chain security, or at least the illusion of such. We love the idea of self-sufficiency and we’re naturally suspicious of globalization. We like that we have factories here that we believe are under our control since they’re within our borders.

I suppose the idea is that no other country can disrupt that manufacturing. For example, we’re on a mission to move semiconductor manufacturing inside the borders of America (the Biden administration passed the CHIPS act specifically to encourage this). Most semiconductors are made in Taiwan, and with China’s never-ending threats, that’s a very fragile supply chain.

There’s clearly some valid security in that particular case. If China invaded Taiwan, I assume we could continue manufacturing here. TSMC is working towards independent U.S. operations which could ramp up in the event of some military action – I imagine they have contingency plans for exactly this, in fact. This is a national security issue, so there would be some emergency process in play.

But that’s a unique situation. Other situations are less cut-and-dried.

For example, lots of European and Japanese car manufacturers have factories here. If we got in some dispute with Germany, would the Mercedes Benz factory in South Carolina continue to build Sprinter vans?

…I don’t think so. There would certainly be legal obstacles, and that plant likely needs things from Germany, so it would in all likelihood simply shut down and lay everyone off.

But since it’s within our borders, couldn’t we just force it to continue operating? Again, I doubt it. There would be supply chain issues from Europe. And management executives would likely walk out rather than turn against the organization that signs their paychecks. Additionally, we’re basically talking about nationalizing private property, which is fraught with political peril.

The idea that U.S. manufacturing gives us self-sufficiency simply might not be valid anymore. The world is far more interconnected than it ever was, and none of these U.S. plants would be totally independent. In the case of war, we could probably capture some of that capacity, but outside of that, I don’t know how independent they really are.

But what about profits? If we increase U.S. manufacturing, that would increase profit flow to the United States. This is the implied crux of the National Review argument.

However, note that much of the vaunted U.S. manufacturing is for foreign concerns. Every van output by the Mercedes plant in South Carolina is not directly producting money for the United States.

Additionally, since we’ve stated that manufacturing employment is largely static, where are these profits going? Even if a manufacturing concern is 100% U.S. owned, that money is going to the investor class, not the working class. How much value that provides to the middle class very much depends on how much you believe in trickle down economics.

To put it simply: I don’t think the manufacturing profits of the future will do nearly as much for the middle class as they did in the past. Profits used to manifest almost directly as paychecks for blue-collar workers. More stuff meant more jobs. But that’s just not true anymore.

We could consider supply chain efficiency as a benefit.

We bring in so much stuff from overseas that the waterways are clogged with container ships belching pollution, and problems like a global pandemic or a ship clogging a key canal can completely screw up economies.

From logistical and environment standpoints, there’s some value in moving goods shorter distances. But from a financial standpoint, we can lump this in with the prior point about profit flow. This efficiency does nothing to employ more people (indeed, by definition, “efficiency” means less employees), it just increases profits. And the value of more profit depends on who you are and where you believe those profits will flow.

There’s also the issue of national pride. In America, we have a very romantic view of manufacturing. We have visions of the Golden Age of American Industry, when millions of workers clocked into factories and Rosie the Riveter held down the homefront during the war.

But, as we’ve noted, manufacturing employment has plummeted. Additionally, the decrease in the power of labor unions and the lower cost of manufacturing overseas has meant factory employment doesn’t have nearly the value it used to. Back in the 1950s, a young man could get a union job in a factory without any formal education, make a living decent enough to buy a home and raise kids on one income, all while earning a good pension.

In 2025, that idea is laughable purely on an financial level. And it’s more unrealistic when we throw in the cultural and social aspects. Given the advent and glorification of the digital economy and our obsession with higher education for the last couple of generations, going to work in a factory after high school is no longer considered a “success.”

Additionally, I’m not sure the national pride we’re looking for is related to just putting stuff together. It’s more about coming up with ideas. In today’s world, we don’t celebrate assembly. We really celebrate innovation.

This might also just be a societal shift. Manufacturing has largely moved offshore in the last 50 years, and we don’t look at final assembly as a point of pride anymore. We love ideas and innovation, and those are often manifested by workers in other countries.

When it comes to manufacturing, it’s a common refain that we need to “make America great again.” But what’s the “greatness” that we’re trying to make happen “again”?

I feel like we believe this is employment. When people lionize our manufacturing history, they’re having fond memories of when people did meaningful work building stuff. But I don’t think that goodness is ever coming around again.

Consider –

Manufacturing employment levels will never be as significant as they once were
Manufacturing pay and benefits will never be as generous as they once were
Manufacturing jobs will never be as socially desirable as they once were

I don’t know if National Review is right about what it should be, but they’re unquestionably right about what it’s not.

So what is it about? What is the preoccupation with “made in the USA”? Do we want to make stuff for a pure profit motive, even if automation and labor changes will likely shift most of that profit away from the middle class?

Politicians constantly try to evoke some memory of the 1950s gritty work ethic of a blue-collar factory town where everyone clocked out at 5:00 and spent their generous paychecks on Main Street until they retired with a full pension and a smile on their face. For many people – Baby Boomers and early Gen Xers especially – there’s still some comfort in this retro-vision.

But those glory days of American manufacturing are probably never coming back. The dynamics of automation, economic changes due to globalization, shifts in societal perspective, and the erosion of organized labor are a bridge that simply collapsed behind us.

An American in Europe

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0500

For an American, I’ve traveled to Europe a lot. Since my first trip to Stockholm in 2010, I’ve probably been in Europe …25 times? I went six times in 2023 alone (two of those trips were one week apart).

I’ve been to a majority of the major cities. I think Madrid is the largest city I haven’t visited (though I have been to Barcelona and Lisbon). Poland is the largest country I haven’t been to (though I’ve danced all around it: Germany and Czechia and Slovakia).

To be clear, these were mostly all business trips. I did combine a trip to London with a week of vacation with my wife, and I often tried to get out and “see something” when traveling to a new city. But I’m was mostly working or speaking at events during these trips.

Someone asked me about the best way for an American to “experience” Europe the other day. I thought about it for a while, I think these are the “Big Four” European trips:

U.K. and Paris, meaning London for sure, and maybe Edinburgh and some places in Ireland (not actually the U.K., I know…). I set these two apart because they’re the most tourist-focused places in Europe.
Southern Europe, meaning Spain, the French Rivera, the Dalmatian Coast, Greece
Central and Eastern Europe, meaning Germany, Czechia, Austria, and Hungary (maybe Switzerland)
Scandinavia, meaning Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (throw in Finland if you want, but Iceland would likely be separate)

Do the U.K. and Paris trip first, then the rest in any order. In no way do I claim this is the totality of Europe, but given the four trips above, you can claim you got the major gist of it; you’ll have at least seen a reasonable range of the different experiences available.

What’s important to acknowledge for an American visiting Europe for a typical stay is that it’s not that different than the U.S. People go there and think they’re going to get immersed in some wildly different culture, but understand that you’re still very much in the Anglo-Saxon world. Walking around Germany, for instance, is remarkably similar to anywhere in the U.S., apart from the language difference.

A poorly-kept secret is that most of the “culture” you’ll experience in Europe is largely for tourists’ benefit. This is something called “heritage commodification.” You can visit traditional cultural events in any country, but know that they will exist primarily only because you – a tourist – are willing to pay to see them, either directly in the form of a ticket, in indirectly as an attraction to get you to spend money on other things.

You might be surprised – and maybe a little saddened – to know that the girl twirling around in the Oktoberfest lederhosen has never done it outside this paid summer gig and it feels as foreign to her as it does to you.

Also her long ponytails are just clipped in.

And she has tickets to see Rihanna this weekend.

Also, know that immigration has made Europe highly diverse – far more than many places in the United States. As such, the food and language is often a big collision of a lot of different cultures, and there are pockets where the racial and cultural makeup gets very specific and uniform. (For example, I stayed at a hotel in Whitechapel, East London. While walking on the street, I was the only White person. Every woman was wearing a hijab.)

This is now got me thinking about “culture” in general. What is culture? What makes you feel like you “experienced” another culture?

I’ll try to divide it up into “levels.” And note that I’m excluding race, because general “cultural differences” in race largely boil down to specific differences in the list below.

Different language
Different food
Different clothes and fashion
Different architecture and built environment
Differences in how the people act and react in the moment
Different media: music, films, art, literature
Differences in how people relate to each other, institutions, and concepts over time

Numbers 1-4 are pretty simple, and you’ll see those right away. (Though, in Europe, you won’t see much in the way in specific fashion, I don’t think, except that Europeans wear jeans less and thus seem to dress up a little more in general.)

Number 5 is a little more subtle, and you often won’t see it if you only stick to hotels and restaurants and the tourist-ish locations where locals have adapted to make foreigners feel comfortable.

Number 6 likely requires some effort on your part (maybe not music – you’ll hear that all over the place – but I can promise you most of the incidental music you hear will sound a lot like what you hear at home).

To me, number 7 is where the deeper aspects of culture lie, and this simply requires time and effort to experience and understand. Getting really immersed in another culture reveals different ways they feel about their government, authority, religion/faith, race, and societal relations.

Also, I maintain that a non-trivial part of experiencing a different culture is feeling out of place in it. And – as awkward as it is to discuss – some of this is racial. If you’re a White person (and 80% of Americans in Europe are…), walking around with a bunch of other White people, in, say, Copenhagen, you don’t subconsciously feel out of place – no one would even know you’re a tourist unless you opened your mouth.

But drop into Central Africa and you’d be acutely aware at all times that you’re the person who is “not from around here,” and I suspect that’s part of the fascination of it all. You would feel very out of place, and you’d come away feeling much more exposed to something out of the ordinary for you.

If you – as a American – want to experience wildly different cultures, then you really need to:

Go to Asia or Africa, or at least some place where people with your same skin color are a minority
Get out of the major cities
Get away from any business that makes money from tourism
Spend a longer amount of time there

Visiting London or Paris for a long weekend at the Marriott is really not going to take you out of your comfort zone. If you want to experience something very different, then spend a month working at some humanitarian organization in the rice fields outside Hanoi.

Europe is fun, but it’s rare that you see something and feel totally out of place. Many times, it could be any town in America.

There’s a tendency to romanticize it with visions of magical castles and rituals and food, but then you find yourself grabbing something at a Burger King in some strip mall covered in graffiti, listening to a cab driver blast Coolio, and wondering if maybe you really just flew to Wichita by mistake.

Update

Added on October 1, 2025

I found this blog post with a great quote:

The thing is, nobody ever actually wants to “live like a local” when they are traveling. Instead, they want to live like a romanticized, idealized version of a local that they have in their head, which generally means that they want advice on how to have a luxurious, personal experience that makes them feel like they are in a dream culture while they are away from their normal lives for a few precious days. In addition, they generally don’t want to be reminded of their utter foreign-ness; really, they want to be separated from other foreigners.

Out on Zzyzx Road

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0600

In March 2017, I attended a conference in Las Vegas. It was three days long, and my wife flew out to join me, which was fun. She flew home at the end.

I had rented a car to drive around with Annie. It was a late-model Cadillac CTS, and it was nice except for a rubbing noise it made when you turned left.

After the conference, I needed to go pitch a potential new client in Inglewood, California, which is somewhere in the Los Angeles metro. I love to drive through the Midwest, and I had a car, so I figured I’d drive it instead of flying.

Las Vegas to Los Angeles is just as much south as it is west. The route goes right through the Mojave Desert. I prepared for four hours of nothing.

But, as it turns out, there are a lot of cars out there. While on I-15 South, I was never more than a dozen car lengths or so from another vehicle. In fact, going over the mountains just south of Vegas, I came to a halt in a traffic jam around some construction. It turns out there’s a lot of traffic on this road.

About halfway through the drive, I-15 goes through Baker, California, which is known as “the gateway to Death Valley.” There’s a big thermometer right on the main road, and this is where you can go north on Highway 127 to the hottest place in the world.

Just past Baker is where there’s an exit to Zzyzx Road.

Zzyzx is an actual place in the California desert, about five miles south of I-15. It’s not a town; it’s technically just an “unincorporated community” which is what they call places that are significant enough to have a name, but not significant enough to have a government.

It was built in the 40s by a guy named Curtis Howe Springer, who was something of a medical quack. He created a “health spa” out there in the middle of nowhere. In a nod to clever marketing, I suppose, he named the place Zzyzx in attempt to be the last word in the English language.

(How do you pronounce this? I’m going with “zizz-icks,” though I have no idea.)

It turned out that Springer had no claim to the land. He was charged with squatting by the federal government in 1974 after he had been out there for 30-some-odd years. The land was formerly known as Soda Springs, but Zzyzx stuck for whatever reason.

The place of Zzyzx is serviced by Zzyzx Road. There’s a sign on I-15 for the exit (the sign is pictured above).

I had seen this word in various contexts in the past – trivia books and whatnot. I vaguely remembered that it was “the last word in the English language” and there was some novelty behind the name. I had some memory of it being named as a joke. (There were also movies – see below.)

So I exited the interstate on an impulse. I had no time pressure, so I figured I’d go for a little adventure.

I turned right and drove north on Zzyzx Road, but it dead-ended in a clearing after about 200 yards. There was an abandoned car here, I remember.

So I turned around and headed south, back across the overpass at I-15, under which dozens of cars were whizzing by.

I remember the road was dead straight and just perfect. This is the middle of the Mojave desert, remember. Coming from the Upper Midwest, I know how much havoc moisture and freezing temps will cause roads. The roads in Sioux Falls as a constant mess, but this road was utterly pristine despite being in the middle of nowhere. Take away the cold and the water, and roads stay perfect.

I followed the road for a mile or so. There was nothing but scrubland on either side. Nothing grew more than a few feet tall. I think there was actual tumbleweed.

I could still see I-15 in my rearview mirror. There were lots of cars and trucks moving across my field of view in the distance. In my memory, I can hear them, but I’m sure that’s just a projection.

But then the road curved around a short, squat mountain. It was still paved, but as I drove on and the mountain slid across my rearview mirror, I was suddenly and completely alone.

I couldn’t see I-15 anymore. And no one could see me.

It was at that moment that I was struck by the absolute enormity of the California desert, and of the wilderness in general.

I don’t really like the outdoors. Other than a stint in the Navy when I was assigned to a Marine Corps rifle platoon, I’ve never slept under the stars. I’m content to remain securely in civilization with a roof over my head. Given my history, I may as well have been on Mars.

I stopped the car and got out.

I remember feeling…raw.

I had spent a week in Vegas, seemingly the busiest place on Earth. I was driving to Los Angeles, one of the largest cities in the world. I had been at a conference, which is an exercise in carefully choreographed events. And I was going to LA to do a presentation, which was also carefully choreographed.

But at that moment, in between those two places and events, there was just nothing. Other than the road I was standing on, there was no vestige of civilization. It was dead silent and empty. The real world was unscripted.

I thought to myself that anything could happen out there, and no one would know. I was momentarily scared. I looked around for wild animals – I don’t know, a coyote or something – but there was nothing.

What if there was? I could get attacked by a pack of wolves, killed, eaten, and when would someone find the car? How long until someone came to look for me? Would anyone know I had exited the interstate at Zzyzx Road? Would someone remember a beige sedan rounding the mountain off in the distance? Did the rented Cadillac have GPS? Was it pinging a satellite somewhere?

If you’re the outdoorsy type, you might be reading these words with some sense of amusement. I might seem adorable to you – a baby adventurer, out of direct line of sight of Mother Civilization for a second, getting panicky.

But for me, at that moment, I was struck by how much I depend on civilization for my sanity. How much I need people and concrete and laws and rules and social norms to make sense of the world. I am so very rarely in uncontrolled situations.

But out here, there was nothing. I could have disappeared completely.

I never watched Breaking Bad, but I know that a lot of the action took place in the desert somewhere. I suddenly had visions of a meth lab nearby. Like, if I rounded the next corner and stumbled onto a drug operation, would I find myself in a barrel, buried under the sand, never to be found?

Yet I was weirdly determined to see what was at the other end of the road. I had come this far, and perhaps this was some sad gesture of protest and rebellion.

I got back in the car, and continued to drive.

Unfortunately, the road eventually turned to gravel, covered in sharp rocks. I had visions of the Cadillac slicing a tire open, and then what? It was late afternoon. I might not be able to walk back to I-15 by nightfall. I was wearing wingtips, for God’s sake.

I saw something off in the distance – maybe buildings? – but it was a long, long way from here to there.

I lost my nerve and turned around. I did 10-point turn because the road was narrow, and I was worried about getting a wheel too far off in the weeds. Lots of horror movies have started that way.

Why am I writing about this?

Partially because I just read a book of essays by an author who told stories about seemingly normal moments that held some significance for him. This got me thinking that everyone has stories inside them that never get told.

I don’t think I’ve told anyone about my experience on Zzyzx Road – the few moments I spent standing there, behind that mountain, being dwarfed the enormity of the Mojave, and of becoming aware of the punishing insignificance of the six-foot-ish miracle of biology that my soul inhabits.

My flesh and blood was nothing against thousands of square miles devoid of anything I would need to stay alive, teeming with things that would try to kill me, and so far away from anyone who could help.

“Life-altering” seems like a big phrase, but it doesn’t have to be. Your life can be altered in big ways and small ways. In some small way, I was altered by those couple of minutes.

I’ve never been much of a camper. I’m still not. But I think I get it now.

Coda

What is at the end of Zzyzx Road?

The remains of Springer’s health spa it turns out. And part of this has become the Desert Studies Center of California State University. I don’t believe it’s staffed all the time, so there’s a good chance no one would have been there.

Thanks to Google Maps, you can see it all now. There are no secrets from satellites.

Here’s the exit from I-15. Drag this south and you can follow the road all the way to the end.
Believe it or not, here’s Street View from behind the mountain, right where the road went from paved to gravel. I chickened out about a hundred yards past this. (If you spin this around, you can still barely see I-15 in the distance, so perhaps I was on gravel when I got out of the car?)
And Street View leads all the way to the end of the road, where the Desert Studies Center is located

And there are lots of relevant Wikipedia pages:

Weirdly, there were not one, but two little-known horror movies released within a couple months of each other in 2006 about this same road.

Zzyzx Road starring Tom Sizemore and Katherine Heigl. This film apparently made just $30 at the domestic box office.
Zzyzx starring no one I’ve ever heard of.

The plot of both films revolve around the basic truth that Very Bad Things™ could happen in the middle of nowhere, and no one would know about it.

Finally, I actually tweeted pictures of some of this trip.

Here’s a picture of the sign from the interstate. If I had gone missing, someone would have eventually found this tweet, I hope.
On the way back the next day, I took a picture of a big solar array near Primm.
And here’s a picture of the open road

(According to this tweet reply, I say that I did my exploring on the way back to Vegas the next day, but the dates are off. I tweeted that on March 7, and I would have driven back on March 8? Honestly, I don’t remember. I might be mis-remembering the timing of all this, but the substance is accurate.)

I didn’t take any pictures out on Zzyzx Road, and I’m glad I didn’t. This story just exists in my memory, imperfect as it is.

Dropping Mics

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0600

I used to love arguing about politics on the internet. I do that less now, but over the years, my willingness to throw down has brought me to an understanding –

No one wants to actually be right about anything.

People just want to feel right about something. And, more importantly, they just want to appear to be right to other people.

The truth is that we’re just fine being wrong. So long as we can plausibly tell ourselves that we’re right, and other people perceive us as being right, then whether we’re actually right about an issue doesn’t matter in the slightest.

What we really want is a dopamine hit. We want that “mic drop” moment, where we bust a rhyme so dope that we drop the microphone and walk off the stage, and our opponent is rendered speechless and can’t even mount a response.

For example, the phrase “owning the libs” has become a description of what conservatives seek to do (“owning” is a term from the video gaming world, which vaguely means “humiliate and destroy”). Instead of denying this, an editor for The American Conservative conceded it and celebrated it.

“Owning the libs” is a way of asserting dignity. “The libs,” as currently constituted, spend a lot of time denigrating and devaluing the dignity of Middle America and conservatives, so fighting back against that is healthy self-assertion; any self-respecting human being would…Stunts, TikTok videos, they energize people, that’s what they’re intended to do.

(The same is undoubtedly true in liberal circles, though, for whatever reason, they don’t seem to have a catchy phrase for it.)

I watched a video the other day that laid out an argument about a sensitive social issue. I thought it was a compelling video – it summed up my personal feelings and it gave me a lovely dopamine hit because it made me feel secure in my rightness.

Feeling the strength of this rightness, I sent the video to a friend, with whom I’ve had debates about social issues in the past, and who I knew was on the other side of the issue. I framed it as “this is why I’m not wrong.”

My friend – who I respect greatly – had seen the video and responded with a rebuttal from a third-party. I read through that rebuttal and got anxious. I didn’t like the rebuttal because I had been secure in my rightness, and the rebuttal threatened that security.

So, I immediately set about finding a counter-rebuttal. I was sure one existed, because the internet can be a small place, and I’m sure the authors of the original video had seen the rebuttal and have no-doubt prepared responses to it.

But then I stopped – I thought, what was the point? I could find counter evidence and send it to my friend, but there’s no chance he would just accept it and say, “Huh. I guess I was wrong. Nice job.” I sure didn’t do that when he sent me his response. My friend would, of course, just go find a counter-counter rebuttal, and we’d be off to the races.

(Yes, yes – I never should have sent the video in the first place. I get that.)

I think anyone can form an effective rebuttal to about anything, especially when it comes to complicated issues. When arguing with someone, we look for “mic drop moments” where we can throw an indisputable argument on the table that leaves our opponent speechless.

This is why political arguments are fundamentally unwinnable. The internet has given us so much content and so many talking heads that will agree with any viewpoint, that every political argument eventually devolves into “evidence trading.”

I once debated politics with someone for almost two years. It was almost exclusively just us trading evidence about which side was worse. There was no depth, no analysis – our minds were made up. We didn’t care if we were actually right about anything. We just wanted to feel like it.

But it’s so hard these days to be unambiguously right about anything. The world exists in overlapping shades of gray.

I’ve written before about how the US economy is so complicated that it probably defies any causal analysis in the short term. Lots of issues are exactly like this. A skilled and well-researched debater on almost any issue can dig into enough cracks to spin evidence in such a way to support any position. You just have to creatively frame the original complaint until you can find evidence to support it.

Inevitably, someone will take some “evidence” – in total isolation of all other factors – and make a meme out of it. Then we mic drop it on Facebook as if this is the sum total of all possible arguments, factors, and nuances into the issue.

There is apparently no issue that can’t be explained by a picture with writing on it (the key: use the “Impact” font, white with a subtle black outline).

Newsflash: any public figure can look bad in an isolated moment. I hate (hate) to use the phrase “out of context” because it’s used way too often to excuse legitimately bad behavior. But it fits – you can find any public figure, no matter how “good” overall, and find some moment where they look like complete trash, then isolate that moment and stick it in a meme.

Who cares if the other 99.9% of that person’s behavior is in complete opposition to the single moment or quote you captured in your meme?

You still won! You got dat sweet dopamine hit, bro! Yay!

Highly related: if there’s no defense, then we just fall back to the default: “Your Side Is Just As Bad And Here Is An Example Of That.” In the end, it doesn’t matter what our side does, as long as the other side is Just As Bad™.

And here’s something else we do, deftly –

When we find an argument that reinforces what we wanted to believe in the first place, we venerate it as The One True Evidence…and we stop looking.

And that’s the key – if we find evidence that disproves our belief, we keep searching because we know there’s a mic drop out there somewhere. When we do find the evidence that agrees with our position or values, we hug it close, pat ourselves on the back for being so well-informed, and then luxuriate in the security of our rightness.

Here’s a 14-second video. This woman is all of us.

(I don’t know how you feel about vaccines, and it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. Substitute anything you want for that issue.)

This goes by a couple names:

Confirmation Bias says that we’ll be drawn to evidence that supports the position we wanted to hold in the first place, and we’ll discount evidence that threatens it.
Survivor Bias says that history is written by the victors, and oftentimes the only reason someone has evidence for a position is because that evidence “won” the battle for their mind, and they stopped looking when they found it.

One thing you find common in intelligence agencies like the CIA is the existence of “red teams.”

A red team is a group that helps organizations to improve themselves by providing opposition to the point of view of the organization that they are helping. They are often effective in helping organizations overcome cultural bias and broaden their problem-solving capabilities.

If an agency wants to make sure their thinking is correct about something, they form a red team whose job it is to argue the point from the other side. They play Devil’s Advocate and try to poke holes in the way the organization is leaning.

Bill Gates used to the do the same thing. He would start meetings by asking for the bad news – he wanted to know all the things that were wrong with something. (I just finished his book from 1999 in which he actually has a chapter entitled “Bad News Must Travel Fast.”)

We never do this as individuals. We want to be able to tell ourselves that we’re right, and we want to be able to plausibly deny any evidence to the contrary. If someone rebuts us, we just need a handy counter-rebuttal, and we’re good.

I saw a cartoon the other day that went like this:

Man #1: “Give me a source for your claim!”

Man #2: “Here is the source, right here.”

Man #1: “I don’t want a source! I just want you to be wrong!”

(It was somewhere at Poorly Drawn Lines, but I don’t have the specific link.)

The scientific method would say that we should gather evidence, evaluate it, and work forward to a conclusion. But, in reality, we already know our conclusion, and we just work backwards to find the evidence to support that. Evidence that works against us, we disregard or seek to rebut; evidence that supports us, we relentlessly promote.

Imagine if a coach asked the referee: “Can you just extend regulation time until we have more points than the other team?”

We are that coach.

No one is wrong anymore. We just don’t yet have all the evidence to plausibly deny it.

But just give us a little more time, and by God we’ll find it, because that mic isn’t gonna drop itself.

The Media and The Truth(s)

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 00:00:00 -0500

"We’ve got facts, they say. But facts aren’t everything; at least half the battle consists in how one makes use of them!”

– Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

When discussing issues of media bias, people talk as if there’s a single version of the truth.

But that phrase: “the truth” – what does that even mean?

No matter how biased, media outlets don’t normally make up facts. They may do a lot of things, but very rarely do they simply invent things, and if they do, it’s a major scandal by which people lose their jobs.

Yet both sides of the political divide claim bias and dishonesty on the other side. Conservatives say The New York Times is dishonest, and liberals say the same about Fox News. I don’t believe either side just makes things up, so why is their reporting so divergent?

Because:

The media – on both sides – subdivides The Truth into many individual Truths
As media consumers, we don’t want to invest the effort understand the single Truth
Media consumers have confirmation bias, and we want The Truth that makes us feel like our view of the world is correct
Media companies have courted specific biases, and they filter Their Truth to match it

From an article entitled “We Need a New Media System”:

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

[…] News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick.

Humans tend to want to isolate things to make them easier to understand. We love it when situations are black and white – we don’t like shades of gray. When the cognitive load gets too great, we tend to toss peripheral items overboard and concentrate on what we consider are the pertinent facts of a situation, to the exclusion of everything else.

But very rarely does anything happen in isolation. Any single fact is one element of a larger story. The Truth – the thing that no one can dispute is an accurate representation of reality – is the sum total of every possible input into that story, both immediately prior and historically. How many of those facts are relevant inputs into the story?

It’s like throwing a rock into a pond, and having water ripple outwards. Clearly, ripples close to the impact were caused by it. But they get less directly related the further away you are. And whose to say if the soft lapping of water all the way on the opposite bank had anything to do with the rock you threw?

The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 are both an immediate reaction to the death of George Floyd, and an accumulated reaction to everything Blacks have gone through in the history of this country and how they have reacted to it.

That is indisputably The Truth.

But what the media is reporting is a subset of The Truth – let’s call it A Truth. A particular media outlet will fixate on some smaller subset of the facts of the entire scope of the situation, and present that as The Truth, while ignoring all the other facts, which the news media on the other side of the political spectrum is quick to seize on and indict the others for not reporting.

There are many individual Truths inside The Truth, and no one can present them all, so they pick one and go with it.

A, B, and C might be the entire truth. One media outlet will select A and C to report, and the other will select B, and somehow connect it to D which is tangentially related.

The key part is this: neither media outlet is lying, they just picked different facts to report and emphasize.

And how can you evaluate “lying by omission” in these instances? The analysis of complex societal problems is often subjective, and valid claims can be made as to whether B and D actually relate to A and C in any meaningful way (indeed, who decides what’s “meaningful”?). Soon, you’re not arguing about facts, but about opinions of why things happened the way they did and what inputs influenced how it played out. That can quickly segue into value judgments as about what we consider important as humans and what that says about our level of empathy and caring for other people.

This is exacerbated by the “gatekeeper effect.” Unless you’re standing on the ground as a physical witness to events, the media is the gatekeeper to what we learn about the world. The gatekeeper decides who gets to pass through the gate. Different media outlets have different criteria and angles they want and need to exploit to keep their readers happy, so they report facts that fit that narrative – they report A Truth, not The Truth.

Years ago, I read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. It’s a history of the country from what Zinn claims is the perspective of the people. It recounts horrible abuses of power and suppression of native peoples and workers. To put a label on it, it’s a wildly Left-wing re-telling of the history of my country that you would never find in any history book.

Reddit has a subreddit called AskHistorians. As the title would suggest, it’s a bunch of historians who will answer questions from anyone. I was disturbed by Zinn’s book, so I asked AskHistorians how accurate it was – did it represent The Truth?

Perhaps surprisingly given the leftward tilt of Reddit, the consensus was that Zinn didn’t invent any facts – he didn’t just randomly make up stories – but he did present only the stories that would get his point across. So, he selectively filtered the sum total of the history of the United States – that massive and elusive thing we would call The Truth – and cherry-picked A Truth which made the point he wanted to make.

But before we lament this situation too much, we need to acknowledge that it’s not resolvable. Because, how could anyone report The Truth even if they wanted to? We simply don’t have the time or attention span to sit through it.

I once read a 700-page history on the labor movement in the United States. It took me weeks. Yet I only scratched the surface of the sum total of information I’d need to master to understand The Truth of capitalism and labor relations. The next time a labor situation came up in the news, I certainly had a little bit more perspective, but more than anything, it just demonstrated to me how big the gaps in my knowledge were. (See: Duning-Kruger Effect.)

In daily media consumption, we seek “News McNuggets” – easily digestible, self-contained items of news that we believe encapsulate The Truth without too much of the cognitive stress that comes with complicating factors and shades of gray. (Hosted news shows are great for this – looking right at you Tucker Carlson and John Oliver.)

But News McNuggets are only found in A Truth, not The Truth. So we usually pick the media that will convey A Truth that will give us the endorphin rush we want, which means we seek out media we know we’re going to agree with. We live in security bubbles of our own creation. (See: Filter Bubble, and read Pariser’s book)

The late Roger Ailes from Fox News reportedly once said:

People do not want to be informed, they want to feel informed.

(It doesn’t even matter if Ailes actually said it – it’s still an incredibly accurate statement.)

And this is how the news media can be dishonest without lying. I sincerely believe that Fox News doesn’t make anything up, but they sure as hell don’t present the entirety of any situation either. Neither does MSNBC.

And they can’t. Because we don’t have the time for it.

You can rail against “Fake News” all you want, but just know that your news is no more The Truth than mine is. We’re both getting different Truths and then pretending like there is no other. But The Truth exists only in lived experience. Everything else is interpretation and spin.

Sadly, if there’s one real truth behind all this, it’s that we live in exactly the media environment we’ve asked for.

On Local Food

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0600

When I travel, I have this romantic notion of eating “local food.” I like the idea of eating food that the locals eat, like I could vicariously become a part of that culture or something.

I do this at home too, when I visit an ethnic restaurant, and I have a server who is clearly of a matching ethnicity, I’ll sometimes ask them what menu option is as close to “what you would have eaten as a child.” (Yes, an absurd generalization. Read on for more on that.)

But I’ve found there are two problems with this –

First –

Sometimes it’s hard for a person to identify what food is “local” and unique to them. If someone asked me for “local American food,” what would I tell them? It would depend on where you were in America. Could I identify a universal? I don’t know … a hamburger? A hot dog? Maybe BBQ?

These foods … might … be … local? I don’t even know. And even if they are, American food has been exported so far and wide that they certainly aren’t unique. Any European could likely find them in a dozen places within a mile of their house.

In Stockholm, I asked a native Swede for “local Swedish food.” They wrestled with the question for a long time, and eventually took me somewhere to get fish with potatoes and – I think – some type of fish eggs. The food didn’t feel Swedish to me, but what did I know?

(A valid point: I travel mainly in Europe, which is mostly Caucasian. Food differences between Europe and America are clearly more subtle than other places in the world.)

Think about it: what do Swedes eat more than anyone else? I have no idea, and a couple minutes of web searching didn’t help. (I did find this article that purports to identify “the best thing to eat in every country.” Sweden isn’t in there, but for the USA, it’s apparently a hamburger.)

Second –

People often don’t want to eat their local food because it’s boring to them.

I was in Denmark and asked someone if we could get some “local Danish food.” Their response: “I’ve been eating that my whole life. Let’s get pizza!”

We (I?) have a romanticized notion that just because a food is native to a location, everyone there likes to eat it. Part of me assumes that everyone in Norway sits around eating lutefisk all day long.

I’ve since come to learn about “heritage commodification,” or “the tourist gaze.” This is a phenomenon where a culture plays up their culture and history in exchange for tourist dollars. No one in [insert country here] might care about the history of their food or culture, but they know that tourists want to see this because they think it matters to the locals, so the local get foreign money in exchange for an “authentic” experience which is ironically non-authentic. Put another way: there are a lot of historical or cultural things that only matter to tourists.

Does this happen in America? When was the last time you had a hamburger? Within the week? Now, when was the last time you had Mexican or Italian? Same frequency? I can’t even remember the last time I ate BBQ. And when I did, I certainly didn’t luxuriate in the idea that this was an American heritage food.

Local people don’t put any cognitive thought into eating local food. We eat whatever we want, and me pushing my expectations onto people in other countries is a little silly. A lot of Swedes probably love Mexican and hate … fish eggs, or whatever those things were.

What do we call the idea that a region’s people are inextricably bound to their local food? Cuisine-centrism?

A final thought along these lines –

I was at a breakfast buffet at a Stockholm hotel once, and I opened the container labeled “Pancakes.” In it were some very thin, crepe-like things. I said to myself, “Those aren’t pancakes. Those are Swedish pancakes.”

Right then, I looked at the next container: it was helpfully labeled “American Pancakes.”

The Nicest Thing Anyone Has Done For Me

Sun, 20 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0500

In the early 90s, I was working nights at a call center. I would go to college full-time during the day, then be at work for the 3:30 to midnight shift.

I had a friend – we’ll call him Doug. We were close, and he worked the same shift as me.

I was a big Oakland Raiders fan back then. One Monday night, they were playing the Kansas City Chiefs, which is a huge rivalry. For some reason, the game was significant – a divisional race or something.

I had taken a half day off, which meant I was leaving work at 7:30 to go home and watch Monday Night Football, which started at 8:00.

At some point in the early evening, Doug motioned for me to come over to his desk. I did, and he said, “Hey, can I talk to you about something?”

I think I responded in the affirmative, but then launched into some half-crazed monologue about how excited I was for the game that night. I must have seemed like a little kid on Christmas. Doug listen attentively, like he always did.

When I was done rambling, I remembered why I came over there.

I said, “Oh, what did you want to talk to me about?”

Doug started to say something, and then stopped himself. He smiled slightly. Then he said, “You know what? Forget it. We’ll talk later.”

I went home and watched the game. It ended late. I don’t remember who won.

Just before I went to bed, I remembered that Doug had wanted to tell me something. It was late, but our shift had ended at midnight, so I called him at home.

His wife had left him. He was sitting in an empty apartment. His marriage was over.

This is what he had wanted to tell me. Apparently, it had happened earlier that day. He needed to tell someone. I was his best friend.

But, here’s the thing – he had started to tell me, but then stopped, because he didn’t want to ruin the football game for me.

He saw how excited I was, and he didn’t want to do anything to dampen that. He set himself aside momentarily so I could enjoy the game, and he went home to an empty apartment, still not having told anyone.

I have never forgotten this. I think about it often.

It remains the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.

On Moral Hazard

Sat, 19 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0500

As I write this, America is embroiled in the Ukrainian impeachment crisis. The claim is that Donald Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for a political favor – he wanted them to investigate Joe Biden’s son, who is (or was) likely to be Trump’s democratic opponent in the 2020 election.

The claim is that their was a “quid pro quo” between Trump and the Ukrainians. You do this thing for me, and I’ll do something for you.

This isn’t necessarily wrong, until it involves interfering in a United States election. Then it’s a very big problem.

The Trump Administration has claimed that absolutely no quid pro quo existed … until August 17, when Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House Chief of Staff, blew everything up by saying this in a press briefing:

“I was involved with the process by which the money was held up,” Mulvaney told reporters. There were “three issues for that,” he explained: “the corruption of the country; whether or not other countries were participating in the support of the Ukraine; and whether [Ukrainian officials] were cooperating in an ongoing investigation with our Department of Justice.”

Whoops. Then he said this:

“I have news for everybody: Get over it,” he said. “There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

What he’s saying is that “everyone does this,” with the implication that “Democrats have done this too.”

Okay, sure. I don’t doubt this is true. I’m sure other presidents have traded political favors for policy, and I have no doubt that Democrats have done this.

But here’s a base, foundational truth: if you get caught for this, you get punished.

If not, we have moral hazard –

In economics, moral hazard occurs when someone increases their exposure to risk when insured, especially when a person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks.

More simply: “we will do stupid things when there are no consequences.”

If you have great car insurance, you might not lock your doors because you no longer bear the risk of theft, your insurance company does.
When the banks were bailed out after the 2007 financial crisis, people complained that the banks would now do whatever they wanted, because they knew that if things got bad enough, they’d get bailed out, and the American taxpayer would suffer the consequences.

And from the opposite direction:

My teenager has an 11 p.m. curfew. She hates it, and thinks she should be able to stay out as late as she wants. The only thing that gets her home at 11 p.m. is the threat of punishment.

Consequences are what keep humans in line when they have no compunction about doing something they should not do.

So, back to Mulvaney’s comment –

If we accept that “everyone does this” or even that “Democrats do this too” (my words) as a reason to let it go, then we have completely abandoned the guardrails that try to ensure good behavior from our politicians. Politicians love to get re-elected, and, if there are no consequences, then we’re essentially saying they should be able to do whatever they want to achieve that.

Yes, other people have probably done what it’s claimed Trump did, yet didn’t get caught. But if they had, there would have been consequences. And to some extent, this puts a limit on the illegal behavior politicians are willing to risk.

It’s one thing to say “Everyone does this.” It’s quite another to add, “…and so we’re just going to stop punishing it altogether.”

Mulvaney is demonstrating what American politics has become. Nothing matters in objective terms anymore. Seemingly, the only necessary response to wrongdoing is, “The other guy does it too.” It doesn’t matter what someone does, so long as they can claim their opponent is just as bad.

Trump may claim he was only doing what everyone else did. Fine. But he knew what he was risking if he got caught.

It’s not perfect, because lots of people do get away with a lot of stuff, but it’s the only backstop we have to total chaos.

Breaking The Tyranny of Three Meals a Day

Sat, 18 May 2019 00:00:00 -0500

I’m a terrible eater. I generally eat too much, only to be partially saved by very good gym habits.

I’ve been actively trying to cut back my caloric intake. While counting calories get a bad rap, the fact remains that most people in The First World consume far too many calories daily. Left to my impulses, I’ll gobble up 4,000 calories on a day where I didn’t even feel like I over-ate – on a “bad nutrition day,” I might take in 6,000.

One of the ways I do this is through what I call “preemptive eating.” I eat for the future – I’ll eat something “because I might be hungry later,” or I’ll eat more at a sitting because I need to “make a meal” out of whatever I’ve got.

In general, we “fear the gap” between meals. When we’re eating Meal A, we’re subconsciously contemplating the gap until Meal B, and we’re eating to make sure we don’t get hungry during that gap.

But there’s no rule that you need to eat three meals a day. And there’s no rule that says you need to eat a full meal at every sitting. We do this because (1) society has grown around this framework, and (2) we try to “solve” hunger by eating enough that we won’t be hungry again for a while.

But you can’t solve personal hunger. You can only delay it.

It doesn’t matter how much you eat, you’re going to get hungry again, it just might be sooner or later, depending on how food is in your stomach at the moment.

The best we can do with hunger is kick the can down the road a little bit. We can solve hunger for now, but it’s always going to come back.

Lately, what I’ve been doing is concentrating on solving hunger in the moment, not the future. When I get hungry, I eat the smallest thing I can eat to not be hungry in that moment. In these moments, I tell myself: “You can have something else later.”

And this is the abundance of the time we live in. There’s always food around. I can always have something else. Whatever I’m eating at the moment isn’t the last meal I’m ever going to eat.

So I try to solve my hunger in that moment, even so far having a goal of being hungry later.

Aside from the fact that I’m consuming less calories overall, there are several other benefits:

I don’t suffer through extended hunger, waiting for a mealtime. If I’m hungry, I eat. I just eat small.
I’m willing tolerate hunger longer. If I know I can eat something when I’m hungry, I’ll often put it off because I’m busy, whereas if I couldn’t have something until a mealtime, I’ll think about being hungry more because I know I can’t resolve it.
I get to eat a wider variety of food. If you eat small portions, you can eat more things. There are some amazing appetizers at restaurants that make great little meals.
I get to eat more often. I like eating, and when I get hungry, sometimes it’s nice because I know I can have something to eat. I often eat out of boredom and anxiety, so this gives me more moments in which I can eat. For better or worse, this makes me feel better.
When I do eat a full meal, I tend to eat far less, just because I’ve gotten used to less food in a single sitting, and I know can eat more later anyway.
I move away from the perfectionism and rigidity that plagues most diet attempts. I eat when I need to eat – that might be three times a day, or maybe seven times a day. I do what works, not some plan that I need to stick to and feel guilty about if I deviate from it – and often then want to abandon because if I can’t do it 100%, I don’t want to do it at all.
Since I don’t let my hunger get too “deep,” I’m less often in a state where I’m tempted to gorge myself.
I eat more quickly. I don’t have to interrupt my day. I can down a snack in less than a minute and keep doing whatever.

That last one has another interesting secondary effect – I think about food less, because you tend to think about things you can’t have. And, when you eat three large meals a day, the set times and the amount of food combine to make you anticipate it. When a meal is an “event,” that causes problems for me.

When you eat at random times, and eat small amounts, food shuffles backwards in your list of priorities. It occupies less mental space in your head during the day. Occasionally, I even get annoyed that I have to stop and eat something.

One of the best books I ever read on food and diet was The Economist’s Diet. In it, they cite calorie abundance as the biggest problem stalking our waistlines, and in a chapter subtitled “Busting the Myth of Three Square Meals a Day” they say this:

[…] we have discovered that a person needs only one square meal, supplemented by two lighter meals, to stay satiated and helpful.

(Sidenote: the origins of the term “square meal” are interesting.)

Sometimes I’ll just eat six “snacks” throughout the day. A “snack” in this case would be a combination of food of perhaps 400 calories or less. Sometimes I’ll have 3-4 of these and then come home to a full meal, or Annie and I will go out to eat. Sometimes I’ll end the day and realize I never ate what someone would consider a “square meal.”

Note that The Economist’s Diet actually recommends against the “multiple meals a day” theory as increasing temptation. Also, contrary to popular belief, there’s actually no scientific proof that it has any benefit.

But, all nutrition and fitness is contextual. If something sounds dumb, but it works, then it’s not dumb. What work is what works for you, and this seems to work for me.

I Miss You

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Last year sometime, I had a meeting at an organization for which I used to sit on the Board.

While I was in the building, I stopped by the office of someone who I had been quite friendly with over the years. We had gotten together for lunch a couple of times, in addition to the work we did on the Board together.

I always felt like we “got” each other. We were on the same wavelength. I was always happy to see him.

I stuck my head in his office. He smiled when he saw me. I sat down.

He said:

First of all, I miss you.

I responded reflexively:

I miss you too.

I mean, how else do you respond when someone says they miss you?

But afterwards, when I had time to reflect, I decided that this (1) was a really odd thing for a grown man to say to another grown man, and (2) it made me feel really good.

Being missed is fundamentally fulfilling. Everyone wants to think that when they’re not around, there exists some social or emotional void that isn’t filled. And it’s lovely when another person points this out. After all, “belongingness” is dead-center in Maslow’s pyramid.

But, still, “I miss you” is just not something you expect one man to say to another, outside of a blood relationship (and even then – I don’t think I’ve ever said this to my only brother). It’s oddly intimate, and it projects vulnerability, which is just not something men do. We don’t need anyone, dammit!

Additionally, I think movies have created this aura of romance around the phrase. Whenever someone says, “I miss you,” it’s always in the context of romantic yearning, usually followed by some pregnant pause, where the air becomes electric and anything is possible. So we don’t say “I miss you.” We neuter any feelings we might have and we say things like, “Hey man, how are you? It’s been too long.”

There are much larger points here, I’m sure, about toxic masculinity and the inability of men to show affection for one another. It’s likely something which is mixed up in hetero identity, because I have a gay friend who lives across the country, and I have no problem telling him that I miss him. But it’s not something you expect in a straight male relationship.

Since my experience with my friend, I’ve done some reading around this. There’s quite a bit of writing which tilts heavily towards the lack of physical affection between men. This isn’t quite what I’m talking about, but if you read some of the articles below, you’ll see that physical affection is really just an analogue for emotional intimacy, and you can’t talk about one without talking about the other.

You don’t have to consume all the articles below, but the quotes are very much worth reading. They tell a pretty consistent story.

When Did Touch Between Male Friends Become Taboo?

When I think of all the embraces that are not happening because of shame, and all the tender letters that aren’t being written just because a man thinks it’s not “manly” to express his feelings to a male friend, I get sad.

How Encouraging Intimacy Between Men May Save Lives

The problem that straight white men like [mass shooter Elliot Rodger] face is one of their own creation. By perpetuating straight male homophobia, straight men starve themselves of a much-needed source of intimacy and affection: each other.

Why Can’t Men Say “I Love You” to Each Other?

The codes men follow in love are tricky. For example, while saying a straight “I love you” is frowned upon, sometimes saying to another man “Much love” or “I got love for you” is O.K. “I love you” might even be passable if it is quickly followed by “bro” or “man.”

Honestly, I read that essay a couple times, assuming the author was gay, given the subject matter and the…tenderness (?) with which he writes about it. But then I caught a reference to “girlfriend problems,” so I now I assume he’s straight. The fact that I initially assumed he was gay speaks volumes.

I read a book of essays by Brian Doyle in which he writes about all the things his brother and him used to talk about that substituted for “I love you.”

In my experience, brothers don’t often talk bluntly about love, even if you do love each other inarticulately and thoroughly and confusedly, because it’s awkward to talk about love that’s not romantic. Everyone chatters and sings and gibbers about romantic love and how it starts and ends and waxes and wanes, but we hardly ever talk about all the other kinds of love, which include affection and respect and reverence, and also brothering, which is rough and complicated.

I have an older brother. We have never articulated that we love each other. Not one time.

The Men Who Have Mostly Female Friends

Particularly in college and beyond, Jake says, he found that he preferred the way women connect – all the friends he’s made since he was 12 are women. “I could just be genuine,” he says, “and not be judged for wanting to talk about how I feel.” It’s a cliché that women get together and “talk about our feelings,” but in my experience with my female and male friends, women often go right for the emotional throat of a conversation, where it may take most men several beers to commence venting.

Guys just don’t spend to together. At best we’re just in the same place.

My Annual Road Trips Show Me How Men Can Build Intimacy

[…] men are more accustomed to what is called “shoulder-to-shoulder” friendships: They gather around an activity.

There’s value in being proactive about it.

The road trip has remained through the shines of new relationships and the weight of heavy breakups; through the frustrations of old jobs and the excitement of finding new work; through denials and reckonings; and through dark periods and sunny skies.

This article has an interesting angle/claim – this problem is actually damaging women:

Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden

Unlike women, who are encouraged to foster deep platonic intimacy from a young age, American men – with their puffed up chests, fist bumps, and awkward side hugs – grow up believing that they should not only behave like stoic robots in front of other men, but that women are the only people they are allowed to turn to for emotional support – if anyone at all.

And this is true. When I get depressed about something, it becomes Annie’s problem. To some extent, this is how marriage is supposed to work, but when one side of a couple has no other outlet except for their spouse, I’m sure it can get exhausting. It’s clearly healthy for both sides to have some other place to turn, but in this day and age, men have fewer and fewer options.

Who other than your wife would you have pick you up from a colonoscopy?

The Post-Colonoscopy Male Friendship Test

My wife, a therapist, tells me that having lots of male friends in your 40s is unusual. The other day, one of her patients – he gave her permission for me to mention this – told her that he needed a colonoscopy and couldn’t think of a single male friend close enough to ask to pick him up from the procedure, which typically involves sedation. So I used that as my yardstick. I asked each of the male friends I mentioned above whether he would drive me home after a colonoscopy. Reader, each said yes.

Here’s a Washington Post article about friendships during COVID:

No game days. No bars. The pandemic is forcing some men to realize they need deeper friendships

[…] some surveys show men are less likely than women to admit they are lonely, while other research suggests men derive more of their emotional intimacy from the women in their lives. In one study, married men were more likely than married women to list their spouse as their best friend.

(Here’s that study: How’s Life at Home? New Evidence on Marriage and the Set Point for Happiness (PDF). Be forewarned that it’s a lot of tables of numbers…)

I’ve told my wife that I don’t really have “friends.” I have lots of acquaintances and colleagues and, of course, bros, which is slang for “I like seeing you, but let’s not get weird, okay?”

Speaking of…

The Case for Hugging Your Bros

But male touch isn’t just essential for childhood development, it contributes to our overall emotional well-being as modern men. So despite the social anxiety around homosexuality that’s still prevalent, we’ve adapted to preserve this essential homosocial bonding.

I saw that word – “homosocial” – more than once. Clearly, that produces generally the same sound as “homosexual,” but it’s completely different. It means, “social intimacy between members of the same gender.”

Clearly, I’m off on the tangent of physical affection now, which wasn’t the original point, but it speaks to how dysfunctional our thinking is here and how bound together the general concept of intimacy is. We just can’t seem to wrap our heads around male-male intimacy without it becoming something more than platonic. Like, even talking about it is a slippery slope that ends up in what some people consider to be a weird place.

Niobe Way wrote a book called “Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection.” In the WP article link above, she says that young boys will tell each other everything, but this changes as they get older.

[…] as boys begin to enter adolescence at age 15 or 16, “you start to hear them shut down and not care anymore,” Way said. They start to act defensive about their friendships, saying they’re “not gay” and that they’re not as close anymore. “You hear those expectations of manhood get imposed on them.”

Way argues the lack of vulnerability in male friendships is rooted in a misogynistic, homophobic culture that discourages emotional intimacy between men.

And that reminds me of a joke I told my pastor once:

What’s the most unrealistic thing in the Bible?

A 30-year-old man with 12 close friends.

I’m not a psychologist or a counselor, so I won’t presume to dig deeper. But I will never forget my friend sitting across a desk from me and saying “I miss you,” and how much better that made my day.

Anecdotes vs. Principles

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0500

I’m reading The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, which is the history of espionage around the world. It’s a magisterial work – some 800 pages.

I’m struggling with it, and here’s why: it’s basically a collection of episodes and anecdotes. Each chapter is about some country or intelligence service in some period of time, and it’s just one story after another. “Someone Did This” and then “Someone Else Did That,” etc.

Now, in some senses, this is what history is all about. One could say, “History is just a series of anecdotes!”

But it’s not. History is that, plus the larger lessons and principles we learn from them. What good are anecdotes unless we learn a bigger truth?

I’m reminded of Malcolm Gladwell, who’s the “master of the anecdote.” I’ve said before that Gladwell just takes a bundle of anecdotes and tries to wrap them in some larger framework just so he can tell stories. Someone once called him “brain candy.”

But whenever I’m done with a Gladwell book, I put it down and think the same thing: that was interesting, but am I any smarter than when I started it?

The same is true of The Secret World. What the book is missing is an introduction with some larger principles – like, “In the following 800 pages, these are the larger themes and principles we’re going to draw out of 5,000 anecdotes.” I feel like the reader has to be “primed” for this, both from a motivational perspective (“Wow, this is gonna be interesting!”) and so they can know what matters and what does (“Yes, this is clearly an example of X!”).

The author should even make explicit callbacks to the principles and themes they laid out, so the reader knows where to place the information and is re-assured that the author is building to some point or purpose. The reader needs to know they’re still “on the roadmap.”

I read The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons a couple months back. Simmons is a master (abuser?) of the anecdote, but he opened the book with a long discussion about what he calls “The Secret,” which was that basketball is a team game, and teams that work together are better than teams with a single superstar. Simmons kept providing examples of this foundational principle, and kept calling back to it again and again over 700 pages. Consequently, this is a thing I will remember from this book forever.

I’m reminded of the psychological principle of “gestalt”:

Something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts

The gestalt of a thing are made up of bits and pieces of anecdotes and stories. They’re the larger umbrella of understanding and wisdom that spreads over and rises out of specific examples. You need to call these out in advance so that a reader can watch for them or, at a minimum, be jarred out of routine when they encounter them.

As for The Secret World, I’m struggling with motivation. Every time I pick up the book (no mean feat – it weighs more than a few pounds), I have a sense of looming dread, since I have no idea where I’m going, and am struggling to figure out how I’m going to be a better person when I get there.

Note:
I gave a practical example of my annoyance in my review of A Promised Land, and then I had the exact opposite experience in Leonardo da Vinci.

Doing Something Poorly

Tue, 5 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0600

I heard something that resonated with me the other day (I forget where I heard this):

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

This, of course, is a play on this common saying:

Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

But, rather than making fun of an earnest, feel-good aphorism, what the former is saying is this: some things can be done just a little bit, and still provide benefit.

We tend to fall into ruts of perfectionism, like “I need to do this thing really well.” And sometimes that’s true. But sometimes it’s not.

Take exercise, for example. Some exercise is better than no exercise. So, if you go to the gym and put in a half-hearted effort, but you do something, then good for you. At least you went, got some physical benefit, and put yourself in the right mindspace.

Of course, this can be abused. You can get in the mode of putting in crap effort for everything and telling yourself, “Well, at least I did something.” But the other side of the coin is that your ability to put effort into something – like fitness – is going to ebb and flow, and don’t quit just because you’re in a place where you suck right now.

Keep moving forward, however slow and inconsistently. And if you can’t move forward, do something to just tread water until you can move forward again.

You don’t always have to be amazing. Sometimes just being something is valuable.

Update

Added on December 1, 2020

During the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a lot of discussion about preventative measures and how much good they do. There’s an argument that it’s not all or nothing – doing anything will lower the risk of transmission, and doing something else will lower it more, and all of these effects are cumulative.

In particular, I loved this graphic that the NY Times reprinted in an article entitled “The Swiss Cheese Model of Pandemic Defense.”

(The graphic is supposedly from the Virology Down Under website, but I searched that site and couldn’t find it anywhere.)

The idea is that every preventative measure you take is like a slice of Swiss cheese. It has holes, sure, but if those holes don’t line up with the next slice in the stack, then transmission is stopped. Even if the holes of two adjacent slices do line up, you’ll eventually get to one where the holes don’t line up. So every slice, no matter how many holes it has, has the opportunity to stop transmission.

You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to stack imperfect habits and practices on top of each other.

The Core Ideological Conflict: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up

Mon, 3 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0500

At its absolute core, the difference between conservatives and liberals seems to boil down to one thing: liberals believe that society can be fixed by grand architecture, while conservatives believe it can only be fixed by individual action.

Call it the difference between “top-down” and “bottom-up.”

Liberals believe that it is the government’s responsibility to put in place laws and institutions to coerce citizens to act in a certain way. Government can provide a framework to influence human behavior to benefit us all. A better society can be realized through community.
Conservatives believe that the only way to influence society in the aggregate is for individual people to take better actions that will organically combine to incrementally form a better society. Societal improvement is based on the foundation of the individual.

As would be expected, each side disagrees with the other:

Liberals believe that the conservative view is flawed because there are situations where no single person has any incentive to change – indeed, it is to their advantage to continue acting selfishly – so they have to be artificially incentivized via external legal and social structures.
Conservatives believe that humans are flawed by nature and will resist coercion. Inequalities will exist because humans have naturally differing levels of skill, ambition, and tenacity and should be rewarded as such. Attempts to architect results removes incentives and reduces ambition and achievement which makes society worse over time.

In A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Thomas Sowell discusses the “constrained and unconstrained views.” He says, in part:

Visions rest ultimately on some sense of the nature of man – not simply his existing practices but his ultimate potential and ultimate limitations. Those who see the potentialities of human nature as extending far beyond what is currently manifested have a social vision quite different from those who see human beings as tragically limited creatures whose selfish and dangerous impulses can be contained only by social contrivances which themselves produce unhappy side effects.

Sowell argues that attempts of government to equalize the playing field just make the situation worse because natural human self-centeredness will cause the penalized group to resist and rebel. Citizens will resist social architecture.

In How Now Shall We Live?, Chuck Colson talks of the liberal trend towards utopianism, which is the quest for a more perfect society through human intellect without regard to basic human character.

Scientific utopianism…expands government control while gradually sapping citizens of moral responsibility, economic initiative, and personal prudence.

In Colson’s view, expansion of government causes dependence and encourages humans to look outside themselves for solutions to problems, when the ultimate solution is based in human character.

Related to this, Dennis Prager says, in this video from Prager University, that:

Conservatives believe that the way to improve society is almost always through the moral improvement of the individual. […Liberals] on the other hand, believe that the way to a better society is almost always through doing battle with society’s moral failings.

There’s clearly a common theme: in the conservative’s view, society can only be fixed from the bottom up.

The liberal response to this aggregate point might be found in The Tragedy of the Commons, a 1968 essay (which has since become a generic economic theory) that says there are situations where no one person is incentivized to act unselfishly, and thus all will continue to act in their own self-interest toward mutual destruction.

The example from the essay is a group herdsmen keeping animals with access to a common pasture.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”

Each herdsman gains from adding one animal, but the common pasture can only support so many animals. So while there is an individual gain, there is a common loss because the pasture will eventually be unable to support all the animals:

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another…But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited.

In the liberal view, citizens are locked in an arms race with each other. If we act unselfishly to the betterment of others, we have no guarantee they will do the same. Thus, the world is full of selfish actors heading toward mutual destruction and it therefore needs external regulation and architecture to ensure we act in a way that prevents negative side effects.

To a liberal, government regulation is often the only way to force citizens to acknowledge that particular individual efforts are having a negative effect on society as a whole, and force collective change for everyone’s long-term benefit.

This is also represented by the economic principle of an externality:

[…] the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. Economists often urge governments to adopt policies that “internalize” an externality, so that costs and benefits will affect mainly parties who choose to incur them.

Left unchecked, humans unfairly inflict externalities on others. Actions have side effects that negatively affect others, and this can only be curtailed by regulation and legal or social coercion.

So, at its core, the difference between Right and Left appears to come down to how one interprets human nature and the ensuing direction from which we approach our problems:

Bottom Up: Do we trust that human self-interest and the improvement of the individual’s moral compass will have a better impact on the world than attempts at social architecture?
Top Down: Do we attempt to manage human co-existence by guiding it from a communal perspective where the rights of the individual must sometimes give way to the rights of the community?

The answer to that question seems to be the heart of political conflict, especially in the United States.

Why the Wealthy Subsidize the Tax Burden of the Middle and Lower Class

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0600

I have a theory: the U.S. economy requires a significant number of Americans to be stupid with money. If we ever all got our crap together and started managing our personal budgets responsibly, the economy might fall apart.

Consider this article from Bloomberg this morning:Americans Can’t Help Themselves From Borrowing More on Credit Cards:

Americans borrow more in good times and less during recessions. The driving factor isn’t our mood about the economy. Borrowing seems driven by our credit limits. When banks offer us a higher limit, we use it. When they cut us off, we tighten our belts.

In college, I was a bill collector for Citibank. Some of the things I’ve seen people do with credit cards just defies belief.

This is why I’m always skeptical about attempts to push tax burdens onto the middle and lower class. Yes, the wealthy pay a lot of taxes (I’ve written about this before, myself), but who else is going to pay them?

You might say, “the 47% need to pay their share!” Okay, well let’s push $1 trillion worth of tax cuts off the wealthy (who unquestionably pay more than their share) and onto the 47% percent who are freeloaders. Justice is served!

But…where is this money going to come from? These people don’t have disposable income lying around that they can just send to the government. If “Joe 47%” is making $25,000 a year and suddenly has to pay another $1,000 or $2,000 a year in taxes, where is this money going to magically come from? Based on his current budget, he can’t pay it.

But, you say, he just needs to be more responsible with his money! He has a flat-screen TV and a motorcycle. He should sell those, and stop buying stupid things!

Yes, absolutely. Let’s have him stop doing those things and pay taxes with the money instead. That will clearly be better for everyone….except Best Buy. Or the entire retail sector. Or the entire economy. Sad fact: if Joe stops doing stupid things with his money, the economy falls apart. Joe serves an economic purpose by mismanaging his finances. Every dollar he spends on something stupid is another dollar which makes the economy go ‘round.

Which brings me back to my point: the U.S. economy requires a significant number of Americans to be stupid with money.

This all relates to a larger, more subtle point: the wealthy might just have to pay more in taxes to free up the middle and lower class to keep the economy moving. Every extra $1 that “Milton 1%” pays in taxes is $1 that Joe can go spend at Best Buy. And Joe spending that money at Best Buy is what keeps the economy turning.

To sound terribly crass and elitist about it: do the wealthy subsidize the tax burden of the lower class so that the lower class can make them rich?

Milton depends on a thriving economy to make money. And Joe – multiplied by 250,000,000 – is the irresponsible engine that keeps that economy moving. Perhaps it’s better for Milton to just pay some of Joe’s taxes so he can keep being stupid with money and Milton can get richer?

If Milton got a $1 trillion tax cut, here’s my feeling on how this would play out –

Milton would love it for the first 2-3 years. He’s paying less money in taxes. But Joe suddenly has to pay the government a bunch of money he doesn’t have. Let’s assume he gets his crap together rather than go broke. Joe stops buying flat screen TVs, and motorcycles, and he cancels cable, and his data plan, and stops eating out, just so he can save enough money to pay his newly enlarged tax bill.

By Year 5, Milton is starting to sweat. The economy has tanked. His business is starting to decline. Whatever it is that Milton does to be rich is not working that well anymore. Economic problems have “trickled up” to made Milton’s life harder.

By Year 10, Milton realizes the truth: it was better to just pay a bunch of Joe’s taxes. Distasteful as Milton found that, it was a necessary evil. Ten years on, he has lost so much more money than he ever spent subsidizing Joe’s taxes in the first place.

In summary, the thought process is this…

If we cut taxes for the wealthy, then…
who is going to pay more in taxes, and…
where is that money going to come from, and…
at the expense of what other economic sectors, and…
what happens to the overall economy when those sectors decline?

Yes, the wealthy pay more than their fair share of taxes. But any “cure” might be worse than the disease.

The Conservative Case for Drug Price Controls?

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0600

Reading a book called Rise of the Robots about the increasing role of automation in our lives. The author takes a bit of a detour in the chapter on health care to discuss how the markets are broken. I’m not sure how related to automation this is, but he makes this interesting point:

…every other national government negotiates prices with the drug companies. The result is that Americans, in effect, subsidize the lower drop prices in the rest of the world.

[…] It’s something of a mystery to me why this is not more disturbing to Americans, and to grassroots conservatives in particular. The Tea Party, after all, got started after a famous rant by CNBC personality Rock Santelli, who decried the fact that people with mortgages they couldn’t afford might be subsidized by taxpayers. Why aren’t average Americans more upset that they are paying pharmaceutical freight for the right of the world – including a number of countries that have significantly higher per capita incomes than the United States?

Drug companies are price-limited in other parts of the world, so they charge higher prices in the United States to make up for it. The rest of the world gets a free(er) ride off the backs of U.S. patients.

The U.S. effectively ships billions of dollars overseas by paying the drug companies to provide drugs at lower costs to other countries. We pay more, so they pay less.

Now, I’m not blanket condemning this. The are some countries so poor that this might be a unintended humanitarian effort than needs to happen. But it’s quite interesting to look at from a politically conservative standpoint. Could this be a rare situation where a political conservative should support price controls in the U.S. so drug companies would have no choice but charge other countries more to level prices?

Feeding Children in Mali

Sat, 26 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0600

I read a book recently called Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts. The book was just okay, but it contained a chilling story that I don’t want to forget.

The book was written by a motivational speaker, and a master of the story and anecdote. We apparently volunteered in the Third World, and relayed this story about his time in Mali, and of a picture he keeps in his office to remind himself of what he has.

The picture shows the 35-year-old me kneeling next to a Red Cross professional in the Sahara Desert. Behind her is a line of children between the ages of two and sixteen.

The food supply in Mali was extremely limited, so the Red Cross was introducing triage. Any available food would be handed out to children between the ages of two and sixteen on the chilling assumption that children under two would almost certainly die and those over sixteen might survive on their own.

The woman from the Red Cross was measuring children’s arms to determine who ate, who didn’t. If their arms were too large, they were “not hungry enough” and given no food. If their arms were too small, they were beyond saving and also given no food. If their arms were in the midrange, they were given a small portion of the available food.

I’d need a sociopath’s personality to be unmoved by the experience. But as I returned home to my “normal” life, there was a good chance the memory, no matter how searing, would gradually recede in power. Except I have this photo.

The picture triggers gratitude, as if the 1984 me is coaching today’s me.

I try to comprehend the idea of denying a starving two-year-old food because they will die anyway, and I simply can’t. While I do not second-guess the people on the ground in that situation, and I just can’t wrap my head around a choice like that.

Much like the author kept a picture of the event to remember it, I took a photo of this page in the book, and transcribed it here so that I might too remember.

New Word: "Variegated" and In-Group/Out-Group Bias

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0600

An adjective which seems to related originally to colors:

Varied in appearance or color; marked with patches or spots of different colors; varied; diversified; diverse.

It seems to just be another way to state “varied,” perhaps with more emphasis on a series of discrete states or gradients.

Found in the book The Organized Mind in a discussion of “In-Group/Out-Group” bias, which is the concept where we find numerous variations of those people in our “in-group,” but we tend to view the “out-group” as a single, monolithic block. The example from the book:

Oh Democrats are a very diverse group – we come from all walks of life. Oh those Republicans – all they care about is lower taxes. They’re all alike.

And the usage of the word…

In cases on in-group/out-group bias, each group thinks of the other as homogeneous and monolithic, and each group views itself as variegated and complex.

Not All "Likes" Are Created Equal

Mon, 5 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0600

I quit Facebook about a month ago.

I still have an account because I need it for work – a surprising number of business comes in through Facebook, and I maintain 3-4 Facebook Messenger conversations on any given day. However, I stopped posting updates back in November and even went to the trouble to “gut” my Facebook account. I found a $2.99 Firefox extension which deleted everything, including 500 pictures and almost 3,000 status updates. Aside from a few profile pictures, my account is now essentially an empty shell.

Why I did this is a long story, involving an intersection between my own narcissism and insecurity. If there’s any platform in the world more capable than Facebook of exaggerating those two things, I have yet to find it. I essentially spent seven years of my life trying to be interesting on Facebook and feeling insecure that I wasn’t as interesting as I hoped to be. It’s embarrassing to admit that, but there you go.

Withdrawal is hard. It’s been difficult to avoid the kneejerk reaction to share stuff. A couple of times a day, I find a web link that I want to tell people about, or something I could take a picture of and share. I keep having to remind myself that I don’t do that anymore.

Last night, my wife and I watched the 1995 remake of Sabrina with our eldest daughter. After it was over, I immediately thought about posting something about it on Facebook. I could tell people about this movie, I thought, and (the thought behind the thought was…) people would “Like” it.

But I don’t do that anymore. Weirdly, I found myself I looking over at my wife (#1) and daughter (#2) on the couch, and thinking, “Hell, I only got two ‘Likes’ out of this…” Nevermind the fact that they were actual “Likes,” meaning actual breathing humans who are important to me and that genuinely liked something I did.

But here’s the rub: not all “Likes” are created equal, and it’s taken me a long time to acknowledge it. Oh sure, in the back of my head, I knew this was true. But as venal and superficial as I am, I somehow equated dozens of meaningless button presses from people I barely knew as having some worth.

So, I watched a movie last night and got two “Likes” for it – my wife and my daughter. I’m on my way back to an emotional state where that is simply enough and I’ll know that those two “Likes” are more important than all the others.

If you are in this state now (and be honest…), stay there. Over almost 20 years, the Internet has turned me into a damn superficial person, and at 43-years-old I’m finally in the process of extracting myself from that aspect of it.

It’s going to take a while to get there (I’m learning that Facebook is just the beginning), but I’ll be a better person for it.

Embedded Racial Bias

Sun, 4 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0600

Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions: A good (bad?) roll up of studies which show that embedded, perhaps subconscious racism is alive and well.

When doctors were shown patient histories and asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much less likely to recommend cardiac catheterization (a helpful procedure) to black patients […]
When whites and blacks were sent to bargain for a used car, blacks were offered initial prices roughly $700 higher, and they received far smaller concessions.
[…] sending emails with stereotypically black names in response to apartment-rental ads on Craigslist elicited fewer responses than sending ones with white names.
White state legislators were found to be less likely to respond to constituents with African-American names. This was true of legislators in both political parties.
Emails sent to faculty members at universities, asking to talk about research opportunities, were more likely to get a reply if a stereotypically white name was used.
Even eBay auctions were not immune. When iPods were auctioned on eBay, researchers randomly varied the skin color on the hand holding the iPod. A white hand holding the iPod received 21 percent more offers than a black hand.

Lots more in the article, including some analysis as to why this happens.

Reading Shakespeare

Thu, 25 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0600

My reading goal in 2014 was 52 books (one per week). I ended up reading 66 (and counting). My tentative goal for 2015 is to read all of Shakespeare’s 38 plays.

I started early with The Merchant of Venice. I read the text first – it’s quite short, but slow, slow going. Shakespeare being Shakespeare, the writing is not…straightforward. To call it “flowery” would be an insult to flowers.

I bought a book which, along with the script, had a scene-by-scene, Cliff Notes-ish companion. All throughout, I was dismayed at how much I was missing. I would read a scene, then read the summary, and realize that huge parts of it had gone over my head.

In an effort to better understand it, I figured I should watch a performance of it. Completely by luck, I stumbled on an amazing collection of 14 YouTube videos comprising the entirety of a 1974 TV special. I watched the entire thing, while reading along with the text, and I learned a lot about the performance of drama:

The timing is quite different. My copy of the play had only Shakespeare’s original stage direction, which was minimal. People would make huge speeches, which you could only imagine them standing there and doing as a grand monologue. But in the video, people stopped talking, then moved around the set, then started talking again. Or they had huge pauses between words that ran together in the text – some sentences, when spoken, began in the middle of a verse in the text, and ended in the middle of another verse. Watching this gave me so much more context. What seemed to be a strange, clearly Shakespearean monologue turned out to be something much less awkward and obvious, broken up between many different actions and gaps in speech which made it seem more natural.
There is emotion, in voice, facial expression, and physical performance. In regular fiction writing, you have adverbs. Someone can say something “angrily” or “happily.” In a script, you have no such direction – you just have dialog and stage direction. Watching Shylock’s reaction when he realizes his daughter has run away made me understand that he blamed Christians for it, and was so happy when Antonio’s ships were sunk, so he could get his pound of flesh. Watching Laurence Olivier delver this is scene is just amazing. Later, when Gratiano mocks Shylock, and when Shylock screams upon being sentenced – mere words in a screenplay just cannot convey the emotion of these scenes.
There is physical context. When the play is being acted out, there are props and rooms and a sense of physical space. The scene where Portia’s suitors are selecting “caskets” made so much more sense – they were actually small chests, not the funeral caskets I was envisioning. When the actors were delivering the lines on a decorated set, so much more made sense than it did when you had nothing but the text.

(Also worth nothing about this play in particular: it’s anti-Semitic as hell. It’s uncomfortable in its stereotypical depiction of Jews. I’m wondering if every bigoted perspective of Jewish people as greedy money-lenders came from this play. The character of Shylock the Jew is a grand collection of every negative cliché associated with the Jewish people.)

A script is a tough read in general. I’m beginning to wonder if my goal to “read” Shakespeare should perhaps instead be a goal to watch a performance of each of his plays, while following along with the script. There’s no doubt that I’ll have to watch each play to make sense of it, and would it be…legal, to do my reading of it at the same time?

Indeed, was drama meant to be watched, rather than read? Can you read a play and expect to comprehend and appreciate the full weight of it? I think when you have a combination of (1) language and verbiage very different from contemporary usage, and (2) minimal stage direction, this makes it very hard to envision and understand what’s going on.

Teaching True North

Wed, 10 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0600

My mother died five years ago. I was 38 when she died, an adult with kids of my own. My oldest was a teenager.

Since then, I’ve watched my son graduate high school and start his second year of college. Watching one of your children leave the house is a sobering experience. You have moments of panic where you wonder if you’ve taught them everything they need to know. Are they ready for the world? I am injecting this adult that I have raised into society – will it be better or worse for the experience?

Over the years, I keep coming back to thoughts of Mom and what she must have gone through with me. I was a disaster as a child and worse as a young adult. I couldn’t remember anything. I had no ability to keep my room clean. Personal responsibility was an alien concept. My adolescence was a continual tug of war between Mom and I. I kept trying to regress into complete disorder, and she kept pulling me back to civilization.

Mom nagged me about grades, though I never improved much. Mom kept on me about cleaning up after myself, though I never did. Mom corrected my English, but I still said things like “I want that really bad” to which she would instantly retort “Badly! You want that really badly.” Mom dragged me to church every Sunday morning, even though I continued to drift away. Mom quoted Bible verses to me, even when I tried hard not to listen.

When I finally left Mom’s house at 21, I wondered, “Is she disappointed with me? Does she think she failed because I never managed to get my crap together?” But now, at 43 and with the perspective that goes along with those years, I think I finally understand.

As parents, we have a core responsibility to teach our children how to find “true north.” We owe it to the world to give our children a compass with which they can always orient themselves in the right direction, even if it takes them a while to move that way. They might get lost on the side of the road, wander aimlessly, even occasionally go backwards. This is simply the imperfect process of growing up. But so long as they know where true north is, they can find their way back.

I spent my early 20s wandering in circles. I spent some time in the military, dropped in and out of college, had bad relationships, drank a little too much, and spent money I didn’t have. By all accounts, I was an aimless wreck.

But all throughout, I knew where true north was. Even if I was heading in the wrong direction most of the time, I was at least self-aware, and I knew what I should be doing, even if I couldn’t bring myself to actually do it.

I don’t know what Mom thought during this time. If she was disappointed in me, she never showed it. She loved me relentlessly, and was always available to dispense either support or tough love, depending on the crisis (and there were many). I suspect she simply put faith in her belief that she had taught me true north, and her hope that eventually I’d circle back in the right direction.

And eventually I did. I married a wonderful woman, built a business, and I’m in various stages of raising three amazing children. I even ended up on the Board of Trustees of the seminary where Mom worked for years (she would have been absolutely floored by this, had she lived long enough to see it).

I think I’ve put a life together that Mom would be proud of. It took me a while to get here, but Mom made sure I knew which path would deliver me.

I try to remember this when my girls don’t throw away the little plastic sleeves that the juice box straws come in. I find these all over the kitchen, and no matter how often I point it out, they still end up everywhere. Perhaps one day they’ll learn to throw them away, or perhaps they won’t, but my responsibility as a parent is to make sure they know what the right thing is, even if they leave my house never having done it.

Yes, it’d be wonderful if we could change every undesirable behavior of our children. Lord knows I’ll never stop trying. But even if they head into the world not being able to keep their rooms clean, staying up too late, and eating too much sugar, I promise you that I’ll be the nagging voice in the back of their heads. Call it guilt, call it what you want, but they’ll think of me every time they don’t clean up after themselves or skip church on Sunday morning. They’ll know true north, and they’ll always know how to find their way back to it.

Now that Mom is gone, I see the path she hoped I would follow, more and more every day. She walked me as far down that path as I would let her, then she let me go, watched me get lost, and eventually find my way back again.

Mom is waiting at the end of that path, somewhere over the horizon. One of the driving forces in her life was to make sure I knew how to find the right way to the end of it. When I get there, I hope I’ll be able to tell her that I did the same thing for my own children.

Where is your Iceland?

Sat, 6 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0600

I just finished “Brave New World,” a novel written in 1932 that describes the “perfection” of society through science.

Parallel to the advancement of science, “Brave New World” deals with the retardation of creativity and individuality. Humans in a civilized society are expected to fit in. “Everyone belongs to everyone else,” is the mantra (indeed, people are bred, with no concept of parentage or family). The masses are tranquilized with regular access to a drug called “soma”. No one needs to step out of line, because everyone is artificially happy. They worship a God called “Ford,” after Henry Ford, the car manufacturer who championed the assembly line method of production.

Two of the main characters – Bernard Marx and Hermholtz Watson – are misfits who have a lingering distaste for the society in which they live. Both have been threatened in the past with being forced to leave. The standard threat is to exile them to an island (usually Iceland), away from civilization, to live with others who have been exiled.

Due to an unfortunate event, these threats come true, and Bernard is dragged out of a room screaming for mercy. After he leaves, “The Controller” (a man who was a bit of a subversive himself in his younger days) says this:

“One would think he was going to have his throat cut,” said the Controller, as the door closed. “Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he’d understand that his punishment is really a reward. He’s being sent to an island. That’s to say, he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who’s anyone. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson.”

The Controller understands that beauty is not in conformity, but in individuality and creativity. Bernard is being sent to an uncontrolled environment, to live with people just like him: “…the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world.”

Hermholtz accepts his fate with more stoicism, as all he has ever wanted to be was a poet –

The Controller smiled. “[…] would you like a tropical climate? The Marquesas, for example; or Samoa? Or something rather more bracing?”

Helmholtz rose from his pneumatic chair. “I should like a thoroughly bad climate,” he answered. “I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example …”

The Controller nodded his approbation. “I like your spirit, Mr. Watson. I like it very much indeed. As much as I officially disapprove of it.” He smiled. “What about the Falkland Islands?”

“Yes, I think that will do,” Helmholtz answered.

May we all find our Iceland or our Falkland Islands someday.

States' Rights and the Scope of Government

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

There’s a constant debate in this country about the appropriate size, scope and strength of government. This debate has raged since all the country was founded and shows no signs of letting up.

Conservatives think all forms of government should be smaller in scope. And while Liberals don’t necessarily want government to be larger just for the sake of being larger (few people will get elected by campaigning for more government), they think that in many cases it needs to be larger in order to adequately enforce justice and fairness.

By size and scope, we mean the “level” at which we are governed. Considering yourself as a resident of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, you’re subject to multiple levels of government, from smaller to larger:

The City of Sioux Falls
The County of Lincoln or Minnehaha
The State of South Dakota
The Federal Government of the United States

Each “level” has its own laws and rules. Sometimes they contradict each other, and there are rules for how those conflicts are resolved. In general, the larger government entity wins – county governments can overrule city governments, states can overrule counties, and the federal government of the United States can overrule everyone.

(You need to understand that word: federal. That means the government of the country. Federal means, roughly, “a group of things together,” or a federation. Whenever someone refers to “federal [anything],” they’re referring to that thing at the level of the country government, as opposed to state, county, or city.)

In the Constitution is something called the Supremacy Clause, which reads like this:

This Constitution […] shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

Essentially, the federal government wins all conflicts over laws. The federal government is “the supreme law of the land,” and if it has a law about something, that law supersedes anything at a lower level of government.

In complete opposition to this is the idea of “states’ rights.” States’ rights means that the states have powers that the federal government shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with. To this end, the Supremacy Clause is held in check by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which says this:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

This says, essentially, that the federal government can only take powers specifically granted to it by the Constitution. Any powers outside of that belong to the states. This amendment was put in place to placate people who were afraid that a large federal government was just going to suck up all the power it could.

That this was included in the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) speaks volumes about how much the founding fathers of this country wrestled with the scope of government. When this country was being formed, one of the biggest debates was how strong the federal government should be, in opposition to the state governments. The two sides of the debate were the “federalists,” who wanted a strong central government, and the (awkwardly-named) “anti-federalists” that wanted a weaker central government.

(The Federalists wrote a series of articles in the late 1780s, while the current Constitution was under debate. These articles laid out the case for our current government in an attempt to persuade people to ratify it. Collectively, they are called The Federalist Papers and they likely constitute the greatest argument in favor of the current government of the United States. As a sidenote, there was an unorganized counter-effort called The Anti-Federalist Papers, which isn’t nearly as well-known.)

Hundreds of years later, we’re still wrestling with this question. We have never-ending arguments about whether or not the federal government possesses the power to do many of the things it does.

The Civil War was certainly about slavery, but it was also about states who claimed that the federal government had no right to tell them how to deal with slavery. More recently, a lot of the argument about Obamacare has centered largely on whether or not the federal government is allowed to enforce many of the laws and rules that program requires to operate. (States have implemented things very close to Obamacare, and no one complained. It became a big issue only when the federal government tried to do it.)

In fact, a lot of cases in front of the Supreme Court aren’t even about the merits of whether or not some law should or should not be enacted. Rather, they’re arguing about whether or not the federal government tried to take power away from the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment.

Why do we care about this? A Conservative would cite three reasons against larger government:

Larger government doesn’t always represent the governed
Larger government runs the risk of over-reaching and becoming oppressive
Larger government is inefficient

First, many people, especially conservatives, feel that government needs to be as “close” to the governed as possible, and larger government shouldn’t be allowed to indiscriminately rule over smaller government. The argument is that The City of Sioux Falls knows what a resident of Sioux Falls wants and needs more than the county, state, or country, so the city would be more effective in addressing those needs.

This is known as “subsidiarity”:

[…] a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate (or local) level that is consistent with their resolution. […] a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level

Put another way, trying to enforce the same laws in Texas (very conservative) and Massachusetts (very liberal) leads to problems. You can’t blanket a hugely diverse country like ours with laws that will violate the conscience and ideals of large groups of people. Therefore, laws should take into account the beliefs and desires of the governed, and we are so different across this country that the only way to make sure this happens is to try to “drive down” government to the level closest to those subjected to its laws.

Second, the United States has a bad history with government. Remember that we broke away from England in the late 1700s, which was the very definition of an oppressive government. It ruled us from across the Atlantic (at a time when communication took months), extracted a lot of taxes, and didn’t do much in return. Therefore, fear and loathing of a large, detached government runs deep in this country. We’re quite different from the countries of Europe in this respect. They have a more trusting and welcoming opinion of government, where many people in this country are still influenced by the memory of our original relationship with the British.

This feeling is strong with conservatives. In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said:

Government isn’t the solution to our problem; it is the problem.

These memories also play apart in America’s love affair with personal firearms. Many gun owners just don’t think the government should interfere, but a segment of this group also believes citizens have a responsibility to arm themselves in the event the federal government tries to seize too much power. Armed insurrection is a very real option for these people, and any attempt of the federal government to regulate their gun ownership is part of a sinister program to de-arm them in order to control them. This might seem far-fetched, but it’s just a small – and perhaps extreme – example of the underlying suspicion Americans generally have of their own government.

Also remember that the current Constitution wasn’t our first form of government. Originally, we created the Articles of Confederation, which effectively made states like little countries – they could print their own money, have treaties with other states, etc. The federal government had very little power over the states. This situation lasted for about a decade before we decided it was unworkable and moved to more tightly unify the country under the current Constitution. So, understand that the current configuration of the United Statesis an even larger government than some of the original founding fathers wanted.

Third, the United States is a big country, and scaling government laws and policies to 350 million people can be tough to do. This argument against larger government says that states can do things more efficiently than the federal government, and the federal government has a long history of screwing things up because it’s just too big.

Additionally, there is repetition and overlap are different levels. When Texas governor Rick Perry ran for president in 2012, one of his promised initiatives was to eliminate the federal Department of Education. Many people were horrified: “He doesn’t want to educate children?!” These people forgot that every state also has a Department of Education, and most every city has a school district. What Perry was trying to say is that education is something we can leave to the states, and not spend money at the federal level to manage it.

So, in the face of all that, why would we want larger government? Why would be want the federal government to step in and rule over states? A couple reasons:

Laws from one level of government to another are so different and “patchworked” that it causes inefficiency in commerce
Laws from one level of government violate some national/federal principle of human rights

An example of the former is dealing with rules that interfere with “interstate commerce,” which is when someone tries to conduct business across state lines. In 1959, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that Illinois couldn’t require a certain type of mudflap on trucks, since no other state did, and in doing this, it made it harder to do business since regular mudflaps were now illegal in Illinois and trucks often had to cross Illinois on their way to somewhere else. The Court said this was a hindrance of interstate commerce and the federal government could nullify this law, which is considered a landmark ruling against states rights and in favor of the federal government.

For the latter, consider gay rights. The Constitution (the federal law) prohibits discrimination on the basis of things like sex, religion, etc., but not on sexual orientation. This means it’s still within the states’ rights to allow employers to fire a gay employee just because they’re gay. Gay rights activists say this isn’t fair, and that this violates a national principle of fairness, and that all states should be simply required to protect gay employees. Therefore, many believe the federal government needs to exercise the Supremacy Clause and require all states to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Issues of states’ rights and the size and scope of government are a never-ending tug-of-war in this country. Every year, dozens of cases make it to the appellate courts that ask for a ruling on whether or not a state or the federal government has the right to do something.

Should each state have broad powers to govern itself without interference? Or are we better served as a country by a strong central government which prevents states from deviating too far from a national standard of legislation? Are we fifty strong, individual states which happen to form a nation together? Or are we more of a single, unified nation which just happens to be divided into fifty states?

A defining principle of a political perspective is where you think the balance of power should lie between the different levels of government, and how strong you think our federal government should be.

Charity and Personal Responsibility

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

One of the defining characteristics of your political view is how you think a government should balance charity against personal responsibility.

Charity is the government giving aid in the form of social programs for the economically challenged: welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, mortgage debt relief, etc. Helping people in need is generally accepted as a hallmark of civilized society and is very much inline with the Christian ideals that the U.S. still overwhelmingly supports.

That’s clearly good, right? So let’s give out as much charity as possible, case closed.

Unfortunately, the opposite side to this argument is that government charity decreases the need for personal responsibility. If people know that there’s a safety net for them, then they won’t exhibit responsibility in their personal behavior. The chronic result of this will be a society of people who don’t feel the need to work hard for anything because “the system” (the government’s social programs) will always be around to save them, so their ambition and motivation dries up and they just live off the system to some extent.

This is a perennial argument in politics, and the side taken on it will very much affect whether you see yourself as a conservative or liberal. Liberals generally believe in greater charity, while conservatives believe in less charity and greater personal responsibility. Liberals don’t believe that the poor are poor because of personal choice and that social justice therefore compels us to help. Conservatives believe in a “tough love” approach, that anyone can improve their circumstances if they are sufficiently motivated to do so, and that too much charity kills that motivation.

(This New York Times article summarized a lot of the research that says assistance does not corrupt the poor. But, in reading that, know there are no-doubt similar examples on the right.)

The sad fact is that both sides are correct, based on how they view the group needing charity. This is one of the biggest problems in arguing about this – both sides tend to think that everyone in a demographic group is there for the same reason. Both sides have created strawmen (go read that link) of the recipients of charity, and based their arguments around supporting or destroying that strawman.

When we consider “the poor” as a mass group of people, the two extremes look like this:

They are poor because of circumstances outside of their control
They are poor because they’re unmotivated and don’t work hard enough

And this is how many people view the situation – they pick one of the above, and paint everyone in the group with that brush. The truth is that there are a lot of reasons why someone might be poor, and different people fall into different groups.

Consider:

A single mother with four children and a deadbeat ex who doesn’t pay child support. She might be working as hard as possible, but just can’t make ends meet, so has reluctantly applied for food stamps but is trying to find a way off them as soon as possible.
A high school dropout who refuses to get a job and just sits around a smokes pot all day, only leaving the house to cash his welfare check. So long as the government is going to pay him to play XBox, then why should he do anything else?

I don’t think anyone would disagree that we, as a society, want to help the single mother, but the high school dropout can dry up and blow away for all we care. The problem is that social programs are not great at sorting these two groups out. We’re expecting finely-grained targeting with a sledgehammer, essentially.

Now, it’s an over-statement to say that each political view thinks the poor is completely comprised of one or the other, but the two sides do disagree on the proportion.

Liberals think that most of the poor fit the profile of our single mother – people who work hard, but just can’t make ends meet due to specific circumstances out of their control (the deadbeat ex, for example), or due to larger forces brought about by the wealthy (“the 1%”) involving income equality, depression of wages for the working class, erosion of worker rights, etc. Social programs need to exist because we have failed the poor as a country by allowing (even encouraging) oppressive economic environments to exist.

Conservatives think that a larger proportion of the poor are not sufficiently motivated, either due to their acute lack of personal ethics, or because they’ve simply grown up in a society that has chronically rewarded inactivity and has therefore ingrained a lack of motivation in them. They believe our society has minimized moral hazard (read that link too) by building larger and larger social programs. Cutting social programs might not fix the personal responsibility problem immediately, but a generation growing up with less charity will be forced to develop more personal responsibility therefore strengthening the country over time.

I think that both sides have the same intent – we don’t want people to have to rely on social programs as a necessity of life – but there are different ways of solving the problem. Liberals think that the problem needs to be solved by the community, and that the poor cannot raise themselves up until we solve larger issues of our social structure like the aforementioned income inequality. Conservatives think that the problem is a lack of personal initiative, and that relying on social programs should not be a comfortable situation, which risks that people simply want to stay there rather than improve their circumstances.

In the end, both sides have set up strawmen for each other. Conservatives think that liberals are naïve and get taken advantage of. Liberals think conservatives are heartless and care about money more than people. If you believe one of these scenarios, then it’s very easy to disagree with the other side and think they’re idiots.

If somehow we could get to a point where social programs existed but only helped those who truly needed help, then both sides would likely be happy. I have no doubt that the average conservative very much wants to help the single mother get to a point of self-sufficiency, and I also have no doubt that the average liberal wants the high school dropout get off his ass and find a job.

But, until we get to that day – which we likely never will – there will be a constant argument over what level of charity we should provide as a society, and what effect different levels have on our individual personal responsibility.

The Politics of Getting Re-elected

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

One would hope that politicians always act in ways which they think will directly benefit the country. But, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they do things that actually go against their better judgment. Sometimes they do this in a specific situation, and sometimes they just adopt long-term positions which they might not completely agree with.

In 2012, famed statistician Nate Silver wrote:

Why is compromise so hard in the House? Some commentators, especially liberals, attribute it to what they say is the irrationality of Republican members of Congress. But the answer could be this instead: Individual members of Congress are responding fairly rationally to their incentives

Politicians, like anyway, respond to incentives. They do things to get things. And the biggest thing they want? Re-election.

If a politician could get into office and stay there with no threat of ever getting kicked out, then they would be free to act in ways completely true to their beliefs (one would hope). Sadly, the actions of a politician are always somewhat covered up by artifice, because they have to be re-elected and this will influence their behavior.

There are three things you usually must have to get re-elected:

The support of your party
A lot of money
The support of your constituents

Obtaining and retaining these three things will influence the actions a politician takes while in office.

First, you need the support of your political party. If you’re a Conservative, then this is likely The Republican Party, and if you’re a liberal, then it’s The Democratic Party.

The parties hold considerable power during a political campaign – they have a lot of money they can choose to spend or not spend on your race, and they often hold the key to getting endorsed by more powerful members of your party. If you’re a Democrat running for office and you get an endorsement and a couple of campaign commercials with the sitting Democratic president, well that’s huge for you. With any luck, he’ll even stop by your state and make an appearance with you.

This means that you have to have your party behind you before you run for re-election. To do this, you have support “the party line” over the years – you have to mostly vote the way party wants you to vote. Your party helped get you elected, and you are expected to support the party’s policies, projects, and philosophies in return. In most cases, you were going to vote the party line anyway (or else, why would you be a member of that party?), but in some specific case, you might have wanted to vote differently but were coerced into following the party line.

If a party – Republicans or Democrats – want to pass something, for example, they each have a position called The Whip. The Whip is a special congressman whose has the unenviable job of “whipping” his colleagues into shape when the party needs to come together on a vote. Whips enforce the party line. This is the person who visits the offices, arranges for vote trading (you vote for my bill and I’ll vote for yours), and I’m sure even threatens people with the withdrawal of political support.

(Future president Lyndon Johnson was famous for this when he was in Congress – look at this picture, for example. Johnson was a physically imposing man, and sometimes his “persuasion” bordered on physical threats. And remember Frank Underwood from House of Cards? He was the Democratic Whip in the House, and you can see how he treated people that didn’t support him. The Whip’s job is to enforce party discipline by whatever means necessary.)

If you don’t vote with your party most of the time, you can expect to pay for it come election season. Your party might withhold funds, they might support your challenger in the primary election, or they might offer only lukewarm endorsements from prominent party figures.

This sounds vindictive, but it’s just common sense. They obviously want to spend money and influence on someone who will be an asset to the party, and if this isn’t you, then they’ll find someone else.

Whatever the consequence, it won’t be pretty, and you likely won’t survive.

Second, you often need a lot of money to run for re-election, especially if your challenger is popular (or if you’re unpopular). Political campaigns are insanely expensive, and it’s a sad fact that you can largely buy elections in this country. I don’t mean that you can get anyone elected, but if most everything else is equal, the candidate spending the most money will usually win. You know that political advertising that drives us nuts every other fall? Well, sadly, it works.

A lot of this money comes from your party (see above), and certainly some of it comes from everyday people who believe in you and donate to your campaign. If you’re rich, you can even pay for some of it yourself – in 2008, Mitt Romney spent $35 million of his own money trying to get elected president.

Unfortunately, there’s another option – so-called “special interests.” These are often individual companies, but also groups of organizations that band together into what are called “political action committees.” These groups are seeking out some kind of political goal, and they donate money to political campaigns to achieve it.

This takes two forms:

A general donation in the hopes of getting a politician elected that will further the goals of the organization.
A specific donation in return for an implicit favor, in the form of a vote on something the organization wants.

The former is relatively innocent – we’re all allowed to support politicians that we agree with. The latter, however, gets pretty sleazy pretty fast. You can’t actually trade money for a vote, but it’s fairly clear that if a certain company donates a ton of money to particular candidate, that candidate is going to vote their way if they get elected. Additionally, when facing down an important vote, a lot of politicians will likely take stock of who donated to their last campaign, and how this vote will affect them.

Here’s a quote from a news article about Comcast (the cable company):

Comcast even in normal years is a major political donor. The company spent more than $3.5 million during 2011 and 2012 on a slew of Democratic and Republican candidates, and it has shelled out just under $2 million already in the 2014 cycle, according to federal records.

Why do you think Comcast is spending that money? Because they want something in return.

You have to consider cause and effect here – which came first, the political position, or the money? For example, consider these three things:

Comcast does not want the Internet classified as a public utility, because it would affect the way they set prices
Comcast has donated a lot of money to the campaign of Senator Ted Cruz
Ted Cruz has opposed classifying the Internet as a public utility

So, which came first? Did Ted Cruz always oppose this (point #3), and Comcast thought, “This is guy we want to keep in office, so let’s help him stay there” (then #2)? Or did Ted Cruz not have an opinion, and Comcast donates a bunch of money (#2), and suddenly Ted Cruz forms an opinion which miraculously coincides with what Comcast wants (then #3)?

For the record, I don’t know, and Comcast has donated to a lot people, not just Ted Cruz. Cruz is a conservative in favor of smaller government, so he very well might oppose the public utility option purely on principle, and Comcast donation had nothing to do with it.

Furthermore, understand that this happens all the time. Every politician takes money from special interests (here’s a website that documents special interest donations; here’s the donations to our own Tim Johnson, for example), so it’s tough to single anyone out.

This sounds a lot like bribery, but the politicians’ defense is that their positions came first, and the money came second. However, I’m quite sure the reverse is often true – some politicians will form (or reverse) a position in exchange for donations, and I’m also sure that some blatant vote-selling happens (“Donate $X to my campaign, and I will change my vote for you.”).

Finally, to get elected, you have to have the support of your constituents. This is clearly a no-brainer – you have to get people to vote for you. And remember that even if you’re serving the entire nation as a U.S. Congressman, the only people that vote for you are the people in your district back home, so you will do things to make them happy.

What’s one of the best ways to make them happy? Bring them money in the form of federal projects. The federal government has money to spend on stuff, and your goal is to get the government to spend as much money has it can in your home district, so you can show your constituents all the money your brought home and consequently get them to vote you back into office.

This is called “pork,” or “pork barrel politics.” Pork is stuff you managed to get the federal government to spend in your district. Some of it might be necessary and justified. Some of it, however, is clearly unnecessary and is done simply because a Congressman worked hard to make it happen.

(This brings up the question of who a Congressman is supposed to serve – their country, or their district? Should they always act in the best interests of the country as a whole, or should they freely screw the country and other states if it will benefit their own district? People have different opinions here.)

This spending can be in the form of all sorts of stuff – you can get the government to bring disaster relief funds after a hurricane, you can get the Army to open a new base in your hometown, you can get the Department of Transportation to spent $100 million on a new interstate, etc.

The late Senator Robert Byrd was famous for this. He was from West Virginia and was a master at steering federal money back to his state. They called him the “King of Pork” and he got so many federal projects back to his state that there’s a Wikipedia page listing all the things named after him because of this. He was quite proud, saying:

I lost no opportunity to promote funding for programs and projects of benefit to the people back home.

This was a good strategy. Byrd served in Congress for well over 50 years, he was re-elected over a dozen times (by overwhelming majorities), and technically never left office – he died while actively serving in Congress.

Pork politics might get you to do things that go against your philosophy and label, which always seems to get overlooked. For instance, conservatives who campaign against “big government” will usually ease off this language when there’s a chance for millions of dollars in federal spending in their home district. The general adage is, “We need to cut government spending! … except if the government is spending it in my district, then it’s cool.” And it goes both ways – a liberal who wants to cut the military budget might shockingly support a proposed Army base in their district…

And consider George W. Bush, who campaigned as a conservative in favor of small government, yet pushed for Medicare Part D, which was a historic and expensive expansion of a social program. He did this during his first term, leading to cynical speculation that he was just trying to lock in the senior citizen vote for his upcoming re-election campaign.

Military base closures in particular are a great example of pork politics in action. Many politicians admit that the U.S. military needs to close several bases around the country because they not necessary. But a military base is usually a huge impact to the regional economy – the average base has thousands of people working there, and contributes millions and millions of dollars to a local economy. Ellsworth Air Force Base out in Rapid City is a great example – if it ever closed, it would devastate that part of the state.

So, politicians want to close military bases in general, but not in their home districts. Indeed, when Ellsworth was threatened with closure some years ago, all three of South Dakota’s Congresspeople (a Republican and two Democrats, at the time) united in a massive (and successful) effort to save it. I don’t know if that was justified or not, but no matter how badly a politician wants to cut military spending, you can bet they don’t want to cut it in their own backyard.

Now, this all seems very cynical, I know. I don’t mean it to – I’m sure many politicians are very principled people who genuinely want to do good things. But the fact that remains that to do anything in office, you have to stay there first. If you’re not in office, then all your raving about your political philosophy isn’t going to do anyone any good.

Senators have it easy – they get six years, so they can forget about getting re-elected for a while and concentrate on governing. The president and most state governors (48 of them) are a little worse off, as they only get four years.

It’s the Representatives (and two state governors) that have a hard time, because they only get two years in office, which means they’re essentially always campaigning for re-election. The minute they get put back in office, they have to start thinking about the next election and how they can get re-elected again. (In fact, the House has been called a “perpetual election machine.”)

As sad as all this is, it’s the reality of it. The need to get re-elected will influence what a politician does in office, because they need the support of the party, money from special interests, and votes from their constituents in order to keep doing what they’re doing.

Why Labels Matter

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

We’ve talked a bit about the “conservative” and “liberal” labels, but you might be wondering why they matter. Indeed, why wouldn’t a politician just eschew labels and say “I’ll do what’s best for the country in all situations”? Wouldn’t that be great?

The problem is that politicians have to get elected, and to do so they have to engage in a form of marketing. They have to “position” themselves to voters. When voter sees a politician’s name in a commercial or in the voting booth, that voter needs to think, “Oh yeah, this is the conservative (or liberal)…” followed by “…and this person will (or will not) support the things I think are important.”

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from mounting a political campaign by saying, “I have no political inclination either way! I’m just smart, and well-intentioned, and I’ll make good decisions!" This sounds great in theory, but the problem is that no one would vote for you.

This is because most voters want simplicity. Life is complicated, so the average American voter wants to categorize things as easily as possible. We like it when things fit into nice little boxes, and when things bleed over the lines, we get annoyed. If we can’t fit something into a box, we tend to not want that thing to exist.

Furthermore, we don’t want a politician to handle just the issues we know about right now. They’re going to be in office for two, four, or six years, so we want to know that they will be able to handle issues in the future in ways that we think are appropriate. These are issues that we don’t know about, and might not even be able to speculate on. We’re trying to put people in office to project our views into the future. The only way to know how to do this is to consider their overall philosophy on governing, and do this, we want to know their label.

Additionally, many American voters categorize themselves. They apply a “conservative” or “liberal” label to themselves, and they want to vote for someone that matches that label. They want to send themselves to Washington, essentially, and they want to do this by voting for someone who thinks the same way they do.

Even better, they want to vote for an entire block of people who match that label. Many voters would simply like to vote for a political party, not an individual candidate, and just sent a whole mess of people to Washington that they believe agree with them more-or-less and will support the issues in the same ways.

There are “straight ticket voters” who simply check all the Republican or Democrat boxes on the ballet without knowing anything about the actual candidates. These voters are voting for a party, or more abstractly, a philosophy they think that party represents.

(Indeed, in many countries, this is how it’s done – you vote for a party, not a person, then the party elects the people who will actually serve.)

It should be obvious by now that political parties are the easiest way for a politician to position themselves. By becoming a Republican or a Democrat, they instantly align themselves with a philosophy, and thus with a huge block of voters. Being the Republican or Democratic candidate can almost guarantee election in some parts of the country. Democrats don’t do well in Texas, and Republicans don’t do well in Chicago because of the demographics of those regions.

This is also why non-aligned candidates (“Independents”) have such a tough time getting elected. Running as an independent automatically gives you an identity crisis with the voters. They don’t know how to categorize you. To understand what philosophy you espouse, they would have to listen to all the different things you say or write, analyze them, and make a decision. Most people don’t want to do this.

I’m not saying that politicians don’t have personal beliefs and philosophies that they use to make decisions. I have no doubt that there are many very principled people in Washington. (For example, I’ve heard from several people I trust that both our senators – Tim Johnson and John Thune – are genuinely good, honest men who act in ways that align with their personal beliefs of what is the right thing to do. Good for us.)

What I am saying is that politicians have to embrace a public persona in order to get elected. They have to market themselves to voters in such a way that the voter identifies with them, thinks they will represent that voter’s interest, and will therefore check their name in the voting booth.

The easiest way to do this is to apply a label to yourself publicly, and then promote yourself in that way.

Labels and Contexts

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

When discussing labels like “conservative” and “liberal,” it needs to be acknowledged that there are different contexts in which they apply. People can be both conservative and liberal at the same time, about different things.

There are three major contexts in which you might apply these labels:

Fiscal policy: things which affect the economy and taxes
Social policy: things which affect how citizens relate to and regulate the behavior of one another
Foreign policy: things which affect how the U.S. relates to other countries

When it comes to fiscal policy, conservatives believe in minimal government involvement in the economy and keeping taxes and regulation low. Keeping the government out of business affairs allows the market to regulate itself. Liberals believe that the market needs regulation, and that when left to itself it tends to be unfair to lower income classes through income inequality. Liberals believe in increasing taxation in order to exact policies and programs to make society better.

In social policy, conservatives believe in what they would call “traditional values,” which generally means they oppose laws allowing gay marriage, support laws restricting abortion, support the death penalty for certain crimes, are against euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, and support the freedom to own and carry firearms. Liberals tend to be on the opposite side of those issues – abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage should be legal; the death penalty and gun ownership should be restricted.

In foreign policy, conservatives believe in a strong national defense, and in the leadership of the United States around the world by projecting our power where necessary to protect our interests and the interests of our allies. Liberals believe in less defense spending, more cooperation with other countries, and more emphasis on the United States as an equal member of the global community.

You can slip from one label to another, depending on the context, or the laws and policies under discussion.

It’s not unusual, for example, to be a “fiscal conservative and a social liberal.” This would indicate that you support conservative policies when it comes to the economy, but you don’t care so much about people’s personal behavior so long as they’re not harming anyone else. As such, you can’t be pinned down under a single label.

Obviously, there’s no official enforcement of labels. You can generally be considered liberal, but have strong opposing views in one particular area. You might be very fiscally conservative in general, but support more funding for the food stamp program because you were raised by a single mother and never had enough to eat as a kid.Everyone has personal idiosyncrasies that cause them to waffle a bit on various issues.

A more practical example: it’s quite common for Democratic politicians in South Dakota to strongly support gun ownership, giving our hunting traditions. In fact, during election season, most Democrats in this state make a specific point to release pictures of themselves hunting, just to counter the natural political assumption that they’re anti-gun.

In reality, the only “enforcement” of labels comes at the voting booth. People will vote for candidates who reflect their own beliefs. If a particular voter is conservative about gun control, we’d hope he or she evaluates a candidate’s claim that they are also conservative about gun control. Politicians lie all the time, so the only hope the average voter has is to be informed.

The bottom line: labels are not absolute. Someone who absolutely doesn’t step out of the traditional boundaries of how they label themselves is probably trying very hard not to, perhaps in order to prove a point.

However, given that these positions usually tie back to a philosophical basis and worldview (remember our discussion of The Individual vs. the Community), people often fall into general groups about issues. If someone describes themselves as a “conservative,” you can usually make some accurate assumptions about the issues they support and the positions that they take.

On the Interestingness and Usefulness of Books

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

I’m reading more now than at any time in my life. I set a 2014 goal of one book per week (52 in all), and as of the second week in November, I’m at 58.

Additionally, I’ve been keeping track of my reading at Goodreads, and I try to write a short review of each book when I finish it. This has the effect of forcing me to think critically about each book and what I might have gained from it.

More and more, I’m encountering a phenomenon where a book is “interesting but not useful.” These are books that are very entertaining, and that I enjoy reading, but that don’t stay with me in any meaningful sense.

This has laid bare the fact that I read for two reasons:

fun
education

I enjoy the process of reading – working through new chapters of 2-3 books each morning over coffee is truly one of the great joys of my life. But I also enjoy the legacy of reading, which is the hope that reading a book makes me a better person in some way – that it leaves “footprints” on my life, and develops me mentally and emotionally.

The best books are both “interesting and useful.” These are books which you love to read, and that educate you at the same time. I thinking now of Where Good Ideas Come From and The Innovators and Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea – three books I couldn’t wait to read every morning, and that have extended me as a person. I refer back to ideas and concepts from both books often.

Books that are “interesting but not useful” are books that are fun to read, but have no lasting impact on your life. Malcolm Gladwell is famous for this. He writes books which are essentially collections of fascinating anecdotes wrapped around some flimsy premise that ostensibly ties them all together (but which usually doesn’t). I love to read Gladwell, but he doesn’t effectively make a case for anything, and I can’t say I come away from any of his books better educated than when I started.

Right now, I’m reading The 20% Doctrine, which is about the idea of “20% projects” as a source of innovation. It’s a collection of business stories which ostensibly prove that 20% projects can be a source for great ideas. The stories are great – for example, the last chapter was about the Off the Bus project that HuffPo did for the 2008 campaign. But can I draw any larger premise out of it? Is there a lesson to be learned? Can I say I’m better off for having read it? …. No, sadly, I really can’t.

Can a book be “useful but not interesting”? Maybe a textbook or something else that’s extremely information-dense. Perhaps we don’t enjoy reading it, but we learn a lot. However, for me, learning a lot makes me enjoy it, so this would be a harder sell. (There are, however, books which are so dense that I get frustrated because I find the topic entertaining, but there’s just so much information to absorb that I can’t take it all in.)

How about fiction? Can it be both? Mostly, fiction is about entertainment (interest), but it can be useful. Historical fiction, for instance, can teach you a lot about how the world works. So-called philosophical fiction can make you think about the world in new ways (sadly, I abandoned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a quarter of the way through).

Additionally, fiction can give you points of cultural reference that you might not have otherwise. I’ve gotten through five of the seven Harry Potter novels, both because they’re fun reads, but they’re also cultural touchstones of the last decade-and-a-half. I can’t count the number of references to Harry Potter that I notice now which I wouldn’t have before (“Ten points to Gryffindor!”).

I’m currently reading War and Peace. I’ve actually gotten into the story quite a bit (which surprised me), but it’s manifesting other benefits as well. It forced me to research the Napoleonic era and the things Napoleon did in Russia just after the turn of the 19th century. Additionally, it’s introduced me to the vagaries of Russian naming, which is critical to understanding all the characters, and I’m beginning to understand the social protocols of a bygone era, which are considerable (and seemingly arbitrary). I’m looking forward to the second half of the book (I’m precisely at 50% right now) when I’m told that Tolstoy expounds on several philosophical concepts about war and life.

So, is “interesting but not useful” all bad? I don’t know. Obviously, I’d rather have both interesting and useful, but perhaps the former category is useful, but just over a longer term. I absorb something from everything, and perhaps these books resonate later in my life in various ways. Perhaps I absorb small things that bounce around in my head and come out somewhere down the line, in some morphed form, when combined with other ideas.

Without a clear answer, the only reasonable strategy is to read as much as possible, of all types of books, at all times. That’s a burden I’m happy to live with.

(And before anyone complains about the title – I checked, and both “interestingness” and “usefulness” are legit words, even if my spellchecker disagrees. Wikipedia even has a page on interestingness discussing how the concept is not a valid measure for if something gets page on the site.)

Evaluating Externalities

Sat, 8 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

What can get mystifying about politics is that opposing politicians can have such different opinions about political issues. It seems like they can never agree about what to do about a given situation even though both sides are presented with the same facts.

A large part of politics is about managing externalities. And how we evaluate these externalities very much determines our position on the issues.

In economics, an “externality” is something that happens to Person B because of an action taken by Person A. From Wikipedia:

[…] an externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit.

So, an externality is a side effect of an action which screws someone else over, essentially. And a lot of how you view politics is defined by how you evaluate and compare specific externalities.

When evaluating an externality, you do so in two ways:

What is the objective degree of the externality? How bad is it?
How does this compare to a benefit we get from the thing that caused the externality in the first place? How much damage would be done if we stopped doing the thing which caused the externality? Is it worth it?

Let’s look at two examples:

The Acme factory in our town spews toxic fumes out of its smoke stack. These fumes affect everyone in the town, since we all breathe the same air. Mary, who lives down the street, didn’t choose to breathe the fumes – she has no choice. She is incurring a cost against her will. This is a classic externality of the Acme factory doing business.

When evaluating this problem, we do so two ways –

What is the objective degree of the externality? We could test the fumes and try to figure out how dangerous they are, but people might differ on the interpretation of the results. The health risks might only be suspected, but not proven. This might be enough evidence for some politicians, but not enough for others. People often simply don’t agree on the degree of damage.

Then, how does this compare to the benefit? The benefit in this case is that the Acme Company is in business, employs people in the town, and contributes to the economy. How much does this benefit compare to the degree of externality? To answer this, of course, we need to agree on the degree (the first question).

If (since) we don’t, it’s tough to compare to the benefit, but we can be sure that the Acme Company itself has an opinion – they would claim that eliminating the toxic fumes would cost them money or shut down the factory. Given the risk of eliminating this benefit, is it worth it to continue to allow the factory to emit the fumes?

So, the action a politician elects to take against the Acme Company (in the form of legislation that affects all companies in the town) depends on how we view the damage the externality causes against the benefit that it provides. Some politicians will claim that employing people is more important than clean air, or they may claim that the damage is minimal or even unproven. Or they may concede that the fumes are bad, but losing the employment benefits of companies like Acme would devastate the town. Others may say that clean air is more important, or that there is less risk because Acme will spend the money to eliminate the fumes rather than shut the company down.

Our position comes down to (1) degree, vs. (2) benefit. The only two cases a politician could make to allow Acme to continues emitting fumes is that:

The fumes aren’t bad.
The fumes are indeed bad, but the benefit is enormous and the cost of eliminating the fumes (shutting the factory down) would be too high.

Now let’s look at something less emotionally charged…like abortion. The externality of an abortion is that a fetus ceases to exist. (Regardless of where you stand on abortion, this point is unassailable – an abortion causes a fetus to go away.)

So, what is the degree of the externality? Like the first example, opinions differ. Many abortion rights advocates (pro-choice) would say that the fetus is a non-sentient clump of cells, not unlike a tumor, so there’s no damage done at all (in this case, there is no externality, because the damage wasn’t done to anyone else – the only person involved is the mother, and she did it voluntarily). Abortion foes (pro-life), on the other hand, would say that the damage is immense because the fetus is a human being, and an abortion effectively murders it.

How does the damage compare to the benefit? Again, it depends on what we think is the degree of damage. If we’re pro-life, then there’s no benefit that can surmount what we feel is effectively murder. If we’re very pro-choice, then we claim that there is effectively no damage in removing a clump of cells, and the benefit to the woman is enormous, so it should be allowed to continue.

What’s far more interesting, though, is a politician who is pro-choice, but less so that the type we discussed above. Let’s say that this politician concedes that there is some degree of externality – the fetus does cease to exist, and that fetus would turn into a human being, so they do have some reservations about an abortion taking place.

But, they reason, the benefits are considerable – there’s the direct benefit that a woman doesn’t have to be pregnant if she doesn’t want to be, plus there’s the indirect benefits of respecting the woman’s right to privacy and her right to make choices about her own body. So, this politician reasons, there is an externality, but not to a degree that it overcomes the benefits, therefore abortion should be allowed to continue.

And this is why politicians disagree so much. They all claim to want what’s best for the country, but when they evaluate externalities and what they should do about them, they can’t agree on:

The degree of damage done.
The benefit provided by it (or the cost to eliminate the damage).

How you interpret those two things will direct the course of action you take.

The Individual vs. The Community

Fri, 7 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

Your personal political philosophy is highly influenced by how you view the way individuals relate to their larger community.

For example:

Conservatives view the individual as the prime mover. The individual is the engine of the economy and the engine of the community as a whole.
Liberals view the aggregate of individuals – the community itself – as the prime mover. The community that individuals create together is the engine that moves us forward.

This belief drives to what extent you believe the community (the government, in some form) should influence the actions of the individual:

Conservatives believe in individual liberty above all else. Leave the individual to themselves, and they will work things out to the general betterment of the larger community – their individual actions will work toward advancing the aggregate.
Liberals believe that the community should assist individuals to achieve greater things and that individuals themselves tend to act in their own self-interest to the detriment of the community. The community has a responsibility to enforce the fair rules of the game.

So a person’s political philosophy often comes down where their natural focus rests: on the individual or on the community?

This parallels the results of a survey by Pew Research. People were asked what was more important: “freedom to pursue life’s goals without state interference,” or “state guarantees that nobody is in need.”

The results were:

United States: 58% freedom, 35% guarantees
Britain: 38% freedom, 55% guarantees
Elsewhere in Europe: 62% guarantees

Roger Cohen from the NY Times sums it up:

This finding gets to the heart of trans-Atlantic differences. Americans, who dwell in a vast country, sparsely populated by European standards, are hardwired to the notion of individual self-reliance. Europeans, with two 20th-century experiences of cataclysmic societal fracture, are bound to the idea of social solidarity as a prudent safeguard and guarantor of human decency.

Last year, I read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, which was an examination of exactly this concept – why people can have such profoundly different views of politics. What Haidt stated was something similar to what I said above – it largely comes down to how people view the individual in relationship to the community.

In fact, Haidt recounted a study that revealed how fundamentally different this view can be, based on your personal culture or background. Given a picture of a living room, someone from Culture/Background A might see the room itself in aggregate (“this is a living room”; the community), while someone from Culture/Background B might see the things that comprise the room (“this is a couch, a table, and a lamp in a room”; the individuals). One person immediately extrapolates the individuals to a larger community and that’s the thing he’s looking at. The other sees the individuals and stops there – he is, of course, aware that they comprise a living room together, but that’s not what he’s looking at.

So, do we view ourselves first as independent actors operating in the world, or do we think of the world first as something we are a part of?

These subconscious inclinations are ingrained in us as children and explain why some countries accept things like single-payer health care as natural and completely reasonable, and other countries damn-near go to war over it (ahem, us).