Impatience

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

Male Fail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demographics and Democratics

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

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

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

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

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

At least, that is something to wish for.

An Oddity That May Be Worth Further Consideration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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