Honor Among Thieves And Among Supreme Court Justices

For those Republicans who are college educated, which includes most of the plutocrats, officials in high political office, and suburban women, it must be evident now that Trump is simply a grifter, one in deep doodoo, because of the huge amount of debt he is carrying.  Even people at Fox News other than Chris Wallace must be aware of this. And, one wonders, whether regular viewers of Fox News who don't have a college degree are also aware of this.  

There is a tendency to want to deny unpleasant facts.  I don't know whether that tendency has a negative correlation with educational attainment or no correlation at all.  But if there are enough such people who are not in denial, they have to be asking themselves, how did we ever let this get so far?  Suppose what is known now about Trump's finances actually had become known in late 2015, before the Primary season kicked off.  Would Trump have been the candidate chosen?  Would any other Republican possibly have won the election?  It seems that because of the prior affinity via The Apprentice, Trump supporters had intense loyalty to him, where they had no such loyalty to any other candidate.  On the other hand, the Plutocrats probably wouldn't have gotten in line with Trump in this circumstance, nor would the likes of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.   The chance of a major embarrassment that would permanently damage the Republicans would have been too great.

I'm not a lawyer, so please don't take my word for it, but it seems to me that by Trump not releasing his tax returns during the 2016 campaign constitutes fraud and, if so, the election should be nullified for that reason.  I have previously argued that the election was stolen.  Mitch McConnell not having the Senate take up President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court was the main transgression, but Russian interference in the election surely counts as well, and the latter was, of course, tied to Trump trying to manipulate the outcome.  In retrospect, it is obscene to recall the chants of "crooked Hillary."  To borrow part of a line from Abraham Lincoln, you can fool some of the people some of the time.  Who will now be shouting "crooked Donald?"  

We were taught in grade school - to the victor go the spoils.  Many treat that as literally true.  But when it becomes clear that the victor cheated, or others cheated on behalf of the victor, should we expect the spoils to be what economists call "sunk costs."  This term means the costs are not recoverable, since the investment can't be reversed.  Does that hold for all the judges and the two Supreme Court justices who have been appointed since Trump became President?  Mitch McConnell has developed a reputation of ramming the judicial nominations of President Trump through the Senate.  I believe there is no doubt that the unholy partnership between McConnell and Trump is based on the idea of McConnell's support of Trump as President, in spite of the transgressions, as long as Trump continues to nominate very conservative judges, whom McConnell then could steer through the Senate. This bargain would be considered unsavory, even if Trump's election was on the up and up.  

Now let me turn to the word honor, in the title of my post.  Suppose you are a person who believes in honor as important.  Then suppose further that you are part of the spoils, in the case where the victor won in a dishonorable way.  That is too easy, so let's complicate it more.  Suppose you have subsequently been assigned to a position that you've aspired for intensely and for quite some time. There is an evident conflict between doing the honorable thing and acceding to your own aspirations.  What do you then do? 

There is an idea in economics associated with Paul Samuelson called Revealed Preference.  The standard economic theory predicts choice from preferences and economic constraints.  Revealed Preference reverses that.  After observing choice and understanding the constraints, one can make some strong inferences about preference.  So, what of all those judges and justices who were appointed while Trump has been President, now understanding that his election is tainted? Where does the honorable path take them?

There is a further thought to work through, particularly on judicial cases where the preferred outcome divides strongly along political lines. And let's focus on when the case reaches the Supreme Court.  Now I don't know this, because I'm not a legal scholar, but I'd hope that many of the justices would have a meta preference that carries across the various cases.  That is, to have the American people maintain a respect for the rule of law.  And that requires that there is a process for making decisions in contentious cases that both sides can respect as the right way to arrive at a decision.  If that process is shortchanged, then the winning side in the heat of the moment might not care.  But the losing side will begin to question not just that decision, but many other decisions by the Supreme Court as well, and respect for the rule of law will suffer as a consequence. 

There has recently been an idea floating that Trump nominated a candidate for the Supreme Court to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg because he expected to contest the result of the election and, as with Bush vs. Gore, the determination would end up going to the Supreme Court. While Chief Justice Roberts is conservative, he is not reliable (from the Trump perspective) regarding how he would decide this case.  So Trump wanted 5 reliable justices: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorusch, Brett Cavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett (if she is confirmed) to constitute a clear majority who would decide in favor of Trump. That political calculus is straightforward enough.  But what of the ethics therein?

As a non-lawyer, I'm not sure of the full set of circumstances under which a Justice should recuse himself or herself from a case, but it seems to me that those Supreme Court Justices appointed under Trump would be obligated to do that if the Presidential election eventually went to the Supreme Court.  If that were true, however, there wouldn't be as strong a reason to immediately nominate a successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  There is another quite different reason for doing so.  If control of the Senate will change with this election, from majority Republican to majority Democrat, then getting that Republican favored nominee in now make sense according to a political calculation.  

Now let me introduce one more idea from economics/game theory.  This is called a credible commitment.  It means taking a costly action now to force a certain decision in the future.  In contrast, talk is cheap and therefore it is not credible.  A promise to recuse oneself in the event of x may not be credible.  For when x has happened the justice may have a change of heart and opt not to recuse himself or herself.   In contrast, resigning now would be credible.  Having resigned, there would be no way for the justice to render an opinion on the case in the future when it comes up

Would resigning now be the honorable thing to do, both for justices of the Supreme Court appointed under Trump and for judges in lower Federal courts appointed in the same interval?  I mean this to be a question to ponder, not one with a ready answer.  Also, from the point of view of predicting such outcomes, I would predict that no such resignations will happen.  

However, I know many people who feel now that America is going to hell in a hand basket. Trump has dramatically accelerated this decline.  Creating real surprise by going against the forecast in a way that is personally costly but also evidently aimed at respecting the rule of law, might be a way for America to get past this dreadful moment.  For that to happen, Trump needs to lose this election and the Supreme Court needs to certify that.  Sacrificing the national well being so as to get rid of the Roe v. Wade decision, also can't happen.  It's clear that has been motivating the recent rapid pace of Federal judicial appointments.  But it is equally clear that the myopic focus on this objective is bringing the country down.

I used to have conservative colleagues in the economics department who would help me to understand their point of view.  I don't have that now and have no sense how other conservatives think about this.  I just have this general sense.  If one side thinks it is winning, it's actually that all of us are losing, but those who feel they are winning are focusing on myopic ends, rather than the overall picture.  I should also add that the liberal versus conservative among the economists I'm referring to was about laissez-faire versus regulation, not about Roe v. Wade.  I could argue with conservatives then.  I can't argue with conservatives now.

Google As A Memory Crutch - Does this give some insight into how we should teach and assess learning?

When I was a teenager my memory was incredibly good.  Once exposed to some information I could recall it, in its totality, with ease.  As I age and see this ability erode, I am saddened.  For whatever reason, the decline is usually associated with not being able to come up with the name of a person.  There are shreds of memory that are still available, but I'm vexed by what the person's name is. I wish I then had an algorithm to follow in my head that would eventually produce retrieval of the name with a high success rate.  But I haven't found such an algorithm. Each time I experience this, I go through a novel search in my head for the name.  It is frustrating to do.  Yet, so far, I'm not willing to concede that I won't come up with the name at all.  More about this below.  

Some years ago, when my memory wasn't deteriorating quite so obviously, I had a similar issue regarding facial recognition, particularly with actors seen in a TV show.  The face looks familiar.  Have I seen the face in something else, so the recognition is real, not a false positive?  I learned about IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base).  IMDB also includes TV programming, which is good because there is a lot of cross pollination between the movies and TV.  I'd see somebody in a TV show years after I had seen the person in a movie (which I watched on TV).  Was it really the same person or not?  IMDB gives a "filmography" of each actor and you can scroll through the list of that to see whether there is movie that you've seen before.  If you find that movie, it is a relief.  Your instinct was on the mark.  If you don't, it's likely a false positive and you confounded the person with someone else.  

Recently I've been doing something similar with Google searches, where in this case it is somebody in the public eye who is not an actor, or it is a well-known historical figure, or possibly an event or social movement.  It seems odd to search for something that you feel you already know.  So, in some sense this isn't learning, it's remembering.  I do it because it is much quicker than my mental retrieval processes, where the gears can be turning for quite a while before a result is produced.  

* * * * *

Now I want to try this in reverse.  Consider the number below.  What event do you associate with it?  Please do not do a search to try to answer this question.  Simply use recall, if you can. 

1215.

My guess is that most people my age (I'm 65 and will be 66 next January) can make this identification without doing a search.  I'd likewise guess that most current college students can't do this, but that's only a guess. 

Now, here's the deal about teaching which this little example illustrates.  Students are prone to memorize.  I've railed about college students memorization for a long time. I've felt that instead students need to produce a narrative about what they learn and incorporate the ideas that way.  The narrative will help commit the ideas to memory and will simultaneously produce a degree of understanding that pure memorization will be unable to achieve.  Further, students typically lose these memories they made by rote if they don't use the ideas subsequently.  The narrative helps the student commit the ideas to long term memory.  Yet, my railing notwithstanding, students in large numbers appear wedded to memorization.  So, maybe we should try to make the students better at memorization.  

With this, I know it is very old fashioned to ask what happened on such and such a date, but maybe there was some virtue to it.  In the case of the example above, students my age when learning World (mostly European) history, learned about the Magna Carta, which was issued in 1215.  (I confess here that before I Googled it, I thought it was 1216, close but no cigar.)  

I don't recall how we were taught about the Magna Carta, but I'm guessing it was taught as a simple hierarchy.  At the pinnacle was the Magna Carta itself. Subordinate to that was the date, 1215, the King of England at the time, King John, and what the document did, guaranteed certain human rights and made the King subject to the law. What I'm suggesting as a change in the way we teach is to abandon the hierarchy in the representation and instead treat it as a vector. (Any component of that vector could be the search term in Google.)   

Then we might teach certain vectors that you'd think wouldn't be in normal courses.  For example, some years ago I read a book Einstein and Picasso.  The linkage is that both worked on understanding simultaneity and did so at approximately in the same historical moment, which suggests there were happenings in that moment that would make simultaneity a worthy object of investigation to the creative mind. Obviously, however, they did this from quite different perspectives.  If you believe physics is physics and art is art, you'll never see this connection.  In contrast, if you consider the larger idea, simultaneity, then the connection will be evident.  This does suggest something for hierarchical rendering, but I'd stick with teaching the vector form, even here.  If that's the method that students learn, then persist with the method.  

Let me close with a bit about assessment of that learning.  The key is to test on each component of the vector, not just one component.  In so doing, students will begin to learn things from multiple perspectives (that of each individual component).   And perhaps in the assessment students should be allowed to use a search engine to answer the questions.  The interesting cases then will be where the "right answer" is not at the top of what the search engine returns.  Can the students find that answer nonetheless?  This seems to me worth trying.

The Quality of Interactions When Race Isn't A Factor

As anti-racism enters the lingua franca, and we now have events such as this Scholar Strike for Racial Justice, it occurred to me that we should take inventory about our interactions when race isn't a factor,  but then possibly also consider interactions where race is a factor but the interactions go reasonably well.  I will focus on the former in this post, but briefly consider the latter near the end of the post.

There is a sucker born every minute.
P.T. Barnum?

The question mark following the attribution comes from the story here about the Cardiff Giant. I chose it to lead off because it seems so apropos of now. In a simplified view of reality based on this quote, society is divided between the takers and the suckers.  Interactions between the two are based on flim-flam and have a predatory aspect.  When I teach this in class I refer to the taker as a snake oil salesman.  For now, I just want to treat it as a category.  When we have a sufficient number of categories, then we can ask how our interactions distribute over them.  The inventory I have in mind would do this over a wide variety of people but still be restricted to where race differences are not present.

A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.
Bernard Meltzer found here

An opposite extreme to the taker-sucker interactions is found in interactions between true friends.  These are what you live for.  They are enjoyable and give meaning to your life.   If as a student you have good friends at school, it is so much easier for you.  Ditto for when you have good friends at work.

Before I wave my hands about all the interactions that fall in between these two extremes, I want to do a tiny bit of theory.  We should separate out one-off transactions from repeat interactions.  At the time of the initial transaction the participants might not know whether there will be repetitions in the future or not.   Consequently, the quality of that first transaction matters a great deal for determining this outcome. I've written many times about valuing a collegial work environment.  In such an environment colleagues are treated as friends and interactions include both real work and playful non-work stuff. Further, collegiality requires that when there is a potential new colleague to treat the person as a true colleague right off the bat.

Most of the time that's how it plays out, in my experience.  However, there are some people I'd classify as jerks, rather than colleagues.  It may take a while for that to reveal, but once it does the interactions are to be avoided, if possible, or to be tolerated but not embraced, if avoidance is not possible.  Now, combining the two extremes, it is possible that a taker masquerades as a colleague until the moment is ripe.  It is also possible that someone who has been a good colleague turns into a taker, if circumstances force that.

For economic transactions, I think these categories and possible hybrids are sufficient. So, for example, whenever I poll my students about their prior experience with group work, invariably they will report some dissatisfaction with such work because one or more of the group members were free riders on the efforts of the other members of the group. The stories of this sort are commonplace for me. But I don't have a good sense about the relative numbers of those who do their share of the group work versus those who free ride.  I also am ignorant about whether the free riding is just an indicator of immaturity and that as the student matures the student accepts the need to do their share of the work, or if the free rider is a personality type that persists.   But it is more complex than this.  I've learned over the past few years that students with emotional problems will sometimes look like free riders in group work, yet they are totally unlike those who are simply being lazy. As students are often not forthcoming with their peers about their emotional issues, it may be hard to tell one situation from another.

Let us consider a different sort of interaction, within groups where the focus is to come to some group decision, but that decision is not necessarily about economics.   Group dynamics may feature factions with the group.  Those factions might engage in rather intense politics about group decisions.  The Economics department at Illinois was intensely political that way when I first joined it back in fall 1980.  Though I did get caught up in  the politics for quite a while, I found much of it ugly, mean, and dispiriting.

It is also possible for friction within smaller groups to occur because of what Argyris and Schon call Model 1.  A member of the group has a strongly felt need to win at all costs, thereby proving to himself that he was right all along, yet possibly creating harsh conflict with other members of the group as a consequence.  The other members get discouraged and either want to leave the group themselves or purge the group of the so-called leader.  I've had experiences of this sort both with campus committees and with volunteer groups outside the university that I've been part of.  But I've also experienced quite wonderful groups that have a strong sense of collegiality among all members.  As before, we'd like to know the relative frequency of the different type of interactions.   In my own experience, after I moved from economics to ed tech, the politics lessened in intensity a good deal, though was never entirely absent.

One last type of interaction to consider is negligence fueled by being oblivious to the situation.  As I'm writing this post, a friend in Facebook posted about teens blaring music from their car while she was trying to get some sleep, then not being able to do that so going outside, knocking on their car window, and complaining to them.  Mixing metaphors in a way I probably shouldn't, at issue is whether obliviousness of this sort remains in some people well after they've reached adulthood and/or for the particular type of interaction caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) should be the message that the recipient heeds.  Driving on the highway features this type of interaction with some frequency.  More recently, one might consider wearing a mask or not in public during the pandemic as an example in this category.

I'm not making a category for ordinary interactions that happen with no incident.  For me, going to the supermarket typifies this sort of transaction.  The person running the cash register and the other person bagging the groceries do their job.  After I make payment they invariably say, "Have a nice day."  There is something comforting in the sameness of these sort of transactions, but they will get no further attention here.

The task then, is for each of us to go through the categories and do a rough tabulation of the frequency of the good transactions and the bad.  This should be done twice, first as recipient, then as perpetrator.  As Argyris and Schon point out, we have espoused theories (in which we are never the perpetrator) and theories in action (where we sometimes are the perpetrator).  Or, if you prefer, there is the delightful song Kids from the musical Bye Bye Birdie.  (Why can't they be like we were, perfect in every way?)  This suggests there will be substantial under reporting of ourselves as perpetrator. But that's a start.  And it means that a more thorough form of data gathering would require going beyond self-reporting and require people to report about others in their group interactions as well as in their bilateral interactions.

Now I want to briefly try to line these categories up with racism.  This is purely guesswork, but I hope it is not entirely unreasonable. Takers are racists.  Suckers can be made into racists by propaganda.  I dare say much of our politics are about this.  People who are fundamentally collegial are prone to be anti-racist, as are Model 2 leaders.  Model 1 leaders, in contrast, are more apt to be racist.  Racism by negligence, as distinct from racism by intent, is possible for people in all the categories.  But if anti-racism training is targeted at the negligence form of racism, it will fail with those who are not collegial and who hold Model 1 as their theory in action

I want to close with a little bit of experience of mixed-race interaction which I observed by listening.  My wife, who worked in campus HR until she retired last week, had many many meetings conducted online after the stay-at-home-orders were put in place.  Her habit was to use the speaker from her computer rather than use headphones.  I could hear much of the conversation this way.  Often the subject matter was quite serious and difficult to navigate. Yet collegiality was preserved throughout these meetings, even though the days got long, with some calls ending well after 6 PM.  And a point I'd like to raise here is that there was a lot of laughter and humor.  Much of that was situational, though a bit was also deliberate.  Dealing with one stressful situation after another, humor seems to be the glue that keeps things together.  And the people evidently had high regard for each other.  Even when they disagreed, the fact that they knew each other so well and trusted each other was how they navigated these matters.  Further, there were also some errors made by one person making a false assumption, because the volume of information was huge and it was hard to process it all.  In this sense collegiality also provided error checking that individuals simply couldn't do.  Misunderstandings were cleared up before they had a chance to multiply and create real difficulties.  Though I'm very glad my wife is retired now, it was inspiring to hear these interactions on a regular basis.  It's how all of us should interact.

My own direct interaction in a mixed-race setting these days is mainly with my primary care doctor.  I don't see him that frequently, for which I'm grateful. When I do see him, race is completely a non-issue.  That's the way I'd prefer it to be.  I wonder if we'll ever get there for the society as a whole.

Other Biases We Have - Is Now The Time To Talk About Them?

I'm reacting to two things I've seen recently.  One is this opinion piece from yesterday by Michael J. Sandel, Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice. The other, is a cartoon a friend in Facebook shared a couple of days ago. The upshot is that for White liberals, who mean well but are guilt laden by their prior lack of sensitivity, they must actively eliminate prior prejudice in themselves that they can now identify.  An alternative view is that for the time being the focus should remain squarely on BlackLivesMatter and excessive use of force against young Black men.  Other biases should remain in the background for now. In this piece I'm going to argue for the alternative view, but first do so indirectly.

I will begin with some examples of bias/prejudice that the reader can use to reflect on the broader question.  This list is by no means exhaustive, but I hope it is illustrative.   

Is it true blondes have more fun?  This TV commercial aired frequently when I was a kid.  I'm guessing that most people my age will remember this line, even now.  If you watched a fair amount of TV, then it was drummed into you.  I thought the comments that follow the video were pretty amusing, so worth reading.  That an individual has a preference for one type of hair color over another is no big deal.  That there is a systematic such preference is quite another thing.  What would be the source of that?

The Marlboro Man, the image of masculinity. We who did watch a lot of TV learned that the cowboy was the good guy and a tough character.  I'm pretty sure that having a cowboy smoking a cigarette was not part of the picture for the kid shows we watched.  (I Googled - Roy Rogers smoking a cigarette - but didn't find any images which showed that).  Further, the linkage of the cigarette dangling out of the mouth of the actor to the actor being cool certainly goes beyond the cowboy image. (I also Googled - James Dean smoking a cigarette - there were many images readily available.)  But all of this eventually consolidated in the image of the Marlboro Man.

In case it's not obvious, these first two examples had the image manufactured by Madison Avenue types for selling some product.  Creating a stereotype is effective as a marketing device.  Many of the biases we do have is because somebody else created them and thus was advantaged by us holding these biases.

Tall people are paid more. Sometimes I mention this in the economics class I teach, with the caveat that we're not talking about NBA players here (where height might correlate well with productivity).  The point of the research in this area is that height and productivity at work should have zero correlation, so height shouldn't matter for what people are paid, but it does.  The book Moneyball illustrated a similar type of bias in how professional scouts evaluated talent (so the wrong players were considered shoo-ins, getting drafted highly, but then under performing).

Ageism.  There are many dimensions to this and in the economy that will exist after the pandemic is over, many of those other dimensions should be considered.  Here I just want to consider one of these.  Imagine you are trying to fill a position and most of the people who are applying for the job are in their 20s or 30s, but there is one candidate who is in their mid 50s.  Will age matter for who gets the job offer, regardless of the other credentials people bring to the work?   As I retired early and looked for some alternative things to do the first couple of years after retirement, I experienced this sort of thing.  I don't think it matters, at least in higher education, for people already working, though even there it might impact promotion decisions.  (Conceivably, in the promotion case, there is a seniority bias that works in reverse.)

Students who skip class frequently.  This one I'm including here because it brings front and center my own biases.  Through most of my teaching (all except fall 2017) I have not required students to attend, but my syllabus said that they were encouraged to attend.  I then used attendance as a proxy for those who were serious about the course versus those who were goofing off.  For many years I thought this was sensible.  But then I learned that student physical or mental health can be a reason for missing class, so it was wrong of me to attribute that to lack of effort.  I want to help students who are struggling in my class, but who are putting in some effort.  Once in a while, I was getting it wrong.

I now want to generalize from the examples but do this very briefly, relying on the approach taken in Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.  Our intuitive selves think fast, so reach conclusions quickly. Stereotyping is a product of our intuitive selves. In contrast, our thoughtful selves think slow, more carefully examine the evidence, and can identify situations where the stereotype produces the wrong answer.  You might then regard advice to look at our own biases as tantamount to urging us to be more thoughtful.  As a retired university professor, I must say I find that attractive.  But Kahneman's theory includes an additional wrinkle.  Our thoughtful selves get tired and can become overworked, at which point our intuitive selves take over.  If that's true, then one might wonder what the best use of our thoughtful selves is.  For those of us who are time abundant because we are retired, one answer might prevail.  For those who are working full time and are already extremely busy, adding to the cognitive load is a blunder.  Most people nowadays, especially those who are working from home, need to find ways to offload work.  Examining all your biases every day is piling on work and will almost certainly get a quick once over each day, nothing more. This will be a waste of time that simply creates more stress.

* * * * *

I now want to switch gears and make a different argument, along political lines.  The Democratic coalition now will hold through the election, because beating Trump is on everyone's radar.  There is total agreement in that objective.

What will happen after the election?  Will the Democratic coalition continue to hold then?  So many voters going into November have a grievance of one sort or another or a key issue that they want to see get addressed.  I wrote about this in my previous post.  The coalition will hold if these voters are patient and understand their pet issue will get addressed eventually, but perhaps not immediately.  The coalition will fall apart otherwise, with this caveat.  Perhaps there can be one designated subgroup that is allowed to be impatient and to expect its issue to be addressed immediately. In my opinion, that one subgroup is African-Americans who fully expect racial justice to be at the top of the agenda in a Biden administration. And, I fear, that implementing a real plan to manage the pandemic will still come first, and for a while might crowd out doing anything on the racial justice front. I hope the Democratic coalition can hold that long and not fracture then and there.

In this sense our politics is like ourselves in our thinking.  The sensible approach can proceed if it is focused, but it will become overwhelmed if it has to do everything at once.  White liberals should recognize this and not try to elevate their other pet issues now (e.g., the $15 minimum wage), but to make sure that those issues remain on the radar of the Democratic party.  Those issues will be addressed when there is sufficient bandwidth to deal with them.