Ukraine and Leadership

Some ancient (it's been attributed to many) is reputed to have said, “There go my followers.  I must hurry to catch up with them, for I am their leader.”  We laugh at that as a slap at timidity in leadership.  We've always had the idea that the role of leaders is to lead the charge, flag high and sword waving.  But we wouldn't relish our leadership leading a rush of lemmings, including us, over the cliff.  We want bold leadership without bad consequences.  Leadership of lemmings is probably best done from behind.  It was a wiser Machiavelli who said, “Fortune sometimes favors the man who acts boldly, and sometimes favors the man who is cautious, but always favors him who knows when to be bold and when to be cautious.”  That’s the kind of leader we rationally would prefer, but our gut instinct is to cheer on the flag waver.

That’s the dilemma the Obama administration faces these days.  We elected Obama to get us out of foreign entanglements after sobering up from several years of overindulgence in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Yet we chafe at the bit to jump into Syria and Ukraine.  I've noted before that going into Syria is like jumping feet-first into the middle of the 30 Years War, with angry factions shooting at you from all sides no matter what you do and no way of knowing what actually is the right thing to do.  It’s relatively easy from a historical perspective to know that we have to tread cautiously or not at all in the Middle East these days, but we still have that urge to knock heads and fix that mess.  Ukraine is harder.

Viewed one way, the Ukrainian protests remind us of our own American Revolution, with Putin as George III and Kiev as Boston, though Yanukovych is no George Washington or Sam Adams.  It’s hard not to grab your musket and become a Minute Man.  It’s a middle class revolution against foreign tyranny, economic consequences be damned, and from our own history we love it.  Yanukovych is concerned about Ukraine’s indebtedness, and is willing to surrender some of Ukraine’s freedom of action to get rid of it by putting Ukraine back in Russia’s orbit rather than joining the EU.  We, with our history, don’t relish the idea of selling your heritage for a mess of porridge.  But oddly enough, that’s something like what Scotland did in the 1890s when, to rid themselves of debt, the Scots surrendered supremacy of the Scottish parliament to the English parliament in foreign policy.  Scottish separatists are still regretting that more than a century later, but it’s worked in the meantime.  With memories of Edward long shanks, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the fall of the Stuarts, it wasn't easy for the Scots either, but their financial concerns outweighed their history.  There isn't only one right choice.

From another perspective, Ukraine resembles Russia’s Cuba.  With historically grounded paranoid fears of invasion from the south, Russia has always maintained its own Monroe Doctrine by cultivating, coercively or not, a row of allied buffer states.  Ukraine, like Cuba to the U.S., would be a key loss.  We remember how we felt and acted when the Soviet Union began cultivating Cuba and threatened to place missiles there.  It’s an honest concern on Russia’s part, and understandable.  What is less understandable is Yanukovych ignoring the expressed will of his own people.

Once again, Machiavelli reminds us of the value of knowing when to be bold and when to remain cautious.  Ukraine is a matter clearly involving Ukraine itself, the Russians and the EU.  Intruding the U.S. into that volatile mix merely roils the waters without solving anything.

The broader question is when to act boldly in a multi-polar world.  Veering too far toward caution simply leads to isolationism, itself a dangerous course in a constantly changing geopolitical environment.  An obvious set of tests are that resolving the situation is in our national interest, the situation demands action on our part, our action will be decisive and there is a clear exit strategy – somewhat akin to the Powell Doctrine.  In diplomacy, however, those tests are themselves complex and capable of multiple interpretations.  Every hot spot around the world does not require our intervention, and in many a proper course of action is not obvious.  We are no longer caught up in a zero-sum game with the Soviet Union, where each loss for them is a victory for us.  Analysis requires cool heads, and action needs to be unimpeded by domestic overheated rhetoric.  Mobs do not seek for nuances, but sometimes in diplomacy nuanced action is necessary. 

 American politics has never lacked for rhetoric but the level of it has grown much worse since Vietnam gave the press and politicians license to suspect everything.  Younger people may not remember that until Vietnam American presidents avoided domestic criticism by travelling abroad.  The saying was that inside the U.S. the president was head of his party and abroad he represented all of us.  Foreign policy was mostly considered bipartisan territory.   Now senators and celebrities take their own trips abroad to muddle the waters and political criticism does not die down no matter how far the president has travelled.  It sometimes includes even the expression on his face as he meets foreign leaders.  It leaves our friends confused and our enemies chuckling.

The greatest loss is the ability to act cautiously.  Obama showed, to universal acclaim, his ability to act boldly with the raid on the Ben Laden compound.  Every cautious step he takes is heaped with domestic criticism.  But John Wayne is not the model for our diplomacy.  Showing the flag is no longer appropriate to every situation in a multi-polar world.  Obama could do a much better job of explaining the whys of acting cautiously, but he needs political room at home to do so.  The real test of his leadership is his ability to get the American people to understand and go along with his proposed actions.  For that, he needs our ears and minds, not our partisan rhetoric.   We need to provide them.

Political Correctness

I’ve experienced lately the distress of “being nibbled to death by mice.”  That’s what an old friend at the office used to call those days when the big things you want to do get overtaken by a multitude of little things that just won’t wait.  One of the things I’d rather have worked on lately has been writing, but there’s been no time.  The mice of January “must do’s” leave no room for excuses, lacking even the empathy of a rat.   I regret that, but it does bring to mind interesting news on the science front.

Recent scientific studies show that rats care about the distress of other rats.  In a study reported in the Washington Post, researchers report that the distress is a product of mammalian socialization, not genetics specific to rats.  That is, all species that raise babies have the capability to respond to distress in others of their species, since babies could not survive if their parent did not respond to their signs of distress.  It is the fundamental building block of empathy, and all mammals possess some degree of it.  Response only to similar members of the same species, such as similarly colored neighbors, is a trained trait learned in childhood.  So, where did Libertarians, with their “cheerful indifference to the needs of others” go wrong?  For, as an example, to a scientist, indifference to the distress of a neighbor much like you who is long-term unemployed is clearly not in accord with natural instinct, but an acquired trait.  It requires refusing to recognize the neighbor as having common human traits.  How, and why, did Libertarians learn to go against natural instinct?  It brings to mind Colbert’s comment that “Reality has a Liberal bias.”  The scientist would probably agree.

The Libertarian might argue that I’m just being “politically correct”, and there’s truth in that.  But what is political correctness in the first place?  Scientific correctness is straight-forward.  A fundamental assumption of science is that there is a “correct” relationship between cause and effect. Smash an atom with an x-ray beam and it will fission, not melt; expose a conditioned dog to the sound of a bell, and it will salivate, not scratch its ear and yawn.  Politics is based on an opposite premise, that there is no “one” correct way to proceed but many, subject to negotiations between parties with differing views and interests.  That in fact is what liberty is all about, the ability to view things in different ways.  We cherish our liberty, and would not want to give it up, even when it requires letting other people be loudly and disastrously wrong-headed.  Libertarians may be going against nature, but they have the right to do so.  That is our true national political correctness, and we remain proud of it.

The problem nowadays is that our views on liberty were developed in a time when all political causes and effects were local, and the world was much less complex.  No one best way was fine in a village argument over locating the school house, but when you’re dealing with the consequences of global climate change or education for a high-tech world economy or the impacts of cross-breeding species of food crops through genetic engineering, it’s a different matter.  There are “best” ways, there are usually severe time-constraints for effective action, ignoring them can be disastrous for billions of people, and finding them requires analysis by experts and willingness to follow uncomfortable courses.  Scientific and political correctness clash head-on.

We've already solved the problem in the financial sector, the one we seem to find the most important. In the U.S. we established the Federal Reserve System, and elsewhere they had already had central banks for many years.  That amounted to delegating to experts the manipulation of the flow of money trough the national economy to avoid debilitating controversy and stalemates arising from the differing interests of all the parties involved.  Climate change and education would seem to be at least as important.  An argument often made against such delegation of major decisions to boards of experts is that it breeds conformity and wide-spread “political correctness”, but it’s hard to spot that as a consequence of the Federal Reserve. Another argument is that expert decisions requiring taxation for funding take your money without your voice, taxation without representation.  But decisions by the Federal Reserve can raise or lower your income dramatically, and we never seem to notice.

The fundamental argument is that each delegation to experts constitutes a lessening of individual liberty.  That’s a substantive argument, and the consequences of ignoring it can be seen in totalitarian regimes like the former USSR or Communist China, where boards of experts planned everything from factory quotas to the number of children you could have.  A creeping conformity can in fact overwhelm whole nations in disastrous ways.  But your liberty ends at the tip of another person's nose, and here we're counting billions of noses.  And there are correct ways to proceed. As it stands, we are simply using individual experts as weapons to cudgel opponents rather than collecting and using effectively the consensus of the entire scientific community.  A delegation to  a board of experts by Congress in specific areas like climate change or genetic engineering, with their conclusions accepted or rejected In Toto, would seem to address that concern.  

We live in a complex and dangerous world where major choices must be made and implemented correctly and quickly.  It is disastrously outdated to think those choices can be made as in olden times, around the village elm with the decision going to those who can talk loudest and longest.  The world will not wait for our decisions.

Insurmountable Opportunities

Back in my office days, we used to look at crises as they arose – there was always at least the “Friday afternoon flap” and often things much worse – and call them “insurmountable opportunities.”  It’s based on the old saying, which may or may not be accurate, that the Chinese character for crisis is a combination of the characters for danger and opportunity.  That’s somewhat akin to Rahm Emmanuel’s famous comment that no crisis should be wasted.

There’s nothing particularly new in the UN report on climate change, due to come out on Monday and whose executive summary was released Friday, except two things.  A number of drafts have been floating around for a while, and it reports the same dismal things as heard previously, only, in some cases, as in sea level rises, sounding worse.  The first new thing was a level of certainty of 95 percent for climate change being caused by human activity.  That’s polite scientific language for “really sure.”  It’s the level of certainty about your condition a surgeon would like, but sometimes doesn't have, before cutting you open.  It’s far beyond the “preponderance of evidence” a civil jury would need to find you guilty of contributory negligence; fossil fuel corporations should remember that.  In other words, we have ourselves to blame.  It’s hard to understand why people who would accept surgery on less evidence still refuse to accept man-made climate change.  They’re valuing their wallet over their internal organs.  That would be a really good study for the social psychologists.

The second new thing was the certainty that climate change will continue for centuries with temperatures rising above 2 degrees Celsius despite what we do.  That means prevention is definitely too late and amelioration and adaptation are now definitely the goals.  That, strangely enough, could be a big part of the solution to our economic problems.  Countering and making use of the effects of climate change could be, and eventually will be, a major new economic sector. Industries and jobs will be created, if not here than certainly elsewhere.  We should make sure they’re here.   I've mentioned the major infrastructure issues to be dealt with many times.  Rising seas and more severe storms mean major new construction.  Green technology is very slowly, and with lots of resistance, coming on board.  That change is occurring much too slowly; a noted historian of energy technology predicted recently that natural gas will be the dominant fuel for the next 50 to 60 years, with wind and solar only becoming dominant after that.  We need lots bigger pushes in those technology areas.  But things are beginning also to get interesting in the adaptation area.

Adaptation is already thriving in other countries.  Remember how rising temperatures are sure to produce more droughts with the need for desalinization of sea water, and of course, much less snow.  An Israeli company is making good money converting sludge from desalinization into artificial snow for resorts.  Other adaptation startups are popping up all over.  There should be a boom in the pipeline industry.  New materials are needed for insulation.  As climate changes some areas will fade and others boom.  Innovative building construction and land development should really grow.   Urban agriculture is a wave of the future. They've used green houses in Crete for many years to grow vegetables protected against the sun.   What is lacking here is not opportunity, but the imagination to use the many opportunities that exist. 

A problem we have to deal with these days is all the entrenched technology, which owners want to hang on to rather than facing the risk of exploiting the new.  When Marconi invented the telegraph, he first tried selling it to France, but it was rejected there because of the competing existing businesses.  He took it to America, where it became an instant success because there was nothing to compete with it.  We increasingly act like France did rather than America, to our loss.  What we need are policies which encourage, possibly though temporary subsidies and tax breaks, the innovations needed to ameliorate and adapt to climate change.  The innovators should not be in it alone.  We all have an interest in their success.  Climate change is a crisis that should not be wasted.

Irrational Ignorance

It’s strange the little things you can learn sometimes from abroad about your own country’s history.  A Dutch reporter recently cited an exchange between Henry Ford and Walter Reuther, the head of the auto workers’ union. Ford was showing Reuther a newly automated factory and said to him, ”Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay union dues?”  To which Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars?”  Sometimes it’s more complicated than that.  Boeing has been negotiating with its machinists’ union, trying to get them to agree to 401(k)’s instead of fixed benefit pensions, along with other concessions.  The workers don’t buy planes, though if they can any longer afford it, they are passengers.  Boeing is using the usual corporate ploy of threatening to move its new plane operations elsewhere, to “ensure it remains competitive” and of course to guarantee its CEO his over $100 million annual compensation package.  Latest word is that the machinists have caved in and agreed.  It’s just another lost battle in the erosion of worker and retiree income that comes about from the capability of corporations to move elsewhere.  It's what economists like Robert Reich, Larry Summers and Joseph Stiglitz regard as a basis for the continued stagnation in our economy.  But it may echo in Congress and elsewhere also.

2014 is the year issues meet head-to-head during negotiation over proposed trade pacts between the U.S. and both the EU and China.  Negotiations have been going on in secret with mainly corporate interests in the loop, but the Obama administration is promising to protect worker interests.   But agreement by the workers and the Congress is going to take a lot of trust, and Boeing is not helping any.  At the same time as it’s negotiating secret trade pacts to promote American exports, the administration is promising to reduce income inequality and protect worker rights.  The goals seem at cross purposes, since profitable exports are generally perceived as requiring low labor costs at home.  At the same time, Larry Summers points out that the real roadblock to a robust economy is inadequate demand for goods and services, and low-paid workers are not going to do much in the way of stimulating demand.  He seems to be echoing Reuther, while the corporate interests are talking like Ford.  We're facing the kinds of policy choices that would benefit greatly from the input of a well-informed public, but that's not what seems to be happening.  Left strictly to the markets and to secret corporation negotiators, the workers are most likely to lose again.  It seems the only way really to cure income inequality and the economy is not from within the usual market mechanisms, which give power only to the corporations, but with the electorate.  The fact that trade negotiations are occurring during an election year may prove interesting.

George Will of course would prefer that those ignorant voters not get in the way of clever negotiators.  In a recent column, he opines that the principal problem with democracy is… democracy!  He quotes favorably Churchill’s quip that “the strongest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”  He bases his views on the “public choices” view of economic theory which holds that “rational ignorance” prevents voters from being well informed on policy choices, and makes them opt for “sentimental” (that seems his code word for considering the needs of others) solutions, rather than the market-based solutions he prefers. He seems to think we would all be better off just letting the markets decide things.  George forgets – surely his education must have included it – that in a democracy, the voting process is a principal means of legitimizing government and stabilizing society.

Rational ignorance is the failure to learn about a topic resulting from a decision that knowing about it won’t affect your life much.  But policy decisions do affect your life a lot.  It’s just that in a market economy where the corporate interests hold the reins of power, only political means are available to the “average voter” to affect outcomes.  The voting booth becomes the “market” in which he can express his choices in a meaningful way.  George could have more closely examined the “average voter” and found that the principal difference between him or her and the corporate negotiator is not in rational ignorance – the negotiators have plenty of that themselves - they understand how policy options affect markets, but not people.  The real difference lies in the quality of their education and the extent of their self interest.  The negotiator, like George, is much better educated and much more happily uninterested in the fortunes of others.  But part of the cure for the ignorance of both the average voter and the negotiator is supposed to be democracy itself.  George could have quoted Churchill saying that “the only thing worse than democracy as a form of government is all other forms of government.”  Or Lincoln saying “God must love the common man because he made so many of him.”  Or Alexander Pope acidly remarking that “How God feels about riches can be seen from those he bestows them on.”   Take that, Donald Trump! 

A quality education in a democracy is supposed to be a public good available to all, provided through public funding as a benefit for all.  It was Jefferson who emphasized that with his sponsoring of the University of Virginia, in his own words, his greatest achievement. If the average voter is not even aware enough to know at least roughly the impacts of policy on his life, then we have failed to achieve a necessary goal of democracy.  The price of liberty is both eternal vigilance and quality education.  If agricultural policy is going to raise or lower the cost of a loaf of bread by a dollar for the average voter, or put or take out a million dollars from the pocket of a billionaire, there is no reason the average voter should rationally be less interested than the billionaire.  Yet elite educations even at the high school level generally include some economics and political science and other subjects needed to better understand policy choices, while much public education is deficient in all that. The deficiency continues at college levels.  The “average voter” starts off with a major educational handicap.  It is that handicap which must be cured for effective democracy, and that requires the enlightened funding which many of the prosperous are so unwilling to provide.

Back in the days of slavery, slaves were prohibited from learning to read and write; their owners knew that an educated person would not willingly remain a slave.  Now in the 21^st century, education must go far beyond the rudiments if we are to maintain ourselves as a free and prosperous nation.  That requires loosened pockets among those who have already benefited from their own superior education.   To overweight ignorance as a factor in policy choices is to turn it simply into an excuse for ignoring the genuine needs of the economically powerless. That  itself displays a kind of irrational ignorance, for it leads not only to the kind of economic stagnation we have been experiencing, but to economic and political strife.

Forgotten People

 Marx is noted for his identification of the lumpenproletariat, the outcasts of society, consisting mainly of the homeless, the long-term unemployed and criminals. But Marx, like many others, thinks mostly of the group, not the people in it.  “Call me Ishmael”, the narrator of Moby Dick begins, and its epilogue starts with a quote from Job, “And I alone am escaped to tell thee.”  He no longer has a name, for he is an orphan on the open sea. That is the fate of outcasts, and that is possibly their greatest loss.  They count only as statistics, not as individuals.  According to a recent report by Fareed Zakaria, there are 46 million of them in America today.

Zakaria notes that the growing concern about income inequality focuses mostly on the flattening of income for the middle class, a good and proper concern, but that to grow the middle class as a factor able to change society requires doing something to improve the lot of the forgotten poor.  That is in fact the most potent way to begin raising the fortunes of the middle class and improving our economy.  .  They must be enabled to become members of the middle class, individuals we know and name as friends, and neighbors about whom we care.

Rand Paul was shedding crocodile tears when he said he was voting against continuing aid to the long-term unemployed because he did not want to encourage growth of a culture of accepted permanent unemployment.  I suppose it’s his own small contribution to solving the obesity problem.  As a consequence of his and other conservative votes, 1.3 million people have just lost the benefits that keep them afloat in very rough seas.  While short-term unemployment is falling, long-term unemployment is higher than it has ever been at the end of a strong recession.  He should have been, but wasn’t, ashamed, for in his role as senator he should know that a large factor in that long-term unemployment is corporate dumping of older, more expensive workers for younger workers willing to work cheaper with less use of corporate health benefits.  They will find no other employment at anywhere close to their former income and skill level.  Yet 80 percent of corporations no longer provide defined pension benefits.  The 401(k) retired workers must eventually rely on will be totally inadequate to their needs; the average size of a baby-boomer retirement account is projected to be $100,000, nowhere near enough to sustain a comfortable retirement.  The Institute for Retirement Security estimates that for Americans aged 55 to 64, the average household is $113,000 short of what will be needed for retirement. Collectively, all workers face a shortfall of at least $6.8 trillion.  But unemployed or minimum wage workers do not save the money needed for retirement.  We face a future of countless numbers of the elderly poor as baby-boomers are “retired” by their former employers.  Many will become homeless.  The upper limit of the “working age” population is being unilaterally lowered by corporations anxious to reap profits as older workers are removed from their rolls.  To the corporations, the health care, housing and feeding of their former workers have become externalities; there are no more guarantees of watches and golden years at retirement. 

The farther down the socioeconomic ladder you go, the more severe becomes the problem.  The University of California Berkeley Labor Center and University of Illinois released a study in October that said 52% of families of fast food workers receive assistance from a public program like Medicaid, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.  Wal-Mart puts out donation baskets to solicit donations for its workers, while simultaneously fighting tooth-and-nail against raising the minimum wage many of them work at.  Other corporations fight equally hard for tax breaks at the expense of governmental care of the poor.  Responsible treatment of employees is becoming an externality, the easily forgotten concern of others, and we are busily growing a new American lumpenproletariat.  Such forgotten workers do not save for a better future; their personal tragedies are permanent. The sad thing is that we are no longer naming them as our friends and associates; they are becoming statistics.

The problem is not just an American one.  World-wide, there's a race going on between declining working age populations and increasing productivity through automation and robotization.  At the same time as aging populations are providing fewer young workers, automation and robotics are lowering the demand for them.  A new balance must be achieved.  Done right, it can lead to positive gains for people; done wrong, we create a new global lumpenproletariat.  China, for example, is facing a future where a declining population of younger workers will no longer be able to sustain China’s current role as factory for the world, and it must retool itself for a different sort of polity and economy.  They have begun doing that with their recent changes in their one-child policy and with their shift toward internal consumption rather than exports.  But what must not be forgotten is the fate of the displaced.   Many emerging nations will be facing revolutions of rising expectations as the jobs and prosperity their people looked forward to begin to fade away.

Countries will deal with the issue in a variety of ways.  In America we must deal with it in a culture of corporate capitalism, in which corporations generally consider former employees as externalities to be the responsibility of others, combined with a Protestant Ethic which undervalues the worth of the unemployed as people and an empathy gap induced by a mythology of frontier individualism.  We overvalue work and undervalue workers.  We have a lot to overcome in treating the issue seriously.

Many concerted actions are required.  The idea being floated about is a good one to reinstate long-term unemployment benefits as re-employment benefits that include funding for training in new occupations.  Raising the minimum wage is needed.  Incentives to reintroduce defined pension systems are needed.  A national health care system is necessary more than ever.  Job creation through stimulating introduction of new technologies is urgent.   The idea I’ve suggested before might work, of setting up ways for workers to invest in operations such as pension funds that lease robotics to small businesses, and thereby reap their own benefit from the robots that may replace them.  The $6.8 trillion shortfall I've mentioned cannot be met by either government or the private sector working alone.  We are all in it together.  In short, a retooling of the economy is needed with the explicit goal of providing for those displaced by the new productivity gains with part of the profits of those gains.

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The greatest need however is to remember not just the statistics, but the people included in them.  Before 1950, 50 percent of the elderly lived in poverty, often alone, forgotten, with no one left to call them by name.  We, and they, are better than that.  But we are turning again toward the same kind of situation.  It is becoming one of the defining challenges of the 21^st century, and we must meet it with grace.   

Avoiding Unforeseen Consequences

The most dreaded word for a patient facing surgery is perhaps “Oops!”  It could signal something terribly unforeseen by the surgeon, from slicing an artery to discovering he had just removed the wrong kidney.  Fortunately, that is why surgeons spend hours rehearsing procedures in advance and studying just what to do in the event of an oops! situation, so bad consequences are rare.  We know the charm of the oops stage of a toddler’s development, but the charm comes with careful supervision by parents, so it, too, doesn’t usually turn out bad.

Unfortunately, public policy, domestic and foreign, is loaded with oops situations, and they often produce really rotten results.  And there are no watching parents to prevent the pain.  Take for example the current scene in Ukraine, where an almost done agreement with the EU was aborted in favor of a $15 billion offer from Russia to become cozier with them.  That is a major setback in the EU’s long-term foreign policy of creating a bigger buffer against incursion by Russia into EU affairs, a geopolitical goal obviously not considered by the framers of austerity policy.  For that foreign policy blunder can be seen, with hindsight, as a direct result of the EU domestic austerity policy, which also produced at the other end of Europe the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Greece.  The policy confined itself only to the needs of the bankers and the markets, and even there, did not do a decent job.  The less robust the EU economy, the more tempting became Russian offers, and the more likely the rise of rabid extremists in Greece.  And that less-robust-than-need-be EU economy undoubtedly affects the closeted negotiations going on between the EU and America over a cross-Atlantic trade treaty.  The economists who sought to nurse the EU through a bad stretch on a diet of gruel and cold water had forgotten, or never realized that foreign and domestic policy are inextricably mingled these days.  The old days when one could argue whether Metternich even had a domestic policy other than keeping the masses at home quiet while he maneuvered abroad are long gone; as are the times when China’s foreign policy was nonexistent in its quest to keep its internal affairs stable.

Closer to home, the Washington Post today reports the growing restiveness of the contracting community and the displeasure of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a major business lobbying force, that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is making only small partial payments to Indian tribes of reimbursements owed them for schools and social services. The Supreme Court has twice ruled that the reimbursements are legitimate and should be paid.  The BIA says it lacks the funding to do so because of the sequester, Congress’s austerity policy, and is paying all it can with the funds allocated to it.  But the tribal obligations are not just grants that can be changed at a Congressional whim.  The tribes have the status of nations, with whom there are treaty obligations, and they are not buying the BIA argument.  The business community is concerned that the BIA argument, if replicated elsewhere in government, could have serious ramifications for doing business throughout the government.  Once again, Oops!

The EU bankers and economists who framed the European austerity policy seem never to have considered seriously that markets operate within a framework of geopolitical considerations, and the American Congress seems never to have thought about it at all.  One problem is that economics does not operate in a vacuum; it is embedded always in a society that has far more to consider than just clearing a market.  Ignoring those external considerations is a hazard which produces “unforeseen” consequences.  They were not unforeseeable if thought had been applied.  The European problem comes about from “trained incompetence”, otherwise known as “if your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.”  It is a failure occasioned by reliance on outdated economic theory and curable by bringing European bankers into a 21^st century world.

The American problem runs deeper.  To become a professional diplomat requires passing one of the most difficult exams in the world, the Foreign Service Entrance Exam, just as becoming a surgeon requires years of medical school and advanced training.  Both sets of requirements are appropriate, for the actions and decisions undertaken when entering those fields are dangerous and have serious consequences.  Yet an American could be elected to Congress while not even qualified to graduate from high school.  Age and citizenship are the only requirements.  A member of Congress can make assertions about the Constitution without ever having read it and vote on budgets which seriously affect the lives of millions without ever having read them.  He or she can cast votes drastically affecting American foreign policy without half the understanding of the issue possessed by a Foreign Service intern.  That is a relic of bygone days when decisions had nowhere near the complexity they do now.  It has always been an American maxim that “experts should be on tap, not on top.”  But at least enough expertise to recognize the seriousness of the issues voted on enough to explore them with experts before voting is desperately needed.  One of the characteristics of the “Tea Party” mentality has been its contempt for the “inside-the-beltway gobbledygook” of knowledgeable experts, and its effects show more and more each day.  A big reason for that are the gerrymandered districts which produce candidates qualified only by how loud they shout the part line.

We make oops moments in surgery relatively rare by demanding the surgeons be properly trained and follow exacting procedures in preparation.  Not to do so would constitute malpractice.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could rely on the professionalism of our congressmen the way we rely on our surgeons?  In the American system, the only way to do that is at the ballot box.

Foolish Consistency

I will never forget Daisy.

At the time I was a young trainee in a Social Security office in a moderately large city in the Southwest.  Daisy was a veteran claims representative, her graying hair, exquisite manners and charming Carolina drawl placing her back in the Old South and almost masking the lively mind behind those alert blue eyes.  Daisy had a unique role in the office.  When derelicts (and there were many of them) came to the office, Daisy was always called to interview them and resolve their problems. 

The derelicts were not easy to work with.  Stumbling in only half-sober, reeking with unwashed clothes, used alcohol and vomit, they often were almost incoherent in their complaints, forgetful of the facts and willing to invent any story that would resupply their drinking money.  Frequently their smell was so stupefying that desks were pushed together to permit interviewing at a distance far enough to prevent gagging. That often involved interviews conducted in a semi-shout.  Daisy interviewed them not from being drafted, but by her own choice. 

Daisy was angelic in her interviewing.  Compassionate, patient, struggling to understand and resolve the problems that had brought them there, she provided those derelicts a caring presence that their mother would have had difficulty matching.  Watching her in action, one knew one was witnessing someone who truly identified with and cared for the troubled people she was there to help, an enlightened person signaling a new future for the old South.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.  In casual conversation back in the employee lunchroom, Daisy’s language and opinions were those of a genteel redneck.  Frequently employing the n-word to describe her mostly African-American clients, she made it clear that she viewed them as little more than incompetent children, incapable of any intelligent action in their own behalf.  Her opinions on the social issues surrounding her clients were those of her slave-holding grandparents.  Yet it was clear watching her in action, that her solicitude for their wellbeing went far beyond the limits dictated by her upbringing and professed views.  In short, Daisy’s actions and her beliefs were inconsistent in major ways.

I thought of Daisy recently when I remembered a “daily aphorism” in the local paper:  “Don’t judge a man by his opinions, but by what his opinions have made him. — G.C. Lichtenberg”.

My first reaction was puzzlement followed by disagreement.  Are not people the sum of their opinions?  How can we distinguish between the man and the opinions he holds?  Right action and right view go hand in hand.  Then I remembered Daisy.

As human beings faced with complex choices we favor consistency.  Consistency has many strengths.  A presumption of consistency enables us to infer many effects and relationships from certain knowledge of only a few.  Presuming consistency eases our moral choices by enabling us to see our enemies as all bad, our friends as all good.  No one looks for good in Hitler or evil in Ghandi.  Even Emerson, proud excoriater of consistency as “the hobgoblin of little minds”, was nonplused when Thoreau accused him of inconsistency for not joining him in prison for civil disobedience. 

Inconsistency confuses us.  It violates our deepest moral sense.  Good people should do good things consistently; evil flows from evil consistently. Justice is based on the search for results consistent with causes.  In some ways consistency constitutes our deepest value.  An inconsistent universe is one based on whimsy, not Justice, on unfathomable fragmentation, not rational wholeness.  We cannot understand an inconsistency that violates our sense of wholeness, our belief in an underlying unity of Being.  Belief in an underlying Consistency knits together our science (the quest for “a general unified theory”) and our theology (God as the ground of all Being).

It is in our theology that the “consistency imperative” gets us in the most trouble.  Consistency requires that God be all Good or else senselessly arbitrary – a construct we find repugnant.  To be not only Good, but Perfect in every way is the measure of a monotheist’s God.  By definition God is the best of everything, and anything less cannot be worshipped.

The ancients faced no such problem.  Odin had one eye, Hephaestus limped, Zeus was a cruel philanderer, Loki a trickster, Apollo the Patron of thieves.  Even Jahweh as a tribal God was subject to jealous rages that He later regretted.   Jahweh once threatened to kill Abraham, even though he had already identified him as father to countless peoples.

Mark Twain remarked that Wagner’s music was much better than it sounded.  He may have been right as well as funny.  Perhaps that’s why I celebrate people like Daisy, whose actions are much better than their words, however inconsistent they may be.  And why I appreciate people like John Boehner, who finally got upset enough to be inconsistent and seek compromise.  He may revert to foolishly consistent obstructionism, but for awhile at least he was wisely inconsistent with his principles.  Sometimes, consistency is the foolish course.  Keep up the good work, John.

Another Merry Christmas to George!

It’s time once again to wish George Will a Merry Christmas and a strong glass of syllabub.  I was worrying about him.  He’s become so shrill lately that I thought increasing loneliness was beginning to bother him.  In his recent diatribe against raising the minimum wage he even resorted to self contradiction, actually indicating a preference for the government transfer payments he has reviled so frequently, in the form of tax credits to the poor. Perhaps, I thought, since Marley’s, err, Milton Friedman’s, death, he begins to hear the soft clanking of chains.  But bah, humbug, the dead no longer contribute to profits, so why should he be bothered by that?  Watch out, George, the closer one gets to that bottom line, the louder the clanking.  But on reflection I realized that the wealthy pay little in taxes anyway, so tax credits to the poor merely constitute a silly act of generosity by the moderately poor toward those worse off than they are.  Let them eat their cake together. 

Besides, he seems to have been joined lately by a junior partner, Robert Samuelson.  Samuelson is still junior in his thinking and style, not yet displaying the philosophical grandeur of libertarianism or the tricks of specious argument regularly demonstrated by George.  He simply sticks to practicalities like his perceived impossibility of combating the budget deficits he abhors by actually raising taxes on the rich.  His is yet a simple argument compared to George’s elegant complexities, so easily confused by what Stephen Colbert refers to as “the liberal bias of reality.”  George is never bothered by reality.  But I’m sure Samuelson will learn.  For example, today’s headline is that Cisco is spending $15 billion on buying back its own stock to increase profits for its executives and shareholders, more than 2½ times what it spends on research and development and more than its annual profits, while at the same time laying off 4000 workers.  Such tactics simply add to lowering demand, thereby creating a vicious cycle of lower demand leading to lower profits which must be shared by fewer people to maintain their current wealth leading to more buybacks, making them hard to defend by simple logic. But at least, thanks to the kindness of Senator Paul’s concern for the wellbeing of the unemployed, Samuelson won’t have to worry about the budget impact of paying long term benefits to those laid off. Such liberally biased reality simply lies beyond the reaches of Samuelson’s arguments, requiring George’s grand libertarian indifference; a few arguments ad hominem, like this one, might help, too.

Perhaps, on second thought, I should wish strong syllabub for the whole firm of Friedman, Will and Samuelson, though it would be a stretch for Friedman.  But that syllabub should be drunk quickly.  The Ghost of Christmas Present is beginning to look more and more like Christmas Future each day, at least for the poor.  Merry Christmas, George!

Controlling Violence

I run the risk of over psychologizing an already sad situation, but here goes.  The Greeks had a word for it, the Dionysia, the Romans, Saturnalia, the Germans, October Fest.   In Latin countries, it’s Carnival, in New Orleans, Mardi Gras.  In just about all orderly societies, under the sponsorships of differing gods, mythic histories, whatever, we have an annual celebration of unbounded spontaneity, venting the spleen, “the world turned upside down.”  It enables the society to live at relative peace with itself the rest of the year.  Some societies do it in subtler forms.  One of the foundation papers in social anthropology is about such a role for cockfighting in Borneo.  In South Africa, Mandela used soccer to help turn a nation around.  The Greeks wrote their tragedies to provide Catharsis; in addition to Saturnalia, the Romans used “bread and circuses.”  They are all ways of finding socially acceptable ways for venting and dissipating the violent streak in all of us that comes from our animal past.

I see in the papers and on TV about yet another shooting in a high school, about 91 children age 10 or under killed in 2012, 37 of them by family members, about random killing and tire slashing and beatings of total strangers, and ask Why?  Part of the answer of course is our clinging on to the frontier mythology of keeping weapons handy to fight off a dangerous world.  But Australia and Canada have had equally recent wild histories and discarded them for modern life.  We have to explain why we cling to our own wild history so desperately that we create our own modern libertarian mythology and are willing to sacrifice children to do so.  Part of the answer is racial strife, our inability to adapt to each other, a third generation punishment for the sin of slavery.  But that does not explain white teenagers in mostly white high schools shooting each other.  Part of the answer is the totally out-of-hand commercial exploitation and glorification of violence by our media, from video game makers to professional sports; we have our own gladiators and circuses, violence made easy.  One excuse is that now there are just so many of us that bad things are bound to happen, but that does not explain why our per capita violence rate is so much higher than elsewhere, including in countries with far higher populations or higher population densities than ours.

Part of the answer may be found in W.H. Auden’s poem about grey citizens living grey lives, and that may speak to the deeper issues.  We pile inequalities onto inequalities, more and more deeply stratifying our society into lives of grey drudgery and frustration that lead to what sociologists call anomie, a sense of alienation. We are busy creating an underclass of grey drudges by our rapidly falling social mobility.  But we are not worker ants, and, forced to live like ones, we grow angry and frustrated.  Left with no vent, sometimes people snap.  At all levels of society, we teach and provide our children no other outlets to their frustrations but violent ones, and when they act out that violence we are shocked.

It has become obvious that gun control is desperately needed, and that gun control by itself is not enough.  The conditions that lead to the anger and frustration being acted out violently must be addressed. Income inequality and low social mobility must be tackled by redistribution of wealth through the tax system.  Unemployment must be eased both through extended unemployment benefits and through jobs creation promoted by government.  Education must be reformed to enable people to live out their dreams through their own skills.  Our health systems need better ways of recognizing and treating the emotionally ill.  The media needs, on moral grounds if for no other reason, to shift its focus away from killer winner take all competition.  No one thing can make the violence go away.  Together many things can.  We owe it to our children.

Family Virtues

One of the problems in economics these days is that economists have forgotten, or never learned, the original meaning of economics.  I found out years ago that you can’t really grasp what a science is actually about simply by analyzing its equations.  I got that partly from reading the essays of Einstein, who described equations as merely the shorthand footnotes at the bottom of the page for the flow of the ideas expressed in the main discourse.  Imagine expressing travel, like a leisurely drive through scenic byways followed by a jet flight from Washington to Paris, as d = rt, and thinking that fully described it.  Einstein wrote that forgetting that fact contributes to the practice of teaching a science or mathematics backward, so that its conclusions are reached only by putting together the equations, instead of having the equations flow from the ideas.  It’s easier to teach that backward way, but leads to students unable to understand how science really progresses.  He added that he knew the truths of General Relativity for ten years before he could express them mathematically in equations. 

It was Aristotle who first coined “economics”, meaning the management of a family or a household for the good of the whole.  By that is meant the relationships, productive and otherwise, between all its members. It used to include things we’d likely include under other disciplines, but now it’s limited to things expressible by that big dollar sign.  Some things to remember: households are fluid, not static; babies are born and old folks die; relatives move in and out; proportional compositions change as sometimes it’s mainly adults and other times lots of kids and then grandparents move in. And nowadays, kids move back in.   Garrison Keillor described home as “the place that when you have to go there, they have to accept you.”  Through it all, it has to be managed so that under changing compositions everyone still gets fed and clothed and sheltered.  Sometimes that means times are hard all around, other times that affluence and enjoyment reigns; i.e., just as composition is not static, total household income is fluid also.  In other words, it’s a lot like society at large.  It’s not by accident we call our country our homeland.  In America, the Constitution prohibits exile, which in a way is more home-like than home itself.

Robert Samuelson, writing in the Washington Post, seems to have forgotten, or never learned, that.  He disavows any connection of home with national economics as not fitting the equations of economics.  He unilaterally declares a class war between young and old, stating that care for the elderly deprives the young.  He cites in support of his view the fact that the proportion of elderly has grown significantly, forgetting he's comparing it to the baby-boom era when there were surpluses of children and massive school construction was the norm. He remarks that many elderly are now self-supporting anyway, meaning it’s no longer the case that 50 percent of the elderly live in poverty.  He’s impervious to Michael Gerson’s admonition that responsible capitalism requires virtues that it does not produce, in this case sharing for the common good.  Beyond that, he seems to forget the fluidity of composition that society exhibits.  At times elders dominate; at other times, as during the baby boom era, children do.  Times change.  And he has forgotten that whatever the income currently available, families share it.

Ways of doing so are the government transfer payments he detests.  He begins to rival George Will in his libertarian indifference. I’d like to think Samuelson is an isolated case, but in today’s Post, Charles Lane and Harry Holder, former chief economist in the Labor Department, both beat upon raising the minimum wage to at least the poverty level as unwise.  Holder worries that increasing the minimum wage might cause a loss of jobs among the young, forgetting the responsibility of government to stimulate the economy to create jobs through promoting new technologies.  Lane and Holder further illustrate the dangers of leaving economics to economists.  They become so enamored of the beauty and power of their equations that they forget the dynamism and powers of the society behind them.

We all need to keep in mind that rich and poor, old and young, and all those in between, are in this together.  It’s time to discard the old class warfare chants.  Anyway, as Warren Buffett noted, that war is over and the rich have won.  It’s time to focus again on that virtue of sharing.  That’s how you manage families.