Amazon Prime has It's a Wonderful Life so I watched it over the holiday for what must be the zillionth time. I know it almost by heart, but it's been a few years since I've last seen it. So, among the puzzles it holds for me is why I still find it compelling to view. One explanation is that it is a tearjerker and I've got a soft spot for movies like that. But there are other things in the story that bring about questions, including several I didn't find answered when I surfed the Web to read about the movie. I'll pose them here.
The first thing to note is that Capra's style in this movie is to bring in a host of issues, touch on them in a gentle way, and then leave them, perhaps for us to reflect on after the movie is over. The one most evident to me in this viewing is prejudice - Northern European whites, as represented by the character, Mr Potter, against Italian immigrants. Potter refers to them as "garlic eaters." I don't believe I've ever heard the expression used in a different context. Has anyone else heard the phrase used elsewhere? Capra was himself of Italian extraction, so surely had a distaste for other slurs, which if used would have added realism to the story, but otherwise would have changed its tone.
The year the movie came out, 1946, Joe DiMaggio was the center fielder for the New York Yankees, probably the most familiar name associated with Major League Baseball, and quite possibly the best player in the game. Yet in New York City when I was growing up, 20 years later, there was a pecking order among the ethnicities where the Italians perhaps were in the middle, but definitely not at the top. In Jane Leavy's book about Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy, which I wrote about here, she recounts a story where on meeting Mantle he introduces himself as Mickey Lipshitz. She inquires why. Mickey responds with something he learned very early on as a ballplayer in New York - When you're going good you're Jewish, but when you're going bad you're EYE-talian. Indeed.
The prejudice as depicted in the movie is linked to the predatory capitalism that Potter emblemizes, owning a slum where many of the townspeople live and pay rent to Potter. This serves as a backdrop for what the Baily Building and Loan would accomplish, enabling people to leave this slum and to own their own homes in Baily Park, which in the post World War II era was a time of great economic expansion where the many shared in the wealth being created. These homes would then appreciate in value as a result. Potter, who prided himself on being an excellent businessman, entirely missed this investment opportunity. His Bank had turned down mortgage applications that the Building and Loan later approved. In some sense this shows the great change in the American mindset, from the late 1920s and into the 1930s to the post World War II era.
Pa Baily, who started the Building and Loan along with Uncle Billy, could be taken as prescient, getting ordinary working people into their own homes well before the post-war boom. But a characteristic of the "business model" that was employed by the Building and Loan was to allow the customers to capture the bulk of the gains from trade. Nobody at the Building and Loan became rich, even after the war, definitely not George Baily.
To be fair to Potter, his prejudice was on class lines as much as it was on ethnic divisions. In the story the two melded together. So, one question the movie brings up is this. What happened to prejudice of the sort that Potter embodied? Did it fade out as racial prejudice took it's place? Or has it survived, perhaps morphing into other forms of grievance? WASP was a pretty common designation when I was growing up. I don't see it used nowadays. What does that reflect?
Let me use that question to segue into a different but related topic. Who views It's a Wonderful Life these days? Does watching it correlate at all with political affiliation? This is one of those things that we'll never learn, unless the polling organizations find it a worthwhile question to ask. But let me speculate. George and Mary, the heroes in the story, are completely accepting of other people in the story. (Of course, George gets very upset at Zuzu's schoolteacher, and eventually gets socked in the jaw by her husband for having balled out the schoolteacher on the telephone, but that's because he blamed her for Zuzu getting the sniffles, and he was under a huge amount of stress at the time.) This acceptance of people regardless of ethnicity or class might be touted as embracing the Liberal view, and perhaps can be seen as a forerunner of today's identity politics. On the other hand, the Bailey's are clearly very family oriented and the movie depicts a very strong sense of community among the people in Bedford Falls who know George and Mary. Indeed, traditional values are what tie the community together. Conceivably, this could appeal to Conservative viewers as well. Does it?
Now another segue as I am intermittently reading Maslow and he writes so extensively about being psychology, an end state of personal development where all challenges have been met and the individual perceives the world as it truly is. In what I've been reading recently, Maslow seems to use the B-psychology label as much as he uses the expression self-actualization. Which character in the movie most represents this psychology of being? Most people probably would say George Baily, as he is the protagonist in the story and performs a variety of selfless acts during his lifetime. Yet I would argue that Mary Baily is the better candidate here. George has ambivalence, which he expresses many times in the movie. He wants to leave Bedford Falls because it is a crummy little town. As a kid and then again as he is ready to leave for college, he wants to make a lot of money and earn fame from his creations, as if these external validators would show he is an important person. Of course, the story plays out so he never achieves these things. Mary, in contrast, has pure motives from an early age. She is in love with George even as a kid. She makes a wish that they will live in that drafty old house when they are married and, of course, the wish comes true. She gives up the money meant for their honeymoon to stop the run on the Building and Loan during the Great Depression. And, she's the one who contacts all the friends when George is in trouble with the bank examiner. She was living the life she wanted to live.
Let me not talk at all about the fluff part of the movie, Clarence getting his wings and all of that. It is charming, but I have nothing new to add here. I want to talk about a few more detail things and then close.
For whatever reason, this is the first time watching It's a Wonderful Life where it occurred to me that Bert the cop and Ernie the cabdriver were used as precursors for the muppet characters with the same names. On this one, I guess I'm slow on the uptake as it apparently has occurred to many viewers. This site says it is merely a coinky dink. Of course, tracing the full causality in our own thinking for when a spark of an idea emerges is virtually impossible to do. So, who knows?
Then I learned that Capra went through many different screenwriters before he got a script to his liking. This included some whose names I recognized. (Capra himself is credited as one of those screenwriters.) Donna Reed reported this was her hardest movie role, though I didn't find out what made it so difficult for her. And Jimmy Stewart was apparently very nervous about the role, particularly the kissing scenes (youth is wasted on the wrong people - a truly great line) because he had served in World War II and this was the first movie he made after returning, so he was out of practice. I'm going to speculate that Capra was something of a perfectionist, which put stress on Donna Reed that she wasn't used to. Jimmy Stewart, and Lionel Barrymore too, had worked with Capra on earlier movies, so were more used to his style. I do have some vague recollections of watching Jimmy Stewart talk about the acting style he typified, where the goal was for it all to look effortless and spontaneous, in contrast to the reality of the hard work in making the movie.
One last point is about intellectual property. I learned that It's a Wonderful Life is in the public domain. The original copyright holders didn't renew the copyright, because the movie was not a big success after it was released. One reason that TV stations were so willing to air it around the holidays is that they didn't have to pay royalties to do so. So the movie took on a second life and has since become an American fixture. It seems to me this offers an excellent example in which to reconsider our copyright laws. Such a revival probably can't happen for most movies (or for most recorded music). But if there a few other hidden gems that would attract attention, yet aren't seen or heard now, because they copyright holder is keeping the property tightly, isn't that a shame and a huge social loss? Why, then, do we allow this?
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Monday, November 25, 2019
The Executive Minds Pretend They're Not Rich
My title, which might seem kind of odd, is taken by combining the titles of two different articles. The first is a piece called The Executive Mind and Double-Loop Learning by Chris Argyris, which makes for quite interesting reading and is readable even by non-academics. (Regarding copyright and getting access to the article for those without a university library to provide access, I found a copy available at SCRIBD, which gives a month's free membership.) The other piece is an Op-Ed in the New York Times from a couple of years ago, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich by Richard V. Reeves. My post was motivated by imagining a hypothetical conversation between Argyris and Reeves about their respective essays.
These pieces are similar in that both authors write about highly educated people who are two-faced. In Argyris' piece, he describes executives who, on the one hand, have an espoused theory of behavior, but, on the other hand, their actual theory in action is quite different, so the two theories do not act in concert. The espoused theory, and now I'm putting words into Argyris' mouth, is to be a good listener and be responsive to the other person. The theory in action, in contrast, is to be proven correct, to win the argument at all costs, and to force the other party into agreeing that the fault was theirs. Argyris refers to this theory in action as Model 1. That the two theories can coexist arises from the many tacit beliefs that the executive has, yet the executive is not conscious that these beliefs impact how decisions are made and quite possibly the executive is unaware of holding these beliefs. They are only revealed by doing a careful post mortem analysis on the executive's decisions.
Similarly, Reeves takes to task members of the professional class (my label for households in the upper quintile of the income distribution, but not in the top 1%). Members of these households argue, at least implicitly, that the U.S. economy is a meritocracy, hence they deserve the good life that their hard work provides for them. But the ignore their own gaming of the system, e.g., sending their kids to posh private schools at a very high tuition to increase the likelihood of their getting into an elite college. The data show that if the household is in the upper quintile then the children, when they reach adulthood and have their own families, are very likely to also be in the upper quintile. This makes it extremely challenging for those who start in the lower quintiles to make it to the top. Thus, the system seems more rigged than meritocracy. But those at the top seem hell bent on preserving the system, rather than changing it, though they go about that quietly if they can rather than make a big commotion.
The experimental design that Argyris employs to illustrate the issues is very clever. He has a transcript of a high-level executive, Y, talking with a subordinate, X. The situation is that X has been under productive on the job for a long time, but X himself believes that this is because the organization has hampered his efforts, not because of his own lack of initiative. Y, in quite blunt terms, lets X know that he can no longer rely on excuses. Either his performance improves or that's it for him. In so doing, Y is utilizing Model 1 to deliver his message. That message puts X on the defensive. It does not empower X to improve his work. Instead, it encourages a passive aggressive response.
The executives who read this transcript are very critical of Y. They don't like how he acted in this exchange at all. Yet, ironically, in offering up their critique they too employ Model 1. In other words, while they are dismayed by how Y handled the situation, they see no inherent contradiction in criticizing Y along the same lines. Therein lies the fundamental problem.
Near the end of the piece Argyris discusses an alternative approach, Model 2, which is about bringing to the surface those implicit assumptions that remain submerged when Model 1 is employed. It is fundamentally an inquiry approach and it requires questioning those assumptions and replacing them with something else when those assumptions are proved wanting. Argyris argues that it takes a lot of practice to become proficient at the use of Model 2 and it should not be assumed that a mere embrace of it will bring immediate good results. Nevertheless, he puts Model 2 forward as the path to use for making real progress that does not produce fracture but instead incorporates the views of all the participants.
I imagined Argyris reading Reeves' Op-Ed piece. Argyris might begin by noting that members of the professional class are well educated and almost surely exude a competence about the work they do. In this they are similar to the executives he has studied, if not identical to them. Reeves likely would agree with that assertion. Then Argyris would follow up with this observation. Reeves may be unaware of this, but his piece reads like an exercise in Model 1 thinking. If Reeves was actually trying to persuade members of the professional class to mend their ways, he likely would be achieving the opposite. They would dig in their heels. Argyris would then recommend that Reeves try a sustained effort at Model 2 on this same general topic. He then says that at present he is unsure what a Model 2 conversation would look like on this matter, but he'd be happy to work with Reeves to design such a campaign. Reeves contemplates this offer.
* * * * *
Now a disclaimer. I an nowhere near an expert practitioner at Model 2. In particular, in my teaching of an upper level undergraduate class in economics intended for econ majors, the students are either children of parents already in the professional class or have high aspirations of entering the professional class once they graduate, get a good job, and find a spouse. Yet these students are remarkably heads down about their own education, meaning they care a great deal about their grades but care much less about learning in a fundamental way and trying to develop habits of mind that will allow such learning to persist after they graduate. I have tried, mainly unsuccessfully, to get these students to see the folly in their endeavor. And, at least some of my efforts have employed Model 2 methods.
Further, as I teach my students in the very first class session, whatever human capital is produced by our course is owned by them. If they are heads down about their own learning, where they themselves are the beneficiaries, imagine how they would be, or their parents would be, when considering a societal redesign where, at least by the normal economic analysis, they would not be the beneficiaries. In addition, such a redesign would entail enormous complexity. Most people don't know how to think about complexity in a thoughtful and constructive way. Further, for those in the professional class the system does work for them. The status quo maintains an appeal for that reason. Rejecting the status quo in favor of something else will take an awful lot of convincing. I wrote about this quite a few years ago, during the Obama Presidency, in a post called Gaming The System Versus Designing It.
Alas, during political campaigns soundbites tend to dominate, even when politicians make an effort to produce serious proposals. And the discussion turns to policy recommendations, too quickly in my view. Much less discussed are the underlying principles that people should have, which then would guide which policies they prefer and which candidates they will support.
My reading of Reeves essay, put in the context of this election season, is that those in the professional class, at least who vote for Democrats, should not vote their pocketbooks. Instead, if they recognized that they were indeed rich, they'd be obligated by a 21st century version of noblesse oblige. They would then support principles that defined what that obligation looks like. Surely it implies increased taxation (some of which might come from reduction or elimination of preferred deductions, such as the one for mortgage interest) but, to use a little math jargon, the principle should pertain to the integral, not to the derivative. In other words, it should speak to the right level of taxation, not just that taxes should be raised on the professional class (and on the the 1% as well).
But we don't have this sort of discussion. Instead, we have an indirect conversation about whether the candidates should be centrists or leftists, where this issue of principle lurks in the background. This has the consequence of pitting working class voters against professional class voters instead of together forming a united front.
This is potentially a huge blunder, where under the current circumstances it could lead to Trump being reelected. I wrote about this in a post called How to Unify the Left and the Center - One Voter's View. There is an immediate tactical agreement that needs to be made to cover the election next year. There is a long-term agreement that incorporates the principled approach, which if done reasonably well should assure the party dominance for the indefinite future.
But to get there from here those principles need to be unearthed. How do we do that?
* * * * *
As I said above, I'm not an expert practitioner of Model 2. But I'm buoyed by the quite recent attention being given to Mr. Rogers, his gentleness and the respect he showed for children. I'm going to use him as a proxy for what effective Model 2 communication looks like. This bit from The Mr. Rogers No One Saw says it all.
In other words, the communication must appeal emotively and not merely be made cognitively. If you are asking people to rise to the occasion they will do so by being inspired, and that's the only way that will really work. Further, such inspiration will be found only by tapping into beliefs the people already have. But we don't really know what these beliefs are. They should be investigated as part of a Model 2 inquiry.
I wrote about such an investigation in the first part of this post. I envisioned an interviewer doing spot interviews with a person on the street. Many such interviews would be conducted. Then this would be done again in longer focus groups, with the participants chosen because they fit certain predefined demographic categories. And it would also be done with certain celebrities. Each of these would be video recorded and made available to the public. The idea would be to make this an ongoing learning activity. I envisioned three different topics. One about being responsible, another about being a good citizen, and a third about paying taxes. The topics obviously overlap but clearly are not identical. To illustrate what such an interview would be like, these are the scripted questions I came up with for the first category.
In any inquiry, one must make the follow up dependent on what is learned in the first round. Also, what I have described so far could readily be manipulated by cherry picking the participants in the interviews or screening the results and only showing those that were favorable for the prior maintained view. The process needs integrity so those things don't happen. That itself will not be easy. But if it could be achieved, the results then might be surprising and facilitate the learning that we hope would follow.
A different sort of learning needs to happen as well. The label "professional class" is very broad strokes and may not be refined enough to identify households that if they were true to themselves would call themselves rich. Let me give the sort of particulars that I think might matter here. One pertains to where people are in the life-cycle. A household that enters the professional class only after the parents have reached their mid 50s, but weren't there until then probably were unable to accumulate a lot of savings until then and might really deserve to keep more of their income than to pay that in taxes. This example suggests that past income should matter in this consideration, as should the age of the household members.
Another pertains to the income of the parents. If the parents were already in the professional class, then the children making it there may be considered an accomplishment, but it is far less of an accomplishment than for those whose parents are working class or poor. Here I will speak about my own situation. My parents paid for my college, so I carried no tuition loan debt. After my parents retired, they started to give cash gifts to my brother and me, a way to make some of the bequest well before they passed away. This enabled me to save a good chunk of my income even in the early years, when living expenses can take a good bite out of income. I had colleagues who lived more frugally than I did (smaller apartment, older car) because they were cash poor then. Their parents weren't as well off financially. None of us were uncomfortable with quality of life stuff. But I had the added luxury of not worrying about money. I don't know if that made me rich then, but I was definitely comfortable. My preference would be for Reeves to have more categories that would together include the entire professional class - comfortable, upscale, and rich. I'm not sure where the boundaries should be, but my intuition in regard to the added tax burden these people should absorb is that a progressive tax principle needs to be applied.
This third particular I'm finding difficult to write about because, on the one hand, it gets at the sort of gaming of the system practices that Reeves has singled out but, on the other hand, it may be that many are followers in this sort of gaming and only a few are really strident about it. I am talking about zoning restrictions for housing and whether income or wealth should be defined, at least in part, by the zoning restrictions of the community in which the household is situated. For example, my parents when they retired moved to a condominium community in Boca Raton called Century Village. It was a very large development. While my parents apartment was modestly sized and provisioned, the place was gated with security guards at the gate. I gather that many communities in Florida are set up this way. The place may have had a minimum age requirement for ownership of a unit. (I'm thinking that was 55, but I can't really recall.) Most of the residents were Jewish and there was a Synagogue on the premises. So there was exclusion of others, which is just what zoning restrictions do. But in this case, that my parents felt comfortable living there is what mattered to me and I think some of these restrictions facilitated that, especially the age restrictions. So how do you parse this out? I'm not sure. Yet I think something along these lines is needed.
* * * * *
I want to wrap this up. I wrote this post to encourage Reeves and others of his ilk to engage in a learning exchange with members of the professional class on what their social responsibility should really entail and whether they themselves can embrace their social responsibility. I believe such a conversation needs to happen now, but it will take quite a long time for it to reach even tentative conclusions. Surely there is not enough time now for it to conclude by the 2020 elections, even if it were to start today. Maybe, however, if this conversation did start now it would be done by the next Congressional elections.
The concept of center versus left does a disservice to thinking jointly about economic issues and identity issues. I tried in this piece to stick with the economic issues only and it is there where I believe that members of the professional class who vote their pocketbooks are in the center or even right of center. This needs to change for the good of the order. But that change will only come slowly and then through a concerted education effort. It's time for that education effort to begin.
These pieces are similar in that both authors write about highly educated people who are two-faced. In Argyris' piece, he describes executives who, on the one hand, have an espoused theory of behavior, but, on the other hand, their actual theory in action is quite different, so the two theories do not act in concert. The espoused theory, and now I'm putting words into Argyris' mouth, is to be a good listener and be responsive to the other person. The theory in action, in contrast, is to be proven correct, to win the argument at all costs, and to force the other party into agreeing that the fault was theirs. Argyris refers to this theory in action as Model 1. That the two theories can coexist arises from the many tacit beliefs that the executive has, yet the executive is not conscious that these beliefs impact how decisions are made and quite possibly the executive is unaware of holding these beliefs. They are only revealed by doing a careful post mortem analysis on the executive's decisions.
Similarly, Reeves takes to task members of the professional class (my label for households in the upper quintile of the income distribution, but not in the top 1%). Members of these households argue, at least implicitly, that the U.S. economy is a meritocracy, hence they deserve the good life that their hard work provides for them. But the ignore their own gaming of the system, e.g., sending their kids to posh private schools at a very high tuition to increase the likelihood of their getting into an elite college. The data show that if the household is in the upper quintile then the children, when they reach adulthood and have their own families, are very likely to also be in the upper quintile. This makes it extremely challenging for those who start in the lower quintiles to make it to the top. Thus, the system seems more rigged than meritocracy. But those at the top seem hell bent on preserving the system, rather than changing it, though they go about that quietly if they can rather than make a big commotion.
The experimental design that Argyris employs to illustrate the issues is very clever. He has a transcript of a high-level executive, Y, talking with a subordinate, X. The situation is that X has been under productive on the job for a long time, but X himself believes that this is because the organization has hampered his efforts, not because of his own lack of initiative. Y, in quite blunt terms, lets X know that he can no longer rely on excuses. Either his performance improves or that's it for him. In so doing, Y is utilizing Model 1 to deliver his message. That message puts X on the defensive. It does not empower X to improve his work. Instead, it encourages a passive aggressive response.
The executives who read this transcript are very critical of Y. They don't like how he acted in this exchange at all. Yet, ironically, in offering up their critique they too employ Model 1. In other words, while they are dismayed by how Y handled the situation, they see no inherent contradiction in criticizing Y along the same lines. Therein lies the fundamental problem.
Near the end of the piece Argyris discusses an alternative approach, Model 2, which is about bringing to the surface those implicit assumptions that remain submerged when Model 1 is employed. It is fundamentally an inquiry approach and it requires questioning those assumptions and replacing them with something else when those assumptions are proved wanting. Argyris argues that it takes a lot of practice to become proficient at the use of Model 2 and it should not be assumed that a mere embrace of it will bring immediate good results. Nevertheless, he puts Model 2 forward as the path to use for making real progress that does not produce fracture but instead incorporates the views of all the participants.
I imagined Argyris reading Reeves' Op-Ed piece. Argyris might begin by noting that members of the professional class are well educated and almost surely exude a competence about the work they do. In this they are similar to the executives he has studied, if not identical to them. Reeves likely would agree with that assertion. Then Argyris would follow up with this observation. Reeves may be unaware of this, but his piece reads like an exercise in Model 1 thinking. If Reeves was actually trying to persuade members of the professional class to mend their ways, he likely would be achieving the opposite. They would dig in their heels. Argyris would then recommend that Reeves try a sustained effort at Model 2 on this same general topic. He then says that at present he is unsure what a Model 2 conversation would look like on this matter, but he'd be happy to work with Reeves to design such a campaign. Reeves contemplates this offer.
* * * * *
Now a disclaimer. I an nowhere near an expert practitioner at Model 2. In particular, in my teaching of an upper level undergraduate class in economics intended for econ majors, the students are either children of parents already in the professional class or have high aspirations of entering the professional class once they graduate, get a good job, and find a spouse. Yet these students are remarkably heads down about their own education, meaning they care a great deal about their grades but care much less about learning in a fundamental way and trying to develop habits of mind that will allow such learning to persist after they graduate. I have tried, mainly unsuccessfully, to get these students to see the folly in their endeavor. And, at least some of my efforts have employed Model 2 methods.
Further, as I teach my students in the very first class session, whatever human capital is produced by our course is owned by them. If they are heads down about their own learning, where they themselves are the beneficiaries, imagine how they would be, or their parents would be, when considering a societal redesign where, at least by the normal economic analysis, they would not be the beneficiaries. In addition, such a redesign would entail enormous complexity. Most people don't know how to think about complexity in a thoughtful and constructive way. Further, for those in the professional class the system does work for them. The status quo maintains an appeal for that reason. Rejecting the status quo in favor of something else will take an awful lot of convincing. I wrote about this quite a few years ago, during the Obama Presidency, in a post called Gaming The System Versus Designing It.
Alas, during political campaigns soundbites tend to dominate, even when politicians make an effort to produce serious proposals. And the discussion turns to policy recommendations, too quickly in my view. Much less discussed are the underlying principles that people should have, which then would guide which policies they prefer and which candidates they will support.
My reading of Reeves essay, put in the context of this election season, is that those in the professional class, at least who vote for Democrats, should not vote their pocketbooks. Instead, if they recognized that they were indeed rich, they'd be obligated by a 21st century version of noblesse oblige. They would then support principles that defined what that obligation looks like. Surely it implies increased taxation (some of which might come from reduction or elimination of preferred deductions, such as the one for mortgage interest) but, to use a little math jargon, the principle should pertain to the integral, not to the derivative. In other words, it should speak to the right level of taxation, not just that taxes should be raised on the professional class (and on the the 1% as well).
But we don't have this sort of discussion. Instead, we have an indirect conversation about whether the candidates should be centrists or leftists, where this issue of principle lurks in the background. This has the consequence of pitting working class voters against professional class voters instead of together forming a united front.
This is potentially a huge blunder, where under the current circumstances it could lead to Trump being reelected. I wrote about this in a post called How to Unify the Left and the Center - One Voter's View. There is an immediate tactical agreement that needs to be made to cover the election next year. There is a long-term agreement that incorporates the principled approach, which if done reasonably well should assure the party dominance for the indefinite future.
But to get there from here those principles need to be unearthed. How do we do that?
* * * * *
As I said above, I'm not an expert practitioner of Model 2. But I'm buoyed by the quite recent attention being given to Mr. Rogers, his gentleness and the respect he showed for children. I'm going to use him as a proxy for what effective Model 2 communication looks like. This bit from The Mr. Rogers No One Saw says it all.
“I wasn’t about to participate in any fund-raising or anything else,” he told me later. “But at the same time I don’t want to be an accuser. Other people may be accusers if they want to; that may be their job. I really want to be an advocate for whatever I find is healthy or good. I think people don’t change very much when all they have is a finger pointed at them. I think the only way people change is in relation to somebody who loves them.”
In other words, the communication must appeal emotively and not merely be made cognitively. If you are asking people to rise to the occasion they will do so by being inspired, and that's the only way that will really work. Further, such inspiration will be found only by tapping into beliefs the people already have. But we don't really know what these beliefs are. They should be investigated as part of a Model 2 inquiry.
I wrote about such an investigation in the first part of this post. I envisioned an interviewer doing spot interviews with a person on the street. Many such interviews would be conducted. Then this would be done again in longer focus groups, with the participants chosen because they fit certain predefined demographic categories. And it would also be done with certain celebrities. Each of these would be video recorded and made available to the public. The idea would be to make this an ongoing learning activity. I envisioned three different topics. One about being responsible, another about being a good citizen, and a third about paying taxes. The topics obviously overlap but clearly are not identical. To illustrate what such an interview would be like, these are the scripted questions I came up with for the first category.
On being a responsible adult:
1) What does it mean to be a responsible adult?
2) Can you give an example where you've behaved as a responsible adult?
3) Does that example typify your behavior or do you often act irresponsibly? You don't have to give an example of where you've behaved irresponsibly if that helps you answer the question.
4) What about other people? Is your impression that they mainly act responsibly or not?
In any inquiry, one must make the follow up dependent on what is learned in the first round. Also, what I have described so far could readily be manipulated by cherry picking the participants in the interviews or screening the results and only showing those that were favorable for the prior maintained view. The process needs integrity so those things don't happen. That itself will not be easy. But if it could be achieved, the results then might be surprising and facilitate the learning that we hope would follow.
A different sort of learning needs to happen as well. The label "professional class" is very broad strokes and may not be refined enough to identify households that if they were true to themselves would call themselves rich. Let me give the sort of particulars that I think might matter here. One pertains to where people are in the life-cycle. A household that enters the professional class only after the parents have reached their mid 50s, but weren't there until then probably were unable to accumulate a lot of savings until then and might really deserve to keep more of their income than to pay that in taxes. This example suggests that past income should matter in this consideration, as should the age of the household members.
Another pertains to the income of the parents. If the parents were already in the professional class, then the children making it there may be considered an accomplishment, but it is far less of an accomplishment than for those whose parents are working class or poor. Here I will speak about my own situation. My parents paid for my college, so I carried no tuition loan debt. After my parents retired, they started to give cash gifts to my brother and me, a way to make some of the bequest well before they passed away. This enabled me to save a good chunk of my income even in the early years, when living expenses can take a good bite out of income. I had colleagues who lived more frugally than I did (smaller apartment, older car) because they were cash poor then. Their parents weren't as well off financially. None of us were uncomfortable with quality of life stuff. But I had the added luxury of not worrying about money. I don't know if that made me rich then, but I was definitely comfortable. My preference would be for Reeves to have more categories that would together include the entire professional class - comfortable, upscale, and rich. I'm not sure where the boundaries should be, but my intuition in regard to the added tax burden these people should absorb is that a progressive tax principle needs to be applied.
This third particular I'm finding difficult to write about because, on the one hand, it gets at the sort of gaming of the system practices that Reeves has singled out but, on the other hand, it may be that many are followers in this sort of gaming and only a few are really strident about it. I am talking about zoning restrictions for housing and whether income or wealth should be defined, at least in part, by the zoning restrictions of the community in which the household is situated. For example, my parents when they retired moved to a condominium community in Boca Raton called Century Village. It was a very large development. While my parents apartment was modestly sized and provisioned, the place was gated with security guards at the gate. I gather that many communities in Florida are set up this way. The place may have had a minimum age requirement for ownership of a unit. (I'm thinking that was 55, but I can't really recall.) Most of the residents were Jewish and there was a Synagogue on the premises. So there was exclusion of others, which is just what zoning restrictions do. But in this case, that my parents felt comfortable living there is what mattered to me and I think some of these restrictions facilitated that, especially the age restrictions. So how do you parse this out? I'm not sure. Yet I think something along these lines is needed.
* * * * *
I want to wrap this up. I wrote this post to encourage Reeves and others of his ilk to engage in a learning exchange with members of the professional class on what their social responsibility should really entail and whether they themselves can embrace their social responsibility. I believe such a conversation needs to happen now, but it will take quite a long time for it to reach even tentative conclusions. Surely there is not enough time now for it to conclude by the 2020 elections, even if it were to start today. Maybe, however, if this conversation did start now it would be done by the next Congressional elections.
The concept of center versus left does a disservice to thinking jointly about economic issues and identity issues. I tried in this piece to stick with the economic issues only and it is there where I believe that members of the professional class who vote their pocketbooks are in the center or even right of center. This needs to change for the good of the order. But that change will only come slowly and then through a concerted education effort. It's time for that education effort to begin.
Saturday, November 16, 2019
Juxtapositions
We take the local newspaper in Champaign-Urbana, The News Gazette. I look at it more for doing the Daily Jumble than for reading the news. Way back when, I read it for the sports section because it was good about U of I sports. But that interest has dissipated over the years. More recently I might read the lead article on the front page, which more often than not is about some campus issue. I'm not well connected to what's going on about campus any more, so this is a way to get a little information and figure out which way the wind is blowing.
This past week The News Gazette changed its layout. Previously the Daily Jumble was located with other puzzles - notably the Sudoku, which I would also sometimes do, and then both were on the same page as Dear Abby. In the new scheme of things, the Daily Jumble is located next to the bridge column by Phillip Adler. Odd as this may seem, I hadn't read that column for years. I simply didn't bother to find it in the paper. But this week after doing the jumble, I would read the bridge column, and found I enjoyed it. What's more, it really is a sort of puzzle. The bidding is given and the reader is asked to figure out how to play the cards as the declarer to make the contract, if that's possible. So far, I've not gotten the right answer this week, but I can say that thinking about this is interesting.
Which makes me wonder, if the bridge column is really a puzzle but Dear Abby is not, why cluster some of these but not the rest? And how did the News-Gazette figure out to change the arrangement? While I don't have real answers to these questions, I do have my guesses. I'm going to say that this is a vintage thing. The bridge column and the Daily Jumble have been around for a long time, at least since I was in high school. (I graduated 47 years ago.) The Sudoku, in contrast, is comparatively new, at least for American readers. So maybe the News-Gazette is doing some implicit sorting of the readership, based on their age.
The thing is, current adolescents would benefit from learning how to play bridge. It teaches a kind of situated logic that is valuable in many other contexts. And it teaches communication skills and how to work together in a partnership. This piece, now from a while back, argues just these things. Yet I'm guessing that very few teens learn to play bridge anymore. When I was a teen (maybe even before that) my parents taught me and my brother the rudiments - fourth from the longest, strongest suit, etc. It was a family thing.
* * * * *
I'm going to do something unusual here and publish one of my rhymes within a longer blog post. I wrote this a few days ago, but then was reluctant to post it to my usual outlets (first Twitter, then Facebook). I'm doing so here because I want to use it to make a couple of other observations.
https://massmail.illinois.edu/massmail/28709.html
Power and sex
Concave or convex?
The U will have new rules
Let’s hope everyone’s temperature cools.
#ButItAin’tOverTillItsOver
While I never dated a student once at the U of I, I was only 25 when I started. I wasn't much older than the undergraduates I taught in intermediate microeconomics. More than once I heard the dreaded question - are you the TA? (If I heard that now, it would make me delighted for a week.) So there was a need to establish one's authority in the eyes of the students. A fellow assistant professor did that by wearing Brooks Brothers suits to class. Getting dressed up was not my thing. I established my authority inadvertently, by making the course way over the heads of the students. Many years later I learned this is a common mistake made by brand new assistant professors.
A few years after I started I learned that the U of I had a somewhat difficult time recruiting assistant professors who were single. The issue of social life (is an assistant professor entitled to that?) seemingly the driver causally, though in discussion it would often manifest by talking about the quality of the restaurants in town. I'm totally out of the loop now regarding this situation. But if the situation is more of less the same as when I started, I can imagine that recruiting single assistant professors will become even more of a challenge, and unintended consequence of the new policy.
A different issue that seems to me at root here, is that even when the age of the person indicates the person is an adult, if there were some sophistication metric that could be applied, would many of the students we have, whether over 18 or even over 21, nonetheless score high on a naiveté metric? If so, does the university have an in loco parentis responsibility, even for students above the age of consent? Back in 2015 I had a brief exchange with Laura Kipnis of Northwestern, after her piece in the Chronicle made quite a splash, Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe. I'm going to put words in her mouth here. In my interpretation of what she wrote the kids are naive because they are overprotected. So stop protecting them.
Somewhat later, I wrote a piece that was intended partly as a refutation to this argument. It's called Shyness and Kindness. The upshot is that some fraction of our students are shy. They are entitled to be that way as students and we must offer them protection, let them mature on their own timetable, not one we specify. I also related some rather horrifying experiences from my first year in graduate school about the torment some of my classmates went through - this was academic torment, not sexual at all. But it had telling consequences on these people. Even if these are not the star performers in the classroom, the university should care about their welfare, as human beings. More recently (about a year ago) I wrote this piece called, Why are we so screwed up about sex and authority? It was an awkward piece to write, as I discussed my own naiveté in the romance department during adolescence. Near the end of the piece it asks about what type of interventions might help in this area. Fundamentally, the question is whether there is a type of education that can help the person overcome their own shyness. Experience is a good teacher, if the stumbles are mild, but not otherwise. So maybe some prohibitions are necessary as means of protection, but my sense is that it can't be the entire story.
* * * * *
This semester in my class I've had a couple of very clear examples of students being intellectually naive, in a way that I can't recall happening before. Back in September students were given this prompt, to focus what they would blog about that week. It turns out that many students didn't realize that opportunism has an ethical dimension to it. So they wrote an inappropriate post (meaning it didn't address the topic at hand) thinking that opportunism simply meant taking advantage of opportunities. Further, as we discussed this in a subsequent class session, they didn't question their own thinking on the matter, say by looking up the word in the dictionary. (Given that they were already online to write the blog post, this is remarkably easy to do, yet they didn't do it.) And some of the students didn't think it was their job to discover the true meaning of the word. Instead, they felt the obligation was on me, to make my prompts clearer so this sort of error wouldn't happen.
The second example happened quite recently. On Tuesday we will be discussing Bolman and Deal's Chapter 8, on conflict in organizations. The prompt for their blog posts asked students to relate some real or fictitious experience they've been involved with where there was conflict, and then to Monday morning quarterback the situation. One conscientious student had read through the PowerPoint for that session, and made note of what I have on slide 12, Newton's Third Law of Human Interaction. But she took it literally, which was not what I intended it. I was being a little cutesy, thinking that most students would already know Newton's Third Law from their science classes, and then using the label as a metaphor, which would get the students to ask the question - what is an equal and opposite reaction when one person acts aggressively? But this student didn't take it metaphorically. She took it literally.
* * * * *
In the case of the first error above, about the meaning of opportunism, you might imagine it was made only by mediocre students. In the second example, however, the mistake was made by quite a diligent student who prides herself on getting good grades. Yet, I learned recently, that in her pleasure time she enjoys watching TV, but doesn't ever read a novel for fun.
One should not generalize from a sample of one. Yet over the years, this has been the same conclusion and I dare say the sample in this time period, stretching back to 1990 or so, is in the thousands. Many students can't make good meaning of what they read, my example 20 years ago was an article from the NY Times, because they don't read enough. So they don't see it as their job to supply the needed context in understanding what the author is trying to say. Instead, it's the authors job to send a simple message.
The current culture values performance on standardized tests and I'm afraid that test prep has replaced doing a lot of outside reading as the means for how students prepare themselves. The inadequacy of test prep as an educational approach is quite evident, if you care to look. But who is doing that?
So we're producing graduates with high GPAs who are opportunistic in their focus of learning to the test but not learning otherwise. And we too at the university are opportunistic, because these students pay the tuition that is our meal ticket. So let's not make a fuss about this, please.
If anyone has read my prior post, where I expressed a lot of frustration, let me observe that the frustration is still there. I wish I could see a way through this based on my own efforts. But at present, I don't. So I probably won't teach again, at least not at the undergraduate level. I need to get some satisfaction from the teaching, which is lacking now.
This past week The News Gazette changed its layout. Previously the Daily Jumble was located with other puzzles - notably the Sudoku, which I would also sometimes do, and then both were on the same page as Dear Abby. In the new scheme of things, the Daily Jumble is located next to the bridge column by Phillip Adler. Odd as this may seem, I hadn't read that column for years. I simply didn't bother to find it in the paper. But this week after doing the jumble, I would read the bridge column, and found I enjoyed it. What's more, it really is a sort of puzzle. The bidding is given and the reader is asked to figure out how to play the cards as the declarer to make the contract, if that's possible. So far, I've not gotten the right answer this week, but I can say that thinking about this is interesting.
Which makes me wonder, if the bridge column is really a puzzle but Dear Abby is not, why cluster some of these but not the rest? And how did the News-Gazette figure out to change the arrangement? While I don't have real answers to these questions, I do have my guesses. I'm going to say that this is a vintage thing. The bridge column and the Daily Jumble have been around for a long time, at least since I was in high school. (I graduated 47 years ago.) The Sudoku, in contrast, is comparatively new, at least for American readers. So maybe the News-Gazette is doing some implicit sorting of the readership, based on their age.
The thing is, current adolescents would benefit from learning how to play bridge. It teaches a kind of situated logic that is valuable in many other contexts. And it teaches communication skills and how to work together in a partnership. This piece, now from a while back, argues just these things. Yet I'm guessing that very few teens learn to play bridge anymore. When I was a teen (maybe even before that) my parents taught me and my brother the rudiments - fourth from the longest, strongest suit, etc. It was a family thing.
* * * * *
I'm going to do something unusual here and publish one of my rhymes within a longer blog post. I wrote this a few days ago, but then was reluctant to post it to my usual outlets (first Twitter, then Facebook). I'm doing so here because I want to use it to make a couple of other observations.
https://massmail.illinois.edu/massmail/28709.html
Power and sex
Concave or convex?
The U will have new rules
Let’s hope everyone’s temperature cools.
#ButItAin’tOverTillItsOver
While I never dated a student once at the U of I, I was only 25 when I started. I wasn't much older than the undergraduates I taught in intermediate microeconomics. More than once I heard the dreaded question - are you the TA? (If I heard that now, it would make me delighted for a week.) So there was a need to establish one's authority in the eyes of the students. A fellow assistant professor did that by wearing Brooks Brothers suits to class. Getting dressed up was not my thing. I established my authority inadvertently, by making the course way over the heads of the students. Many years later I learned this is a common mistake made by brand new assistant professors.
A few years after I started I learned that the U of I had a somewhat difficult time recruiting assistant professors who were single. The issue of social life (is an assistant professor entitled to that?) seemingly the driver causally, though in discussion it would often manifest by talking about the quality of the restaurants in town. I'm totally out of the loop now regarding this situation. But if the situation is more of less the same as when I started, I can imagine that recruiting single assistant professors will become even more of a challenge, and unintended consequence of the new policy.
A different issue that seems to me at root here, is that even when the age of the person indicates the person is an adult, if there were some sophistication metric that could be applied, would many of the students we have, whether over 18 or even over 21, nonetheless score high on a naiveté metric? If so, does the university have an in loco parentis responsibility, even for students above the age of consent? Back in 2015 I had a brief exchange with Laura Kipnis of Northwestern, after her piece in the Chronicle made quite a splash, Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe. I'm going to put words in her mouth here. In my interpretation of what she wrote the kids are naive because they are overprotected. So stop protecting them.
Somewhat later, I wrote a piece that was intended partly as a refutation to this argument. It's called Shyness and Kindness. The upshot is that some fraction of our students are shy. They are entitled to be that way as students and we must offer them protection, let them mature on their own timetable, not one we specify. I also related some rather horrifying experiences from my first year in graduate school about the torment some of my classmates went through - this was academic torment, not sexual at all. But it had telling consequences on these people. Even if these are not the star performers in the classroom, the university should care about their welfare, as human beings. More recently (about a year ago) I wrote this piece called, Why are we so screwed up about sex and authority? It was an awkward piece to write, as I discussed my own naiveté in the romance department during adolescence. Near the end of the piece it asks about what type of interventions might help in this area. Fundamentally, the question is whether there is a type of education that can help the person overcome their own shyness. Experience is a good teacher, if the stumbles are mild, but not otherwise. So maybe some prohibitions are necessary as means of protection, but my sense is that it can't be the entire story.
* * * * *
This semester in my class I've had a couple of very clear examples of students being intellectually naive, in a way that I can't recall happening before. Back in September students were given this prompt, to focus what they would blog about that week. It turns out that many students didn't realize that opportunism has an ethical dimension to it. So they wrote an inappropriate post (meaning it didn't address the topic at hand) thinking that opportunism simply meant taking advantage of opportunities. Further, as we discussed this in a subsequent class session, they didn't question their own thinking on the matter, say by looking up the word in the dictionary. (Given that they were already online to write the blog post, this is remarkably easy to do, yet they didn't do it.) And some of the students didn't think it was their job to discover the true meaning of the word. Instead, they felt the obligation was on me, to make my prompts clearer so this sort of error wouldn't happen.
The second example happened quite recently. On Tuesday we will be discussing Bolman and Deal's Chapter 8, on conflict in organizations. The prompt for their blog posts asked students to relate some real or fictitious experience they've been involved with where there was conflict, and then to Monday morning quarterback the situation. One conscientious student had read through the PowerPoint for that session, and made note of what I have on slide 12, Newton's Third Law of Human Interaction. But she took it literally, which was not what I intended it. I was being a little cutesy, thinking that most students would already know Newton's Third Law from their science classes, and then using the label as a metaphor, which would get the students to ask the question - what is an equal and opposite reaction when one person acts aggressively? But this student didn't take it metaphorically. She took it literally.
* * * * *
In the case of the first error above, about the meaning of opportunism, you might imagine it was made only by mediocre students. In the second example, however, the mistake was made by quite a diligent student who prides herself on getting good grades. Yet, I learned recently, that in her pleasure time she enjoys watching TV, but doesn't ever read a novel for fun.
One should not generalize from a sample of one. Yet over the years, this has been the same conclusion and I dare say the sample in this time period, stretching back to 1990 or so, is in the thousands. Many students can't make good meaning of what they read, my example 20 years ago was an article from the NY Times, because they don't read enough. So they don't see it as their job to supply the needed context in understanding what the author is trying to say. Instead, it's the authors job to send a simple message.
The current culture values performance on standardized tests and I'm afraid that test prep has replaced doing a lot of outside reading as the means for how students prepare themselves. The inadequacy of test prep as an educational approach is quite evident, if you care to look. But who is doing that?
So we're producing graduates with high GPAs who are opportunistic in their focus of learning to the test but not learning otherwise. And we too at the university are opportunistic, because these students pay the tuition that is our meal ticket. So let's not make a fuss about this, please.
If anyone has read my prior post, where I expressed a lot of frustration, let me observe that the frustration is still there. I wish I could see a way through this based on my own efforts. But at present, I don't. So I probably won't teach again, at least not at the undergraduate level. I need to get some satisfaction from the teaching, which is lacking now.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Capitulation
The course I'm teaching this semester hasn't gone as I've wanted it to go. I wrote about this in a post yesterday addressed to my students. I have not required attendance. I tried to encourage it, but perhaps inadvertently did the opposite. At this point a majority treat the class as if it is totally online, while there are other students who take the class as if it is blended (hybrid), mixing times where they do attend with other times where they skip class. There remains a small group of students who attend regularly, the exception to what some years ago was the rule. Among these students, most are quiet by nature, at least as I perceive them in the classroom. They are each diligent students, getting their coursework done in a timely manner. Many of the other students are not so diligent.
I had been trying to engage the handful that still do show up in Socratic dialog, but it feels as if they are reluctant participants. In the past I've always had one or two glib students who evidently would want to respond to my queries, which gave me the sense that my methods were effective. Not this time. So I've been wondering why persist in what now seems a fool's errand. This morning I broke the logjam.
While it goes against my own inclinations, I made a PowerPoint presentation, animated it for on screen viewing, and then made a voice over screen capture video of the slideshow. This PowerPoint was all text (though sentences, not bullets) and meant to be something like lecture notes for the follow up to the homework that is due tonight. As some of the students have already completed that homework, I wanted them to have access to the video immediately. If coming to class is too arduous for most of the students, this is a quicker way to get some of the take aways I'd like students to have. The video is under 14 minutes, perhaps on the longish side for an on screen presentation, but much shorter than a full class session.
This is more about satisfying my guilty conscience than about anything else. From a purely utilitarian point of view, I should cater to the students who don't come to class, as they are now the majority. I do want students to make connections between the homework and other ideas, about how to apply the model to various real-world circumstances as perceived from an economics view.
Indeed, I designed the class with the idea that the homework would be preliminary to class discussion. Some of (maybe most of) the poor attendance can be attributed to an instrumental mindset. Since the class discussion is itself is not graded and it is not aimed as preparation for the homework (or the next quiz) why bother coming? I have no way of measuring how widespread such instrumentalism is outside my course, but if I were to hazard a guess I'd say that it is endemic to the undergraduate economics major and perhaps to many other majors on campus.
So the design, which might make sense if students either feel obligated to come to class no matter what or feel some desire to learn deeply even if it puts their course grade somewhat at risk, has been defeated by the attitudes of the students I do have, who are used to presentation coming first and assessment following that, to test their comprehension of the presentation. That's the traditional method. It is ingrained in these students, as near as I can tell.
It remains to be seen whether any of the students will look at this follow up PowerPoint and video. I can track hits data on the PowerPoint and hits plus minutes viewed on the video. But I'm now doing this little experiment at a time in the semester where many students are just trying to keep their heads above water. So it is far from a perfect test, and low access doesn't mean this wouldn't have been preferred by students earlier in the semester.
Nevertheless, it is something. And if I do get some indication from students that they actually prefer this sort of thing to what I had been doing, will I then consider redesigning the entire class that way? Hmmm.
I had been trying to engage the handful that still do show up in Socratic dialog, but it feels as if they are reluctant participants. In the past I've always had one or two glib students who evidently would want to respond to my queries, which gave me the sense that my methods were effective. Not this time. So I've been wondering why persist in what now seems a fool's errand. This morning I broke the logjam.
While it goes against my own inclinations, I made a PowerPoint presentation, animated it for on screen viewing, and then made a voice over screen capture video of the slideshow. This PowerPoint was all text (though sentences, not bullets) and meant to be something like lecture notes for the follow up to the homework that is due tonight. As some of the students have already completed that homework, I wanted them to have access to the video immediately. If coming to class is too arduous for most of the students, this is a quicker way to get some of the take aways I'd like students to have. The video is under 14 minutes, perhaps on the longish side for an on screen presentation, but much shorter than a full class session.
This is more about satisfying my guilty conscience than about anything else. From a purely utilitarian point of view, I should cater to the students who don't come to class, as they are now the majority. I do want students to make connections between the homework and other ideas, about how to apply the model to various real-world circumstances as perceived from an economics view.
Indeed, I designed the class with the idea that the homework would be preliminary to class discussion. Some of (maybe most of) the poor attendance can be attributed to an instrumental mindset. Since the class discussion is itself is not graded and it is not aimed as preparation for the homework (or the next quiz) why bother coming? I have no way of measuring how widespread such instrumentalism is outside my course, but if I were to hazard a guess I'd say that it is endemic to the undergraduate economics major and perhaps to many other majors on campus.
So the design, which might make sense if students either feel obligated to come to class no matter what or feel some desire to learn deeply even if it puts their course grade somewhat at risk, has been defeated by the attitudes of the students I do have, who are used to presentation coming first and assessment following that, to test their comprehension of the presentation. That's the traditional method. It is ingrained in these students, as near as I can tell.
It remains to be seen whether any of the students will look at this follow up PowerPoint and video. I can track hits data on the PowerPoint and hits plus minutes viewed on the video. But I'm now doing this little experiment at a time in the semester where many students are just trying to keep their heads above water. So it is far from a perfect test, and low access doesn't mean this wouldn't have been preferred by students earlier in the semester.
Nevertheless, it is something. And if I do get some indication from students that they actually prefer this sort of thing to what I had been doing, will I then consider redesigning the entire class that way? Hmmm.
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