Where Does This Issue Belong?

It’s an “issue,” as we say. It concerns a lot of people. Something ought to be done about it. Let’s imagine the easiest possible resolution. There are three leaders in this societal constellation: one of the polity, one for the economy, and one for the society Let’s call them tyrants—meaning nothing scurrilous by the term—so that we have three “areas” to consider and a tyrant for each.

All we have to do is to decide which tyrant gets to decide on this issue.

Well, that’s not entirely true. First we have to explain the diagram. The three colored figures are the polity (red rectangle), the economy (blue oval) and the society (green oval). Each figure has a core—the darker color marked A—and a periphery. The periphery—the lighter color marked B—is a kind of antechamber. B is where an issue is when it is on its way to being a part of the core or when it is on its way out of that figure entirely. An issue does not, in this figure, move directly from A in the polity to A in the economy. It would first move from A to B in the polity, then from B to A in the economy.

This possibility of issue mobility is a concern to the tyrants, of course. In most cases an “issue” belongs to me because it is something from which additional authority and additional revenue can be extracted. When someone says, “This is a problem for Superman!” Superman smiles. More heroics and more fame are in the offing. There are issues, on the other hand, which are dead losers. Sometimes they simply can’t be solved and whoever has the issue is “it” and will take the fall. Sometimes an issue can be dealt with, but it will cost more to solve it than you will gain in revenue. That’s a loser. Sometimes it can be dealt with, but the only successful ways of dealing with it will make you enduringly unpopular. That’s a loser too.

Such issues as these really belong somewhere else. It’s about those issues that Superman says, “You know, Batman is the right person to take this job on.” The tyrant of the economy says that each family ought to save more. The tyrant of the polity says that consumer spending ought to increase. The tyrant of the society says that the welfare of each family—not the aggregate demand or the aggregate savings—is the proper goal.

That much of an explanation will show why some potentially mobile issues—the ones in the B areas—are sought after while others are nearly pushed out the door. What remains is to consider why C is there; that oddly astrocyte-shaped blob. I wanted it irregular because problems that have not yet been placed as issues are…well…irregular. I wanted those odd little rays to look just a little like tentacles. I wanted the whole shape to strike you an inchoate and faintly menacing.

In C, an issue could belong anywhere. That’s a jump ball for all the people (and their tyrant) who want it. It is a live grenade to all the people (and their tyrant) who don’t want it. But if we are talking about new issues—and that’s why I developed this particular image—it isn’t an “issue” until it is a “problem” that is placed somewhere.

Problems are personal. Issues are public. It’s when someone in authority says, or when a lot of people who have no authority say, “Say, that’s really a job for ______” that it become an issue. It could be a job for the polity, a job for the economy, or a job for the society. It doesn’t “belong” anywhere, the way a lost wallet full of one hundred dollar bills and a credit card “belongs” to its owner. It “belongs” somewhere in the way a job belongs to the only person in the community who has the tools and the equipment to keep the river from flooding the town.

So by the time a problem is “socialized” as we say; by the time it has become an issue, there is still the question of where it can best be dealt with. If I am the tyrant of the economy and I can see that my ownership of this issue will benefit me, I do everything I can to claim it for myself and to render your claims—you other two tyrants—less attractive or plausible. If it looks to me like the kind of issue that will tar the hands of anyone who tries to manage it, they I will see it belonging properly to you. I might say you are responsible for it. I might say only you can deal with it. I can say that no one else has the necessary authority or popular support or access to resources to manage it properly. What I really mean is “Anyone But Me.”

A strong smoothly functioning society will have three powerful settings and a clear process for placing the right issue in the right place. Compared to those two things, nothing else matters much.

Dr. Obama's Bedside Manner Needs Work

It occurred to me recently, that back in the bad old days of medicine when there was very little you could actually do for a patient, people understood their job to be “being with” the patient and making him or her comfortable. The illness was going to what it was going to do. Before germ theory came along, everything was even more mysterious than it is now. The bedside manner emphasized “I’m here for you” rather than “Take two of these and call me in the morning.”

When “take two of these” works, I’m pretty happy with it and I am delighted in the great progress medicine has made since it discovered germs. But I didn’t have these little medical reflections for no reason at all. There was something going on that had those same contours and it took me a little while to catch just what it was.

It’s the economy. It’s in bad shape and it’s going to go on being in bad shape for quite a while. Dr. Obama would really like to be a “take two of these and call me in the morning” kind of president. It’s his style. But Dr. Obama doesn’t have access to anything, two of which will help his patient. The president will, of course, do a lot of Republican bashing over the next year—as he should—but he is still going to be held accountable for the bad economy and he doesn’t have any way to treat it.

Let’s consider some possibilities. Let’s give the banks a bunch of money so they can loan it to people who will do something productive with it. Dr. Obama can see to it that the banks get a bunch of money. He cannot require them to actually lend it to anyone. When the banks get the money, they will consult their own needs for reserves, for security, for high return loans and when they have considered all those, they will just sit on the money.

Let’s encourage companies to hire more workers. This would help with the unemployment problem, one would think. As the economy picks up, the companies really could use more workers, but they make more money by reducing workforces than they do by increasing them. The new economic situation, in other words, allows quite a few currently unemployed workers to get their jobs back, but it doesn’t require the companies to rehire them. The new “leaner” companies are going to be much more profitable, even as the economy continues to crawl along in low gear. Nothing the President can say will cause these companies to make less profit so that the economy will improve.

The President could always raise taxes on businesses, of course, and use the new revenues to invest in new technologies and more employment. But there’s this problem with the businesses. They get the same services from the U. S. government whether they pay taxes or not and a business that has an accounting department that does NOT know how to keep the profits safe in an off-shore bank has a very uncreative accounting department.

The President could always cut taxes on the rich, of course, allowing them to create new jobs as their market savvy allows them to. That has been prescribed many times and actually tried several times and it turns out that the rich have better things to do with their money than use it to increase production and therefore employment. Yachts and corporate jets come readily to mind, but I am sure there are lots of less visible things to spend the money one. The point is that they don’t spend it in ways that help the economy in any broad way.

Robert Reich argues persuasively in his book, Aftershock, that the fundamental problem of the American economy is that we don’t pay our workers enough to enable them to buy what we make. Consumer spending is two thirds of the Gross Domestic Product, I heard yesterday on the radio. Increasing what we pay the workers would enable them to spend more money—and they would spend it—which would increase demand, which would increase employment, etc. This is the well-known Henry Ford solution. It was Ford who scandalized the whole world of business by paying his assembly line workers enough money that they could buy Ford cars. He sold a lot of Ford cars that way, but Reich passes along some of the commentary that appeared in the Wall Street Journal when he did that. Scathing!

So that is a “treatment” that would work. There is nothing Dr. Obama can do, unfortunately, to get that prescription filled. Nothing. Actually, there isn’t anything in the whole “take two of these and call me in the morning” world that the President can do. And that’s why I think it is time for him to break out his bedside manner and get into the “I’m here for you” mode. This guy’s got the idea, I think.

Debt-Limit Chicken--And Worse

July 27, 2011. It is now less than a week until the United States of America tells the people who have loaned money to us that we were, after all, a bad risk. The debt limit confrontation has been pictured as a game of chicken between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner, the only presiding official in the Congress who opposes him. Sen. McConnell will have to wait his turn.

So…a game of chicken. We drive our cars toward each other at high speeds. In the best outcome, you flinch and turn aside and I win. In the second best outcome, I flinch and you win. In the least good outcome, neither of us turns and we kill each other. But now that I have gone that I realize that there is an outcome even worse. We both flinch and turn into each other (that would be to the right for you and to the left for me—how very familiar that sounds!) and reveals ourselves not only as cowards but as incompetent cowards. That would be worse.
I’m not sure that chicken captures all the elements of this contest, however, so I would like to try several others. How about Russian Roulette? You spin the cylinder, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger. You have five chances out of six of surviving—if you do it one time. If you do it over and over—I’m not at all good at calculating cumulative probabilities—the odds get worse.

So let’s consider the roulette elements of the present situation. President Obama can’t control the Democratic votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers. Speaker Boehner can’t control the Republican votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers, which, until recently, was the same one the President preferred. The two parties are highly ideological. Votes which pitted 80% of Democrats voting one way against 80% of Republicans voting the other way were once unusual; now they are the commonest kind of vote. The new Tea Party-backed Republican House members believe they owe intransigence to their constituents—it is their sworn duty—and that intransigence has now been turned against the leader of their own party. This has led Eric Cantor, the Number 2 man in the House to tell them to “Grow up,” a sentiment also found on the lips of the President. How awkward is that?

This is highly unstable. Now we approach this brink over and over. The probability of hitting the live chamber, by this analogy, goes up radically as you do it over and over. Eventually, you will hit the live chamber—that would be the House in the present scenario—and you blow your brains out. Actually, that might have happened in the 2010 elections; it’s still too soon to tell.

The third scenario, one which captures yet another aspect of this impending disaster, is a champion battle. I’m thinking of David and Goliath as an example. I’m not really sure, now that I think of it, what was supposed to happen to the army of the defeated contestant. Were they supposed to be massacred? To be slaves? To be put in internment camps? I really don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter, because the notion of “champion” is all I need. Theoretically, if David wins, it is good news for the Israelites. If Goliath wins, it is good news for the Philistines. But fiscal default isn’t really like that. If we default, both David and Goliath lose. And all the people David and Goliath represent also lose. All of us are killed or enslaved or put in camps, or whatever. The cost to anyone of borrowing money for anything will go up, for instance. You don’t need to be on the losing side to suffer this defeat because both sides are the losing sides—not just the champions but the armies and not just the armies but the civilian populations. Everyone—litigators, bundlers of financial instruments and off-shore hiders of revenue and Chainsaw Al personnel departments—loses.

These three images together give us a fuller picture, I think, of what
we’re up against. This account sounds crude and contemporary to my ears,
however. This is how Lincoln put it.

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were
anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to
avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place,
devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and
divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them
would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would
accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

Small Government Odyssey (SGO) Creationism

This post continues my Small Government Odyssey (SGO), a series of reflections on what it would take to reduce the size of government on the one hand, while seeing to it that the legitimate needs of the citizens are met (by someone, but not by the national government) on the other.

The diagram shows economic, social, and political sectors. My argument is that to the extent that the needs of the citizens are met in the social sector (families, schools, neighborhoods, clubs, etc.) and in the economic sector (producers make money, consumers receive affordable goods and services, employees receive a living wage), there will no appeal to the political sector. The size of government, accordingly, will shrink. So will the proportion of the GNP it consumes and the power it gets from making authoritative decisions on the appeals made to it by dissidents in the economic and social sectors.

This view does not distinguish between legitimate dissidents and illegitimate ones. In the small government business, the focus is on reducing the appeals to the national government made by people who think they aren't being treated fairly in the social and economic sectors. It is what they think, not what a panel of fairminded citizens decide, that makes them want to invite government in.--an action we all pay for in higher taxes and fewer freedoms. You can do that by simple repression, of course, but repression gets expensive after a while, so that is self-defeating. You can do it by lowering expectations, but the principal commercial strategy involves raising expectations, so that isn't a sure thing either. You can do it by coopting resentment or by deflecting it to other targets, but whenver that fails, the federal government is there, looking for an invitation to substitute their judgment for yours.

In fact, school boards are governments, so they are part of the polity. The force of these questions, however, has to do with the national government, so for the purpose of this question, I am going to consider the school boards as part of society, rather than polity. If we want the national government to stop interfering with the preferences of local boards and the parents who elect them to office, what would we have to do?
Since the Constitution forbids any promiscuous mixing of religion and government, we would have to find that Creationism is not a “religious doctrine.” It is a theory, like any other, about the origins of our world and the species of plants and animals that have come to live on it. Evolution is a theory and Creationism is a theory and which theory is to be taught is to be at the discretion of the local voters. That would work. The national government does not intervene in local school district decisions to mandate balanced histories or any particular approach to art or any of several methods of teaching arithmetic. Under this scenario, biology would work the same way.
Once the political hysterics had quieted down, however, the professional side of the question would have a chance to emerge. Just as there are pharmacists who refuse, on personal grounds, to dispense drugs they disapprove of, so we might find some biologists who refuse, on professional grounds, to teach poorly supported theories in place of well-supported ones. Just as the voters who elected the judge must share their authority with the judge’s professional promises, so the school district voters would have to share their authority with the teacher’s professional promises. It wouldn’t be an altogether bad idea if science teachers adopted “First, Do No Harm” as their professional motto.
If there were a professional certification by the Biology Teachers of America and if you couldn’t teach biology without a professional certificate, then schools would have to choose between certificated biologists—who would emphasize the value of well-supported over poorly supported theories—and noncertificated biologists, who would teach anything the school board demanded of them. Parents might gather at the home of a certificated science teacher who refused to teach Creationism in his biology class, but the teacher has his oath to protect him and the parents would have to choose between a well-prepared teacher for their children and an ill-prepared one.
Presumably, colleges and universities would not be forced to treat applications equally—those from school districts with professionally certificated teachers and those from districts without them. It would take action by the national government to require them to accept students who were, in the judgment of the university, ill-prepared for university work. We are trying to do without national government intervention and besides, there is the question of the grounds on which the government might intervene.
The Constitution requires the intervention of the national government in the affairs of the school districts IF Creationism is a religious doctrine.[1] If it is not a religious doctrine, then the present appeal to national government authority falls short and local preferences prevail. This provides a wonderful opportunity for biology professionals to decide what they are willing to do, as educators, and what they will need to refuse to do because of the harm it would cause.
For myself, I would rather see a conflict between a popularly elected school board, on the one hand, and professionally accountable biologists on the other than a conflict between a national government wielding the Constitution and local school boards wielding parent preference. I think it would be a more useful conflict and I am quite sure it would be more fun.
[1] It wouldn’t have to be religious. There are agnostic versions. “The earth and all subsequent living things were created at a single recent time, but the data now at hand provide us no way to say how that happened.” There are thousands of theistic versions. Nearly every culture, no matter how small or how isolated, has an account of how the god [name of local deity] or the gods [name of college of local deities] created the world and all that is therein. There could be a rotation of Creation myths, using each in turn.

SGO: Creationism

This post continues my Small Government Odyssey, a series of reflections on what it would take to reduce the size of government on the one hand, while seeing to it that the legitimate needs of the citizens are met (by someone) on the other. The diagram shows economic, social, and political sectors. My argument is that to the extent that the needs of the citizens are met in the social sector (families, schools, neighborhoods, clubs, etc.) and in the economic sector (producers make money, consumers receive affordable goods and services, employees receive a living wage), there will no appeal to the political sector. The size of government, accordingly, will shrink. So will the proportion of the GNP it consumes and the power it gets from making authoritative decisions on the appeals made to it by economic and social dissidents.


In fact, school boards are governments, so they are part of the polity. The force of these questions, however, has to do with the national government, so for the purpose of this question, I am going to consider the school boards as part of society, rather than polity. If we want the national government to stop interfering with the preferences of local boards and the parents who elect them to office, what would we have to do?


Since the Constitution forbids any promiscuous mixing of religion and government, we would have to find that Creationism is not a “religious doctrine.” It is a theory, like any other, about the origins of our world and the species of plants and animals that have come to live on it. Evolution is a theory and Creationism is a theory and which theory is to be taught is to be at the discretion of the local voters. That would work. The national government does not intervene in local school district decisions to mandate balanced histories or any particular approach to art or any of several methods of teaching arithmetic. Under this scenario, biology would work the same way.


Once the political hysterics had quieted down, however, the professional side of the question would have a chance to emerge. Just as there are pharmacists who refuse, on personal grounds, to dispense drugs they disapprove of, so we might find some biologists who refuse, on professional grounds, to teach poorly supported theories in place of well-supported ones. Just as the voters who elected the judge must share their authority with the judge’s professional promises, so the school district voters would have to share their authority with the teacher’s professional promises. It wouldn’t be an altogether bad idea if science teachers adopted “First, Do No Harm” as their professional motto.


If there were a professional certification by the Biology Teachers of America and if you couldn’t teach biology without a professional certificate, then schools would have to choose between certificated biologists—who would emphasize the value of well-supported over poorly supported theories—and noncertificated biologists, who would teach anything the school board demanded of them. Parents might gather at the home of a certificated science teacher who refused to teach Creationism in his biology class, but the teacher has his oath to protect him and the parents would have to choose between a well-prepared teacher for their children and an ill-prepared one.


Presumably, colleges and universities would not be forced to treat applications equally—those from school districts with professionally certificated teachers and those from districts without them. It would take action by the national government to require them to accept students who were, in the judgment of the university, ill-prepared for university work. We are trying to do without national government intervention and besides, there is the question of the grounds on which the government might intervene.


The Constitution requires the intervention of the national government in the affairs of the school districts IF Creationism is a religious doctrine. If it is not a religious doctrine, then the present appeal to national government authority falls short and local preferences prevail. This provides a wonderful opportunity for biology professionals to decide what they are willing to do, as educators, and what they will need to refuse to do because of the harm it would cause.


For myself, I would rather see a conflict between a popularly elected school board, on the one hand, and professionally accountable biologists on the other than a conflict between a national government wielding the Constitution and local school boards wielding parent preference. I think it would be a more useful conflict and I am quite sure it would be more fun.

High Cost Students

I've been thinking about the 80/20 rule. An online group, about whom I know nothing at all (VentureLine.com) offers this description, of which the last line is the one that is most important to me.

80 - 20 RULE (Pareto Principle/Law) is a general rule of thumb in business that says that 20% of the items produce 80% of the activity, while 20% of the product line produces 80% of the sales, 20 % of the customers generate 80% of the complaints, and so on. In evaluating any business situation, look for the small group which produces the major portion of the transactions you are concerned with. This rule is not exactly accurate, but it reflects a general truth, nothing is evenly distributed.

Certainly it is true that, so far as the experience of teaching students in concerned, the costs are not evenly distributed. So let's say that my usual American government class of 60 or so has a 20% that cause most of the confusion, take most of the in-class organization time, most of the office hours time, etc. That give me 12 high cost students. Let's say four of them are trying to overcome very demanding obstacles of language and culture. Four of them are deeply risk avoidant. Four of them are just lazy. These 12 take up most of the time that would otherwise be spent teaching or working on academic questions during office hours. What to do?

Nothing is to be done about the first group. They need all the help they ask for and don't ask for more than they need. The response I should make to these high cost students is to pay the cost and be glad to have the privilege. The other two groups are a little more complicated.

There are two approaches to the risk avoiders. The first, and probably the preferable, approach is to reassure them. It's not so hard; you understood most of the assignment correctly; this is a mistake from which you can easily recover; you are a smart college-competent student; it'll all make more sense as we go on, and so on. If that works, all is well. If not, the other alternative is to raise the risk of trying to avoid risks. For the students who will try to take up ten minutes of class time making sure that they have done the assignment correctly or have understood the assignment correctly, or who do that same job in 30 minutes of office hours, they need to know that they will be losing points on the assignment by doing that. If there is an uncertainty, say what it is. That's free. If you want me to grade your paper as a preface to your handing it in so I can grade it, that will cost you.

It's crude, but the theory makes sense. If risk is what they are sensitive to, make bad student behavior more risky.

That leaves the remaining four students, the lazy ones. The goal of these students is to get me to do as much of their work as possible. They are confused; they want more specific instructions; perhaps an outline of their papers would help them grasp the assignment. These students hope to leave the office ready write a paper I have just constructed, outlined, and pre-graded. And they themselves have not yet done anything except show up and act helpless. But even in this sorry category, there are different kinds of students. Some of the students who "act lazy" are just doing what they have been taught to do. They have been taught to be helpless and to succeed as students by being parasitic. They need to know that we do it differently here at the university level. Or that, however they do it in the department of your major--that awkward phrasing keeps me from having to choose a poster child--we don't do it that way here in political science.

The remaining two students are accomplished parasites. They know what they are doing. They will take you for your last minute and despise you as a sucker when they leave the office. Your lack of the most basic defenses makes you the sucker in the stories they will tell their friends over a couple of beers that night. And the next night, and the next.

The most appropriate response to these two students, out of the class of 60, is to refuse to be a sucker. Turn the project back on them, so they can begin to learn how to do it. Not clear enough? Write a paper that illustrates your current understanding of the assignment and I will use it to help you move in a more profitable direction? Not specific enough? Let me remind you of the principles we covered; what examples come to your mind as illustrations of that principle? What ways of doing the assignment can profit from those illustrations?

There's no way not to have high cost students, but there are ways of understanding them that allow you to be generous to some, independence-granting to others, and savvy enough not to be a sucker for the remaining ones.

Are the Problems Too Big?

I start my course in political psychology by introducing "the problem." We start with "frictional" rather than "normative" problems. The friction is easy to describe: either you wanted something you couldn't have or do or something you didn't want was done. Those are frictions. "Wanting" seems a fundamental part of human motivation. It is the "willing" part of "willing and able." But the narrower condition that this leaves out is "wanting and in consequence, trying." For class purposes, the question is this: "Is just 'wanting' in the absence of any specific attempt to achieve the purported goal, useful evidence of an actual intention?" The conventional notation has been W = wanted to, b1 = because, but (D) = was not able to, b2, because. The first explanation (b) says why you wanted to; the second, why you were not able. But what if we changed it to I = intended to; to to T = tried to? "Tried to" captures the immediacy I am after. It screens out "I always wanted to live in Japan," which certainly needs to be screened out. "Intended to" is helpfully broader, but it raises the question of what ought to count as an "intention." It is more than wanting to but less than trying to.