Executive Summary

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?

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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.