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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah Baby

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

What Will Follow the Trauma of Trump?

The last week or two I've been haunted by the following metaphorical scenario.  A cancer patient has learned that the disease has metastasized.  There is a particularly large tumor which is causing a lot of pain.  The doctor recommends excision of this particular tumor, as doing that will so lessen the patient's discomfort.  But otherwise, the doctor suggests letting the disease run its course. There is an experimental treatment that might cure the disease entirely, but the success rate is only about 1% of the time.  The treatment itself is painful and disorienting for the patient.  So, the likely outcome with the treatment is no gain yet with lots more pain. Under the circumstances, facing facts but otherwise doing nothing seems the most sensible course of action.

* * * * *

I hope it's obvious how to translate the above into our current national politics.  A Harris-Walz victory on Election Day can be seen as excising a very large tumor.  If that happens and if there is no return of Stop the Steal, or even if there is such a return but the initial effort in that direction peters out quickly, then the majority of voters will breathe a big sigh of relief.  What then?   Owing to emotional exhaustion from all the national politics, most voters will likely want to turn their attention elsewhere, to relax and enjoy life.  Nobody would blame them in that event.  It would be completely understandable.  In that case, the system will operate much as before, and we'll muddle through. Then, President Harris may go through a honeymoon period, where substantive things do get accomplished.  But the underlying cancer will have remained in the system.  Gridlock in Congress is then very likely to return, just as it did under President Obama.  

Having read this far, you might very well guess that the rest of this post is about considering that experimental solution, the one which could cure the disease entirely, even if the likelihood of doing so is extremely low.  I will discuss my version of such a solution in two parts.  Part one will offer my diagnosis of the disease.  Part two will offer my version of the cure.  Then, in the the conclusion, I will encourage readers to either make modifications to what I suggest, bringing the result more in accord with their own thinking, or have them offer entirely different alternatives yet with the the same goal - to provide a cure for what ails the system.  

Let me also note here that as a sports fan I do believe in "the jinx" and, consequently, I've been wondering myself whether this post should not be published till after election, if at all. The reason for doing otherwise is that some of the ideas offered here will be hard for readers to digest, not conceptually but as to their plausibility.  These ideas might then be entirely discounted and matter for naught.  So I will make a concerted effort to keep up a flow of posts that promote the ideas and hope that with such persistence readers will be more willing to entertain the thinking.  Going from that to putting the ideas into implementation is another matter.  That will require others who want to go "all in" with these suggestions.  My hope is that my posts might serve as a call to action.

* * * * * 

The Diagnosis

I will list several particulars, each with its own annotation.  The particulars are meant to be interconnected.  The first three are at the level of national politics.  The next three are at the level of the general population. 

• Trump drew all the attention, and then some.  Consequently, the Republicans in Congress were set free to act as they would, without concern for consequence, except from Trump himself.
  
  
  • The most obvious of this sort of action was the trial that followed the Second Impeachment of Trump, which was about him inciting the events of January 6.  Two thirds of the Senators would need to have voted guilty for a guilty verdict to obtain.  A majority of the Senators did vote guilty, but that majority wasn't large enough.  Each of those who voted not guilty was a Republican.  There were 43 Senators in that category.  The reader needs to ask, did those Senators vote their conscience or did they turn a blind eye to the evidence, either out of the quid pro quo with Trump or out of fear of retaliation from him?  If the latter, they violated their oath of office.
  
  
  • The only possible threat these Republicans faced for voting to acquit Trump was not getting reelected.  Evidently, for most of them that threat wasn't credible.
    
    
    • In this particular case, the next election was almost two years off and voters typically have a focus only on what is of concern at present.  By the time of the 2022 election, this vote would have been largely forgotten.  Further, the point is amplified as Senate elections are every 6 years and those elections are staggered, so that only one third of the Senate seats are up for contest in any election year.
  
  
• The quid pro quo amounted to this: Republicans in Congress would ignore Trump's various "indiscretions" if in return Trump would do as they favored, particularly with regard to nominations for judicial appointments.
  
  
  • Trump kept his end of the bargain this way.  And Democrats in the Senate got played earlier, by weakening the rules for approval of appointments, as under Obama so many of his nominations (for all sorts of positions, not just judicial nominations) were blocked under the Filibuster.  Obama was upset by this and asked then Majority Leader Harry Reid to do something so that his nominations would go through.  Reid, in turn, had the rules for approval of non-judicial appointments weakened.  Later, then Majority Leader McConnell extended this to include judicial appointments. Subsequently, even with only a narrow majority in the Senate, Republicans were able to get Trump's nominations through.  Indeed, Judge Kavanaugh received only 50 votes for confirmation, yet that was sufficient for him to become a Supreme Court Justice.
  
  
• That majorities in each House of Congress have been so slim gave more power to the Plutocrats, who didn't face sufficient oversight and who kept many of those in Congress in their pockets, as a consequence of their donations to their campaigns and other forms of "generosity." 
  
  
  • The Citizens United case was decided in 2010, during President Obama's first term.  In the process of doing background reading about the case, I stumbled onto an essay about Sandra Day O'Connor that clarified things for me although it was not directly related to the Citizen's United Case.  Rather, it dealt with an abortion case from 1989 dealing with a Missouri law, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services.  Justice O'Connor was against Roe and she was the swing vote in the case.  In spite of her prior disposition, she felt it inappropriate to use the case to overturn Roe out of judicial restraint.  In practical terms, this meant deciding the case narrowly.  Further, she argued that judicial restraint is the approach that conservative justices should take, though apparently she was the only one of the conservative justices to hold that position. 
    
    The issue of judicial restraint also played a large role in Citizens United v. FEC, which originally came to the Supreme Court in March 2009.  Chief Justice Roberts wrote the initial opinion, in which the case was decided narrowly.  Justice Kennedy wrote a concurrent opinion, which argued that the case should be decided broadly and, in particular, that restrictions in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act violated the right to free speech.  Ultimately, this view became law and those restrictions were shut down.  Justice Souter, who retired from the Court later in 2009, wrote the original dissenting opinion.  It gave a scathing critique of the Chief Justice, who was accused of manipulations that would make him seem moderate while bringing about this broad reduction in the BCRA. 

• Extreme income inequality has become a feature of the economy; where we truly were a "middle class society" when I was kid, we no longer are.  To illustrate this, consider the simple statistic: Median Family Income/Mean Family Income, which has experienced a downward trend since the mid 1950s.  (I describe why I looked at this statistic in this post from May.)  If families with income at or near the median are living comfortably, then income inequality per se is not a problem.  But if such families are struggling to make ends meet then income inequality is a big deal.  (Also note that there are non-family households, which typically have lower income than family households.)
  
  
  • How Inequality Threatens Civil Society, an essay from eight years ago by Nobel Prize winning economist Angus Deaton, is well worth the read.  It gives an explanation for why the inequality has emerged - lack of productivity growth leads many entrepreneurs to engage in "rent seeking" rather than in finding the "new new thing." This motivates the uber-rich at one end of the income distribution and leaves less to go around for everyone else.  Further, certain sectors of the economy suffer from extreme bloat. Deaton mentions healthcare and finance.  Elite higher education may be another of those.  With this as explanation, the piece talks about the social ills caused when too many people can't earn a decent living.
    

• There is a severe mental health crisis in the U.S. as documented here.  The piece points out that the crisis began before COVID-19, but was surely exacerbated by it. 
  
  
  • In fall 2019 I wrote about witnessing this in the course I was then teaching.  The post is called Dire Education.  This paragraph from my post describes the futility that seems at the heart of the mental health issues for college students. 
    
    The thing is, this student is by no means the only student in my class who is struggling emotionally.  Indeed, such struggles may be the new normal. There is discord between (a) very high tuition, (b) pressure to get a good job after graduation, and (c) the students don't know what they want for themselves.   To this I'd add the following.  Many of the students I see in my course don't appear competent at a cognitive level in the course prerequisites.  They've had years and years of school as credentialing, without it producing a foundation for further learning later in life.
    
    
  •  I have no direct experience with the world of work outside higher education, but I suspect that my explanation in the previous bullet, suitably translated to the world-of-work setting, would hold up reasonably well there.  Surely when on the job the fear of being fired or getting laid off has to be very stressful as would being unemployed and then performing a job search that turns up only poor offers.
    

• There is extreme enmity between some conservative Republicans and some liberal Democrats.  The conservative Republicans despise the liberals for their elitism - looking down their noses.  The liberal Democrats despise the conservatives for their selfishness and insularity.  The media reinforces these prejudices.  Indeed, for some TV News networks making the viewers angry is part of the business model, as angry viewers tend to be "repeat customers."
  
  
  • Some of this may be inevitable.  When I was a teenager (late 1960s and early 1970s) the divisive issue was the Vietnam War and it was sometimes characterized as the Hardhats versus the Hippies.  But the then over-the-air TV news didn't exacerbate the tensions much, though there was criticism of liberal bias in the news.  Comparing now to then in this regard gives a dystopian view of technology that enables different news programming depending on political preference.
    
    
  • Political Polarization has many causes.  One of these that the linked piece mentions is the increased reliance on gerrymandering.  Another, I think this still matters but it is not commented upon nearly as much, is that before LBJ and his Great Society programs there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, and there were moderates in each party.  This right-left overlap between the parties served as a calming influence.  Subsequently, there was party realignment.  Many of the conservative Democrats became Republicans.  The center within each party moved to the extremes.  At first this was just a consequence of realignment rather than that individuals became more extreme.  The latter did happen, but that was later.
    

* * * * *

The Cure

Unlike in the previous section, let me provide an overview instead of a list of particulars.  The spoils from the political arrangement between Trump and Congressional Republicans need to be undone.  Vice President Harris has talked about signing a bill into law that restores Roe.  But, given the current composition of the Supreme Court, won't such a bill be deemed unconstitutional not too long after then President Harris has signed it?  If that is anticipated, the undoing of the spoils becomes a necessary part to restoring Roe. There is also a longer term concern, which to my knowledge no one else has talked about yet.  If these spoils remain it will provide a terrible precedent.  Sometime in the future, we could possibly see a replay with a charismatic yet tyrannical President coupled with a wish list from those in Congress in the President's party that can only be implemented by violating the Constitution.  And the next time, it could be the Democrats who are set to do this.  

Let me leave for the moment how this undoing might happen and instead turn to the need for a program that lessens income inequality in a real and substantial way and does so over an extended period of time.  Further, such a program must help not just those who are working or are actively seeking employment, but others as well, particularly those with mental health issues sufficiently severe that them working at present would be in nobody's interest.  This might challenge readers, who hold the belief that work is essential.  I encourage such readers, and everyone else as well, to have a go at this essay by Bertrand Russell published in 1932, In Praise of Idleness.  It's another idea that will require a lot of chewing over.  And, of course, this is not to say that incomes should be fully equalized whether the person works or not.  Unemployment insurance as a notion might convey some of what the solution should be like, but the term of the insurance, the factors that might extend the term further, and the amount paid all need to be taken into consideration.

Regarding programs that might aid those who are suffering from severe mental health problems, treat drug addiction and alcoholism, and encourage those who participate in such programs to see it through to where there is substantial improvement in their own mental health so that they are ready to return to living normal lives, I am out of my element here.  I do want to note that while I was still teaching in retirement (that ended in fall 2019) there was a well publicized need for more mental health professionals on campus (this need was national in scope, not just at Illinois).  But I also felt that our ordinary approach to educating students was far too dehumanizing.  How we can make both school and work more humane is not something we ask very often.  We should be doing that.  And if we come up with good answers, we should implement them.  Beyond that, I shouldn't be prescriptive here.  Let someone else who understands these issues far better than I do be the one to make recommendations.

Casting this into a political setting, I am currently in the midst of reading Keynes' essay, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written soon after the close of World War I, where he argues that the reparations being asked of Germany were far too severe, would hamper their recovery from the war, and cause much resentment.  Though Keynes is often associated with the Great Depression, he didn't predict that in this essay.  Here we can consider the Great Depression as adding fuel to the fire that Keynes had already predicted in this earlier essay.  Weimar Germany was not stable.  We all know what ensued after that.  The Marshall Plan, which came a few years after World War II ended, provided economic recovery in Europe, for friends and former foes alike.   It was quite a contrast to the reparations demanded of Germany after World War I.  In that sense, the economic proposals I have briefly sketched here give an overview of an economic recovery plan for America.  My recent post, Male Fail, offers some ideas programmatically about how this might be done.

Assuming the economic plan was implemented and proved effective, one might expect anger to tone down and tolerance for others unlike ourselves to increase.  If so, one might imagine this to be the favor returned as part of the quid pro quo for receiving economic assistance.  It very well could require facilitating organizations such as unions, churches, or community groups to get the recipients of the economic assistance to understand this quid pro quo.  But it would be the effectiveness of the program that would get those recipients to accept their obligation under the quid pro quo.

The last point to make on the economic program part of the plan is that it needs to endure for quite a while, though on plan specifics those might evolve over time to better fit the then current situation.  How long is quite a while?  I don't know, but certainly long enough to get the political objectives accomplished.  Just throwing out a number here, I would say about a decade.  That is certainly long enough for the economic program to become an expectation for everyone in society.

Now let's take up how the undoing will happen.  The key thought is that a super-majority of the voters must form that supports a specific agenda - the undoing coupled with the economic program.  These voters will come from both parties and include Independents as well.  Voters in this super-majority will vote for Congressional candidates who endorse the full agenda.  Over time, because of the massive number of such voters, Congress itself will move toward having more than two thirds of their members, in each of the two houses, endorse this same agenda.  Once that has happened, an Impeachment Trial aimed at one of the Supreme Court Justices nominated by Trump (or for that matter a similar such trial aimed at a lower court judge nominated by Trump) will obtain a guilty verdict.  Anticipating that, some of the Justices (and judges) may spare themselves the indignity of that experience and retire before it happens.  That would be okay.

To facilitate this happening, a separate non-party organization would need to form, to advance the agenda, get voters who support the agenda to become members of the organization, track candidates as to where they stand on the agenda, and perform these functions in an ongoing manner.  I don't believe this can happen within one of the parties now because voters from the other party will be reluctant to switch parties.  We need to make it easier on the voters to support the agenda.  If they can identify candidates from their own party who do this, bully for them. And, once this gets well along, one might imagine that this non-party organization encourages its members to, on occasion, cross party lines in their voting.  This might matter, particularly, during the primaries. 

Further, the non-party organization needs to remain strictly neutral on political issues that lie outside the agenda.  (In what I've articulated so far, foreign affairs would not have any place in the agenda.)  Now, let me complicate things a bit.  The narrower the agenda, the more likely it is to get people with otherwise diverse points of view to endorse it.  But the narrower the agenda, the less likely it is to cure the disease.  So setting the agenda scope is a non-trivial matter.  Beyond that, it also will matter how individual items are framed.  Indeed, that is critical.

I've had the idea to create a super-majority of voters for a while.  Back in fall 2022, I wrote a novelette that considers just the political component, the undoing, and only reaches that point in the last third of the book, where until then the goal was simply to restore Roe.  I wrote that as fiction, rather than as an essay as I'm doing here, because I didn't know how to get around the low probability of success while keeping the reader's interest.  (This is explained in the Notes to Chapter 01.)  But when I wrote the draft for that book, the upcoming Presidential election was quite a way off.  Now that it is pending, maybe some readers will be interested in what I'm saying here.  There are quite a few arguments brought forward in the novelette about how the political agenda is justified, how the super-majority would form, and the role played by the facilitating organization.  But I also tried to write the book in a way to talk about obstacles in achieving these goals.  I don't mean to imply that any of this will be a walk in the park.

I didn't have the economic piece in the novelette because at the time I didn't know how to fit it together with the political piece.  My blog is full of posts on economic matters, but until now I didn't see them fitting holistically with the political piece.  I believe that considering the economic piece as the analog to an economic recovery plan delivered after a devastating war is useful for the framing.  Further, while our national politics tends to treat economic assistance on an item by item basis, at present the focus has been on affordable housing, in the past it was on raising the minimum wage, actually the whole picture needs to be considered, even if it will take time to implement a full economic plan.

Let me close this section by imagining hypothetical conversations with Republican-leaning friends (I typically vote for Democratic candidates, though not always) on the ideas I've sketched here, provided in advance I know they are not going to vote for Trump and they too would like to see Roe restored.  What would their reactions be to what I've said?  I'm guessing they'd be pretty noncommittal.  They would need to reflect afterwards about matters.  The test is whether they'd want a follow up conversation, one where they could pose the questions and I'd try to address those.   Maybe that would lead to still a third conversation.  If a reasonable synthesis could emerge, I would be quite okay with that.

* * * * *

While I'm comfortable with my own abstract thinking, I will confess it leaves a lot of holes that need to be filled, in particular, my not understanding the minds of many voters.  In 2016, for example, I didn't understand why so many Republican women voted for Trump, in spite of his evident misogyny.  Nowadays, I don't understand why so many MAGA Republicans seemingly vote against their own economic interests, nor do I comprehend why the race for President still seems to be so close.  I also don't know how my own high school classmates would react to this blog post.  My guess is that they'd say, it's interesting but there is way too much wishful thinking in it, Lanny.  They'd also say the post is much too long.

If that's on the mark, then I'd want to know whether they have some suggested changes/improvements that might still get us past merely muddling along in our politics.  I want other readers of this post to likewise feel empowered to offer changes/improvements in the argument.  If you do this as a comment on this post, I will greatly appreciate it and respond in kind.  If you'd prefer to send me an email, note that my contact information is given in the right sidebar.  Your message may very well influence subsequent posts I write on this topic.  And if you publish your suggestion on your own Website, please let me know.  In the old days when this blog was totally about ed tech, I could track those things.  I no longer can.   Thanks in advance for doing so.

Impatience

Getting the meaning in what you read
Doing so at near ultimate speed
The inherent contradiction
Brings forth an affliction
Which is termed - intellectual greed.
#SlowSlowQuickQuick

Male Fail

I'm going to give a brief reaction to this piece in the New York Times: Many Gen Z Men Fell Left Behind.  Some See Trump as an Answer.  There are three points I'd like to make.  

First, while at the Democratic Convention most if not all of the speakers took shots at Trump himself and deservedly so, little if anything was said about those voters who support Trump, other than those ultra-MAGA types who were directly involved in the January 6 events.  (Adam Kinzinger did speak to them as fellow Republicans.)    If we really are to get past the Trump era, and if it is really true that many Trump supporters are hurting both emotionally and economically, as I believe it to be the case, then these people should not be punished because of their collective guilt but rather should be helped out so they can be repaired and in that way the country may get repaired as well.  This will be hard to do politically as those who support Harris in this election and are part of the working class will expect that they themselves should be the exclusive targeted beneficiaries of a Harris Presidency.  But it needs to be done and, indeed, it needs to be ongoing for quite a while.

Second, there is something wrong with how macroeconomics is done these days as the various statistics, such as the unemployment rate, aggregates over various sub-populations which are having quite different experiences.  The Democratic Convention itself focused on a sub-population, the working class.  It did not talk much at all about people living in poverty.  On the other end of the spectrum, it did not talk about those, like me, with advanced degrees and a career trajectory where income was reasonably good, if not spectacular.  If there is underemployment within a sub-population, that needs to be addressed by fiscal policy targeted at that sub-population.  We should not let the aggregation of different experiences from different sub-populations hinder us in taking political action. 

Third, the scale of intervention that is needed is typically underestimated.  Part of this is worrying about creating huge deficits that will ultimately create a terrible inflation.  Another part is by eyeballing how much actually can be collected in additional taxes from the upper tier in the economy, without that creating a huge political, if not economic, fallout.  Being aware of this underestimation issue is not the same thing as resolving it, but maybe it will help in sizing programs that actually get political consideration.

While the Green New Deal has been an idea floating around for quite some time, it seems to have lost some currency.  Eight years ago I wrote my own post about it entitled, Hard Hats That Are Green.  The virtue of that post is that it manipulated the numbers to get concrete cost estimates of such a program and the scale of the offering.  We've had substantial inflation in the interim and that needs to be accounted for, so the post could use some updating that way.  But it does give a method for thinking through implementing such a program.  Our recent activist fiscal policy, such as the American Rescue Plan, has been near-term intervention to bring the economy out of a slump.  The underemployment in certain sub-populations is a structural problem that will take much more time to solve.  That needs to be understood.  It won't be one and done.

Let me advance one more way of thinking about sub-populations and then close.  This time the focus will be geographic.  Many people who live in rural areas have suffered economically, with low employment prospects, yet with a preference for the rural lifestyle.  While most economists had argued that the solution is for such people to migrate to urban areas, Covid may have put the lie to that suggestion.  Might it be possible to have a sensible intervention with these people perhaps migrating a little but still retaining the rural lifestyle?  About six years ago I wrote a post called The Morrill of the Story, which called for the Land Grant Universities to serve as hubs for Green New Deal type interventions.  I hadn't seen that suggestion made elsewhere and, admittedly, since I live in such a college town, I may be biased in proposing it.  But it seems to me something like that should be done.  

In closing, I wonder whether any of these suggestions would be politically possible, because the targeted population favors Trump now.  At present that seems a vice.  If the Democrats do have a big win in November, maybe it will come to be seen as a virtue, as the agenda to repair the nation takes on prominence.

Demographics and Democratics

So it seems we now have each political party claiming to be populist.  

I am quite cynical about Republican populism and I definitely am not alone in that view, for example consider this recent piece by Michelle Goldberg.  In this story MAGA is a con job, fueling the resentment of working class whites to make them feel empowered, while economically Republican policy has remained tilted in favor of the uber rich.  In this rendering, Trump is a latter day PT Barnum.  That the working class whites continue to fall for this con rests on multiple factors that are interrelated - a triumph of prejudice over rationality, a sense of emasculation owing to their own poor economic prospects, and a perception of White demographic decline in America that they personally experience through poor prospects for marriage and parenthood.  Further, for reasons that I don't fully understand, while any populism casts the ordinary guy against the elite, somehow the uber rich escape the resentment the MAGA types have.  That resentment seems to be reserved for academia, political correctness, and perceived censoring of free speech.  Anger is the underlying feeling that ties it all together.

At this convention the Democrats seem equally determined to champion the working class.  However, they are doing it in a multi-racial and multi-cultural context.  As the cameras panned the audience at the Democratic Convention last night, that much was evident. I was wondering to myself whether any MAGA types were watching and, if so, how they reacted to what they were seeing and hearing.  I learned from some searches in YouTube that a former very strong Trump Supporter, Rich Logis, had a brief video featured at the Convention.  Logis is now one of those leading the Republicans for Harris effort in Florida.  But Logis' own movement away from Trump happened earlier and culminated in summer 2022.  Did his video have any impact on current MAGA types or was it merely window dressing for Convention activities?

If instead of race and culture, one looks at income distribution, then my household is squarely in the 10% and, frankly, not much of the rhetoric I've heard at the Convention so far speaks to those like me.  I truly think that the populism which I expect to persist should be mixed together with the JFK ideal - Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country?  Paying taxes should be viewed from the vantage of the JFK ideal, which is why a progressive tax system makes real sense.  We may not be ready for that type of conversation in this presidential campaign.  But we will need to have this conversation and very soon. 

Too many, including me, believe that the system now is rigged.  If the reality can truly change so that the justifiable cynicism that so many currently have does not persist, maybe instead of populism we will talk about decency without resentment and that the system works.  And then, maybe the parties will come closer together and we will no longer be a country divided.

At least, that is something to wish for.

An Oddity That May Be Worth Further Consideration

Nowadays, I mainly do my book reading on an electronic device, mostly that's a Kindle Fire, and recently I read a novel on my new Mac laptop, using the Kindle app for the Mac as the reader.  I prefer to make the font sans serif, comparatively large, and the page with ample line space.  This is easier on the eyes for me and that matters, particularly in persisting with the reading.  I end up buying several books at a time from the Amazon store, deliberately intermixing "great works" with "page turner" fiction.  This year I've been on a kick to read through books I've given a go at earlier in life but couldn't make it even halfway through.  

I'm currently reading Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon.  Not that long ago I read Ulysses, by James Joyce.  I was in over my head with Ulysses, often not getting the intended meaning.  I felt underprepared as a reader.  Maybe the experience gave me some empathy for students in that category, but as I no longer teach, there is not much benefit in that.  Stylistically, Gravity's Rainbow is in the same mold and there are definitely passages which I don't get.  But they are less frequent than with Ulysses and my background knowledge is better suited for understanding what Pynchon serves up.  

In both cases the Kindle software aids in getting through the book.  There is something called "reading speed" which is calibrated based on how fast prior pages were read.  Then the software infers how long it will take to read the remainder of the chapter as well as the remainder of the book.  In this way the reader can track the progress made - not in gaining understanding, but in completing the reading task.  Even if such aids diminish the ability to concentrate on what is written, they do help in persisting with the reading.  That is something.

For books in the page-turner category, recently I've been relying on detective fiction, either by Raymond Chandler, whose protagonist Philip Marlowe is well known from the movies, or by Colin Dexter, whose Inspector Morse character I first encountered in the prequel Endeavour, which can be watched now on Amazon Prime. Yet quite recently I reverted to an old reliable, John Grisham, and purchased the trilogy: Camino Island, Camino Winds, and Camino Ghosts.  The oddity in my title refers to the first two of these books.  

At least in the Kindle version, there is a Study Guide with questions for discussion that appear immediately after the novel concludes. (I was somewhat disappointed that Amazon.com gave a table of contents for the preview of the print version but not a table of contents for the full book, so I don't know whether the Study Guide is also in the print version.)  A study guide for page turner fiction, one that is included with the book rather than appear as CliffsNotes!  Hmmmm!!!

I can only guess as to why this is happening and I will give my conjectures below.  But let me say first that I would be delighted to learn what is really going on here.  This is a case where I hope my guesses are off the mark.  

First, whether Johnny can or can't read, it seems pretty clear that Johnny doesn't read.  School is failing most students this way.  When my kids were little there was Harry Potter, which received so many plaudits because it seemingly made Johnny interested in reading.  And at least one of my kids developed the reading habit as a consequence. But for him, pleasure reading was mainly (perhaps exclusively) fantasy fiction.  What about branching out from there?  Might it be that English class has been restructured in that they have kids read page turner fiction in a variety of genres so that the kids can experience pleasure reading and thereafter self-direct their reading as a leisure activity?  

I recall that when I was in junior high school and high school, much of what we read in English class was selected because it was thought to be "good for us" to read great works of fiction, even if the takeaway was nebulous to us students.  Let me mention just two titles here, Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye.  I would guess that most of my friends read those in school.  Assuming that, could they point to how reading those books contributed to their own personal growth?  A discussion along those lines might be interesting for considering what English class should be doing today. 

The other possibility is that the study guides in the first two books are really a setup for the third book, Camino Ghosts, which does not yet have a study guide.  Without giving away the plot, the book title refers to the ghosts of former slaves and Africans who were brought to America but then escaped slavery.  I should add that Camino Island is fictitious, but is set off the Florida coast northeast of Jacksonville.  Florida is a state where banning books and not teaching Black history is happening now.  Maybe Grisham novels might escape the scrutiny of Florida censors.  Could it be that Camino Ghosts is aiming to be taught in the schools, a backdoor way for students to learn that Black history is real?  

When I said above that I hope I'm wrong about this, it is because I'd prefer a front door way for students to learn Black history.  And I'd rather that students develop the reading habit early, preferably in elementary school if at all possible.  Reading is critical to learning to think reflectively.  Yet there are obstacles to this, beyond book banning.  Given those obstacles, maybe a pragmatic solution is something to hope for now. 

A Selective History from Reagan to Trump

I'm responding to this opinion piece from Peter Wehner entitled What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me.  There is no doubt that those Reagan Republicans still alive today are haunted by all that Trump stands for.  Nevertheless, I found the essay unsatisfying, mainly for what it left out.  

There was no mention of the Tea Party and the havoc it wrecked.  A particular example I have in mind is Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who was noted for his foreign policy expertise, losing in the 2012 primary to a Tea Party candidate, which was followed by the general election where the Democratic candidate won.  This was a form of destructive cannibalization (from the Republican viewpoint) that repeated many times. 

There was also no mention of Newt Gingrich and the Contract for America, where in the previous decade that imposed constraints on the Clinton Presidency, and hence the fiscal policy mistakes that were made, evident in retrospect if not in prospect.  During Clinton's second term the economy was in high growth mode mainly due to the dot.com bubble and the Federal budget ran a surplus the last two years, where deficits had been the norm beforehand and which returned soon after Bush II took office.  Those surpluses could have been used to fund massive public investment projects.  At the time, the economy had been changing from one that had centered on manufacturing to one focused on the provision of services.  Working class people, especially men, took a hit economically as a consequence.  Many didn't have the right skill set for the service economy.  Further, they resented that the service work was for lower pay.  Increasing the supply of blue collar jobs outside of manufacturing would have been a sensible accommodation, but it was not to be.  And when Bush II did take office the budget surplus was squandered on a tax cut for the rich.

Then there were two big events of note, each of which created a major imprint on the present.  The first of these was the war in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein.  So much has been written about the immorality of that war that I don't need to expand upon it here.  But much less has been written, to my knowledge, about those who served in the military then and their connection to MAGA now.  One did read about a large number of suicides committed by veterans of that war.  Evidently, they felt morally betrayed.  What about those who didn't commit suicide?  And what about their friends and relatives who had a more indirect connection to the war.  Did they too feel that their country had betrayed them by creating false expectations about what would happen?

The other event is about the "rescue" put in place after the burst of the housing bubble and the start of the financial crisis that then ensued.  The plan bailed out many of the big banks, which were then able to rebound.  The financial system as a whole was saved.  But individuals in underwater mortgages didn't fare as well.  Many lost their homes.  The reality is that many shouldn't have qualified for mortgages to begin with.  The only collateral they had was in the market value of their homes increasing steadily.  So they had their expectations raised and then brutally lowered.  Yet there were funds appropriated to help them out, but those funds remained unspent.  If the big guys could get bailed out, why couldn't they be bailed out as well?  That didn't happen.

Let me identify two other factors that have clearly mattered.  One is the Citizens United v. FEC decision by the Supreme Court, which happened in January 2010.  It enabled a huge amount of "dark money" to enter the political arena.  If the various Republican incarnations are cast in the language of innovation, this dark money can be conceived of as a kind of venture capital.  Of course, the main goal of such funding was to produce tax cuts which would give substantial return on investment.  The secondary goal was to create a structure that would generate enough voters who support it where the primary goal could then be achieved.  

The other factor is about our media, particularly the environment in which voters get their information about the news.  When Reagan was President, Cable TV had become the norm, but the innovation in news programming was CNN.  Other channels that provided news programming: ABC, CBS, and NBC did so with evening shows on workdays (a half hour each of national and local news) and then Sunday morning programming for commentary. PBS offered yet one more alternative.  There was no station favored by one party only.  There was a lot of criticism from Conservatives about Liberal bias in the news.  But voters were getting their information from the same sources, more or less.  Near the end of Reagan's second term Rush Limbaugh's radio show began, and the politics of grievance started anew.  That show developed a large audience, but at the time it did not have a television counterpart.  It would be more than a decade later until Fox News came on the scene, as did MSNBC, though the latter was slow out of the gate.  By the early to middle 2000s, much of the audience was getting their news and/or commentary from one of these networks, each of which featured stoking their audience, as that was a way to hold viewer interest.  It meant that Republican and Democratic voters were getting different narratives about the news and as a result wouldn't see eye to eye on most matters of politics.

In case this isn't obvious, none of these developments encouraged moderation.  One might ask, what can be done now to undo the most pernicious of these factors/events?  Alternatively, one might ask what other innovations might get the country back to having a shared vision and then be on a more sensible path thereafter?   If one compares the election now to the election of 2008, there is the similarity in that it feels as if we are in crisis - then because of the Great Recession, now because Trump might be reelected.  Many want simply to get past the crisis and not consider other items that would complicate things.   I fear, however, that without asking these questions now, they might never be asked at all.  That would be very unfortunate.

A Brief Note in Response to Aaron Sorkin's Opinion Piece

I am reacting to this essay, which appeared in yesterday's New York Times.  Let me say first what I liked about it.  There is no doubt that now the Democrats need to make an appeal to lifelong Republicans who have been Never Trump as well as to those who are now No Longer Trump supporters.  They need to vote for the Democratic candidate in the coming election rather than sit this one out.  Sorkin's suggestion of making Mitt Romney the Democratic candidate would likely achieve this end.

But there are two things I didn't like about this essay.  First, Sorkin doesn't address at all whether the whole thing is really a zero-sum game in that attracting lifelong Republicans to vote for the Democratic candidate will repel lifelong Democrats, who then won't vote at all.  Is it possible to make this a positive-sum game, getting both groups of voters to participate in the upcoming election?  If so, what would do that?  I will discuss a possible answer to that question below.

Second, Sorkin seems to believe that a singular act, nominating Mitt Romney, will be like flipping a switch and then achieve the desired result.  However, what if each voter, instead, hems and haws about whether to vote in the coming election, because they are unsure of whether they can rank in a lexicographical manner beating Trump over all other issues and are more comfortable having a candidate who on the other issues has views that parallel their own?  In this election it would be desirable for voters to have this lexicographical ranking, but wishing doesn't make it so.  What might be done to achieve the desired end?

My view is that we should treat voters as learners and truly educate them (I don't mean indoctrinate them) on these matters.  Learning of this sort needs to accommodate the learner's prior disposition.  Further, negotiation through to a newly held point of view can only happen with an instructor whom the learner trusts.  This sort of learning will be labor intensive and time consuming.  I have articulated these ideas in my recent novelette, Adventures of the Minute Women, though the story there is applied to related matters rather than to the Presidential election. 

If begun immediately could such an educational program produce results at scale by election day?  I don't know, but that is what I wish that Sorkin had argued in his essay.

Is Seven Days in May, a book and then a movie from the 1960s, relevant for now?

The book was published in 1962. I was 7 at the time.  The movie came out in 1964.  I don't think I ever saw it in the theater, but I watched it on TV several times, perhaps before I read the book, which I believe I did in Junior High School, though my memory is very imprecise on these details. The book is about a plot by the military to overthrow the government.  It was very much steeped in the politics of then, as the Wikipedia entry details.

I thought of Seven Days in May by considering some questions about January 6 that to my knowledge haven't been asked, the enormous coverage of that event notwithstanding. As Trump was Commander in Chief at the time, why didn't the January 6 plot come from within the government, either some element of the military or a different element from the intelligence services?  I will leave it to the reader to puzzle over this one and come up with answers of the reader's own choosing.  Now, take the hypothetical where a plot of this sort actually was possible.  If you compare it to the plot that actually happened, does it make it seem that the execution of that plan was quite amateurish, in spite of the terror and violence it did produce?  Here I will weigh in with my own view.  That's how it seemed to me.

Now I want to get at how the events of January 6 impacted the views of those higher up in the military as well as those in the then Republican establishment who are now on the outs with Trump; Mike Pence comes to mind here.  But to do that let's take a step back to earlier and what the views in the military were then.  

It has been quite a while since I stopped watching the News Hour on PBS.  Judy Woodruff was the host then and the Tea Party was very much in the vernacular.  I became overly frustrated with interviews which had one Democrat and one Republican.  The latter invariably stonewalled and the questioner, out of an attempt at fairness, didn't hold the person's feet to the fire.  I didn't need the aggravation.  But before I quit watching, I recall seeing on many occasions a high ranking military official on the show. Invariably the person would say that in their official capacity they are non-partisan and would not take sides in any political debate.  Does that remain true today or did the events of January 6 change that in a particular way?

As a total outsider to all of this, I can only speculate as to the answer.  But I think it likely that insiders have, at the least, posed similar questions for themselves.  It seems prudent, one would think, to see if the normal processes would prevent Trump getting reelected. In that case no Seven-Days-in-May-like plot would be needed, so none should be attempted.  But recent events suggest that the normal processes have played themselves out.  So what now?

Let me speculate a little more, albeit in the form of a question.  Suppose that there is some group of insiders who have hatched such a plot, President Biden is aware of this, and these insiders have arranged to give the President deniability.  Would that be a reason to stay in the race for reelection, the very poor debate performance and low polling numbers notwithstanding?  

In the Seven Days in May story, the good guy is President Jordan Lyman and the bad guy is the egotistical general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Mattoon Scott.  Do we have a similar situation today, but with the good guy and bad guy roles reversed?

A Simple Statistic for Measuring Income Inequality

The traditional macroeconomic measures of economy-wide  performance are the unemployment rate and the inflation rate.  When both are low the economy is thought to be performing well.  When one or both are high, there are economy-wide problems of some sort.  But even when both of these measures are low, might it be that a significant fraction of the population is not benefiting from that overall good performance and, indeed, could it be that many are struggling?  While most can readily admit to that possibility, out of sight is out of mind, or if you prefer Daniel Kahneman's acronym from Thinking, Fast and Slow, there is WYSIATI.  In other words, unless there is a third statistic to go along with the unemployment rate and inflation rate, one for measuring income inequality, the income distribution issues become a tertiary matter only in thinking about economy-wide performance, so we don't really discuss those who are hurting economically in spite of the strong indicators. 

But the statistic that economists are likely to want to play this role, the Gini coefficient, hasn't caught on in popular discussions of income inequality.  It is my view that the Gini coefficient is too complex for most people to understand and thus a simple-to-understand statistic is needed to play this role. Admittedly, such a statistic will have its limitations.  I don't want to deny this.  But as politicians discuss the issue, the usual focus is on the middle class.  For that reason I think the statistic I suggest is compelling.  It is the ratio of median income to mean income.  (On the Fred Blog, the reciprocal ratio is graphed, though their data only goes through 2013.  They draw a similar conclusion to what I concluded below about this as an indicator that income inequality has been increasing, though they don't hazard an explanation for these results.)  I will illustrate this measure with a simple Excel workbook I put together from readily available data. Below is a brief discussion of how this workbook was constructed. 

I did a Google search on - mean household income U.S. - and soon found what I wanted.  The first hit was the U.S. Census; but that didn't have what I needed. At the second hit I found this page from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.  Note that the graph says family income rather than household income.  With the aide of a friend, I found this definition of household at the Census.gov Website. From there, households are divided into two categories, family or nonfamily.  From what I know about the income data, family households must, on average, have higher income than nonfamily households.  Further, from elsewhere on the Website there is an issue of non-reporting.  I suspect the issue is more serious with nonfamily households.  Taken together, this may explain why the St. Louis Fed seemed to prefer family income to household income.  

I really liked the page I found because if you scroll down from the graph it provides links to a host of other graphs for related searches, median income distribution for example. And with a bit of further exploration I learned that each graph gives you the ability to download the data that generates the graph.  Initially I downloaded two worksheets, one for real median family income, the other for real mean family income.  They cover the same years, from 1953 to 2022.  I copied and pasted the data into a blank Excel workbook on the same worksheet.  So, the first four columns of my Excel (columns A and B and then columns D and E) are simply reposts of the St. Louis Fed data.  My contribution, meager though it is, can be found in column G, where the entry in column B is divided by the entry in the same row that's in column E, with the result expressed in percentage terms.  I don't believe the ratio of median to mean income to be very compelling on strictly theoretical grounds.  But I found the downward trend extremely interesting, something worthy of further discussion. 

To make sure I was on terra firma, I repeated the exercise, this time with nominal data.  There is a series of median family income that is not inflation adjusted and another series of mean family income not inflation adjusted.  The latter actually has two different series, either Vintage 2022-09-13 or Vintage 2023-09-12.  I chose the latter as it had data for 2022.  The former only goes as far as 2021.   I then did essentially the same thing as before in computing the ratios.   I compared the real and nominal results side by side (that is not shown in the Excel) and learned that while the results are not identical, they are quite close, within a few hundredths of a per cent in each case.  And the downward trend is still there.

Some Mechanics of Income Distribution and of the Trend in Question

I mean this essay to be available to non-economists and non-statisticians.  Anyone who has an interest in economics as it speaks to our national politics should find this essay accessible.  So here I'd like to explain a little about what's going on behind the scene to drive the results.  For those readers who don't need this type of hand holding, you can skip this section, puzzle for a bit over what explains the downward trend, and then resume reading the next section. 

If the income distribution were a bell curve, the median and the mean would coincide, so their ratio would equal 1 or 100%.  If you held all incomes below the median constant but added a fixed amount to each income above the median, then the median itself would remain unchanged but the mean would go up by half the fixed amount (as half the population received that income increase).  More generally, symmetric distributions, such as one that yields a bell curve, will produce an equal median and mean, while distributions that are skewed to the right will have the median less than the mean.  The greater the skewness the more the disparity between median and mean.  The U.S. income distribution is skewed in this way.  Evidently, the distribution was closer to a bell curve in 1953 than it was in 2022.  

Income in the U.S. has mainly been growing; both median and mean family income have been growing, the data say as much.  If median income grows at the same rate as mean income, then their ratio will remain unchanged.  For this ratio to fall requires mean income to grow faster than median income.  The reader should interpret this as incomes higher in the income distribution growing faster than incomes lower in the distribution.  That this has been the pattern for some time suggests that those who are lower in the distribution may have distinctly different views of the overall economy than those who are higher in the distribution. 

What Caused the Downward Trend?  Will the Trend Continue?

Here is some speculation on my part, which might be thought of as the start of an argument on these questions.  Post World War II, the U.S. economy really embodied the notions we associate with a "middle class society."  The GI Bill, in particular, repaid, in part, those who served in the military by helping them start on a middle class lifestyle, which I will note was far more modest than its equivalent today.  For example, the square footage of the family house or apartment was comparatively small and there might have been a single vehicle for the family car.  So, part of this is about attainment level.  Another part of this is about institutions that supported this attainment.  Unions were much stronger then and many more people were union members.  Unions helped their members lead a middle class lifestyle.

Now let's make a little conjecture that I deem likely - voting participation correlates with income.  The downward trend in the median to mean income ratio can be thought of as the system rewarding those with higher incomes, who in turn tend to vote their pocketbook.  In this view the surprise might be that the trend wasn't steeper earlier.  I do want to note that in my eyeballing of the data the trend happened under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, though it was somewhat steeper when Reagan was President.  

It can be argued that high marginal tax rates at upper incomes, which existed through the Carter administration, and have kept coming down for the most part since, inhibited the taking of very high income.  That inhibition lessened as the tax code changed.  The rich could then be more greedy and without shame.

Still a different way of looking at this, economic theory explains that a factor of production must be paid at least its opportunity cost (what that factor could earn at its next best opportunity) in order to elicit the factor's participation.  Payment in excess of the opportunity cost is called an economic rent.  Economic rents tend to exist where the factor is supplying something scarce.  And when there is excess demand for the product produced, those economic rents can skyrocket.  Earnings for those people will grow much faster than for those who merely earn their opportunity cost.  Parallel to this, certain sectors of the economy have experienced hyperinflation - health care and higher education are two such areas.  I believe that accounting and finance are also in this category.  These are just examples and are not meant to be an exhaustive list. The areas experiencing hyperinflation are likely the same areas where earnings have grown much faster than median income.

Is this slowing down now?  I'm not seeing it.

Naming the Median/Mean Income Ratio

Coming up with an idea is one thing.  Marketing it is quite another.  I'm including this cutesy section because I think the marketing calls for a compelling name, yet I couldn't come up with any that weren't too convoluted.  So I encourage those readers who want to make a go of if to suggest a name and then either do so in a comment or send me an email with it.  I'll post those and see if readers can identify a favorite.  

The Frequency in Updating the Measure

I believe that both the CPI and the unemployment rate are updated monthly.  Further, seasonal adjustments in CPI measures allow them to reconsider the earlier numbers in light of new information, going back at most 5 years to make such adjustments.  (Beyond 5 years the numbers are fixed.)  The data I used for computing the Median/Mean Family Income Ratio were annual.  Can a measure that only changes annually compete for importance with these other traditional measures of the macro economy?  Alternatively, might it be possible to get more frequent income measures so the numbers would be more timely?

I don't know the answers to these questions.  My thought is that if this remains just an idle curiosity then we're stuck with annual measures, which might then reinforce why the measure isn't taken more seriously.  Alternatively, if interest in the measure spiked, then perhaps there would be data forthcoming to support a more frequent adjustment of the numbers.  But that's just speculation on my part.  

Wrap Up

In the previous decade I wrote a fair amount about income redistribution, as a policy matter.   This post is probably the last one I wrote of that sort.  It was written while Trump was President and before Covid had manifest.  

I view the current post as several steps back from policy.  It's about how people perceive the economy.  It is not an unusual proposition to say that people will see the same thing differently depending on where they are standing at the time they make the observation.  Yet somehow when we talk about the macro economy, we lose this thought except for saying that Democrats will see it differently than Republicans.  I do think where people are in the income distribution matters for this perception.  It matters a lot.  Indeed, it matters much more now than it did in 1953, when the U.S. really was a middle class society.  We need a way to talk about that and I hope that the simple statistic I suggest in this post offers a vehicle for doing so. 

And, to be clear, I view income inequality itself as a proxy for wealth inequality.  Those who have a large debt burden relative to their income and "live paycheck to paycheck" have to endure every bump that the economy dishes out whereas those with enough savings and access to credit have buffers to allow them to be comfortable in spite of the economy's vicissitudes.  But getting direct measures on wealth and access to credit is much harder.  So proxy measures will have to do.  And the one I suggest is both readily available and easy to understand.

Eating as Consolation, Overeating as Habit

This piece is meant as something of a refutation to, A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong, an opinion piece in the NY Times from 10 days ago.  While my critique can readily be framed in theoretical terms, and I will do so next, after that I will be autobiographic in order to give some support to my claims.  I'm not trying to be a role model with this.  I only hope that my story can give readers enough fodder for them to work through their own personal examples.  There is one way that I'm unique in writing about this, as a former academic economist.  I can give a behavioral economics spin on the coping process.  I hope that part is helpful.

Johann Hari, the author of the linked essay, squarely puts the blame on the food companies, who design their products in a way that customers find them addicting.  (In this there is a remarkable parallel with the cigarette companies, as depicted for example by The Insider.)  Hari reports that he was born in 1979.  I'm more than a generation older, about 9 months younger than Jerry Seinfeld.  I surely don't want to get the food companies off the hook.  While the recent movie, Unfrosted, has been called a comedy, it easily could be considered a mockumentary about the big cereal companies.  I guess that most viewers would agree.  There is a lot of nostalgia in watching that movie, but also a feeling of entrapment from all the bad choices we made.

Nevertheless, I think it a poor approach to consider what the big food companies do as the the sole cause of obesity, leaving all the psychological issues as effect.  I much prefer to have a multi-causal approach, as I hope to explain below.  Here, let me get to just a few of those issues.  In adults, is overeating related to excess with alcohol or drugs?  Or should each of these only be considered separately?  It seems evident to me that in children it may be one thing, but in adults quite another.  Even if drugs like Ozempic are effective, are there reasons for good health and greater self-esteem from both getting the overeating under control and increasing physical activity?  That too seems evident, with an obvious answer of yes.  Further, while it is well known that there is a mental health crisis among young adults today, I will impute here that the primary cause is a lack of a sense of agency among these people.  To confer agency on someone, that person must try to address his or her own issues, perhaps failing frequently, but with the occasional success, and then learning how to do it better the next time based on the prior experience.  Generating a sense of agency about one's eating seems to me a key factor.  To do that one needs a multi-causal approach of obesity. 

I've struggled with my weight for much of my life and I still am struggling with it now.  So I don't want to maintain that I have some miracle cure for obesity.  I only want to argue that the struggle is necessary.

While I will mainly focus on psychological/motivational causes, I want to acknowledge the possibility of genetic/cultural causes for obesity.  I can remember that as a very young kid my mom would call me a fresser. (She was one as well.)  And in my high school yearbook, where friends would write something next to their photographs, one friend wrote that I was the hungriest kid he knew.  Saying that was a bit unusual, but it goes to show an unfortunate part of the reputation I had at the time.  I do want to note that for me it is impossible to parse the genetic causes from the psychological ones.

Now let me get to the title of the post.  Leading off with eating as consolation was intended to get the reader to ask - consolation for what?  The answer will depend on the reader.  In my case, the issues for which I needed consolation changed over my lifetime.  I will sketch some of them below.  Others who have struggled with obesity might do likewise in coming up with their own issues.

As a very young kid, the issue for me was poor self-image based on physical limitations.  For example, the schoolyards would have jungle gyms.  I was afraid of climbing them, though other kids were not.  In general, I was a klutz.  I was a very big kid and my coordination wasn't as good as the other kids.  Further, I was grouped from nursery school onward with kids who were somewhat older than I was.  (Being the biggest and the youngest is an odd combination.)  This was compounded by two other factors.  I had difficulty with fine motor activities, threading a needle for example, handwriting for another example.  My dad made a thing about the latter, which didn't help my self-esteem at all.  Then too, when we started to play ball sports, (see my post from a decade ago called Slapball) it was evident that I was worse at catching the ball than the other kids.  Right around the time that President Kennedy was assassinated, I was 8 then, I got my first pair of glasses.  Until then, I had a visual disadvantage compared to the other kids in following the flight of the ball.  All these physical issues were eventually overcome (except the handwriting, which has been abysmal for my entire life) but the psychological scars that formed remained.  

It can be argued that all young kids have some difficulties of this sort; angst in adulthood likely has its roots in early childhood.  But not all kids resort to eating as consolation for those difficulties.  Do these kids find other ways to cope at an early age?  I don't know.  I do believe the genetic explanation may matter here.   But it is also possible that parental intervention serves as a different sort of buffer for the kid.  I had less of that as my mother often wasn't home or when she was she was busy tutoring a student in a foreign language.  I often cite this piece by Hanna Rosin, The Overprotected Kid, which argues that parenting has gone too far in the other direction since I was a kid.  The kid needs to take some knocks, no doubt.  Where the right sort of balance can be found I will leave to others.  The only point to take here is that kids will look both for self-protection and for consolation when the self-protection is inadequate.  Some will find the latter in eating.

Let's move on.  I briefly want to turn to the boy-girl thing.  It terrified me in junior high school and thereafter for two reasons, one that should be already apparent.  Although I was a very good student, that did not offset the poor self-image I had and I was still the largest kid in the class, by far.  So, that I didn't think I was attractive to girls shouldn't be a surprise.  But the other reason might be more unusual and specific to me.  I often would not understand how I felt about something and would note that sometimes in the future I would change my mind about things.  If I told a girl I really liked her now, would I be implicitly leading her on that I wouldn't change my mind about her later?  I couldn't imagine being able to talk my way out of a situation like that.  This served as a big inhibition in getting started.  

There must be a huge amount written on eating as consolation, especially for teens, given a forlorn love life. I haven't tried to find references on this as the point seems so obvious.  And, quite clearly, I fell into this category.  

Now a bit about the second part of my title, on the overeating as habit. Any activity done repeatedly that is not done through the coercion of others has the potential for turning into habit. The point here is that a vicious cycle can readily form.  The overeating causes the person to put on weight, making the person less attractive to others, and thereby confirm the need for eating as consolation.

In 10th grade I went into a depression; there were a variety of causes for that.  One of them was putting on weight and feeling out of control in doing so.  I did see a shrink at the time, who helped me some, particularly with my limitation in making eye contact with authority figures.  And I saw the family doctor as well, who prescribed some medicine (I believe it was an amphetamine of some sort) to control my appetite.  I recall losing about 20 or 25 pounds that spring.  But I was unable to keep the weight off after the prescription expired.  It is an issue with any drug treatment for obesity.  What will happen after the treatment concludes?  Or will the drug be taken for the person's entire lifetime thereafter?

I put on a few more pounds in college and after I graduated (in January) I wanted to change things, so I went on a crash diet where I lost about 45 pounds.  It was one meal a day, dinner, with no seconds.  I did this without any drugs for around 2 months.  I have a vague memory of hanging around in my bedroom at home either watching TV or reading - not interacting with people much at all.  I seem to recall a belief that I could handle the intermittent fasting if I didn't have social interactions that would test my mettle.  It's why nowadays I would suspect that people can't both lose a lot of weight and work at a stressful job.  It's one or the other, but not both.  Let me return to that issue in a bit.

When I went to grad school there was nobody at Northwestern who knew me from how I was earlier.  I looked more or less normal (maybe a bit husky) but I still had the mindset of an obese person.  That presented it's own challenges.  

I will fast forward now 14 years, till when I got married.  The weight remained more or less stable.  I found a reasonable balance between eating, drinking, and physical activity, and for 2 more years after that, when our first child was born.  Parenting, with its chronic lack of sleep, brought about the first chink in the armor.  Fatigue lessens one's powers of self-restraint.  Then I changed careers in the mid 1990s, from being an academic economist to being an administrator for educational technology.  There was job stress in the latter position that I wasn't ready for.  My saving grace, weight-wise, was jogging, which helped relieve the stress and kept the weight somewhat under control.  While the weight did trickle up, the routine I had worked more or less until 9/11.  Right around then my knees gave out and I could no longer jog.  Perhaps 7 or 8 years later I took up walking, which is not a perfect substitute for jogging but it is definitely better than nothing.  Until then I was quite sedentary.  We did buy a stationary bike, but I don't think it was sufficient exercise for me.

I also experienced a work change in summer/early fall of 2002.  Where before I was running a small Center for Educational Technologies, which was much to my liking, the work stress notwithstanding, thereafter my center merged with the big campus IT organization and I became the Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies.  Nominally, it was a promotion for me.  In actuality, I ended up being involved in big IT matters much more than I cared for and was not nearly as happy with the work I was doing.  The reader should be seeing a big need I had for consolation at this time.

The major difference between then and my teens is that at Illinois alcohol had become an alternative way to console myself, often drinking with friends but also quite a lot on my own. And here's the thing to make that relevant to this piece.  Alcohol doesn't just lower one's inhibitions in social situations.  It also lessens (perhaps eliminates) one's sense of self-control with regard to eating.   When the work stress got particularly bad in fall 2004 and all of 2005, my weight ballooned upward.  Things came to a head in September 2006 when I had a very bad fall in my bother's house in Ann Arbor, severing all the tendons between the knee and the thigh in my left leg.  Reform happened very slowly after that and in different stages.  

I'm going to fast forward to now.  I'm about 100 pounds lighter than I was when I had that fall and within 10 pounds of the weight when I got married.  The motivation for losing weight during this entire time has been to promote better health.  Back in 2015 I was experiencing hip pain and found that I was a candidate for a hip replacement procedure.  But a few years earlier, I had a rotator cuff repair after which my shoulder got infected and I spent 5 days in the hospital for them to clean out the infection.  The memory of that lingered and I wanted to prevent a repeat experience.  I reasoned that if I lost about 30 pounds or so the chances to avoid infection would be much greater.  Lo and behold, while it took quite a while to lose that weight, what I found while walking is that the pain in the hip was largely gone and I could walk further without difficulty.  Other health issues motivate me now.  I will spare the reader from detailing those, but reducing drinking and eating less are part of the solution to each of those issues.

Recently, my diet has changed remarkably towards the fruits and vegetables end of the spectrum and I am much more conscious of getting some exercise, even if it is not aerobic exercise.  On the former, I think it worth noting that I'm quite comfortable financially, so a change in diet puts essentially no pressure on the family's savings.  For people of more modest means, high starch diets are likely less expensive.  Getting to a more healthful diet when on a tight budget is surely a challenge.  It seems to me that some form of government intervention, such as a tax on the food companies to fund subsidies on fruits and vegetables available to people of modest means, would make good sense here.  But the devil is in the details and I don't want to get sidetracked by those here.  So let's get to the last point.

I'm not big on willpower.  When applied to learning, I'm a strong advocate for intrinsic motivation and self-actualization.  I very much dislike the term - deferred gratification.  (See, for example, my post on Maslow's essay, The Creative Attitude.)  It is far better to be totally absorbed in now.  But that does not mean there shouldn't be any forward thinking, far from it.  In behavioral economics there is the notion of a nudge.  Simply put, a nudge is something you do in advance that either raises the cost of doing the bad thing or lowers the cost of doing the virtuous thing, thereby increasing the likelihood that you won't go astray in that moment of weakness.  

When I was a single assistant professor, well before I had heard of a nudge, I would nonetheless employ the concept by never buying ice cream to keep in my apartment.  The assistant professors would often walk to Green Street in the afternoon and get ice cream at Baskin Robbins.  That was okay and I indulged in the activity along with the others.  But by not having ice cream in my apartment, I would avoid the scenario where later in the evening I was alone and perhaps with something bothering me about work.  Had there been ice cream in the apartment, I might have eaten all that was left in the box.  But it was just too much effort to go to the grocery story to buy a box.  So, this particular nudge was effective that way.  

Once you're married, you lose some control of what is in the refrigerator and freezer as well as what's in the liquor cabinet.  If there is to be an effective nudge, it needs to be found elsewhere.  For me, I've got two things I need to control.  First, it has to be about limiting both food and liquor consumption.  I'm prone to overdo on both and if I drink too much I will then eat too much (and then stuff I shouldn't eat at all).  Second, the impulse to be a bad boy this way definitely depends on time of day.  It is much stronger in the evening then it is in the morning.  To control the evening weakness, I try to go to bed early - about 8 PM during daylight savings time, even earlier during standard time.  This is anti-social in many ways.  But it is far less anti-social as a senior citizen than it would have been as an assistant professor.  I'm disciplined enough that once I've gone upstairs to bed, I won't come back downstairs till the morning, when it's coffee that I want and which I won't deny myself.  

However, I'm not perfect with this and after a week or so of following the regime I will typically break down and have a few drinks, eating too much as a consequence.  I do need some break from the regimen.  The issue is whether I can get right back on the horse after that or if instead I have a period of indulgence that follows.  For me these days, a big determining factor of which happens is the extent of physical pain I'm feeling.  I'm not good about toughing it out.  If things hurt a lot, I will drink.  Moderate arthritis pain I can tolerate, as I've now come to accept it.  Sometimes I over exercise or have some minor accident and then the pain is more intense.  This is where returning to the regimen becomes very difficult.

So, I'm not advocating for this specific form of nudge, because everyone has a different life situation. But I would strongly encourage readers to experiment with their own approaches and see if they can find something that works for them. 

If you try this for a while, but nothing seems to work, have a Pop-Tart.  A sense of humor about the situation helps too.

The Old Dog Is Working On A New Trick

Trying extra hard to restrain
Impulse control is a drain
Yet it is what's needed
For aging to be impeded
The message could not be more plain.
#HopingToKeepTheOldDemonsAtBay

Inadvertent Anti-Learning

For the past couple of weeks I've watched a lot of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament.  Even with Illinois' decisive loss to UConn, certainly very disappointing for Illini fans, I continued to watch other games.  The commercials for these games remained remarkably constant, with the usual suspects being fast food commercials, insurance commercials, and car/truck commercials.  There was one commercial that didn't fit this mold and I wondered why it was there.  This one was from Grammarly Business and was about using AI to resolve an office scheduling problem.  Twenty years earlier, when I was a campus administrator, that sort of problem would have been solved by the secretaries working together.  Now there is an automated alternative, la-de-da.  But the commercial implied the solution was beyond human capacity.  It's that thought which triggered the ideas in the rest of this post.  

Let's move on and talk about learning.  A few years ago I featured the following graphic in a post called A Simple Model of How Adults Learn.   (In turn, that post was part of a Website I called the Non-Course, which I developed during Covid in an attempt to encourage college students to learn on their own and develop the reading habit.  Alas, it was just me blowing off steam and had no other impact.)

There is nothing original in this graphic.  You can find the ideas previously expressed in a paper by Kenneth Bruffee called Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind."  Evidently, a way to externalize one's thinking is to engage in conversation with another person who wants to do likewise.  Yet writing, a different form of externalization, can also be considered as conversation, in this case with an imagined reader.  And if ingest happens via reading, then the reader can be thought of as being in conversation with the author.  Ditto for reflection, which is internalized conversation. 

Personally, I have found this conversation metaphor extremely useful in considering how we learn.  And it has helped me in affirming a belief I've had for some time.  The meta skill we want to see develop in the learner is the ability to produce a coherent narrative, one that takes account of the relevant points, sequences them in a way where others can understand the ordering which in turn makes the narrative comprehensible, and in total offers an explanation for the topic of discussion. 

How does one develop this meta skill in the learner?  That too is no mystery; it takes a lot of practice of the right sort.  I have seen it called "effortful study" but I believe most now refer to it as deliberate practice.  This conveys the idea that the practice must be challenging to the learner, but the learner must view the goal of the practice not so far out of reach as to be impossible to attain.  The deliberate part is comparatively new to our understanding, but that practice is needed in learning is hardly a new idea.  The following quote dates back to the 17th or 18th century.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Sir Richard Steele

To make these ideas more concrete, much of the deliberate practice the learner should engage in must require transfer - which means using the new idea in a novel context. A successful adult learner has developed the habit to practice transfer whenever exposed to a new idea.  This is a way that the learner can test whether the idea is really understood.

My sense is that many college students don't get it about transfer.  Instead, they cave into the extrinsic motivation provided by the goal of getting good grades in their classes.  This then serves as a justification for much of their study time to be devoted to rote.  Further, it does so in a way where the time devoted to study is manageable.  As I like to tell students, real learning takes as long as it takes.  The deliberate practice with transfer I mentioned in the previous paragraph likely would be rejected by many students as too time consuming.  I wrote about this more than a decade ago in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams?  Though I don't have any current data on this and my own teaching experience ending after the fall 2019 semester, my guess is that, if anything, the situation is even worse now.  

With college schooling so considered, I want to turn attention to informal learning outside of courses and to formal education at the K-12 level,  or perhaps only the K-5 level, where extrinsic incentives may be weaker or entirely absent (at least one can hope that to be the case).  Is it poor pedagogy that's the problem?  Or does technology detract from the deliberate practice that nascent learners need?  When I was a kid there was both Why Johnny Can't Read? and a view that watching television was making kids illiterate.  So, at this level of abstraction, these questions have been with us for a very long time.  

More recently, technologists and social scientists have gotten together to consider this and related questions.  It's not quite a quarter century ago when John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid published The Social Life of Information.  (An updated version came out in 2017.)  I read the original version a few years after its release, when I was doing campus edtech, and found it a godsend in that it put the emphasis where I thought it should be, on the social practice that the technology induces.  (A few years later in a post called Learning Technology and the "Vision Thing" I referred to this as the Umpire Theory of Technology.  I still subscribe to that today.)  The sociologist Sherry Turkle was more explicit about how the technology blocks the requisite deliberate practice in a New York Times Op-Ed called, Stop Googling. Let's Talk.  

Now I want to get at the word inadvertent in the title of my post.  The discussion above suggests a new technology may have a differential impact on people depending on how far along they are on their own personal learning curve.  Mature learners may react differently than nascent learners.  Do the designers of the technology anticipate this?  If not, this differential reaction is what I mean by inadvertent.  The last time I taught, fall 2019, students who were in the classroom before class started either had their phones out or their laptops out, with the former far more popular.  (There was one iconoclastic student who would have a paper book out.) None of the students tried to engage me in friendly conversation before class.  I have no difficulty asserting that mobile technology has severely limited the deliberate practice that students need at Externalization (the lower left box in the diagram) and it probably has also limited the deliberate practice at Ingest.  

But I'm behind the times.  What about AI in this regard?  I can only guess at its impact.  To date most of what I've read about it is on student cheating and its possible detection on written assignments.  I don't have a good sense how students will use the technology in other contexts.  And I, for one, don't want to banish the technology in favor of pure thought. But I do want to hope that students are getting some important deliberate practice with Reflection, though I fear that even prior to AI many students were not engaged in this way.  

It is hard to know what is going on in someone else's mind.  The best we can do is to engage them in conversation and inquire about that.  The technologists have had their day, and then some.  It's time for the sociologists and the evaluators to take center stage and take their best stab at what's going on.  Maybe some of it will support the cheer-leading for the technology.  But, and this I think is the critical point, the cheerleaders should acknowledge the need for such an effort and accept the results, regardless of what they turn out to be.