Maslow Encore Une Fois

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correlation, Causation, and Inference in Big Time College Sports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Hubris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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.