Lanny on Learning

Reframing the Debate about ACA

2025-12-12T09:57:00.001-06:00

As in my recent posts, I want to focus on members of the "professional class," which I define as being in a household with income between the 80th percentile and the 99th percentile in the income distribution. These people are comfortable income-wise but probably wouldn't consider themselves rich. My household is in this category.

For the purposes of illustration, I produced the graphs below. I use TurboTax for doing our Federal tax return, and I have copies of the returns from 2010 through 2024. TurboTax produces summary information, which I used in the graphs. Note that there are 15 data points, but for readability those are connected with straight line segments.

In the graph, Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) is Gross Income less Exemptions. Early on my kids were still dependents on our tax return. Later, they weren't. Taxable Income is AGI less Deductions. The two track each other reasonably closely. Total Tax is what was paid to the Federal Government in Income Tax. Also note that while the even numbered years are clearly indicated on the horizontal axis, I deliberately removed the income level numbers on the vertical axis, to preserve a modicum of privacy for me. I think you'll get the idea without knowing the specific numbers.

Now, one specific qualifier about our income. I received quite a windfall in 2010, which was sufficient to put us into a higher tax bracket. We received another windfall, though not as large, in 2020. After the year with the windfall our income dropped, and then rose gradually thereafter. It would actually be easier to make the point I want to emphasize by not including 2010 in the graph, but I thought it better to plot all the data I had available.

Also, everything that is plotted is in nominal income, meaning there is no adjustment for inflation. The dollar values are in the year that the income is being reported.

The graph below takes the information from the first graph and then plots average tax rates. Effective tax rate is Total Tax/AGI, while Tax Rate on Taxable Income is Total Tax/Taxable Income. Again, the two curves track each other reasonably well.

Now we can get to the point. From 2012-2017 the Effective Tax Rate was about 18% and rose somewhat in this time period so the last couple of years it actually was above 19%. Then, from 2018 onward the Effective Tax Rate was below 17% and then from 2021-2025 it was below 15%.

Suppose the tax experience for my household was typical of those in the Professional Class. Then we might conclude that the Effective Tax Rate was higher in Obama's second term than it was during Trump's first term and it remained lower during Biden't term in office.

It is said that one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. But I'm going to do that here. I know of know economic efficiency argument for the reduction in taxes during Trump's first term. When Biden took office, amid the horror of Covid, one could make an argument that the economy needed fiscal stimulus, though tax cuts for members of the Professional Class, who likely have substantial savings, are probably not a very good way to stimulate the economy.

So, from an efficiency perspective, why not return to the tax rates as they were when Obama was President? The debacle with ACA is real enough, but there is insufficient discussion on the tax revenue side of the equation.

If people in the Professional Class saw these graphs and took the message from them I'm trying to send, would they agree to a rise in tax rates back to the their levels a decade ago? How can one be so cruel to people of modest means so as to preserve this gift horse? That seems to me the question we should be asking.

Executive Summary

2025-11-17T09:18:00.006-06:00

My previous post, Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?, reads more like a full White Paper than a blog post. I did a word count on it and it's about 5,400 words. Plus it is written as an overview, with many links to other posts for further detail. So, it is a slug to get through. Below I offer what might be considered an Executive Summary of the ideas, which should be far more readable.

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The Democrats appear stuck in identifying a unifying theme that appeals to voters. Sometimes when stuck, the best way to get unstuck is to reframe the issues. This proposal can be considered such a reframing.

The focus is on what I call the professional class, households within the 80th-99th percentile in the income distribution. For 2024, the last year when the data is available, the 80th percentile begins at around $175,000 while median household income was around $83,730. So, households in the professional class have more than twice the income of the median household.

Next is the surprising part. The focus is not on what these households will receive but rather on what they will contribute beyond what they are already contributing. These households will contribute by agreeing to pay more income tax.

Nowadays, most of these households support the Democrats. By making this agreement these households will encourage the Democrats to embrace a platform which features higher income taxes on both the professional class and the rich (the 1%). Where in the past proposals to tax the rich have largely ignored the professional class, either those proposals have been unsuccessful or perhaps have worked for a while but then came undone. By making the professional class a feature of the platform, the proposal will be far more likely to succeed and far more able to stick.

With the agreement in place, the Democrats can then focus on programs that economically benefit the lower 80% of households. Thus, the idea is to make the Democrats focus on the economic welfare of ordinary Americans, while giving them a credible way to fund the programs that they’d like to put forward.

Members of the professional class are tired of the rampant selfishness that pervades society. They very much would like to contain that selfishness and offer a more publicly spirited alternative, social responsibility. Embracing the agreement is an act of social responsibility. Sticking with the agreement is again the socially responsible thing to do.

However, members of the professional class recognize that acting individually they are powerless to achieve a change in the ethos. What is required, instead, is for members of the professional class to act in concert, with this unitary action highly visible to all members of society. Were that to happen it would encourage other members of the professional class to embrace the idea, and it would also encourage members of households in the lower 80% of the income distribution who are of voting age to vote for Democrats.

There remains to consider how members of the professional class can make their embrace of the agreement in both a credible and highly visible manner. To do this, imagine there is a demonstration project that benefits foodbanks, homeless shelters, school organizations, and other charities at various locations around the country. The project would be funded by donations from members of the professional class, who would contribute the difference between what they would have paid in income tax were the tax rates as in 1995, inflation adjusted, versus what they actually paid in the past year. These donations would signal a willingness to be taxed at the higher rates.

For this to work, word of the demonstration project must spread widely and the demonstration project must grow precipitously. Were that to happen, the overall goal would be obtainable.

Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?

2025-10-29T16:35:00.023-05:00

This post has two different sources that served as stimuli. One of those is the Opinion piece in the New York Times from a few days ago, How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do. This is other than how things have been historically and it serves as a contributing factor in the Democrats struggle to find an identity. The other source I reached a bit more indirectly. I was watching Season 3 of the Diplomat on Netflix. (The show itself is a bit too absurd for my taste, but it does fill the time till I find something else that appeals to me more.). In the casting Allison Janney is the President of the U.S. and Bradley Whitford plays the First Gentleman.

Almost immediately, my thoughts turned to The West Wing and it occurred to me that many members of the Professional Class likely were fans of The West Wing, so that if arguments were put forward in language familiar to viewers of that show, those arguments would apt to be persuasive. I thought of one particular episode where President Bartlet plays simultaneous chess with both Sam and Toby, who are in different rooms. And the chess games really just serve as a cover for more serious discussion. With Sam, in particular, the President urges, "See the whole board." (This is from Season 3, Episode 14, Hartsfield's Landing.)

I thought that seeing the whole board was a good metaphor and that member's of the professional class, most of whom are highly educated, would like to hear arguments about their own political identify that helped them to see the whole board. Also, as part of the character's background President Bartlet had been a Nobel Prize winning economist. This might make members of the professional class more receptive in receiving economic arguments concerning their political identity, though from my years of teaching economics I know there is a real risk that too much drill down will put the audience to sleep. So, in the ideal, a high level overview would be presented and the drill down would be made available to those who want it but not be included in that overview.

As it turns out, many of the points I want to put forward, I've actually made many years earlier, first as a reaction to the TEA Party, where I was appalled by their narrow-minded selfishness, and then up and through the Presidential election of 2016, where Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote but Donald Trump won the Electoral College and thus became President. Plus, by making these points prior to the present context, I'm credible on at least one point - I've been thinking about these issues for some time, so the ideas haven't been hastily constructed to fit the current circumstance. The earliest of these, posted in April 2011, was meant as a bit of humor, Raise My Taxes --- PLEASE! But the subsequent post, The Lanny Tax Plan - Sort of, was intended to be serious. Item (F) in the plan is closest in spirit to what I want to write about here and is a good way to introduce the ideas, giving substantive meaning to the word "embrace" in the title of this post.

(F) Raise marginal tax rates gradually for all households starting at the 80th percentile, $100,000 a year, in such a manner that reaching the 98th percentile you have the Obama proposal to eliminate the Bush cuts. That is the burden of tax increases should be much more broad than is being proposed at present. The message needs to be shared burden, not punitive on the rich.

Now let's get to the tasks at hand needed to "see the whole board." They are:

Characterize the current situation so it is amenable for analysis.
Consider the relevant history on how we got here.
Propose an immediate solution that would ameliorate the situation, i.e., perform a Machiavellian analysis rather than engage in wishful thinking.
Consider why the participants would persist with this solution in the long term, i.e., ask about the ethical considerations and, in particular, focus on social responsibility as a prime motivation.

Ask what actions might the participants take that would convince others that their commitments are genuine. This is necessary to get others to join in.

Anticipate pushback from those who stand to lose if this solution takes effect. Consider what measures might effectively counter this pushback.
Likewise, take Murphy's Law seriously and then consider in advance how to prevent things going wrong, also taking seriously that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In other words, do a SWOT analysis on the proposed solution.

Let's proceed to the analysis.

Framing

Beginning with the obvious, so we can move past it, members of the professional class who are Democrats clearly are anti-Trump and anti-Trumpism. They would like to see that defeated soundly, in a way where successors don't emerge and instead there is some return to "normalcy." That said, I want to take a longer term view, so will frame things somewhat differently that I hope is nonetheless sensible to the reader.

America is a plutocracy de facto while it is a democracy de jure. The plutocrats control Congress mainly via their control of the Republican party. Economically, the plutocrats are the main beneficiary that results from this control, so it comes as no surprise that whenever the Republicans are in power tax cuts that favor the rich are a big part of the agenda.

But, because we remain a de jure democracy, these Republicans still need to get elected and there are far too few plutocrats to get that done on their own. They must rely on rank and file voters for this. At this level of abstraction, one might wonder why these rank and file voters don't demand a slice of the economic pie for themselves. In fact, they have been distracted from doing so by a massive amount of propaganda aimed to stoke their anger and keep them in an ongoing state of agitation. When I was a kid, we learned in school about Yellow Journalism, which was prominent during the Spanish-American war. More modern media has greatly intensified the effectiveness of the approach. The movie Network, which came out in 1976, was prescient in this regard. Social networking online has only magnified the effect further. Contentious social issues of one sort or another are the red meat that the plutocrats throw to their rank and file dogs, who chew them up. The rank and file are emotionally addicted to this role of propaganda to stoke their fires. From the viewpoint of an outsider looking in, the rank and file are being played by the plutocrats in this way, so as not to ask for pecuniary reward.

Professional class members are far from blameless, however. In a recent post entitled, Crass Warfare, I wrote a bit about my own financial situation. After voicing concern about the possibility that I will need quite expensive long-term care, as I went through the experience where my mother required it, I wrote:

But apart from that, modest changes in either income or expenditure have no impact on family well being and mostly money matters are not on my mind, even while I'm the one who files the tax return annually.

If that's even within the ballpark of how many members of the professional class think about their own financial situation, then it at least partly explains why social issues seem to have become a prominent concern. Yet the Democrats are often perceived as hypocritical this way and sometimes the criticism comes from other than the Republicans. For example, consider this piece by Richard V. Reeves, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich, which takes on zoning restrictions in housing as one evident point of such vulnerability. Yet it doesn't take on the source of the pretending itself, that they literally might not realize how well off they are, for as Daniel Kahneman explains in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, people have difficulty imagining beyond their own immediate experience. And again taking myself as representative, I grew up in a middle class household in the 1960s. Even if my material well being is much more advantaged now than it was then, I still feel myself middle class in outlook. Kahneman refers to this as WYSIATI (What you see is all there is).

But in a quite different vein, organized labor is far weaker than it was 50 years ago and thus doesn't have as much voice within the party. There are multiple voices, which together may seem like noise rather than a coherent message. And now the Democrats largely appear in disarray, with only a handful of exceptions to suggest otherwise. This is not the path toward electoral control by getting working class people to switch parties.

When I started my first real job as an assistant professor at Illinois, 45 years ago, I soon learned about voting your pocketbook, as I would occasionally argue state and national political issues with colleagues who were Republicans. (At the time that meant they were anti-regulation.) The idea that voters will express selfish preferences is at the heart of economic models of politics and I became quite familiar with the approach. But there is an older idea, noblesse oblige, that says privilege conveys social obligation. As a kid, I learned this idea from JFK's Inaugural Address:

Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.

An embrace of democratic socialism by members of the professional class would then be a kind of noblesse oblige, in the spirit of JFK. Perhaps it should be termed "profess oblige" to make it sound distinctive, so that it will engage both members of the professional class and other voters as well. For in order that this be truly effective it must convince other members of the professional class to behave likewise, and that must happen en masse in a way that's visible to all.

This is far from a trivial matter, as with every issue regarding voting and social participation there is a need to overcome the free-rider problem. In other words, if my social class as a whole is collectively making significant contributions and my individual contribution is negligible relative to the total because I'm only one of many in my social class, then the collective contribution should still be effective even if I don't make mine. So, acting selfishly, I have incentive to hold onto my money and not make a contribution. The free-rider problem can be overcome by social conscience, if enough people possess it and act on it. Among those who haven't acted on it yet, one might imagine that a sense of urgency could cause one to act or that peer pressure could also do so. But something else would be needed to make it persist, habit the likely explanation or some other reenforcing mechanism.

Let's make one more point here and then move onto the next section. This will take a lot of time, both to happen initially and then to persist. We have a tendency to want solutions that work readily at the snap of one's fingers. That can't happen here. This is the long game and members of the professional class need to understand that in order to play it well.

History

Readers need to learn about the history of income distribution in the U.S. and the history of tax rates, so they have a foundation for the ideas expressed here. They should also learn some of the history about electoral politics. One thought on that score is to consider voter participation, which from my eyeball look at the data has been pretty abysmal. Might non-voters be attracted to vote if the Democratic party as a whole embraced Democratic Socialism? Another thing to look at are the episodes where Democrats had control of both the White House and Congress. Those experiences have been fleeting. As surely the full agenda of Democratic Socialism can't be accomplished within just two years, what can be done to make full control of this sort more enduring?

With an anecdotal approach to our history, one might get much of the message across. For instance, we are now enduring this insanely long shutdown of the Federal government where Food Stamp benefits will likely be cut. Consider the contrast to the present in the situation near the end of World War II, where the G.I. Bill was passed, showing that our government then was willing to invest in ordinary Americans. Yet as compelling as the anecdotal approach may be, it can be seen as cherrypicking the anecdotes.

So, one might prefer to look at actual data, which for the variables I suggested above are numerical. Below I will provide a suggestive look at such information. Eventually, one will need a more exhaustive and carefully done look, yet constructed in a style where readers can make good meaning of what is being presented. Let's begin.

I originally constructed the following in a post entitled, Socialism Reconsidered - Part 2. The table was constructed with data about household income. I got these data from Wikipedia, which got them from the Census. The data are divided into quintile bands, with the amounts showing the upper limit of each band. I computed the numbers in blue, which show the differences in the upper limits of consecutive bands. Notice that they rise over time and themselves look like an income distribution, reflecting that the higher income households are getting further away from the median income household during this time interval.

The time period that is shown gives the years when the economy was recovering from the burst in the housing bubble, which is what precipitated the global financial crisis. While the financial system was saved, many who had been living in houses with underwater mortgages were dispossessed. They were obviously upset by that - the rich get their debts forgiven but ordinary folks do not. Obama was President at the time and it may be that there was little he could do other than what was actually done, given that he had so little support from Republicans in Congress. The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, after a considerable period of debate within Congress and ultimately without a "public option." Only one Republican member of the House voted for it. No Republicans in the Senate supported it. One wonders now how many Trump supporters are on Obamacare and if they are aware of this history.

I have it on my to do list to update this table with more recent years of data as well as years earlier. Yet I've been vexed by the thought that if the table has many more rows, then simply eyeballing it will not be possible and the message from the data may be entirely lost. So I reflected about some way to get out of this difficulty. Eventually I came up with this post, A Simple Statistic for Measuring Income Inequality. The household income distribution is skewed. While at lower incomes it looks like a bell curve, there is a very long upper tail reflecting that higher incomes are increasingly spread out.

My statistic is the ratio of Median/Mean household income. With a bell curve, this ratio is 100%. With a skewed distribution as I've described it, the ratio is less than 100%. This spreadsheet shows annual results for the statistic from 1953 through 2022. Note that it says family income rather than household income. Apparently the Fed divides households into two groups, family and non-family. As the data for the former were available, that's what I went with. So, a good chunk of the population is missing in these results. Nonetheless, I think because they can be readily eyeballed the results are interesting. The decline in the statistic starts in the 1970s, where the decline is modest. It is precipitated in the 1980s and continues thereafter. In my mind the decline in the statistic is a ready way to see the hollowing out of the middle class numerically.

Yet the reader should be cautioned. I've shown this post to some economist friends who were not impressed by it at all. Focusing only on variables of the center, median and mean, implies missing all the other information inherent in the full distribution. So, perhaps I'm oversimplifying with this presentation. But as I wrote in my post about the statistic, I think the Gini Coefficient is too complex for the general population and consequently too many readers would be lost if that is what was presented. So, I will leave it there and move on to consider tax rates.

The Federal Income Tax is a complex beast and comparing changes with it over time is a non-trivial matter. Nonetheless, we can make some headway by breaking it up into deductions, on the one hand, and tax brackets and tax rates, on the other. Here I'm only going to focus on the latter, though if at some later point in time one wants to contemplate the more egregious of the former, then do note that the Carried Interest Deduction is probably at the top of the list. The table below is from a post entitled, Ask What You Can Do For Your Country. For the category, Married Filing Jointly, it gives focal incomes in $50,000 increments, inflation adjusted, (there is an error in the labelling, where it should say Taxable Income rather than AGI) and then gives the amount owed to the IRS, first reported in 1980 and then in 5-year intervals after that.

Note that in 1980 Jimmy Carter was still President. The reader should be able to fill in who was President for all the subsequent years. Eyeballing of the table reveals there has been a general decline in average tax rates over time, more so at high incomes. The reader should note that with the initial tax cut under Reagan, efficiency arguments were advanced to justify the action - the economy would grow faster and thereby have the tax cut pay for itself. This argument was given by the Laffer Curve, though I believe many economists didn't buy that argument. Subsequent tax cuts after 1980, I believe, didn't receive such justification. They were simply part and parcel of the Republican dogma.

The table clearly needs updating so we can better talk about the current situation. Yet even with only those years that do appear the table is intended to get the reader to ask, is there a socially desirable set of average tax rates? With that, note that under Clinton average tax rates rose at higher incomes, which was one reason why the government achieved a budget surplus in the tail end of his tenure. (There was also the boom generated from the dot.com bubble, an additional important factor.) We tend to think of tax policy changes as based on where rates are at present and then consider increments or decrements based on the political feasibility in changing rates. But doing it this way makes it seem there is no set of rates that is fundamental. Might voters feel otherwise? My own opinion is that the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001 were pure give away and of no efficiency benefit whatsoever. Others, of course, are entitled to their own opinion about it.

Let's wrap up this section with a bit of history on voting. A table on voter participation rates during years with Presidential elections is given in the table in this post, Socialism Reconsidered - Part 3. It hovers in the mid 50% range. And we should note that participation rates during the primaries and out year elections tend to be lower. For more than a decade I've participated in early voting and for the last couple of years that's been via vote by mail. Of course, I'm a retiree. Would non-retirees be more likely to participate if these options were generally available? Thinking of this differently, is there mileage to be gotten by playing the participation rate card? Or is that a political loser? We know that members of the professional class participate at a much higher rate than does the general population. So they are over-represented while the poor are under-represented. Maybe the question should be framed still differently. Would the Democrats effectively raising the participation rate help to favor them in elections? Conversely, what about efforts in this direction that were largely ineffective?

Finally, look at the table presented here on Party divisions of Congress. When Jimmy Carter was President, for one term only 1977-1981, the Democrats were the majority in both houses. In contrast, when Bill Clinton was President, the Democrats were the majority in both houses only for the first two years. Thereafter the Republicans were the majority in both houses. Under Obama, again the Democrats were the majority in both houses the first two years, then for the next four years it was split with the Democrats the majority in the Senate and the Republicans the majority in the House, while for the last two years the Republicans were the majority in both houses. Under Biden, the House was majority Democrat the first to years and majority Republican the last two years. The Senate was closer to being evenly divided, as a few independents played the role of swing voters.

The lesson I'd like to draw from this is that if there is a political agenda that will take multiple terms of Congress to accomplish, there is a need to get voters aware of the importance of this agenda and perhaps to not be so upset if the entire agenda hasn't been completed all at once, so they continue to vote in support of the agenda. This will require quite a change from the historical norm and thus should be thought of as an enormous challenge to rise to.

Initial Proposal

Let's imagine that members of the professional class send a public message, a draft of which is below. The message is meant as an encouragement for the leadership among the Democrats to embrace Democratic Socialism and for all voters who would benefit from such a move economically to vote for the Democrats in future elections. The message needs to be credible. As they say, talk is cheap, so mere talk won't cut the mustard. There must be actions taken that are sufficiently costly as to signal that these members are serious in their intent. Let's call the taking of such a costly action an embrace.

We now want to consider the embrace of Democratic Socialism as an innovation and consider how innovations diffuse a la Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. In particular, I'd like to ask who will play the role of Connectors and Mavens. The former can't be very well known Democratic Socialists, at least not at first, as the embrace by others would be too self-serving for them. It must be various experts from within the professional class - top journalists, lawyers, doctors, university professors, etc. What would it take for there to be early adopters within this group, if the proposal became known to them? I don't have a good answer to that question, which is a current weak point in the argument. But if some are identified I'd imagine they'd make brief individual videos intended for an audience within a given field and then a group discussion to highlight the commonalities in their views, say recorded in Zoom and reproduced for all to see, with the hope that these would gather a large viewing and that some fraction of the viewers would then themselves embrace.

The embrace itself would be a payment of money toward a Demonstration Project. The Demonstration Project would benefit foodbanks, homeless shelters, school organizations, and other charities at various locations around the country. It would time to do this in a balanced manner, regardless of whether the locale was Red, Blue, or Purple. Ultimately, the aggregate of what is given to these various organizations must line up with the amount contributed to the Demonstration Project.

To make matters concrete, the amount of the donation would be the difference in the income tax owed if the rates tax were those of 1995, inflation adjusted, compared to the actual tax paid during the past year. There would need to be a tax calculator that readily produced those amounts and have this information bundled with the receipt for the donation. There would also need to be the highest level of information security so that the individual's identity is certified as legitimate, on the one hand, but is not publicly revealed, on the other, to avoid harassment of the individual after the fact. Then the full pool of donations, absent the names of the donors, can be made public to show what part of the professional class has made the embrace. Independent auditors need to certify the entire process.

I haven't said this yet, but the project would certainly accept donations from very rich donors, who indicate support for the underlying ideas even if they are not members of the professional class. It might or might not accept modest donations from others in the population, depending on whether that can be done in an inexpensive manner. Surely it would be good for others to show their support for the project, but that will likely have little impact on Democrat leaders to adopt Democratic Socialism as the core of the party platform and it likely won't persuade too many Trump supporters to switch party allegiance.

With that as background, below is a draft of the message that members of the professional class will implicitly sign when they make donations to the Demonstration Project.

I, who am relatively well off financially, want to convey to the Democratic Party leadership that I willingly embrace a substantial tax increase on my household in order to help restore America to a middle-class society. Toward that end I urge the party leadership to embrace Democratic Socialism as the core of the party platform. I also want to urge voters who would benefit economically from this embrace to vote for Democrat candidates. They need to understand that many of the very rich in the country will be against this, but if we secure solid majorities in Congress and the Presidency as well, then we can pass laws that promote Democratic Socialism, which will very well include substantial taxation on the rich, even though many of them will perceive it as punitive. So be it. We are a democracy where it is the will of the majority of the people that should speak, not the will of the majority of the dollars.

Let me close this section by noting that I didn't mean to pooh-pooh the role played by prominent Democratic Socialists, inside and outside of government. And my hope is that political infighting would be minimal in determining how a leadership coalition would work, should the embrace move forward. But I also want to say that I think a youth movement among the leadership would be welcome. I am soon to turn 71 and consider myself a geezer. I know that I don't have the needed vigor to be part of such leadership, even if I can write a sketch of the plan, as in this post. If the post does persuade others, then it will be time for a baton pass to those who are more vigorous in order to move the project along.

Confronting Murphy's Law

As I referred to The West Wing early in this post, let me do so again to say that sometimes we are our own worst enemy. After finishing up one bit of business, President Bartlet would often ask others in the Oval Office, what's next? We're all used to having a broad agenda and going from one item to the next on it, even if those items are apparently unrelated. In particular, if there is some early success with the embrace of Democratic Socialism, the longtime Democrats who are angry and tired from Trump's attacks on various social justice programs will feel impelled to undo some of that and address others with new initiatives. But those who switch over from supporting Trump very likely didn't do that to address social justice issues. If there is only a little of that maybe it's okay and the coalition can remain intact. I don't know. But why risk it, especially early on? At present Democratic Socialism will be the New New Thing for the party. But even as it becomes the Same Old, Same Old, this a word of caution that sticking with it might be the right play and doing anything else will be seen as being too greedy. I'm not a political insider on this, but I will say that polling about it may not be enough, especially if people's attitudes on this score change significantly over the business cycle - in particular, a recently laid off person is likely to be resentful about a variety of things. It's not that writing this paragraph will eliminate the problem entirely. But it is good to be aware of it ahead of time.

The Smack of the Republican Attack Dog

How much did the propaganda around Benghazi and Hilary Clinton's email determine the outcome of the Presidential election in 2016? That was a rhetorical question to get the reader to realize there likely will be some sort of propaganda response to the ideas presented in this post, if there is any sign of an initial uptake of them. What that propaganda response will be is beyond me, but as with the previous section, it seems to me better to appreciate the likelihood of it happening than to ignore it in the planning. The obvious question then is this. Are there forms of self-protection that might be taken to minimize the impact of such attacks so that current Trump supporters who would benefit from a move to Democratic Socialism are not swayed by those attacks? The only thing that occurs to me now is that much of the Demonstration Project leadership should come from outside national politics. Trying to impeach private citizens for expressing themselves is fraught with difficulty. Arguing that elected officials have violated their oath of office is a different matter. Maybe the rules have changed on this since Trump has returned to the White House. But at least early on, I would play it as if the rules are not different.

Wrap Up

My stated goal with this post was to provide a see-the-whole-board presentation of what members of the professional class embracing Democratic Socialism would look like and then what it might achieve. My hidden agenda was to get these ideas off my chest, as I've been sitting on these thoughts for a while now.

My difficulty in writing this piece was in determining whether I'm giving too much detail or not nearly enough. Perhaps the answer varies from reader to reader.

I know of one immediate criticism - there is too much wishful thinking in the piece. No doubt, there is some. I hope to get some early feedback from some friends and then perhaps make some modifications in the writing based on that.

I always wonder with pieces of mine like this one, if it isn't entirely wishful thinking why hasn't somebody else come up with it already? The only answer I have is that it seems most people are caught up in current events. I think it is necessary to step away from current events to consider the ideas presented here as a real possibility. It is why I've referred to many of my earlier posts, all of which were written before 2020, with the exception of the post on the simple statistic about income inequality.

Here is one last point. Being willing to to pay more in income tax to embrace Democratic Socialism is one thing. Taking a leadership role in the Demonstration Project is quite another. The people who would qualify for it based on their reputations are likely incredibly busy already. This project will demand intense attention. Making that sort of commitment is huge. I do hope there are people who will step up to it. And I hope that happens soon.

An Analog Mind in a Digital World

2025-10-18T11:44:00.009-05:00

I spend an inordinate amount of time these days doing word puzzles. As the solutions can be computer generated, one might wonder why the puzzles have such a hold over me. My favorite puzzle these days is Letter Boxed, which I try to solve in two words, making it more of a challenge to find such a solution. In this puzzle, consecutive letters within a word must be on different sides of the box, so words with double letters are not allowed, but more importantly many other letter combinations that seem natural also are not allowed. I will use today's puzzle, depicted below, to try to illustrate why solving this puzzle has such a hold on me.

Experience with this puzzle suggests the first step, which is to note the vowels, in this case there are all 5 of them, and then to note the challenging letters, which I would say are the "x" and the "v" though some of the other consonants might prove challenging as well. At this point, the aim is to find a long word, using as many different letters as possible, which includes all of or at least most of the challenging letters.

Now, here is the thing. Intuition is a key bit in coming up with a word to try. And it is that intuition plays such an important role for me, which makes me want to come back and try the puzzle again the next day. But intuition doesn't work in one big Gestalt. Instead, there is an initial guess of a plausible solution. After an entire life of the mind doing this sort of thing in various contexts, it remains a mystery to me how I come up with that initial guess, whether it is transparent or shows some insight into the matter at hand. In this case, the initial word I tried was "extensive" which has 9 letters but the "e" appears three times, so there are 7 distinct letters, not bad but not great either. Plus the consonants that are missing, "b" and "h" are moderately difficult to match with the remaining vowels, "a", "o", and "u". If this is the solution then I either need to find a word that starts with "e" and which includes the remaining 5 letters or a word that ends in "e" that includes those remaining 5 letters. I try it for a while but I don't make any progress with it. This suggests I need a different long word, perhaps one that includes a "b" or an "h".

Now a bit of an aside. If this was teaching a class rather than solving a puzzle for fun, I would make a point that failure as intermediate product is necessary for learning, and that getting a wrong answer that seemed possible in advance offers clues as to the direction one should take to find the right answer. I believe this is a key lesson as to how people think, but most students don't master this lesson because they want to get to the right answer straight away and they're too impatient to let the full process play out. Frankly, I believe that students using AI as a tool only makes this worse, though I'll admit that is purely intuition on my part and is not based on experience, as I stopped teaching after fall 2019, well before the AI tools became generally available. In any event, one gets better as a thinker with practice of the sort I'm describing here and the guess as to what to try next gets more well honed.

The next word I tried was "exhaustive", which swaps the "h" for the "n" in "intensive", and then includes both the "a" and the "u". Those added vowels were a bonus for me as I was focused on the consonants. The remaining letters then are "b", "o", and "n" with the "o" and "n" on the same side of the box so they can't be used consecutively. So, as much as my brain wants to use "bone" as the other word, that just won't work. And for a few minutes that fact becomes frustrating to me. But then a possibility emerges and eventually I find a longer word that does work, "bovine". Further, since "bovine" contains "ive" (though not in that order) it is now possible to use "exhaust" rather than "exhaustive" as the second word.

I have found a Website that generates solutions by computer to Letter Boxed and every once in a while it says there are no two-word solutions. If I've tried the puzzle for more than an hour and haven't made any progress, I want to know whether I should stop or not. Obviously, if there is no solution I should stop. (And once, I found a two-word solution when it said there was none.) But if there is a solution, I might very well persist for quite a while longer. With learning situations other than word puzzles, over time one develops a sense of whether a solution can be found via persistence or if, to the contrary, the problem is just too hard for me to solve. If the former holds then there is still the matter of putting in the time that's needed to find that solution. This, I'm afraid, isn't nearly as much fun as is coming up with the spark of an intuition. But having the required patience is an important lesson too.

Not quite 30 years ago, I attended a workshop for WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) instructors, which I thought was the best workshop I ever attended regarding pedagogy. If memory serves, part of that workshop was getting those in attendance to make their own personal writing process explicit. Writing the first draft of something, I've found, shares these bits about sparks of intuition and about persistence to produce a full narrative. I wonder if others describing their thinking process would be of value, especially to make it less of a mystery to younger people.

And I wonder whether the process I've described in this post makes me part of a breed that is going extinct. I hope not, but I'm afraid otherwise.

If I Were Running the Yankees

2025-10-10T10:49:00.003-05:00

Matty Alou was once a Yankee too.

I watched all of the Yankee games in the Playoffs, after not watching them much at all during the regular season. I confess that I was bummed out by their mid-season swoon, but I became optimistic after that. The last series with Toronto was hard for me to stomach and much of what I say here stems from that.

But first, some general comments. We need more microscopic statistics, for pitching and hitting those need to be on a pitch-by-pitch basis. With that, pitch quality needs to be assessed. In particular, if the pitch has intended spin, did it do what it was supposed to do or did if flatten out and hang in the zone? Speed and location also matter. Given how much attention has been given to Aaron Judge's game-tying home run in the third game of the series, where the pitch was definitely inside, we need a better idea of what pitches outside the zone are hittable and whether swinging at them is better than taking them (or not). We also need to know how pitch quality correlates with pitch count and the number of times the batter has faced the pitcher.

For the Toronto series, in particular, I'd like to know how Gil, Fried, and Rodón performed on pitch quality, whether Toronto batters just made good swings on good pitches or if there were too many bunnies thrown. If it was bad pitching, worse than during the regular season, then the obvious cause is the added pressure of the playoffs, especially when you're playing for the Yankees. On this, I haven't any brilliant thoughts other than that it's better to have experienced it beforehand, and make whatever inner adjustments one must make to get through it better the next time. Luke Weaver may be a different story. The New Yorker had a recent piece with the subject - Roger Angell writing about Steve Blass in the mid 1970s. Weaver might be another instance of the Steve Blass phenomenon. I don't know. I'd like to see him try to work through it. He was pretty awesome a year ago.

Now, getting to the offense, I think the Yankees underutilized an asset - speed. Grisham, Bellinger, and Chisholm all are very fast runners. They are also all left-handed hitters. But none of them have a particularly high on base percentage. They swing for the downs much of the time. What about, instead, trying to bunt for a base hit? I think this should be a regular feature of the Yankees offense with these players and they should put in the time during the offseason developing that skill. Indeed, Judge might bunt for a hit once in a while, to show leadership and encourage his teammates this way.

There is also making a contact swing and trying to go the other way. Bellinger does choke up on the bat, but then his swing has quite an arc to it. Can he and the others learn to make a flatter swing and be comfortable at the plate doing so? This goes as well for Volpe, who is right-handed. He is also a fast runner and he has this same issue of swinging for the downs much of the time. I conjecture that the added pressure of the playoffs makes that sort of swing more likely. So possessing a flat and shorter swing would be a way to combat the pressure. That seems to be what the Blue Jays did.

There are two Yankee hitters whom I wouldn't try to change, as far as their approach at the plate. One is Stanton, whose swing is idiosyncratic, plus he's getting up there in years. The other is Wells, who is a dead pull hitter but did okay in the Playoffs. As the primary catcher, he's got his hands full with other things. So I'd leave his hitting alone.

The first base position and how that will be handled is something I'm still puzzling about. Ben Rice looked like an awesome hitter against Boston. But Toronto seemed to expose his weakness against the splitter. Weaknesses do get amplified under pressure. And then, his defense is okay but not great. Goldschmidt is more reliable defensively and more predictable as a hitter. I don't like the idea of platooning them, but maybe that's what the team needs to do.

I haven't mentioned third base yet. It seems the Yankees have options there. Oswaldo Cabrera was on the IL and didn't appear in the playoffs. I liked watching him play and hope that the Yankees keep him in their plans. If so, some of the others who appeared at third during the Playoffs won't be there next year.

Getting back to statistics, there should be won-loss percentages against each team played, home and away. There may be a sense that Yankees were good because they won a lot at the end of the season. But they played mediocre teams then. There may also be a sense that sometimes a team goes on a hot streak while at other times it is in a slump. A win or a loss should factor in how the other team is doing this way. The overall idea is to get a sense of how good the team is beyond the win-loss record.

The last thing I'll say here is about camaraderie among the players, coaches, and manager. We fans don't get to observe this. But in one brief interview with Aaron Boone, he seemed to say that Ryan McMahon has high marks in this dimension. If the players themselves got to choose who would make the team and who would be in the starting lineup, would they be influenced by this camaraderie factor? And, if so, would they be frank with each other about team weaknesses as well as team strengths? I would hope so. It's my belief that this team, largely with the same personnel, can be better if they shore up their weaknesses. Raising the OBP of the players not named Judge would be a good indicator that they've done so. Having improved pitching against high-quality opponents would be another such indicator.

The Going Back In Time Fantasy

2025-09-21T10:54:00.002-05:00

Trying to relive one's life over again, avoiding the evident mistakes, hopeful in that good fortune will shine on this alternative envisioned path, seems a likely pursuit during one's lifetime, but especially in retirement when there is ample idle time for this sort of reflection. Much of what I do in this domain focuses on childhood and adolescence, also early adulthood, and it is of such a personal nature that I won't provide specific examples of it here. But there are some things I wonder about that can readily be explored out in the open without causing me personal embarrassment. I will do a bit of that below.

Of course, one can also do this sort of exercise with a focus on national politics rather than on oneself. My favorite one of these is imagining what if Gerald Ford hand't pardoned Richard Nixon, which from the perspective of winning the election in 1976 would have been the smart thing to do. If Ford had won that election, he would have been President during the Iran hostages crisis. If nothing else, this sort of exercise allows us to see how seemingly unrelated events have shaped our history, with apparently pernicious consequences.

Let me get back to the personal. I didn't do much writing in junior high, high school, and college. I did what was required by courses and every once in a while I would write a piece for a school publication. I remember that in junior high I had an essay in the Social Studies Magazine entitled Mayor Lindsay's Poker Game, but I can no longer recall the subject matter of that piece. I had other essays of this sort in high school, but the total didn't amount to that much writing. Given the outpouring of prose in this blog over the years, I have to wonder why that didn't start earlier in my life. Here I'm going to speculate on one of the causes being the mechanical aspects of writing, in particular my difficulty with handwriting, and what might have helped me to overcome that.

Somewhat later in my schooling, though I can't remember when, I abandoned cursive for printing. As an assistant professor writing economic theory papers, I wrote in pencil on yellow ruled pads, one side of the paper only and then with a line space for each line of text I wrote. The idea there was that in the proof reading if an error was spotted, the line space could be used to insert the correction. But I must say that the pencils and the yellow ruled pads were supplied by the Economics Department, needed inputs for research and teaching. So I was free to treat them as abundant resources. When I was living at home during junior high and high school, it would have been my parents who paid for the notebooks and pens or pencils that we used. This created an implied obligation to use these items with some prudence, though in spite of this obligation I was always sloppy with them as with other things.

Now a bit of my personal history that most of my friends don't know about. After having a difficult time emotionally during 10th grade, I needed to do something during the following summer that would occupy my time and get me out of the house. So, I ended up attending a secretarial school in Flushing to study typing. The touch typing skills I learned there eventually came to serve me well, after I got a personal computer and started to use it as a writing tool. The time lag in that was perhaps 18 years or so. In a similar fashion, the Fortran I learned as a senior in high school and again as a sophomore in college served as a foundation for understanding how to use Excel effectively for explicating microeconomics ideas. The time lag in this case was far longer. So I'm a big fan of developing foundational skills that might pay off, if only well into the future. But I never used the typing skills I learned that summer while at home, except for writing school papers, even though we had both a manual typewriter and an electric typewriter as well. I've been noodling around with why that was and the best I can come with now is that writing on my own then would necessarily have confronted my own tormented thinking. I didn't want to do that.

So, I've been wondering how my personal trajectory would have changed had I learned typing earlier, in junior high. It was required to take shop class then, which if memory serves was one period per week for an entire school year. (Perhaps the band class I took met for 4 periods per week to accommodate that period of shop class, but that's just a guess now as I really don't remember that.) In 7th grade I took woodworking as a shop class. In 8th grade it was ceramics. I didn't mind the experience but I can fully assert that those classes produced no long term benefits for me. What if in 7th or 8th grade I had taken typing instead?

Typing was tied to secretarial skills and with that there was strong gender bias with that at the time. Secretaries were women. At the secretarial school I attended after 10th grade, I believe I was the only boy in the class. That was no big deal as I didn't know any of the kids there beforehand and didn't stay in touch with any of them afterwards. If I had tried to take typing at JHS 74, however, I might very well have known some of the kids in the class and it might have raised a few eyebrows with some of them, and likewise with some of my teachers. That's easy enough to anticipate. Harder to get at is whether it would have been a mountain or a molehill. I don't recall this very well, but I believe at the time when I was writing a paper for school I would write it out by hand and then my mother would type it up. If that's right, I could have relayed that fact and said I wanted to control the entire process. Then typing for me wouldn't be preparation as a secretary but would instead be about better performing as a student. Whether that argument would carry the day, I don't know, but I think a case could be made for it.

Even with that, interacting with the girls in typing class who knew me might have presented some challenges. Yet it might have opened up some opportunities as well. My class was quite gender stratified, as exemplified by whom one hung out with in the schoolyard after lunch. I might have been able to cut through some of the gender stratification in typing class.

So, suppose I took typing as shop back in 7th grade instead of taking woodworking. Would I have felt a desire to use this learned skill thereafter? And if so, would it be for copying things written elsewhere or would it be for expressing my own ideas? I read books frequently then and by 8th grade I think I was subscribing and reading through The New Republic, a weekly magazine. I could have written reactions to some of what I was reading. That doesn't seem to be too much of stretch to consider, even if the intent was just to produce diary-like writing, rather than to publish the work.

There would need to have been an impulse for trying this. And there would also need to be some working through of the logistics in getting this to happen, as both typewriters were in the den, a room my mom used for her language tutoring.

Much later in life, I've found with the blog writing that I will stew over some ideas and keep stewing over them unless they find their expression in some way. Having a conversation with a friend about them is one way. Writing about them is another. Once the ideas have found expression, I can move onto something else. This is one of the rewards in writing for me that is quite apart from how a reader might react to what I've said. Conceivably, it is sufficient reward to make writing a habit, especially when there aren't enough friends to have those conversations with and/or when some of the topics are better kept private.

I'm going to close with a bit of self-deprecation. I learned at that typing school that I have weak pinkies, particularly the left one. On a manual typewriter, this meant that characters hit with the left pinky, particularly the "a" key, resulted in something that appeared below the line of the rest of the typing. This was a little discouraging. Would all these lofty ideas about writing be wrecked by my own physical ineptitude? Who knows? The back in time fantasizing tends to emphasize the possibilities but ignore the obstacles. Sometimes it seems real life does just the opposite.

Developing a Personal Philosophy that Resonates Within

2025-08-08T17:38:00.005-05:00

Recently, I finished reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. (I read the Kindle version, which costs $0.99. There is a free version at Google Books, with a different translation, but it doesn't seem to have page numbers and overall it seems to have somewhat more pages than the Kindle version.) For a retired person, like me, long books are something to cherish. Anna Karenina is quite long, over 1200 pages, though not nearly as long as War and Peace. The benefit from the length is that the reading then lingers within the same narrative framework and the mind becomes comfortable with the familiarity that provides. Further, apart from the Russian names, which take a bit of getting used to, Tolstoy is quite readable. The meaning making that the reader must do is not overly challenging, though readily identifying the Russian names of the leading characters takes a bit of time.

This is in contrast with Ulysses by James Joyce and Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, also very long books, both of which had lengthy segments that were over my head. I had started each of those books multiple times in the past, only to put them down when the reading wasn't resonating with me. Within the past year I've completed reading them, earning a mental badge I bestowed on myself, if not getting the satisfaction from the effort that one wishes for ahead of time. There were segments of illumination for me, so it wasn't all for naught. But there were other parts where I couldn't make heads or tails from what I was reading. Trying to read those parts, the experience was something like what I had as an undergraduate in a course on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which is why for now I'm sticking with great works of fiction and not trying to read philosophy, though if I maintain the present regime for long enough maybe I'll give philosophy another try.

Without giving away the storyline of Anna Karenina, I do want to observe several different aspects of the narrative that I enjoyed very much. First, much of the "action" takes place within the heads of the characters. I think this is a main reason for continuing to read fiction rather than getting the story in remakes from movies or TV. Apparently there have been several such reproductions of Anna Karenina. If I do watch any of them, it will be a while before that happens. I know there are cinematographic techniques, flashbacks come to mind, which try to simulate what is going on inside the mind of a character. But I've found that too much reliance on flashback becomes tedious and sometimes one can't tell the present action from the flashback. With reading fiction there is no such difficulty.

Second, Tolstoy is able to make each of the primary characters the focus, now and then, so their point of view comes across fully. It's not just about how others regard the character. It is how the character reflects on her/his own situation. The reader having this perspective enriches the story a good deal. Third, the story is told longitudinally and encompasses different segments of the characters lives. This allows Tolstoy to pose the general question - does success or failure at one segment of life prepare oneself for the next segment, to make success more likely then? In turn, success or failure itself should be taken not so much by the absolute circumstances as events unfold but rather by the character's disposition to those circumstances - optimism or pessimism, a harsh and rigid tone or a gentle and flexible tone - that's what seems to matter.

I've deliberately written the above in an abstract way, so as to make the questions applicable to the present in America, although Anna Karenina is about nineteenth century Russia and all of the main characters are members of the aristocracy. This gives them traditional roles to play, even as the world is changing around them. I thought the story applicable to my own situation, financially and professionally, both as a former tenured faculty member at a major research university and as someone whose family has been in the top 10% of the income distribution for at least the past 20 years, with both my wife and I being campus administrators before we retired. This doesn't make us rich, but it does mean we're financially comfortable. Many of the aristocrats in Tolstoy's story were, in fact, in debt. But they were able to navigate the situation, nonetheless, because of their privileged position. Even some who were well off financially didn't seem that remote to me. I want to get back to this bit below.

But first, let me talk a little about personal philosophy. To me, this is something the individual cultivates in advance to prepare oneself both for life's challenges and for life's rewards, how to mentally react to either and then move on from there. When I was a junior and senior in college, in graduate school too, I thought of the personal philosophy as learning to live within one's own skin. It takes a good deal of time to develop and the personal philosophy itself might evolve quite a bit over time, as circumstances change and as perspective about past events also change. In Anna Karenina, the character most taken up with finding a personal philosophy is Levin, and for that reason I related to him more than to the other characters.

It may have been easier to come up with a personal philosophy around the time when I was in college as the term, the generation gap, was in vogue then. (The reader might also enjoy this music of the same name from Eddie Harris and Les McCann.) It becomes imperative, therefore, for the kid to find his own set of beliefs if he is not going to simply accept the expectations placed on him by his parents. Many evenings at college, I spent a good deal of time lying in bed asking myself the meaning of life questions, as they applied to my own situation. I have a sense that many college kids today would benefit from doing something similar, but they don't. They haven't come to grips with making their own decisions and quite possibly disappointing their parents. Student loan debt, of course, adds to the pressure here. But other things matter too and I'm very much afraid that so much of the depression and loneliness you read about in college students today is because they don't try to work through their own personal philosophy. Indeed, they don't know how to do that.

However, the need for a personal philosophy is not just for those who are on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood. To imagine life is full of peace an harmony thereafter, which it did seem to me when I got married and then during the years when the kids were very young, fails to recognize that life's circumstances change. Does the personal philosophy accommodate those changes or does the personal philosophy need to be modified in order to do that?

For me this question manifest most directly in dealing with the work stress I faced as a campus administrator and the compulsive eating and drinking I indulged in as an unhealthy way to compensate for the stress. Until around 9/11 I kept it somewhat in check, with jogging the one regular form of exercise I could do to attain some balance. But then my knees gave out and goodbye jogging. Foolish me, I didn't find a sensible alternative for many years. As a result, my weight ballooned up, as did my blood pressure. Ultimately, I found that going for long walks was something I could do regularly and while it wasn't aerobic exercise like the jogging, it was significant. And more recently I've gotten the compulsive eating and drinking under control, with the diet modified to include lots of fruits and vegetables, and not so much starch and processed sugar. I'm far from perfect this way but much better than I was.

This gets to the question of whether the source of the stress itself can be reduced and if so whether that should happen. My personal philosophy says its important for me to take care of myself both mentally and physically, on the one hand, and be a socially responsible person, on the other. The issue is when these two goals are at odds with each other, in particular, when being socially responsible means taking on additional stress. In fact, since the election last November I've largely been ignoring the news and the various opinion pieces I used to read, for peace of mind. But it seems the country is going to hell in a handbasket, hardly a novel observation. Doesn't a socially responsible person have an obligation to do their bit to make things right? Might the answer to that question depend on how serious the health problems seem to be at the time and what consequences the additional stress would be for that? I am vexed by these questions.

There are also questions of ineptitude that lie behind this issue of personal philosophy. Given the present situation in America, what could I possibly do that would be both socially responsible and at least marginally effective in this domain? It might very well be that I'm too late to the party and too old for all of this. But I'm not certain this is true. And I know from when I was doing ed tech at the campus level that I was a reasonably good analyst about the issues that concerned the profession at the time. I developed something of a reputation nationally, mainly expressing my opinions in certain widely read listservs and also on my blog. I often had the feeling then that the profession was missing things and it was my job to make others aware of those things. But then I had a ready audience for my expressions of thought. Now I don't. I do have the same sort of feeling now with respect to national politics, the politicians and the pundits are missing things of importance, and I've written a few posts as of late that hint at those. Yet it seems like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. It doesn't make a sound. Nonetheless, I will close this post by taking out my metaphorical saw and cutting down a couple of metaphorical trees.

With the great big beautiful bill that has been recently passed, my household will experience a modest tax cut. Why are we getting this "benefit" and does it make any sense? There was enough written about raising the SALT (State and Local Taxes) deduction cap that some of it penetrated my defenses and I became aware of it. And, of course, with the Federal Income Tax, it depends on your time horizon. Once upon a time there was no cap for this deduction, as there is no cap on the mortgage interest deduction. I'm on the fence about this one. Maybe it makes sense, but maybe not. The other reasons for our tax cut, however, make no sense to me. They seem a bribe for voters in my income category. If they are still working then they likely will attribute it to the meritocracy and that they "deserve" the tax cut, regardless of the social circumstances and the budget implications. It's the not realizing it's a bribe where perhaps I can make a contribution, by raising a stink about. I think it's a commonplace now that hardcore MAGA types have been played by the uber rich, who are the real beneficiaries of Trump's Presidency. But it makes you want to ask whether voters in my income category (in the top 10% but below the top 1%) have also been played. This hasn't been discussed much at all. Maybe it should be. If these voters were less concerned about their own pocketbooks, might they raise a big stink about the uber rich claiming way too much of the pie? At least those in the income category who claim to be Democrats should be making such a stink. Shouldn't this be getting some attention?

The other matter I'm taking from Einstein and the Bomb, a short movie that can be found on Netflix. I watched it just a few days ago. I was taken with a quote from Einstein that wasn't central to the rest of the story being told, but is relevant to our current politics. Einstein was a pacifist. But he had experienced the horrors of Nazi Germany and wanted to see Hitler defeated and the Nazis halted. Einstein was pragmatic enough to know that this would take a war; diplomacy would not work. The quote, which I'm paraphrasing, is that to counter nationalized force, one needs a nationalized force.

If you look at today in America and see the various organizations in America being attacked by Trump's government, each organization seems to respond on its own (often via a lawsuit of some sort before caving in). It's as if Trump is picking off each individually, one by one, and they lack the power to resist. During the time period that Einstein and the Bomb was devoted to, the primary opposing forces to Nazi Germany came from England, America, and Russia. What if now in America we need a nationalized force to oppose Trump, yet that force comes from within America? How would that work? Is it even possible? Back in March I wrote a post called Should There Be A Remake Of Seven Days In May? It offered up a hypothetical about how such a counter force that would function on a national level might work. I felt the need to write the post, yet I also felt quite out of my element in doing so. At best, the post might bring about a superior version written by someone far more competent to do so. However, I wouldn't expect such a superior version to emerge from our usual politics. The politicians seem fixated on fighting the battle at the ballot box, rather than fighting a real civil war.

Let me stop here by noting that even if I've made these point before they still linger within me, so it feels good to get this off my chest. For now I can move onto other things. But I will also note that while I was in the midst of writing this post I really wanted to have a drink. Not all of the demons we face are external.

Shrinking (Without The Violet)

2025-07-17T16:54:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I watched David and Lisa on YouTube. The movie is from 1962 and is done in black and white, mainly without background music and at times the digitized version is hazy. while at other times it seemed as if the screen was shaking. I watched it on my computer in theater mode rather than full screen, because of the low resolution of the video. These glitches notwithstanding, I found it compelling. I had watched it on TV as a kid, perhaps more than once. I don't believe I had previously watched it as an adult. Below are some impressions from doing that.

Much of the story takes place at a high school for students who have profound psychoses. The students live at the school. The actual classes aren't part of the story. The time spent in social activity provides the focus. The school staff includes healthcare professionals who casually interact with the students. The head psychiatrist, played by Henry Da Silva, is notable for his low-keyed and gentle demeanor, which remains unwavering. His conversations with David are one of the features of the film. In these discussions David is skeptical and non-cooperative, at first. Eventually, David becomes trusting.

David is played by Keir Dullea, who also starred in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The character is very intense, quick to display anger at any provocation, yet also phobic and extremely frightened of death, so much so that he tries to protect his personal environment by not letting anyone touch him. He also seems to prefer a degree of formality, both in the way he talks and in the style he dresses, often wearing a jacket and tie, though later in the movie sometimes a sweater replaces the jacket, with the tie remaining. Presumably the formality is a vestige of his upbringing and that his parents, particularly his mother, cares a lot about appearances. Ultimately in the movie David finds fault with his parents for the superficial and dishonest way they interact with him. He runs away from home after that. The formality also conveys that David would be considered well educated and quite intelligent, at least as applied to abstract school subjects.

Lisa is played by Janet Margolin, a rising young actress in the 1960s. Facially, she is simultaneously beautiful and innocent, and her look makes it quite understandable for why David would fall for her. She speaks in rhyme of a sing-song variety, simplistic in some ways, yet quite on point as well. While others who don't penetrate Lisa's shell respond to her in normal speech, David soon figures out that to communicate with Lisa he must enter her world and respond in rhyme on the same subject that she brought up. This is effective.

I found myself sharing some characteristics with both David and Lisa and I wondered (and am still wondering) whether if if were possible to somehow merge these characters then would that produce a type of balance" In other words, its not that for me the stimuli aren't there to produce psychoses, and some response to stimuli is needed, but by then moving onto other things, the response doesn't fester into something more serious. Maybe that's true, but maybe it's wishful thinking. For now, I won't try to resolve that.

I also wondered what it would be like if we all had ready access to a psychiatrist in the Henry Da Silva mode, having conversations on our frustrations as needed. Would that help? Giving such access to adolescents, as in the film, makes some sense as at that age a person's worldview is not yet a settled thing, and the psychiatrist can help the person work through the various dilemmas. As an an economist, I'm quite aware that demand heavily outweighs supply in this domain. I'm ignoring that issue here. I'm just wondering about the benefits from a normative view, taking my assume-a-can-opener approach.

So, I wondered if old farts like me might still benefit from such conversations with a psychiatrist, or is it enough to talk things out with friends once in a while. My sense of things is that we repress our anger frequently, vent occasionally, and sometimes indulge in unhealthy recreation as a form of consolation. Is there a better way and would chatting with a psychiatrist help us find it?

The movie itself is a charming love story and I think it works on that level because the characters are otherwise more extreme than we're use to. But there are some minor flaws in the film that I'll simply mention here. Keir Dullea was in his mid 20's when the film was made and the other actors in the school were also in their 20's or in their late teens. In other words, they were too old for high school, under otherwise ordinary circumstances. This is not a big deal in the movie because they seem approximately the same age, relative to each other. For comparison sake, I did a search on Welcome Back Kotter and found the same issue emerges these. The other flaw I'll mention concerns David's grooming, which is immaculate. But how could he get a haircut if he wouldn't let anyone else touch him? It's a puzzler. Now I'll leave that one alone too.

One last point I'll make is in the form of a question. Would younger audiences today be drawn in by this movie or is a generational thing where people my age would find it compelling but younger folks today would not, perhaps because so many of then are already experiencing anxiety, loneliness, and depression that they don't need a film to remind them of that? I don't know. Bridging across the generations is a challenge.

Flying Under The Radar Politics

2025-07-09T10:14:00.000-05:00

While I mean this to be a stand-alone post, in some sense it can be taken as a sequel to my post from Saturday. It was motivated by asking these questions. If there were an effective way to fight back against regressive income distribution and someone like me wanted to support that effort by making a money donation to it, how would that happen? How would I know to trust the mechanism wasn't some scam? How would I learn about this mechanism, in the first place?

My think-alouds qua blog posts do satisfy the requirement of flying under the radar, but that's because hardly anyone reads them. The hidden message in my title is perhaps best thought about via a metaphor of a military submarine that deploys effective radar. There is ample and full communication aboard the ship, but the enemy subs and other enemy vessels can't detect that communication at all. Now, to make the problem harder, imagine that it is a virtual submarine, where the crew are actually geographically dispersed, as are those aboard the enemy ships. Can this sort of communication still happen?

My intuition tells me that yes, it can happen, but that much of the last mile in such communication will need to be done face-to-face rather than online. This is not a perfect solution, for sure. The movie, The Conversation, comes to mind even though it came out more than 50 years ago. And the money donation itself would almost certainly still need to be done online, as for someone like me that's how I do all my charitable giving. So the face-to-face part would need to be sufficient as to not bring attention to those other bits of communication that remain online. And the face-to-face part would also need to establish the credibility of the participants, thereby developing trust between them. The intermediaries who do this work likely will require substantial training ahead of time, so they are effective in what they do.

Now let me get beyond this issue of communication and talk about other reasons for why one might want some of our politics to fly under the radar. If you see the world as I do, then it seems that the Trump White House is proactive, for better or worse, mainly for worse, while those impacted by the decisions of the Trump White House are reactive. Their instrument to restore things as before is to rely on the courts by them suing the government. Further, political activity by the rank and file has happened mainly through public protests, such as the recent No Kings Day. Participants certainly felt empowered as a result. But did this and other protests have any impact on the the Trump White House?

It is my belief that the vast majority of us who didn't vote for Trump, as well as those who now regret from doing so, still believe in American Democracy and that the right curative for what ails us now should happen at the ballot box. But what if intelligent insiders have come to believe otherwise, that we're too far gone done the path to totalitarianism, to expect the ship to right itself of its own accord. In this case more proactive steps would be needed. Let me leave for now which proactive steps to take, but rather simply consider this one question, whether proactive steps are necessary or not. That is a fundamentally political decision that needs to be made and it can't be made out in the open. Further, if it is decided by these insiders that a series of proactive steps are necessary, then some sketch of an implementation plan must be developed. That plan also can't be distributed out in the open. The secure communication that I briefly discussed above will also be needed to put such a plan into action.

Now let me switch gears and ask something different. Even though this is impossible, if one could poll those who are outspoken against the Trump government, how would they react to the suggestion that their protestations are insufficient and that some sort of targeted guerrilla warfare is needed, because the ballot box solution will fail? I posed this question to argue that a two-faced strategy will be needed. The public face will continue to advocate for the ballot box solution, while the flying-under-the-radar face will advocate for a proactive strategy, which may then become known to the public, but only after the implementation is well underway. And, if eventually making the public aware is indeed part of the implementation plan, then it must be the same political leadership who wears both faces.

Could this be happening already? I have no way of knowing, but I hope it is.

Crass Warfare

2025-07-05T12:21:00.006-05:00

I'm going to give a personal reaction to the passage of the recent bill that has garnered attention from so many.

First, I want to talk about household income and expenditure. The word "comfortable" is what I rely on in describing my own situation. For a change, compared to prior posts where I've talked about income distribution and income inequality, I'm not going to give any income numbers here. I will just make a qualitative argument. While we do have a mortgage on the house, we also have substantial equity in it. Other than that, we don't carry debt. Credit card bills are paid in full. We have a decent income and a nice nest egg. I'm 70 now, so will have to start withdrawing from my IRA in a few years. We haven't planned for that yet - give some of it to the kids (or grandchildren if and when they appear on the scene) or sit on it just in case, which in my mind would be for long-term care expenses for which we don't have insurance. I was treated for prostate cancer back in 2018 and while it is in remission now, I was told immediately afterward that I didn't qualify for long-term care insurance as a consequence. My mother did eventually spend through her estate because of such expenditure and since I was handling her finances then, I've got that notion of spending through the estate firmly in my mind. But apart from that, modest changes in either income or expenditure have no impact on family well being and mostly money matters are not on my mind, even while I'm the one who files the tax return annually.

With that, I should mention a few other things that are related. We live in Champaign, Illinois, a college town where the cost of living is modest compared to more urban settings. With various issues of arthritis and other health tsoris, primarily in my right hip and lower back, I don't travel much at all, as that seems to make things worse pain-wise. I do have some of my father's miserly ways (he came of age during the Great Depression) so, for example, I will turn off the ceiling fan in a room when nobody else is there. But this is more to appease my conscience than it is to save us money. I really don't know what the dollar savings amount to from this behavior. On the flip side, I do try to be generous on the rare occasions when I'm out with friends, especially when that's with folks who used to work for me back when I was doing campus ed tech. I know that our relative incomes are advantaged in my favor, so I treat this as a kind of obligation.

Given this background, I'm going to next consider how the recent bill will affect me. I expect my Federal taxes to be lower, which as I understand things will be both because the SALT limits have been raised substantially and because the marginal tax rate that applies will be lower. We'll see. So, this will implicitly be a modest increase in income, which if the bill hadn't gotten such attention would largely go unnoticed by me and have no evident effect on family decisions.

Given that, the reduction in Federal taxes seems to me like an implicit bribe. A bribe for what, you might ask? I interpret this as saying - take the money and then shut up about it. Don't point out that others, with much higher income than yourself, are going to receive much more money. There has been a good deal written about how regressive the bill is; for example, consider this recent opinion piece. If there were enough people in a similar income situation to mine who complained about this regressivity, then the bill would be a political loser. It might still end up that way, but if the complaints come mainly from those who are at or near the median in the income distribution, it will seem like the same old, same old. I do have the feeling that the Republicans have bought out people in my income situation and have been doing that for a long time, certainly since the Bush tax cuts and perhaps as far back as the Reagan tax cuts.

To go a bit further on this, I've felt for some time that Democratic Socialists, like Bernie Sanders and AOC, make a mistake because they focus on the beneficiaries of progressive income redistribution and, with the exception of the uber rich, ignore those who will make the necessary contributions so that the income redistribution happens along with a balanced budget. In that scenario, people with income like mine are simply out of the picture, nonplayers without a role. Instead, and I've written quite a lot about this in this blog, particularly under the tag Socialism Reconsidered, with posts that date back eight years or so, there should be an emphasis on Social Responsibility, which would then define our roles, both to make contributions to the income redistribution and to monitor the very rich, so they are held to account and don't weasel their way out of the their financial responsibilities to fellow citizens.

This mistake has enabled the approach where folks in my income situation can be quietly selfish, perhaps make some charitable contributions to ease their consciences, but in no way does that solve the income redistribution problem, and the country becomes more and more unequal as a result. And privately, this view is supported by a notion of meritocracy and the Just-World Hypothesis, even as the system seems more and more rigged by the already haves.

In this sense, the recent bill appears to me as more of the same, though more so. Further, it demonstrates that those who want progressive income redistribution don't have a meaningful way to fight back.

* * * * *

What would a meaningful way of fighting back look like? Recently I finished reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. I am going to to use the history depicted there - mainly the close of the Napoleonic Wars, where the French invaded Russia, eventually took Moscow, but then the French troops lost all sense of discipline, began looting the city which had largely been abandoned, and found there wasn't enough to loot for them to survive, let alone thrive. So the French withdrew, and kept on withdrawing, all the way back to France, with the vast majority of the remaining French troops dying along the way.

Now it may seem quite unusual to look for a meaningful way to fight back by turning to historical fiction, in this case where it isn't even American history to consider. But it's not so unusual for me to do so. After all, I'm a complete outsider to the American political situation, for one, and I don't think the news and the limited number of opinion pieces I do read provide much fodder to come up with a helpful answer. Consider that in March I wrote two blog posts that were directly or indirectly driven by this question, though I will readily admit that each also contained more than a little bit of wishful thinking.

In each of these and in the present post as well, I take the various plutocrats as the enemy. Given some of the egregious behavior perpetrated by rank and file MAGA types, one might consider them as the enemy. In my view, however, these people have largely been played, with the antipathy and racism they openly exhibit stirred up to distract these people from the underlying economic issues. If significant progressive income redistribution were to take place, my belief is that these folks would calm down substantially, though I'll admit there might be quite a lag between cause and effect.

In the first of these posts from March, entitled Should There Be A Remake Of Seven Days In May?, I muse about what it would take to make a vote for conviction in a Senate trial of Trump, following a third Impeachment. The two such trials we already had were each a sham. Could such a trial be rigged in the other direction if suitable pressure were brought on the plutocrats who donate heavily to Senators and shower them with largesse? What pressure would need to be put on the plutocrats to make them behave in this way? Who can exert such pressure? I think it is necessary to ask these questions and try to identify answers, even if the conclusion is that it will be extremely difficult to orchestrate, so it is very unlikely to happen. If there is a good answer to the original question about a meaningful way to fight back, it is not likely to be found directly. One will need to noodle around quite a bit before finding some alternative that truly seems plausible.

The second post from March, entitled The Sequel Where Clarence's Older Cousin Turns Mr. Potter Into Another George Bailey, is a fantasy where the problem of plutocrat selfishness resolves itself on its own accord. To that I'm sure the reader will respond something like - let's not hold our breath waiting for that to happen. I concur. But if some other plausible alternative is found, this one might provide cover for the Plutocrats, the equivalent of waving a virtual white flag.

Now let me turn to applying lessons from Tolstoy to the matter at hand. The Russian Commander in Chief during the Napoleonic War was Kutuzov. After the horrific battle at Borodino, where there were a significant number of casualties on both sides, Kutuzov had the Russian army retreat, even as other Russian generals were calling for further armed conflict. Kutuzov faced additional criticism from allowing the French to take Moscow. But what the other generals and various critics didn't understand was that Kutuzov was waging a war of attrition, which became especially evident after the French army left Moscow and suffered heavy losses in retreat, even without other battles being fought. This protected the Russian army, one of Kutuzov's main goals. And without issuing any formal instructions for this to happen, Kutuzov cleverly enlisted Russian peasants to engage in guerrilla tactics against the then dispersed French army. The peasants were motivated both by pride in country and by wanting to capture French army supplies for themselves.

Before getting to some guesswork about how metaphorical guerrilla tactics might be applied against current day plutocrats, I have to admit that I don't know any of them so I can only surmise as to their motivation and I also have to admit to my own confirmation bias in making such an assessment, even as when I used to teach economics I'd say that we can't make interpersonal comparisons of utility, a commonplace statement within the discipline. Nonetheless, I will assert that for plutocrats wealth is not about the consumption that can be afforded, as they can purchase anything they desire to consume, but rather is about the power and control that can be wielded. The uber rich like the tax cuts they will receive under the current bill because it is a recognition of their power. Conversely, they have been so against Obamacare precisely because it was an overt challenge to their power.

Thus, any guerrilla tactics that have a chance at success must be an assault on that power, done in such a way that the plutocrats feel they can't defend themselves. And, if I'm reading the situation correctly, the timing is ripe now for this guerrilla activity because the bill that passed greatly overextended the political will of Republicans in Congress, so there is likely to be substantial inertia now rather than any attempt at follow up legislation. These Republicans will have shot their wad and, at least in regard to national politics, this means the plutocrats can claim victory but then should probably go into hiding for a while. If, however, the plutocrats start to experience personal defeats that they feel they can't prevent, they won't have offsetting political opportunities to express their power.

The Russian army did pursue the French army while the latter retreated, keeping their distance but encouraging the French to keep moving quickly. The peasants were aware of these movements and in this way Kutuzov coordinated the guerrilla fighting. It is likely that the current day version will also need coordinating. But as the activity would mainly be illegal, the Democratic Party itself can't serve as the coordinating body. If the guerrilla activity were nonetheless happening, Democrats could argue that when they retake the White House, those found guilty of crimes for pursuing the guerrilla activity will be pardoned. After all, there is quite a recent precedent for that. So, there can be more than tacit endorsement of the guerrilla activity. Nonetheless, the leadership for it will have to come from elsewhere.

As to the aims and tactics of the guerrilla activity, it would be lovely to invoke stories of Robin Hood into the narrative at this point, income redistribution in the small if you will. Is that feasible? I don't know. Beyond that, some of this might entail destruction of property, acts that the plutocrats can't defend against, while other parts of it might entail creating personal embarrassment for the plutocrats, where again they are helpless to prevent this. With that, one might imagine a real physical presence that is disabling as well as an online presence (hacking if you will) which is likewise disabling. An initial coordinating activity might be to produce a list of the plutocrats along with their significant holdings. I'd guess their numbers would be somewhere in the low thousands. Those who might engage in the guerrilla activity likely would number two or three orders of magnitude more than that. Somehow, the tactics would need to leverage that numerical advantage.

The reader will want specifics here which, unfortunately, I can't supply as I have no experience in this domain. My intuition tells me that for specifics it will require either people who formerly were in one of the Intelligence Services or people who actively engaged in industrial espionage. Such people will have to self-identify yet remain largely invisible for this to work. Does that requirement in itself render the entire thing a pipe dream? I don't know.

As I wrote at the end of the Seven Days in May post, I write these posts not to come up with an implementation plan, as I'm not competent to do that, but rather to get the reader to think through the possibilities. And if as a byproduct some of the readers start in on War and Peace, all the better.

Two Reasons Why I'm Scared of Using AI

2025-06-25T14:10:00.002-05:00

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
--- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

The line seems so apropos to me now. I have an old hit tracker for my blog called StatCounter. I no longer get a lot of hits on my blog, according to StatCounter, and the majority of the hits I do get are from bots of one kind or another. Blogger gives it own stats regarding number of hits and typically reports an order of magnitude more of such hits. It does give a geographic distribution for those hits, but it doesn't provide the info that StatCounter provides, which matches the reader's online address either to the particular post or otherwise to the blog in general. Indeed, I know essentially nothing about those hits which Blogger reports but StatCounter doesn't register. Are those from human beings or from bots? I don't know. Note that this is for activity of mine I do try to track, however feebly. With the rest of my computer usage, however, I'm not trying to track anything. The paranoia comes from the feeling that all those providers out there, as well as the nefarious players who operate behind the scenes, are trying to track me, either to sell me something that I really don't want, or to entrap me in a way that would create some personal damage, and inadvertently I give them information so they can do that.

That said, I do continue to write blog posts on occasion, post fairly frequently in Facebook, and write the occasional rhyme that is posted in BlueSky. So, in spite of my paranoia, I am putting fodder out there and I should acknowledge that might be making things worse. But I do exercise control in making that content. Generally, I have my guard up then. (There is a life lesson, don't write a post when you're very angry, which I've learned the hard way.) It's those interactions where my guard is down that is of more concern. I'd really prefer not being observed then.

However, I'm not a purist about it, for sure. I use many of Google's services, including their search engine, which now features AI. The convenience benefit from doing so lured me in and now the use is largely habitual. Plus I've recently had chats with AI when that is providing online help for some service I use. One instance was with my bank about an online banking issue I was having; another was with my coffee vendor about a delivery that hadn't yet been scheduled. With the former, it didn't seem there was an alternative to talk with a human being and I needed the transaction to go through. With the latter, I was hoping it would be quicker than my human communication had been in the past. (It wasn't.) I suspect that increasingly, paranoids like me will find that they can't be purists about this. Nevertheless, they can significantly reduce their interactions with AI as compared with those who are fully engaged with it. Does that matter? I hope so, though I really don't know.

* * * * *

Let me get to the other reason. Over my lifetime, I've spent a significant amount of my thinking in producing a narrative of one sort or another. Maybe it started even earlier, but I'm sure it happened in college, lying in bed at night, thinking about the meaning of life questions. Then, I hardly wrote anything that wasn't a paper for some course. Whatever externalizing I did was in conversation with friends. Professional writing of research papers increased after I became an Assistant Professor, but while my set of friends changed completely (they were other Assistant Professors in Economics), I mainly didn't write papers with them, though I did have many conversations with them. That all started in 1980. I eventually did write papers with a few others, but that was work. Conversation with my friends was my social life.

When I switched careers to Educational Technology, which started in the spring of 1996, I began having conversations with faculty around campus about online learning. I really enjoyed those conversations. It was the best part of the work. In some sense, my blogging, which began 9 years later, was my internalizing these conversations, but then producing some output from those internalizations that others could have a go at. The writing happened because I didn't have friends I could share my thoughts with over coffee. My peers then had similar positions as I had but were located at other universities. This was before Skype was popularized and, since everyone was so busy, even if we had the technology available a one-on-one online meeting during working hours seemed a luxury we couldn't afford. (After I retired, for a while I hosted ooVoo chats with a group of friends. We called ourselves Grumpy Old Men of Ed Tech.)

In order to process a narrative, such as the one for this post, I will use external tools. These include an online dictionary, if there is mention of a movie or two then I will often take IMDB.com as a source, and for more general information I used to access Wikipedia quite a bit. Using these tools notwithstanding, I exercised full control of the narrative. It reflected my thinking. If, in contrast, I thought of AI not as such a tool but rather as a coauthor, would I want that, to surrender some control so as to get to ideas I wouldn't have come up with myself? Is it egotistical on my part to say I prefer full control, even if I'm then limited by my own prior experience and reading?

I must say that with this a good part is about worrying where to find the slippery slope, after which ceding control has gone too far. Further, I'm someone who has had a variety of bad habits over my lifetime. If ceding control over the narrative is initially challenging, but then continuing to cede control starts to become easy, might that turn into another bad habit for me, regarding less and less practice with reflective thought?

I can imagine that my own diminished mental function would encourage a different answer than I gave above. So, perhaps five or ten years out, I will be unabashed about using AI as a writing partner. But I'm not there yet. And, truthfully, I'd like to forestall that time for as long as possible.

Artificial Dumbness*

2025-05-29T16:22:00.006-05:00

*The term Artificial Stupidity has already been claimed by Computer Science.

With my title I mean to make reference to the massive amount of illiteracy that characterizes our society today and, in particular, to make a follow up post to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Is This the End of Reading? In the main I thought the piece well done, quite comprehensive on the issue, making the argument that what we are observing now about the non-reading of many college students is the consequence of a long-term trend. Covid amplified the effects of that trend but it surely didn't start them. The article also brings in the lack of face-to-face social interaction that many students now seem to expect, the consequence being that many of them feel lonely, something the article does point out, and also not getting sufficient practice in conversation, a point not made in the article.

When it comes to remedies, the article considers what a few concerned college instructors have been doing to counteract the situation. While those efforts may inspire some other instructors, collectively they don't scale up well. Further, because the piece does appear in the Chronicle, the focus is on what might be done within higher education to address the issue. From a societal viewpoint however, that would seem too late in a student's academic career to seriously get started with literacy. The efforts really should begin in elementary school, or even earlier.

Next let me touch on some earlier efforts on the literacy question, some of which get to how reading is taught. The book, Why Johnny Can't Read, was published in 1955, the year I was born. So, it seems, the issue of broad-based literacy has been with us my entire lifetime. I wrote about my own experience with learning to read in a post called PLAs Please, which was mainly about outside-of-school learning. This is the most relevant paragraph for reading instruction in elementary school.

Reading was different. Pretty early on, perhaps fourth grade, we had SRA. This history by Don Parker is a fascinating read, if a little melodramatic. We also had individualized reading. (Those who preach a learner centric approach likely will be intrigued at how early this piece is and yet that its critique is not about “teacher centric” so much as it is about “grouping,” where all students read the same book.) And now I must confess that my memory fails, or that I’m not able in looking backward to attribute cause to school or elsewhere or in some combination.

The reader should be aware of my own confirmation bias. Intuitively, I would like to replicate my experience in elementary school for current students. But would that work? Those who go on to become a college professor typically were quite good students themselves and may not be aware of issues that other students face who are more typical. There are also generational effects that should be considered. For example, we had several local public libraries within easy driving distance and my dad would take us on Saturday so we had a new book to read each week. He bought a bunch of Time-Life books for me to read as well. Further, I had very good teachers, I lived in a nice middle class community in Bayside, and I graduated from P.S. 203 in 1966. Aside from playing outside, which I did with my friends, television was the main competitor for my time that might have been spent on reading. I actually did a lot of both. Homework, for me, was not very time consuming.

Now let's fast forward to consider later reforms, yet well before the present time. I wrote about this in a post called Are We Ketman? written right before I retired. I was reading Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the American School System, after I had read a review of her book by E.D. Hirsch. I found the history that Ravitch wrote about fascinating, since I lived through the Reagan years and was vaguely aware of the report, A Nation at Risk, which came out in 1983, but I was an assistant professor of economics then and somewhat heads down with a focus on my own research (although I did read the New York Times). I was somewhat more aware of No Child Left Behind, which became law in 2002, as by then I was a campus Ed Tech administrator and got to know several people in the College of Education, some of whom were quite wary of NCLB. At the time, I don't believe I had a strong opinion on the matter, but by a decade later I had become quite disappointed with the accountability movement as it impacted college-level instruction, which I wrote about in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students prepare for exams? This post details how illiteracy and non-learning are tied at the hip. By enabling instruction like this, higher education is a major culprit in the larger drama.

My belief is that literacy is necessary for sense making and making sense of things is a primary reason for education. This is true whether you regard education primarily as a passport to a good job, which I take is how the majority of the people view the purpose of education today, or if instead you regard education as a way to make good citizens, a necessity in a democratic nation, with John Dewey and his book Democracy and Education the primer, and Harry Boyte a latter day apostle. (I saw Boyte give a talk on undergraduate education back in 2016 and wrote a long post about it then.) But as my previous paragraph should make clear, you can talk about a noble purpose of education, on the one hand, while the actual functioning of instruction betrays that purpose. Further, to the extent that the passport view of education holds, college faculty seem like gatekeepers and resentment can build when the education itself is non-nurturing, so the gatekeeper function appears that's all there is to it. This is true not just for those who haven't attained a college degree, but for many newly minted graduates as well.

With all of this as background, we should then ask, who benefits from this massive amount of illiteracy? I will answer with a few examples from my recent experience before generalizing from that. Tuesday morning I received the following text message:

Illinois State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Final Notice: Enforcement Penalties Begin on May 29. Our records show that as of today, you still have an outstanding traffic ticket. In accordance with Illinois State Administrative Code 15C-16.003, if you do not complete payment by May 28, 2025, we will take the following actions:

1. Report to the DMV violation database
2. Suspend your vehicle registration starting May 28
3. Suspend driving privileges for 30 days
4. Transfer to a toll booth and charge a 35% service fee
5. You may be prosecuted and your credit score will be affected
Pay Now:

https://idot-illinois.gov-qnfr.icu/portal

Please pay immediately before enforcement to avoid license suspension and further legal disputes.
(Reply Y and re-open this message to click the link, or copy it to your browser.)

I subsequently found this Illinois Department of Transportation page, warning about text and email scams like the one above. Who falls for these? Does lack of literacy correlate with falling for a scam like this? My guess is that it does. Also in the last couple of days, I've gotten phone calls from numbers I don't recognize in California and Arizona. I don't pick up and they don't leave voicemail. I'm going to assume those were scam calls as well. Who does pick up on calls like those? So, it seems to me that scammers benefit from massive illiteracy.

My generalization is to consider scams in the world of politics. And it's not just Fake News! Trump is a master of misdirection. I contend that he has doubled down on attacking DEI because he wants to divert our attention from other things his administration is doing. In particular, he mainly doesn't want ordinary voters to focus on economic issues (even while it is their primary concern). The "Big, Beautiful Bill" is a prime example. In the main it's about tax cuts for the rich. Why should ordinary voters want that? And why should they tolerate it when it raises the deficit and necessitates cuts in programs like Medicaid? But if the voters have their attention elsewhere, they won't be asking these sort of questions. I am still amazed at how many younger voters, including those who are college educated, voted for Trump because their job prospects are mediocre at best and they are challenged to find a clear path for entering the middle class. Their economic travails are real enough. But their lack of literacy is on display, as is their poor memory for failing to reconsider how Trump screwed up during the first year of Covid, which is probably what cost him reelection in 2020. How could they think he'd be better to improve their own economic situation this time around?

* * * * *

The word artificial in my title suggests that we can remedy the situation if we set our minds to it. Is that only wishful thinking on my part or could we truly improve literacy in this country and with that improve sense making and reading between the lines as well? I will content myself with making a few points on this question rather than detail a full program to achieve the goal. I may do the latter in a subsequent post.

The massive income and wealth inequality in our country has fueled the passport view of education. Reducing the importance of the latter will require doing something of substance about the former. A friend recently told me that I have socialist tendencies. Indeed I do. Many others do not. Yet how an overwhelming majority of Americans don't share in my views completely baffles me.
In particular, how we fund K-12 public education now leads to de facto separate and not equal schools, as Jonathan Kozol has repeatedly reminded us. But the lack of literacy is not just among lower income students. So, while we try to better fund school systems, we will need other ways to improve literacy.
I have this image in my head about when my kids were little and I would read to them at night, either with them already in bed or sitting on my lap and then getting ready for bed. In other words, the act of reading was associated with snuggling, in this case with a parent. Could the snuggling happen with other adults, at a school or a library or some other place that kids might congregate? And could those adults be volunteers who help teachers or librarians, because that sort of thing, while important, probably breaks down if there are too many kids per adult so the teachers and librarians can't do it all themselves.
I think the first book I read was The Cat in the Hat Came Back by Dr. Suess. I read many of the Dr. Suess books as a kid and the rhyming was definitely an attraction. (I write a lot of my own rhymes now.) When my kids were little, we read aloud Sandra Boynton - A hog and a frog cavort in the bog. Does rhyming help kids learn to read at first? I know there is some sensitivity that kids from different social settings might need different things to read to identify with. But perhaps there are certain universal ways to make early readings easily understandable and that should be more of a concern. Context will definitely become important at some point, but perhaps it is less so initially. Is rhyming one of those universals?
Some years ago I learned about service learning - college courses where students rendered community service and the course instructors and community service providers worked in tandem to make the entire thing functional. At present, one might imagine those adult volunteers from a few bullets back to be registered in a service learning course. Right now, that could happen within the College of Education, which would rule out most college students. But what if the University as a whole embraced the idea regardless of the student's major and with the University providing transportation and other facilitating services so that the college students could spend one day a week in reading to these primary school students? Would that become something attractive to do for the college students and in that way reinforce the good citizen approach to education.
In addition, might such a service activity by college students encourage them to improve their own literacy by reading on their own more? And, if it did this, could it also impact how these students go about the courses they are taking?

Let me wrap up with a note of caution. Sometimes I can become very idealistic and hopeful, in spite of the current evidence. Also, my experience as an Ed Tech administrator, at first in the mid 1990s when it actually was a lot of fun, then later in the mid 2000s, when we tried to scale the approach to the entire campus, which was far less enjoyable, is that early adopters can accomplish remarkable things and then make you quite hopeful. Majority adopters, in contrast, tend to do things in a boring way and can make you cynical about things. Being aware of this in advance, perhaps there might emerge a way for the early adopter results to maintain and spread more broadly. I certainly hope so.

Rubbing SALT into the Wound

2025-05-15T12:59:00.001-05:00

I'm commenting on this piece from today's NY Times, which is about how the cap on the deduction for state and local property taxes is causing problems for Republicans in the House in passing that big, beautiful, tax bill. Here I just want to make a couple of quick observations, but a personal point first.

Yesterday, I paid the initial installment of the Champaign County property tax. Even though we get the senior citizen exemption, it only lowers our tax bill a trifle. The amount of our property tax well exceeds the $10,000 federal cap. That's mostly not a big deal for me except on specific days - when I use TurboTax to file our federal return and when I pay the property taxes. Otherwise, it is out of sight, out of mind. But Champaign housing costs are modest and we have comfortable retirement income.

The underlying issue considered in the article is for those who live in the megalopolis in and around New York City. This includes those who live in Nassau County, Suffolk County, Westchester County, Eastern New Jersey, and New York City itself, all of which are mentioned in the article, and perhaps those with an even longer commute to the city, such as in southern Connecticut. The issue is about housing costs, which are sky high, and how working families even with two earners struggle to afford the expense. For them it's very challenging, no doubt. With that, the $10,000 cap on the deduction for state and local property taxes, which first came into effect in 2018, added insult to injury.

So, Republican lawmakers in the area are looking for some way to remedy the situation, perhaps by raising the cap, or getting rid of it altogether. But, this needs to be done in a revenue neutral way, where the tax revenue lost from raising the property tax cap gets offset by some revenue enhancement elsewhere in the system. To this now retired economist, a cap on total deductions makes sense whether those deductions are for mortgage interest, property taxes, charitable contributions, healthcare costs, or other categories of expense that are eligible for tax deduction.

But, here's the thing. An overall cap on deductions would impact the highest income taxpayers most. No doubt charities would be upset by such a change in the law, as they'd lose some of the largesse that high-roller contributors had been making. But the real ones complaining might be those Republican lawmakers, who lose out on gifts from these same high rollers, just because they made the actual tax law more progressive.

In my opinion, that's how the tax system should be. It's quite ironic that the cap on this single tax deduction has become such an issue in the New York megalopolis that it might expose the regressive nature of this big, beautiful, tax bill. If I didn't find some dark humor in that, surely I'd be crying about it.

Al Truism

2025-05-09T10:14:00.003-05:00

Earlier today my Facebook feed was filled with items about Bill Gates, stemming from this piece in the NY Times Magazine, about the plan to zero-out the Gates Foundation endowment in the next 20 years rather than to try and have the Gates Foundation operate in perpetuity. Most of the piece is an interview by David-Wallace Wells with Gates, to try and shed some light on Gates' perspective as to what the Foundation should be funding and why.

Gates is very into problems of pubic health, particularly as they manifest in developing countries. He talked a lot about Africa, mortality rates of children and their mothers while giving birth, and disease that should be imminently eradicated, certainly before the Gates Foundation goes out of business. He also talked a lot about future technology, both for pharmaceuticals yet to be developed fully and for artificial intelligence, which might very well deliver medical care as well as serve as teachers of children, especially when the human alternative is in short supply. I would call all of this forward looking.

(These days I prefer to read a sans-serif font, as it offers less clutter for my eyes. But looking at the title of my post, one flaw with a sans-serif font is that the symbol for a lower case "L" is the same symbol as that for an upper case "I" and in some contexts, one might not be able to tell which was intended. While I was going for a pun with my title, I wasn't looking for this ambiguity. I meant the lower case "L" though the reader is free to make his or her own interpretation.)

But I wondered whether the interview missed on some points, particularly this one. Given the U.S. government has cut its public health services internationally, for example PEPFAR and especially USAID funding of healthcare, should the Gates Foundation step in to partially fill the void? It seemed implicitly as if the answer to that question is no, but the reason why that's the answer wasn't provided. I would have liked to see this spelled out.

A second question I have, one related to the first one, is whether some coordination across foundations is needed for filling the void. With each foundation acting independently, and the others with smaller endowments than the Gates Foundation, they too can say no because the hole to fill is just too big for them. Would that no longer be true if they acted in concert?

Let me close on this note. I'm comfortable financially but not wealthy. I find similar dilemmas in my own charitable giving. The bulk goes to the volunteer work I'm engaged in with Universal Love Alliance, but I also give locally to the public schools and the food bank. Each has needs. The approach I take to balancing them is completely ad hoc. Can one do better than that? I wish I knew.

Getting Started

2025-04-28T11:31:00.004-05:00

When I was a kid, before I took piano lessons, which I started when I was 8, I learned two songs. One was Chopsticks, which was a very easy piece. You can see why it became an introduction to playing the piano. The other was Heart and Soul. That was played as a duet. One person, sitting on the right side of the piano bench, played the melody. The other person, sitting on the left side, played the accompaniment. Now I'm wondering how Heart and Soul found its place to be in this role and did the composer, Hoagy Carmichael, have any idea when he was writing this tune that it would eventually come to play this role.

Maybe those of us who care about teaching and learning should spend more time considering gateway activities, do-able and compelling at the same time. Identifying those poses a challenge, certainly. But the payoff from having found one seems quite large indeed.

I Am Not A Psychiatrist, But Really...

2025-04-21T18:32:00.009-05:00

... how can the ADHD research be so inane?

I am reacting to this piece from the NY Times Sunday Magazine. At first, I thought it an interesting read but as I got further into it I became increasingly frustrated with the maintained assumptions. Let me explain my concerns.

Here is the setup in many of the experiments described in the essay. Students known to have ADHD are divided into two groups. Both are tasked with doing something cognitively challenging. The first group gets some treatment (Ritalin, Adderall, or something else in that family of drugs) while the second group gets the placebo. Then they are scored on engagement in the doing the task and in the success on working out the problem. On the engagement front, the first group well outperforms the second. In identifying a solution, however, both groups are equally bad. Though engaged, the first group doesn't come up with a good strategy for addressing the problem posed.

Now, let's take a step back from ADHD and instead focus on learning. Then we'll return to ADHD and its consequences for non-learning. It seems appropriate to posit that learning is cumulative. That goes for reasoning skills, background knowledge needed to make sense of the current situation, and a sense of confidence that when working a problem one can get to a reasonable solution. For those students who don't have learning disabilities, whether ADHD or something else, we'd fully expect the junior high school student to be more proficient than the first grader in these dimensions and we'd expect the high school student to be even further along. But for a student with ADHD or some other learning disorder, is that true? If the lack of prior growth inhibits the learner at a later stage, why should we think that engagement will address the issue, unless engagement goes back to square one and allows the growth to occur so as to catch up, albeit at a later time in life than is usual? But that's not what the experiments reported about in the essay did. Apparently they assumed the students had age-appropriate reasoning skills, only to find that their experiments revealed otherwise.

Now I'm aware that students are scored on their reading by grade level. I wish students were likewise-wise scored on their reasoning by grade level, but to my knowledge they are not. What, however, would happen if reading grade level were taken as a proxy for reasoning grade level? Could the experimenters have obtained the students' reading grade level before administering their treatment? If they had done that, would the experimental results have been so surprising?

Later in the piece there is a discussion about stimulants and their impact on engagement of the people who are taking the stimulants. After reading a bit in this part, I did a Google search to ask, is coffee a stimulant? Indeed it is. If the author of the piece acknowledged that up front, and also acknowledged that most readers of the piece were doing so while drinking coffee, then the idea of stimulant or not seems unrealistic. The vast majority of us are on stimulants. Comparing Adderall to coffee might then be useful to establish level of intensity as an important matter. But stimulants or not as an issue should never have been brought to our attention.

Finally, I believe that engagement itself is not a sufficient test, though it is evidently necessary. The issue is engagement in something that promotes personal growth versus engagement that is mainly dissipative. And on this matter, one needs to ask whether others can task the student and merely by doing so assert that is important. Were the student to task himself or herself and do so in a responsible way, would he or she concur or do otherwise? We can only speculate about our historical giants. Were Einstein and Freud, for example, hampered by learning disabilities, ADHD or otherwise? We can all agree that Vincent van Gogh was so hampered. But he clearly was engaged. Is that the answer then?

Charity, Government, or Joint Provision of Social Services: When Is One Better than Either of the Other Two?

2025-04-01T10:53:00.005-05:00

For the past few years I have been making a monthly contribution to the local food bank, part of my usual charitable giving. A couple of weeks ago I learned that USDA had been giving grants to food banks around the country, but those were cut by DOGE recently. I wondered how I should respond to this news. Should I increase the amount of my monthly contribution? As one person operating in isolation, that would just be a drop in the bucket. Would it be possible for enough like-minded people to contribute more so as to enable the food banks to continue their operation, even if it weren't a perfect match for the DOGE cuts? And how would the needed coordination come about to make this outcome possible? It is these questions which provide the fuel for this post.

The post is also fueled by the little bit of news and opinion pieces I have been reading as of late, which have the Democrats searching for a coherent direction in which to respond to the Trump offensive. I will offer an idealistic pie-in-the-sky approach that might at least be considered some before dismissing it as too impractical. Let me begin.

The good about charity is that it addresses a felt need and that those who make donations to the charitable organization do so voluntarily. Under these circumstances, the need always seems to exceed what the charitable organization can deliver. In other words, the donations and the need don't line up perfectly and the charitable organization is constrained to limit its services within what's made available via donations. Government provision of service, in contrast, can scale up well beyond that, but then services are funded by taxes (or deficit spending) and taxes are often cast as coercive rather than as social obligation needed to maintain the public weal. With this simple (and perhaps simplistic) casting of the circumstances, the scale of the need then determines the better way of doing things. At low scale, charity is better. At very high scale, government provision is better, so food stamps rather than food banks. Joint provision makes the most sense when the scale is somewhere in the middle. This story could be readily complicated to make it more realistic. I will refrain from doing so here, because I want to move onto other matters.

I receive lots of solicitations from non-profit organizations, some of which are charities, but some of which are not, such as for a Democratic Party organization or a Democratic candidate. I find there is a very large number of such solicitations. And I also get commercial solicitations, a remarkable number for life insurance that I don't need, and others for a new credit card or a new bank account. In total I find the solicitations overwhelming and for the most part I entirely ignore them, which renders them ineffective. I wonder how many others are in the same boat as me on this score. Would it be possible to reduce the volume of the solicitations, perhaps by consolidating many of them, and thereby get the few that do still come through to capture my attention in a way where I might respond positively to one of them?

On a different point, one needs to concede that the Republicans are far better at propaganda than the Democrats. In large part, this is because negative messaging is usually more effective. In the past, some of that negative messaging has gone into demonizing the people who receive government assistance, casting them as immoral cheaters. For example, back in the 1970s in response to AFDC, we heard about Welfare Queens who were ripping off the taxpayer. While personally I find such messaging offensive, there is no doubt that it was effective with many other voters, by appealing to their prior prejudices. The Democrats have a harder job here, in trying to deliver an uplifting message about government being helpful to its citizens, one that voters take sincerely rather than regard with deep cynicism. How might such a message get through?

And still a different thought, which I think should be given some consideration. In a well functioning society every citizen plays a role. But in the rhetoric of politics, there is a tendency to focus on some sub-population only and ignore the rest of the voters. It is necessary to have inclusivity across economic classes in the political rhetoric, if at all possible. The Democrats now want to embrace economic populism, which to me is quite okay, but then it seems that voters like me are largely ignored, a mistake in my view. We have an important role to play, though mainly out of social obligation rather than as recipients of government largesse. Widespread need and social obligation are two sides of the same coin. The political rhetoric should reflect that.

Having set the table, I'm ready to deliver my proposal to address these issues. The Democrats should form a charitable foundation, for now call it the Democratic Party Foundation (DPF). (I tried to come up with an alternative foundation name that was a riff on The Invisible Hand, but everything I attempted was already taken. Somebody more adept at marketing can come up with a better name.) The purpose of the DPF is first to make grants to charitable organizations, such as the food bank. Second, when there is evident need but there is no charitable organization operating to address the need, the DPF will be empowered to create such a charitable organization to fill the gap. Third, as long as the Democrats maintain minority status in Congress all Democratic organizations, such as the DCCC, will suspend their own fundraising activity and instead redirect potential contributors to the DPF. Likewise, Democratic candidates for office will redirect their campaign contributions to the DPF. The hope is that this will refocus attention on the need the DPF attempts to address and away from current political issues, which are quite nasty. Fourth, partly just to educate Americans about their fellow citizens and partly to encourage additional donations, the DPF will shine a light on people in need, under various circumstances. And last, up front the DPF will announce that if and when the Democrats become the majority party in Congress, and take over the White House as well, some of what the DPF supports might very well move to government provided programs instead, because the need is much greater than the contributions the DPF can bring in to address the need.

Some evident challenges that the DPF will face are about how to maintain fairness in selecting those charities the DPF does support and what level of support the DPF does provide, how not to become overly bureaucratic so that the bulk of the donations to the DPF end up as grants to other charities, and how to avoid even an appearance of impropriety. I don't have solutions for these challenges that I can present here, but it is evident that such solutions need to be contemplated in advance of the formation of the DPF. Further, as one can anticipate that many of those in need won't receive any help from the DPF, one wonders whether they will remain bitter about the Democrats or if they might as least come to agree that the DPF is doing as best as it can to address the issues. What would it take to make the latter more likely?

In case it is not evident yet, going all in with the DPF is meant to be an extraordinarily drastic solution, which one might hope should become evident soon after the DPF begins to operate. For the sake of argument, let's say the DPF has some early success, the consequence being that the narrative in the media becomes more about the overwhelming need many citizens are feeling and much less about what Trump and Musk are doing to upset the apple cart. Further, suppose this new narrative begins to have appeal to some very wealthy Americans, both Democrat and Republican. Might they then make significant donations to the DPF? And might they also speak out about the absurdity of tax cuts on their own behalf? Were that to happen, we'd almost be home.

When I was a child my dad would read to me and my siblings at night before we went to bed. Sometimes it would be Aesop Fables. My little sketch of a solution to our current dilemma is very much in the spirit of The North Wind and the Sun. In the story, the Sun wins out. Wouldn't it be delightful if that were to happen here, pipe dream though it may be.

The Sequel Where Clarence's Older Cousin Turns Mr. Potter Into Another George Bailey

2025-03-27T16:52:00.004-05:00

I have a soft spot for schmaltzy movies and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of my favorites. I must have seen it a zillion times, but in case you haven't, it's available on Amazon Prime, among other places.

The hero of the story is George Bailey, a genuinely decent person who has lost his way, after his uncle Billy has misplaced a large deposit that their Building and Loan needs to continue to operate. George takes responsibility for Billy's error but then despairs as there seems no way out of this thicket unless this money is found. Clarence is George's Guardian Angel. He helps George work through the various dilemmas, initially by almost drowning so that George has to save him. Ultimately, it is George's wife Mary who does the heavy lifting, calling all of George's friends to ask them to chip in and help George out. They do and then some. George then has his faith restored and Clarence "earns his wings" for helping out this good soul to get on the right path again.

In this story, Mr. Potter is the bad guy, the richest man in town, but totally uncaring for the others who live in Bedford Falls. He is stingy and manipulative, a complete contrast to George. The story I vaguely have in mind would take that at as a starting point, but then via the various happenings that the story depicts, Potter goes through a transformation. He is unmarried and has no children. What should he be caring about when he enters the afterlife? The selfishness might be best understood if he expects to live a considerable while longer and the power he wields gives him personal satisfaction. In the story as told, he doesn't have to confront that question. How would his personality change if circumstances forced him to realize the end of his natural life was imminent? Some alter ego would be needed to help Mr. Potter work through the moral dilemmas and reconcile himself both with his future in the afterlife and his earlier natural life. Clarence's older cousin, also a Guardian Angel, is in position to do this.

* * * * *

I have no skill as a screenwriter, so beyond this very brief sketch I am not going to attempt to write this sequel. I welcome any and all to give it a try and consider what you come up with as an original work of your own, not a derivative of this post. I want to encourage your creativity, not stifle it. While we always need interesting new ideas, we especially need them now.

Instead, I want to make two brief points and then close. One is that this idea of a highly significant life event fundamentally altering one's perspective is not novel. Indeed, over the past two days I watched the mini-series, Prime Target (it's on AppleTV+) where the protagonist goes through such a transformation in the ultimate episode after a horrific experience in the penultimate episode. (For the sake of those who might watch this, I don't want my post to be a spoiler. I will say I thought the series was okay but not great.) I wonder how many other mini-series or movies feature a similar personal transformation in the lead character.

The other point, in case it is not obvious, is that Mr. Potter can be taken as a placeholder for some current day plutocrat. We might then ask whether such a personal transformation might happen with one of them and what would that take? Could it be orchestrated by others? If so, how? In my previous post, I briefly mentioned coercive means whereby a host of plutocrats change their perspective and thereby enable a credible impeachment of Trump. But such coercion amounts to a kind of warfare. Not feeling that necessary as of yet, one wonders whether there is a more benign alternative that might achieve such results.

I don't want to try to answer that here. I simply want to encourage others to be asking similar questions.

Should There Be A Remake Of Seven Days In May?

2025-03-10T12:28:00.002-05:00

For those who are my age (and those even older) you may very well have read the book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. I'm sure I read it, maybe in junior high school, or perhaps in 9th or 10th grade. I seem to recall it was quite a compelling read. More will recall the movie, which starred Burt Lancaster as General James Mattoon Scott, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Kirk Douglas as Jiggs Casey, General Scott's adjutant, Frederic March as the President of the United States, Jordan Lyman; and Ava Gardner as General Scott's jilted lover, Eleanor Holbrook.

The story is about a coup attempt in the U.S., a plot schemed by higher ups in the military, in which the plan is for General Scott himself to assume the Presidency once the coup succeeds. General Scott is far more hawkish against the Russians than is President Lyman and with that General Scott has far greater popularity among the public. A recent treaty with Russia, signed by the President, is viewed as a demonstration of his weakness. The public is fearful that the Russians won't keep to their end of the bargain. Jiggs Casey is not one of the conspirators in the plot attempt. He learns about it by decoding the messaging that he receives on behalf of General Scott. He then brings this information to the White House, so the President knows about the conspiracy. The bulk of the story is about how the plot is then thwarted.

It is worthwhile to cast this story within the real events of the time. The book was first published right around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The movie came out a couple of years later. The JFK assassination happened the year in between. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution happened earlier in the same year as when the movie came out. I started junior high school a couple of years after that, when the Vietnam War was beginning to ramp up. It took a while before I became aware of anti-war sentiment and the distrust of the military leadership that sentiment engendered. So, it may be that how you read this book depended on when you read it. But for me it was clear - Jordan Lyman the duly elected President, his advisers and Jiggs Casey as well were the good guys in the story. General Scott, who exceeded his authority in plotting the coup, along with his fellow co-conspirators were the bad guys.

If there were a remake of the story, it would need to be cast in the current moment. And, at least from where I'm sitting, that means the story would have to be reversed in a critical way. The coup plotters would be the good guys. For the good guys to win in the story, the interesting part would then be how to construct a plausible coup attempt that has a chance of succeeding under the current circumstances.

* * * * *

The above is the view from 64,000 feet. I know from my teaching days that for learners such a view is not sufficient. They need another view closer to the ground, an example that illustrates the more general proposition. For that reason I'm speculating about a possibility, I dare not call it a likelihood, where the coup plotters come from entirely outside the Federal government and then exert their pressure indirectly on those within.

Here is the idea in a nutshell. While a bunch of assassinations of key players would have visceral appeal to many readers (including me) pulling this off seems incredibly unlikely. So a different path is needed. Let's instead consider Impeachment. Both of the previous Trump Impeachment Trials in the Senate were a mockery. If there were to be a third such trial (as well as near simultaneous Impeachment Trials for others in the current Executive Branch) how might it be that guilty verdicts are obtained then? My answer is that ahead of time a sufficient number of Senators would need to be blackmailed in a certain way - namely that donations to their campaigns as well as other largess they have been receiving would be entirely cut off if they voted the wrong way on Impeachment. Who could make credible such blackmail threats? The plutocrats (multi-billionaires) who operate behind the scenes could do this. But why would they do this? They, in turn, must be blackmailed or themselves kidnapped and forced into it. They obviously wouldn't do it willingly, at least not at first.

How do you turn blackmailers and kidnappers into the good guys? Well, part of this should be considered a latter day Robin Hood story. Criminal activity that robs from the rich and gives to the poor casts the criminals as heroes. (Implicitly, there is a backstory of the rich becoming that way on the backs of the poor and then being quite stingy about it. Robin Hood and his Merry Men are undoing this injustice.) So, who gets to play this latter day band of Merry Men?

My candidate is some subset of major research universities. They have the needed expertise in computer science (for hacking into bank accounts), in finance (for knowing how to manipulate funds without arousing attention from the authorities), in providing muscle (via ROTC and possibly other law enforcement preparation programs), and they have the connections with the high rollers who are on their governing boards and comprise their largest donors.

Now a few preliminary questions need to be asked and answered before this candidate can be considered plausible.

Are these research universities in a good position to cast themselves as Robin Hood? At present, the answer is no, as I argued quite extensively in this post: Repricing - in Higher Education and in the Economy as a Whole. But, apparently higher education is getting clobbered money-wise by the current White House. If it wants to save itself in the eyes of the public it needs to recast itself in a credible way as a critical instrument toward rebuilding a middle-class society. And it needs to recast itself to insiders at the university as well, particularly students and faculty. Toward that end, I suggest a large group reading of Democracy and Education by John Dewey.
Do the circumstances justify "biting the hand that feeds you" in having these universities turn on their large donors in the way sketched above? I'd respond to this question in two different ways. While the donations are large from the point of the universities' coffers, are they large when considered as a share of the donor's wealth? If not, what else might be done to put that private wealth toward the public good? And can donors be convinced of doing that purely by reasoned argument or is that a pipe dream?
Universities are supposed to be havens for free speech and open communication. In such an environment, how does one keep word of the conspiracy from leaking out so as not to be thwarted by the current regime? I don't have a good answer for this one. I only know that the question needs a good answer.
If the conspiracy were otherwise effective, would most liberals nonetheless object to it because the ends don't justify the means?

* * * * *

In this closing section, I want to get at some of my reasons for writing this post. As with many of my posts, the main goal is to get the reader to think through the issues rather than to provide a blueprint for resolution of these issues. Further, elsewhere I largely am not writing/commenting/publicly reacting to the current political news, this as a way to keep my emotions somewhat in check. But I can't keep myself from doing a "what if" exercise of the type that I'm not getting from the little I do read in the news or from posts by my friends. I spent all these years as an theoretical economist and then an ed tech administrator doing such what if exercises. It's part of my persona.

From seeing posts in Facebook, evidently there is a lot of frustration with the current White House and a lot of the posts are protests of some sort. I do understand the need to vent. I yell at the TV when watching a basketball game and I think the ref made a bad call. But do I really think my yelling at the TV will impact the game situation at all?

So there is a reason to ask what coordinated fighting back looks like rather than individual venting. In between might be coordinated protest, which is legal and ethical. But is it effective, and if so, how long does it take to be? Do we have the time available to allow it to work? It seems to me that under the current circumstances it is reasonable to ask whether there are more expeditious means.

Then, too, I don't think we can rely on the a purely political solution now. The Democrats are too weak and in disarray as to how to address the present crisis. So, shouldn't non-political solutions be contemplated even if they seem improbable at first?

One last point is that I apparently have a bug for Seven Days in May. About a dozen years ago I wrote a post called ECOMCON, after having watched the movie again. The underlying issue at the time was the treaty with Iran about them not developing nukes. So, for me Seven Days in May serves as a good reference point for making argument. But what about for later generations. Would they want to watch the movie? If so, would it entertain them? I wish I knew the answer to those questions.

Putting Two And Two Together About The Current Trade War

2025-02-03T08:57:00.002-06:00

I've read some pieces recently about Trump's misdirection and his taking actions to confound things so that others, the media and the press mainly but also some Republicans, don't understand the real intent. Using that, I'm going to posit a simple idea that might explain things.

The idea is this. Certain domestic industries are clamoring for protection. The one that comes to mind is microchip production. In the past, Silicon Valley companies have imported their microchips, possibly from a vertical integration arrangement where this critical input was produced abroad as part of a global supply chain. Suppose that, as of late, the decision was made to bring that supply chain entirely within the U.S. You may very well recall that this was a goal both for Biden and for Harris.

Now, the efficient thing to do in this case, assuming the government supported this goal, would be to place sector-specific tariffs to make the import of these inputs more expensive and thereby enable domestic production of the inputs to be more viable. But that would be showing one's cards. Trump does not play Indian Poker.

So, instead, we have the current tariff morass, where the bulk of it simply offers cover for the desired protectionist policy. Further, to make things more explicit, we really only want to apply tariffs to inputs that come from China, though one might imagine that China would itself use intermediaries to avoid the tariffs, if possible. We don't have any desire to place tariffs on goods from Mexico or Canada that are not themselves imports from China.

I want to note that this is all conjecture on my part. I have no direct evidence about what I'm saying here. But it does make sense to me.

Maslow Encore Une Fois

2025-01-09T08:11:00.014-06:00

This is a connect-the-dots post. One form of connection is from the past to the present. My blog started back in 2005 and some of the references that I linked to in posts during the first year were from pieces written earlier than that. So I will take snippets from several of these early posts to make the case that what was happening then in higher education offered a reasonably good foreshadowing of what is happening now. A different but related connection is that issues within higher education seem to mirror issues within society as a whole. Then, a third connection is about the search for resolutions of these issues. I've tried a variety of these, each of which has failed (mainly because I offered them up as a theoretical possibility but had no way to implement them). It does seem that to date societal imposed solutions have made matters worse. Is it possible for there to be effective solutions that do improve matters?

Now let me take a lesson from some recent TV shows I've watched, which go back and forth between the present and the foreshadowing events that happened earlier. I will mention two pieces I've read in the last couple of days that discuss current major social issues. One of those is this opinion piece by Chris Hayes about boredom, I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own. I struggled with this piece, first because initially I thought it was about why people voted for Trump, but that turned out to be a just a throw-away line. Then later I felt that while the premise is probably right, boredom is widespread, there were many points that might have been made but weren't, so the picture Hayes paints is far from complete. I will get to some of my criticisms later in this post.

The other piece is from the Chronicle of Higher Education by Beckie Supiano, Some Assembly Still Required How K-12 reforms and recent disruptions created Gen Z’s baffling habits. I was much more in agreement with what was said in this piece, though I believe there is a tendency to attribute most of the problems to Covid, and not consider trends in (non)learning that were forming prior to Covid. Certainly, at the Higher Ed level, the student mental health crisis was manifest in 2019, if not earlier. Covid exacerbated the situation but wasn't the initial cause.

Now let me go to the foreshadowing. In a post from June 2005 called Connections Across Cohorts of Students, I referenced a piece that George Kuh had written for Change Magazine back in 2003, What We're Learning About Student Engagement from NSSE. Kuh's essay offers us language for the antonym of boredom, engagement. But, more importantly, this paragraph which I quoted in full in my post is worth reproducing even now.

And this brings us to the unseemly bargain, what I call the "disengagement
compact": "I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone." That is, I won't make
you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won't have to grade as
many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this
bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many
students get decent grades--B's and sometimes better. There seems to be a
breakdown of shared responsibility for learning--on the part of faculty members
who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part
of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions
provide.

I would argue that the disengagement compact is still alive and well in Higher Ed, though campuses like Illinois worked in certain very specific areas (notably undergraduate research) so they could score higher in those metrics that NSSE focused on and so as not to have to face the issue head on. And Supiano's piece makes it seem that K-12 is also witnessing the disengagement compact. I don't have any evidence, one way or the other, whether the workplace offers yet another locus for the disengagement compact, yet I would not find it surprising if others could readily provide such evidence.

Over the years, I've been somewhat idealistic as to how to address these social issues. Maslow has been my hero this way and self-actualization seems the evident answer to the prayer that such a solution might be found. Another post from the first year of my blog entitled, Maslow, gives some then relevant examples of self-actualizers and provides a link to this site, which offers a primer on Maslow's work. It also offers a list of attributes a self-actualizer will exhibit, which I thought would make for a good set of aspirations for any student. The list is reproduced below:

Truth, rather than dishonesty.
Goodness, rather than evil.
Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity.
Unity, wholeness, and transcendence of opposites, not arbitrariness or forced choices.
Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanization of life.
Uniqueness, not bland uniformity.
Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or accident.
Completion, rather than incompleteness.
Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness.
Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity.
Richness, not environmental impoverishment.
Effortlessness, not strain.
Playfulness, not grim, humorless, drudgery.
Self-sufficiency, not dependency.
Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness.

The questions I asked myself then are whether an ordinary student can be encouraged to become a self-actualizer, if becoming a self-actualizer was mainly nurture rather than nature, and if it is possible to make up for lost time when early forms of nurture prove insufficient in this dimension. I'm still asking myself these questions now.

But on one point, I think clarification should be given now. Sometimes, the Hierarchy of Needs is interpreted too primitively - when some of the being needs are not satisfied then that fully blocks the possibility of self-actualization. This is not right. In a post from 2013 called Some thoughts on the new Campus Strategic Plan, I quoted directly from Maslow's book, which gives a more nuanced view:

If we wish to help humans to become more fully human, we must realize not only that they try to realize themselves, but that they are also reluctant or afraid or unable to do so. Only by fully appreciating this dialectic between sickness and health can we help to tip the balance in favor of health.
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

The dialectic between realizing oneself and being unable to do so is in all of us. Some may be more able to attain a better balance, but nobody is all of one and none of the other. If that's right, then encouraging someone to self-actualize must help both with those behaviors directly but also with managing the inevitable bits of sickness, bits which most of us are loathe to talk about.

Now let me get to my criticisms of the piece by Chris Hayes. There are things he should have taken up, but didn't. First, he didn't talk at all about time spent with friends. His focus was on solitary activity. Extroverts, in particular, get their mental sustenance from having conversation with others. Hayes could have written something about this, including that loneliness is prevalent nowadays, even when there is electronic communication with others, though that is better than no communication whatsoever. But loneliness didn't get a mention. Sticking with this theme about conversation, I wrote about my personal take on it in a post called, The virtues of making it up as you go along. In that post I made reference to this paper by Kenneth Bruffee, Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind", which relates conversation to thinking and to writing. They form the vertices of a triangle. Hayes would benefit from reading Bruffee's paper. And, perhaps anticipating reading Bruffee's paper by a decade, I wrote a series of 7 posts on Inward Looking Service Learning, which was about how to promote conversation between more experienced students and other students just getting started, in the belief that such conversations would encourage learning, with that general idea then applied to a variety of contexts.

I did something similar in my own teaching in the late 1990s, though I paid the more experienced students rather than try to give them course credit for doing the work. The latter idea comes from the observation that helping/mentoring/teaching others offers its own lessons about how to communicate, and those lessons are quite valuable. Alas, this idea never saw the light of day on my campus because institutional practice ran too far afield from heavily relying on undergraduates to support instruction. Further, though there is the alternative of conversations between students and instructors during office hours, and back in 2007 I wrote a rather extensive post about this alternative called Rethinking Office Hours, my experience in teaching the one course a year I taught in retirement till Covid is that most students are too shy to attend office hours. The shyness is explained by the fear of looking stupid in front of an authority figure. Students would rather forego the experience entirely as a consequence.

Indeed, Hayes could have spent some time in his piece on considering fear of failure and its relationship to boredom. In particular, Hayes might have made mention of Later, a book review by James Surowiecki, which talks about procrastination. It leads off with an example that features George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize winning economist. That Akerlof procrastinates in some circumstances is the writer's way of saying that everybody does. And then Hayes could have amplified matters with the following sort of question. Are we engaged in fun things while we procrastinate or are we bored then to seemingly punish ourselves for not engaging in the task we should be doing? I don't know the answer to that question, in general, but I can say that I procrastinated some in writing this post and I confess that I was bored some during that time.

I do want to look at the other end of the tunnel, after the task has been completed. Over the years I've learned you can't always be on. After a period of high stress, there is a need to decompress, to relax, and then recuperate. Similarly, after a long period of high concentration, which may not have been stressful but which was quite intense nonetheless, there needs to be some time to veg out. Yet we are creatures of habit. Might those down time intervals get longer, just because we get used to what that feels like? If so, does that encourage us to be bored?

Hayes might have also taken on multiprocessing, supposedly our way of dealing with information overload, but does that too encourage boredom? And then he might have talked about exceptions that prove the rule, folks who are fully engaged in the task at hand. Does that mean they are self-actualizing?

I have two distinct recent examples. This essay by Louise Glück, Writing As Transformation, is a personal story of a writer who at a very young age seemed to already understand her life's path, and that for her writing was completely absorbing as an activity and as a means for personal growth. Others might read this piece just to learn that it is possible to be so inspired. But I suspect that for other writers the story is different, as it was different for me. I had a preference for face-to-face conversation or, if you will, argument with a friend, done over a coffee, and on a recurrent basis, say for a couple of hours once or twice a week. (When I was under 30, it might have been later in the day and then done over a beer.) When I was a campus administrator for educational technology, I had such colleagues who had parallel jobs at peer institutions. Being with them was very pleasurable for this reason. But, it wasn't frequent enough. I had many ideas swirling around in my head that needed to find some form of expression. I started this blog as an alternative to these conversations. After a couple of weeks of posting without letting anyone else know about the blog, writing blog posts became a habit for me. A few months later, Scott Leslie wrote a post about my blog and it soon became known within the edu blog universe. ( A few years after that I had to move the blog off of the campus server, Guava, and relocated it to Blogspot, losing quite a few subscribers in the process. Some years after that I dropped Technology from the blog's Title, though not in the url as I didn't want to lose more subscribers then.)

The other example is from the world of sports. I'm a fan of Illinois Men's Basketball. I not only watch the games but also watch the post-game press conferences on YouTube, which features Coach Underwood and also a couple of players who did well in the game. It is interesting to hear both coach and players talk about the intensity of practice and that to perform at a high level in a game, the players need to do that first in practice. This level of intensity is for physical performance and I wonder if Maslow, were he still alive, would term what the players do as self-actualization. I also want to note that I've watched a bunch of short television series about men in a military setting engaging in fierce combat of some sort. The esprit de corps among these men is very similar to the feel one has about the Illini basketball players. The achievements are a team effort, though in a particular instance individual effort does matter. Yet there doesn't seem to be any within team competition. All the competition is with the team they are playing against. This intensity is quite the opposite of boredom.

The fans also share in this intensity. While I only watch on TV these days, I still feel it when viewing the game from home. But, it is hard as a fan to maintain this when it's known that the team is mediocre. I used to be a fan of the New York Knicks in basketball and the New York Giants in football, but I stopped watching both pro sports years ago because there just wasn't enough pull to keep me going (and I was a fan of New York teams while living in Central Illinois).

I want to mention a couple of solutions I've attempted, as theoretical exercises, to promote self-actualization in our students. The first one was about developing an explicit program for teaching intuition. Students should be encouraged to express their curiosity about a subject and see where that leads. They should then drive the inquiry that follows from the questions they have generated up front. The thought was that if this is done on a repeated basis, the interplay between the questions and the inquiry would help teach what makes for good questions up front as well as how to conduct an inquiry that really does address the questions. So, I started to draft a book which I called Guessing Games, to pursue this idea, with each chapter a stand alone essay on a particular sub-theme. While it started out well, and I was happy with the early chapters, I eventually hit a snag that I didn't know how to resolve. The chapters themselves needed to be written in the style of inquiry, but I have a very strong tendency to lecture, and revert to that in my writing quite often. The last few chapters I wrote seemed like lecturing to me, and it caused me to lose interest in the project. This does not mean that the underlying idea is bad. It does mean, however, that for the underlying idea to see the light of day in a completed work, I need a co-author who embraces these themes, or some other writer needs to write a complete work on these ideas, taking my early chapters as a launch point for that.

The other solution is a site I set up during Covid to encourage college students who were then time abundant to embrace a program that would have them read more and teach themselves about learning-to-learn. I called this the Non-Course. (If you go to that site, it would be better to read the various tabbed pages before going to the Non-Course Blog, which then gives an overview of a self-directed program that might be followed.) I never had any students to try it out. (Generating ideas like the Non-Course is something I do okay. Marketing those ideas is a different matter, one where I'm pretty much clueless.). I want to note that the self-help sites Chris Hayes mentions in his essay are meant to be fully consumed in a matter of minutes. These two possible solutions that I've linked to require a far greater time commitment. Are my possible solutions DOA just because of that?

Let me wrap up. I don't normally ask myself whether I had been self-actualizing. I ask a different, but perhaps related question. Was I so absorbed in the activity that I completely lost track of myself. This could be while reading a book, watching a movie, or listening to music. It's not just from the writing activity or really the pre-writing - letting the imagination wander to figure out, in general, what I plan to say in the piece. It's different in editing mode, where I'm more self-critical and therefore not so unaware of self. I've found over time a transference in my own focus from pre-writing to an emphasis on editing (though I can't say that my proofreading is above suspicion in spite of this transference). Some of this, I believe, is health related. I'm a geezer and the various aches and pains get in the way of being fully absorbed. It wasn't that way 20 years ago. Another part may be less stimulation from which I feel a need to write in order to make sense of what I'm experiencing. It is different to blog when you are working full time than when you are retired. With the former, there is a lot going on and a need to get the blog post done, to get back to the day job and so the thinking can move on to other matters. In retirement there is less going on and less urgency to get things done. And further, my audience now is mainly bots. I have a few human readers, but not too many. Does that matter? Should it matter? With a large audience the writer may feel some obligation to the readers. There is no such obligation with bots.

I read Toward a Psychology of Being fairly early in my career as an ed tech administrator. Doing so was part of my regime to self-instruct about how people learn. I recall that at the time I felt that Maslow was speaking directly to me. I read it again somewhat later, and while it didn't produce quite the same reaction, I did find the re-read rewarding. Yet after that I had a work colleague who had a PhD from the College of Education who reported reading it for one of her classes, but not getting much out of it at all. Frankly, I couldn't say whether that was because her inclinations are different from mine or if reading as an opt in activity is quite different from reading in a course when that is required by the instructor. Indeed, my own inclinations also lead me to read a book of Maslow's later essays, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Within that collection there are essays about Maslow's belief that creativity and self-actualization are intimately linked. He utilized an expression that I really liked - the creative attitude. Now, I don't know how to get this done, but I have a sense that a voluntary reading group on Maslow aimed at those confronting current learning issues would be quite helpful. It wouldn't provide the answers, but it might very well encourage the asking of interesting questions that aren't currently being considered.

Correlation, Causation, and Inference in Big Time College Sports

2025-01-04T12:35:00.001-06:00

The past day or two I have been puzzling about whether the results of the Rose Bowl, a college football game where Ohio State overwhelmed Oregon in the first half, and the Illinois basketball game against Oregon on Thursday evening, played on Oregon's home court, where the Illini set the record for the largest point spread victory by a visiting team in NCAA basketball, are somehow related. In each case Oregon was the higher rated team going into the game. Ohio State had played Oregon previously during the regular season. The game was close and played on Oregon's home field. Oregon won by a small margin. Illinois had played other higher rated teams tough, notably Tennessee, even though that ended as a loss for the Illini. So, ahead of time, one might reasonably have predicted that these games would be close. That they each ended up as blowouts was quite a surprise.

As a fan, I care more about Illini basketball than I do about Illini football, though I did watch the Citrus Bowl. And I don't generally watch college football on TV, but I did watch most of the first half of the Rose Bowl. With basketball, not only did I watch the game against Oregon, but I also watched on YouTube the postgame interviews with the head coaches. Dana Altman, the head coach of Oregon, bemoaned the lack of defensive effort his team showed against Illinois. He said that Illinois was a good offensive team, but not that good. They looked unstoppable because Oregon didn't play defense. Defense is mainly an effort thing, and Altman was taking to task the effort of his own players. But he never said why the effort level was so poor. Nate Bittle, the Oregon Center, and supposedly quite a good player, appeared for 21 minutes, while he averages over 25 minutes a game. He was out quite a bit during the second half. Again, one wonders why.

Might it be that the Oregon football team, particularly the defensive unit, had a low level of effort in the Rose Bowl? If so, one again would want to know why that was. And, maybe, the underlying explanation for the basketball team's poor defensive performance is similar to or even identical to the underlying explanation for the football team's poor defensive performance.

Now a bit on probability that I'm taking from Daniel Kahneman. In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he warns the reader about making inferences from small samples. Fans are prone to do that and, in particular, if the team has struggled some in the past then to take account only of the recent successes, as if the team "figured it out" and is now on the path to greater glory. But it is possible for there to be an outlier great performance that doesn't become a repeat event. I am particularly reminded of Brandon Paul's great performance against Ohio State where he shot the lights out. Further, if the opponent is not up to snuff, for whatever reason, it would seem that the outlier becomes somewhat more likely, especially if that is unknown by by the other team, which might otherwise lessen its own effort to keep the situation from becoming too embarrassing.

There are now several sports pundits who produce their own ratings of college sports teams. I'm behind the times on this. I used to follow the college basketball ratings that Jeff Sagarin produced, but he no longer seems to be doing this. I only mention this here because I'm guessing that no matter which rating you follow, they don't use information from other college sports. In other words, Oregon losing to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl won't impact at all how to account for Oregon losing to Illinois in men's basketball on January 2. But might there be relevant information content that should be accounted for?

Likewise, it seems there is now a huge industry of sports betting. In that, the odds set by the bookmakers depend not just on past team performance, but also on the latest poop about the team, such as if a player has been suspended, or injured, or has some emotional issue to cope with. But do the teams disclose all that might matter here? During Covid, rules were imposed that forced disclosure of players who had tested positive and when that was. I believe it to be the norm, however, that many "minor" injuries are not disclosed. So, what I'm really wondering here is whether at Oregon there was some illness or emotional trauma that impacted players on both the football and the basketball teams but it was kept hidden. A big time gambler, who might be a donor to the athletic program at Oregon, could have made a lot of money if in possession of this information when the rest of the world wasn't. I mention this only because it gives some possible explanation for why the information wasn't disclosed.

But what I'm really interested in is the perception of how good Ohio State football is as well as how good Illinois basketball is. It would seem that each of them would be overrated if there were such private information about Oregon that wasn't disclosed. Performance of these teams in the upcoming game(s) will speak to how good they are. I'm wondering whether anyone will find out if there is important information about the Oregon teams that wasn't disclosed. I'm unaware of mechanism that might reveal that now.

Of course, everything I've said here is speculation. It's possible that Oregon football under performed simply because they hadn't played in a while (they had a bye in the first round of the playoffs) and Oregon basketball just had a bad hair day. I have no way of knowing which it is. It's just that the juxtaposition of two highly unlikely events happening in tandem creates a situation that raises one's eyebrows. And I'm surprised that nobody else has brought up the possibility, though maybe they have and I'm just ignorant of it.

My Hubris

2024-11-09T11:23:00.007-06:00

Many of my friends and family are feeling malaise now, given the outcome of the election. I am no different. But where I'm likely to be quite different is to have the urge to come up with a strategy for the Democrats, first by doing a SWOT analysis on their positions, then by coming up with a sensible path that emerges thereafter. I need to say that as somebody outside the political machinery, in many respects I don't know what I'm talking about. That I will come up with something both sensible and realistic is unlikely. My hubris is that it will be otherwise. Yet knowing that ahead of time I will still go through this exercise because I know myself well enough that if I don't do it, the ideas will just fester inside me. On the other hand, if I do the analysis and write about it, I can get it out of my system and move onto something else, perhaps not returning to thinking about politics for a good long time.

Let's begin. Perhaps surprisingly, I'm going to take as my inspiration my World Series viewing on TV, particularly the commercials. Up through the League Championship Series, there were two main networks that covered the games. TBS had the American League games. Fox had the National League games. It was Fox that had the World Series. I don't know whether that mattered for what I say next. Maybe it did.

The commercials were repetitive and the bulk of them were about selling product. Some were political, in support of one Presidential candidate or the other. All of these were attack ads. Rather than praise the candidate who endorsed the message, the commercial would rip the other candidate. There were commercials from both parties, though there seemingly were more pro-Trump commercials than pro-Harris commercials. I should also note that, except for viewing sports, I don't watch Fox. So, I don't know whether the commercials during the World Series were the norm for that network or were specific to the World Series.

We should take a moment to reflect on why attack ads prevail rather than ads which might uplift and educate the public, while attack ads breed cynicism and contempt. Apparently, it is believed by those who make the commercials that negative emotions are stronger motivators, particularly for voters who are undecided, as to the candidate they will choose or whether they will exercise the franchise. Given this, what's fair is fair. Harris commercials told us that Trump would be a disaster. Trump commercials reciprocated. But the reality is that Trump had been President, so there was a record of how he operated in office. Harris, as Vice President, played a much lesser role. The Trump commercials focused on what Harris said in interviews rather than what she did in office. Further, the Harris commercials were delivering a condensed version of what a viewer would see when watching a segment on MSNBC, condemnation of Trump. The Trump commercials, in contrast, focused on a very specific item to concentrate the fear about Harris.

The focus was on Harris embracing equal rights for Trans people. Now, that a Democrat would support equal rights for all Americans regardless of (you can give quite a few qualifiers here) is not surprising. But instead of condemning this general principle, evidently doing that would be a political loser, the Trump commercial instead zeroed in on this incredibly small portion of the population. I don't know whether this was a coincidence or not, I suspect otherwise, but around the same time there were news items about other schools cancelling their women's volleyball matches with San Jose State, which has a Trans player on the roster.

There is an unspoken question in the background that needs answering. Do voters truly embrace equal rights for all? Or, instead, do they believe something else such as - they are entitled to have their own prejudices against others and don't want to be forced to feign otherwise? Perhaps there could be some hybrid that is closer to the mark - the former is the ideal we strive for while the latter is the current reality. This provides a backdrop for the evident resentment over the last few years against DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Programs in Higher Education and the far earlier pushback against 'political correctness' that should also be taken into account. The Liberal Elite forced these ideas on the rest of the population, who didn't want them. And the Democrats have been captured by the Liberal Elite. At least, that's one interpretation of our recent political history that I've heard repeatedly. But there is another question that's not being asked, but should be. If the hybrid is a good first pass at the current reality, how does one get closer to the ideal? As it is a difficult question to answer, I will move on.

It may be that all of this is a red herring and that the only thing which matters to the voters is given by that famous James Carville line - It's the economy, stupid. Here's my little bit on that, based on reading this piece from NBC on why we had the electoral outcome we had. There were only two real factors mentioned, immigration and inflation, which is what I'll focus on here. The entire rest of the piece is about what I'd term political ephemera. It may matter in the moment, but its significance is far more symbolic than real.

Ordinary people are pretty good at identifying economic problems, though there may be some issue with labeling. For the typical consumer, inflation is associated with high prices of the goods and services they purchase, rather than associated with the economist's definition - it's the rate of increase of those prices which is inflation. And while the official statistics measure that rate of increase on an annual basis, many consumers are likely to compare now with their pre-COVID experience. On that score, gas prices are quite modest, at least around Champaign IL, where I live. Grocery store prices, on the other hand, are much higher. For people with a modest income, that's a biggie. Interest rates are much higher now. And, while I don't mean to be frivolous about this, it's seems that TV prices are much higher, with many of the shows you want to watch found on subscription channels that you don't currently subscribe to. The sellers of the TV programming are practicing death by a thousand cuts with their buyers, or so it seems. Plus, the labor market is much softer now. I have two sons, both in their early 30s. Each was laid off earlier this year. So I'm saying this based on personal experience. That the labor market is softer matters. It matters a lot.

As to causality, however, especially when the causes are non-proximate, ordinary people tend to blame the current occupant in the White House, in this case Joe Biden, even when the root cause of the issues happened before the current occupant was elected. The story is something like this. COVID was the root cause. Prior to COVID, the economy was doing quite well. When COVID arrived, it disrupted global supply chains in industries across the board. In some cases, those were temporary disruptions. In other cases, the suppliers went out of business. When supply lessens, price rices. That's elementary economics. That is not the whole story, but it is the beginning. The next part is that other suppliers used the situation to act opportunistically - they raised their prices even without the drop off in supply, because it was profitable to do so and under the circumstances they wouldn't be blamed for price gauging. This made the situation worse. Then the final part is that once there is a general rise in prices, it tends to self-perpetuate as others try to catch up, since their own purchasing power has eroded. In other words, an inflation expectation has been created.

The Federal Reserve has as one of its mandates to combat inflation. It does this by raising interest rates, which makes borrowing more costly and thereby lessens demand. That this happened during COVID makes Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, seem like an evil demon. He was creating financial pain for many people at a time when the entire population was scared for their lives because of the disease. In some sense, the experience mirrored my time in graduate school during the late 1970s, which was a period of Stagflation. Prices were rising while the economy operated well below capacity. The Fed worried about the former and assumed that when COVID came under control, overall economic performance would improve. Alternatively, purchasing power can maintain under inflation if income rises at the same rate as prices. The American Rescue Plan of 2021 did just that, so you might argue that the raising income bit should be handled by fiscal policy rather than monetary policy. In my view, that plan should have been renewed for at least the next two years. But politics is such that if the situation starts to seem almost normal, it is harder to get bills through Congress. Biden does own that.

Let me turn to immigration and why so many Americans now seem to be against it. It is fundamentally about competition in the labor market and the belief that workers who are willing to accept low wages and poor working conditions should be deterred from entering the market, if at all possible, so that the wages of other workers get boosted as a consequence. This means the jobs themselves must remain within the U.S. and not be exported abroad. Further, there is a hidden hope that the work can remain labor intensive and not be automated in a way that fewer workers are needed. This became explicit during the recent longshoremen's strike, where that was one of the contract demands. But note that the longshoremen are unionized. To my knowledge there has been no connection made between being anti-immigration and being pro-union.

One can consider Trump's proposal to put tariffs on imports in this light. It would have the effect of bringing supply chains for some products more inside the U.S. and in some cases entirely so. Of course, it will also artificially raise product prices. That's what protectionism does. What will be the net effect on 'real wages,' which can be defined as the purchasing power of the income earned? In any particular case it can go either way. Normally economists think that protectionism lowers national income because it blocks potential gains from trade. But there is a literature on 'strategic trade policy' (think of the Chinese here) where restricting imports and promoting exports in certain specific industries can raise national income. As I have yet to hear anything about strategic export promotion, and the strategic trade literature focuses on a small trading country, not the U.S., I would bet on the policy shooting us in the foot. Here I'm just trying to get at its origins, not at its merit, and with the origins get at the mindset of many Americans.

As I said, Biden owns this. And Harris inherited it. Given that, the polls should have predicted that Trump would win in a walk. But the polls didn't do that. This is a puzzle for which I don't have an answer. It could be that polls were systematically wrong. (But why?) Alternatively, there might have been more shenanigans than have already been reported. Possibly, it could be both. I hope that the press can untangle this and do so soon, well before Christmas. I believe that our reaction now depends on an understanding of the truth here.

* * * * *

Now I want to consider Trump moving America toward fascism by giving two possible ways to consider this. Regardless of approach, it is helpful to consider the messaging that Trump employs entirely as misdirection. He is manipulating the public, no doubt. The question is this - manipulating toward what end? That's what I will take on here.

One interpretation is that this is a replay of Germany in the 1930s. I'm guessing that many of my friends are fearful that is the case. I am fearful too; I don't want to deny that. But I want to keep open the possibility that there is another take on the situation.

This is that Trump throws the MAGA types a bone now and then, but in actuality treats them like dogs who can largely be ignored on economic matters. Getting the followers stirred up is a way to attain the necessary votes for reelection. But the economic spoils will not be shared with them. It's the plutocrats who lurk in the background, including Trump himself, who will get those spoils. In this sense the followers have been played by Trump, but they don't seem to realize that they have been played. Will they wake up to what is going on?

If this other alternative better explains things, then you might imagine that the fascist machinations of the next Trump administration will be mild, when the economy is going okay, because the masses will be content, more or less. If the economy sours, however, or if there is some other crises a la COVID, then those fascist machinations will ramp up, as a way to distract the masses from their own situation. In this case there is a risk that the first alternative will obtain. Consequently, one might ask whether many among the masses might sour on Trump before this happens and in addition ask whether they'd be open to messaging from other sources that suggests there might be alternatives for them. This, it would seem, is entirely unknown and unknowable now.

Let me overlay on this the twin issues of Trump's longevity and Trump's senility, curiously parallel to the situation with Biden. On the one hand, one might imagine that he doesn't last two more years in office and that Vance takes over then. On the other hand, one can also imagine that he seems to get through the four years but he doesn't want to leave office, so he challenges the 22nd Amendment or simply bypasses it. In the former case, the issue is whether the cult of personality that is Trump can carry over to others or if the magic will be gone then. In the latter case, I can only imagine this happening if we are headed for a replay of Germany in the 1930s. It is the most worrisome case.

* * * * *

We've reached the part where it's time to ask how the Democrats should respond to the circumstances. Let me give a word of caution first. The temptation to find answers quickly is very strong. That temptation needs to be resisted. Much thought needs to be put in trying to understand the situation fully and then giving an accurate description of what is going on. As I said at the outset, I'm an outsider. My analysis makes sense to me, but there is a lot I don't know. Similar analyses need to be done by insiders. If some agreement among them can be found, then there will be a good basis on which to determine the appropriate reactions.

Now a few things occur to me, which I'm comfortable affirming, even as an outsider. First, the Democrats have a credibility problem because too much of their prior message has been on other than - It's the economy, stupid. They have acted as if the agenda can been quite broad. This works for those who always vote Democrat, but at present that's a minority. If they are to broaden their base the agenda must narrow and the bulk of what's in it must be on economics. This makes sense as long as Trump is pursuing the throw-the-dog-a-bone approach to governing. Second, the messaging should be directed to ordinary working people, ignoring Trump and his indiscretions as much as possible. The Democrats are not as good at propaganda as Trump is. They should realize that much of what they've done has backfired, that they've been helping him with their overt attacks on him. Third, there needs to be persistence in this, not a quick one and done. Many of the rank and file won't be happy with that, so there needs to be messaging with them too. The thrust of such messages is that you can't move closer to the ideal if you remain in the minority.

And what should be done if the replay of Germany in the 1930s seems the likely outcome? I would want to know this. How many of those who voted for Trump are not MAGA types at all and would oppose overt fascism rather than support it? The form of such opposition needs to be beyond the electoral. You see batted around in the press the expression - civil war - which is easy to say but much harder to understand what it would mean now. Some violence, I'm sure, would be part of it. But resistance in other forms will be needed as well - a war of information, if you will. The specifics on that are beyond me. There is no good in me speculating about it further. Others who better understand the situation need to fill in the details and then explain what should happen.

* * * * *

Let me wrap up. While I have had some difficulty in writing blog posts for the last couple of years - the pre-writing activity would take much longer than it used to - this post was comparatively easy to write, even if it still took a few days from gestation to final product. I take that as an indication that these thoughts were prominent for me and I needed to express them. I'm less interested in trying to persuade others with this piece as to my recommendations, but am strongly interested in them demanding to get other analyses done similarly that get at describing the current political reality. I'm suspicious that such an analysis can't come from the press, because it needs an arms length perspective and being less wrapped up in moment to moment matters. I think it requires a social science background to provide. With that, I hope others who are qualified have a go at it and, in turn, that gets the rank and file to reflect on what Democrats should be doing for now.

From Long Ago - My Inner Thoughts About Learning Technology And Undergraduate Education

2024-10-26T09:28:00.002-05:00

What I write here was triggered by seeing an ad in Facebook about a Master Class taught by the well known writer, Michael Lewis. I've read several of his books. Back in 1999, I read The New New Thing, Lewis' take on the technology entrepreneur, Jim Clark. As Clark was instrumental in the founding of Netscape and Netscape was the sequel to the Mosaic browser, the book held some extra interest for tech folks at Illinois, where Mosaic was developed. The university botched that technology transfer process, which indirectly impacted me in ed tech, as neither CyberProf nor Mallard, sophisticated online quizzing tools that were popular on campus at the time, were brought to market, ultimately ensuring that these applications would have limited shelf life.

But it wasn't just technology transfer where there were issues. I thought then that undergraduate education had severe problems. It worked well for the top 10% of the students and perhaps the next 10% as well. But it didn't work well at all for students more in the middle. And while individual instructors would talk about this with me, at the time I was the Director of the Center for Educational Technologies and had such conversations with some regularity, there was nothing like the social networks of today for having a more public conversation on this subject. The Campus, as a rule, likes to self-promote on its Website and in other vehicles (like those infomercials shown during the halftime of football games). It didn't have a way to publicly discuss areas of weakness. I thought the public should be made aware of the concerns with undergraduate education. But how might one go about doing this?

I want to note that this was about 5 years before I started writing this blog and while the CET had a newsletter where I had a column, that wasn't the right vehicle for disseminating my concerns. Further, while I was an insider on these matters, I was not a journalist, so I didn't consider writing an exposé, as I thought doing so wouldn't get much attention at all. (Most academic writing is for insiders, so gets little to no attention from the general public.) Instead, I made a leap of faith and convinced myself that if I could tell a story that was compelling in its own right, then people would read it for that and learn en passant about the issues I wanted them to consider. With that I came up with the idea for writing a novel.

It is called The Rise of JCU. JCU stands for Justin Carruthers University. Note that JC are the initials for Jim Clark. The character in my story is loosely modeled after the real world Jim Clark. There is another character loosely modeled after the real world Michael Lewis. The underlying idea was that a character very much like me came up with a plan that Justin Carruthers would sponsor - a for-profit university that would do undergraduate education in the right way. But that is expensive to do, so a good part of the story is in coming up with ways for this to make sense as a business venture.

Ultimately, I produced 10 chapters and some front matter, which if you are interested you can find here:
https://uofi.box.com/s/0d4qvf0i47763dia4enk
I do want to note here that at the time of writing the labor market was overheated - jobs at McDonald's were going unfilled even though they were offering well above the minimum wage. The economics part of the story is more plausible in such an environment. Alas, the dot.com bubble did burst, as did the housing bubble some years later. A real solution to the issues I raise needs to be functional regardless of the macroeconomic climate.

I stopped about halfway through the novel for a few different reasons. Having just reread it all the last couple of days, I can see that the main reason was that I had explicated all the learning issues and economic issues that I wanted to talk about ahead of time. Perhaps those could have been refined further in later chapters, but more likely, it was simply that the rest of the story needed to play out. There was less motivation for me at that point. Another reason, I had a friend in the Writer's Workshop on Campus who was reading the chapters and offering his critique of them. In the last couple of chapters I started to write about a romantic interest between a couple of students at JCU. He said that part didn't work for him, on a story level. I didn't know how to fix this and/or whether I should simply take it out altogether. But having more on the student perspective and the life issues that accompany the school issues is critical. I do have a different scene where the faculty talk about this. So I don't want to minimize the concern. But I'm less able to talk about the student experience - mine was so long ago and I may simply not have had a good picture of student life at the time of the writing.

The last reason for stopping in the writing is that I knew the overall effort would have to fail. I did bring multiple instances of failure at a lower level into the story. Nothing like this is ever just smooth sailing. But I found those more painful to write as I needed to not just talk about the problem but then I had to have a follow up to explain why it wasn't fatal. Thinking through the fatal problem in what is meant as an uplifting fantasy simply wasn't attractive to do.

If any of my friends in higher ed who were around circa 2000 and are still working read this, I wonder how much they would find the story quite dated versus how much it remains still relevant. I'm too out of it now to make that determination myself.

Yeah Baby

2024-10-20T07:56:00.002-05:00

Giancarlo Stanton
Seems like he could be in Canton
But with so often going for the downs
Its more probable to be Cooperstown.
#MVPForTheALCS