Charity, Government, or Joint Provision of Social Services: When Is One Better than Either of the Other Two?

For the past few years I have been making a monthly contribution to the local food bank, part of my usual charitable giving.  A couple of weeks ago I learned that USDA had been giving grants to food banks around the country, but those were cut by DOGE recently.  I wondered how I should respond to this news.  Should I increase the amount of my monthly contribution?  As one person operating in isolation, that would just be a drop in the bucket.  Would it be possible for enough like-minded people to contribute more so as to enable the food banks to continue their operation, even if it weren't a perfect match for the DOGE cuts?  And how would the needed coordination come about to make this outcome possible?  It is these questions which provide the fuel for this post.

The post is also fueled by the little bit of news and opinion pieces I have been reading as of late, which have the Democrats searching for a coherent direction in which to respond to the Trump offensive.  I will offer an idealistic pie-in-the-sky approach that might at least be considered some before dismissing it as too impractical.  Let me begin.

The good about charity is that it addresses a felt need and that those who make donations to the charitable organization do so voluntarily.  Under these circumstances, the need always seems to exceed what the charitable organization can deliver.  In other words, the donations and the need don't line up perfectly and the charitable organization is constrained to limit its services within what's made available via donations.  Government provision of service, in contrast, can scale up well beyond that, but then services are funded by taxes (or deficit spending) and taxes are often cast as coercive rather than as social obligation needed to maintain the public weal.  With this simple (and perhaps simplistic) casting of the circumstances, the scale of the need then determines the better way of doing things.  At low scale, charity is better.  At very high scale, government provision is better, so food stamps rather than food banks.  Joint provision makes the most sense when the scale is somewhere in the middle.   This story could be readily complicated to make it more realistic.  I will refrain from doing so here, because I want to move onto other matters.

I receive lots of solicitations from non-profit organizations, some of which are charities, but some of which are not, such as for a Democratic Party organization or a Democratic candidate. I find there is a very large number of such solicitations.  And I also get commercial solicitations, a remarkable number for life insurance that I don't need, and others for a new credit card or a new bank account.  In total I find the solicitations overwhelming and for the most part I entirely ignore them, which renders them ineffective.  I wonder how many others are in the same boat as me on this score. Would it be possible to reduce the volume of the solicitations, perhaps by consolidating many of them, and thereby get the few that do still come through to capture my attention in a way where I might respond positively to one of them?

On a different point, one needs to concede that the Republicans are far better at propaganda than the Democrats.  In large part, this is because negative messaging is usually more effective.  In the past, some of that negative messaging has gone into demonizing the people who receive government assistance, casting them as immoral cheaters.  For example, back in the 1970s  in response to AFDC, we heard about Welfare Queens who were ripping off the taxpayer.  While personally I find such messaging offensive, there is no doubt that it was effective with many other voters, by appealing to their prior prejudices. The Democrats have a harder job here, in trying to deliver an uplifting message about government being helpful to its citizens, one that voters take sincerely rather than regard with deep cynicism.  How might such a message get through?

And still a different thought, which I think should be given some consideration.  In a well functioning society every citizen plays a role.  But in the rhetoric of politics, there is a tendency to focus on some sub-population only and ignore the rest of the voters.  It is necessary to have inclusivity across economic classes in the political rhetoric, if at all possible.  The Democrats now want to embrace economic populism, which to me is quite okay, but then it seems that voters like me are largely ignored, a mistake in my view.  We have an important role to play, though mainly out of social obligation rather than as recipients of government largesse.  Widespread need and social obligation are two sides of the same coin.  The political rhetoric should reflect that.

Having set the table, I'm ready to deliver my proposal to address these issues.  The Democrats should form a charitable foundation, for now call it the Democratic Party Foundation (DPF).  (I tried to come up with an alternative foundation name that was a riff on The Invisible Hand, but everything I attempted was already taken.  Somebody more adept at marketing can come up with a better name.)  The purpose of the DPF is first to make grants to charitable organizations, such as the food bank.  Second, when there is evident need but there is no charitable organization operating to address the need, the DPF will be empowered to create such a charitable organization to fill the gap. Third, as long as the Democrats maintain minority status in Congress all Democratic organizations, such as the DCCC, will suspend their own fundraising activity and instead redirect potential contributors to the DPF.  Likewise, Democratic candidates for office will redirect their campaign contributions to the DPF.  The hope is that this will refocus attention on the need the DPF attempts to address and away from current political issues, which are quite nasty.  Fourth, partly just to educate Americans about their fellow citizens and partly to encourage additional donations, the DPF will shine a light on people in need, under various circumstances.  And last, up front the DPF will announce that if and when the Democrats become the majority party in Congress, and take over the White House as well, some of what the DPF supports might very well move to government provided programs instead, because the need is much greater than the contributions the DPF can bring in to address the need.  

Some evident challenges that the DPF will face are about how to maintain fairness in selecting those charities the DPF does support and what level of support the DPF does provide, how not to become overly bureaucratic so that the bulk of the donations to the DPF end up as grants to other charities, and how to avoid even an appearance of impropriety.  I don't have solutions for these challenges that I can present here, but it is evident that such solutions need to be contemplated in advance of the formation of the DPF.  Further, as one can anticipate that many of those in need won't receive any help from the DPF, one wonders whether they will remain bitter about the Democrats or if they might as least come to agree that the DPF is doing as best as it can to address the issues.  What would it take to make the latter more likely?

In case it is not evident yet, going all in with the DPF is meant to be an extraordinarily drastic solution, which one might hope should become evident soon after the DPF begins to operate.  For the sake of argument, let's say the DPF has some early success, the consequence being that the narrative in the media becomes more about the overwhelming need many citizens are feeling and much less about what Trump and Musk are doing to upset the apple cart.  Further, suppose this new narrative begins to have appeal to some very wealthy Americans, both Democrat and Republican.  Might they then make significant donations to the DPF?   And might they also speak out about the absurdity of tax cuts on their own behalf?  Were that to happen, we'd almost be home.

When I was a child my dad would read to me and my siblings at night before we went to bed.  Sometimes it would be Aesop Fables.  My little sketch of a solution to our current dilemma is very much in the spirit of The North Wind and the Sun.  In the story, the Sun wins out.  Wouldn't it be delightful if that were to happen here, pipe dream though it may be.

The Sequel Where Clarence's Older Cousin Turns Mr. Potter Into Another George Bailey

I have a soft spot for schmaltzy movies and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of my favorites.  I must have seen it a zillion times, but in case you haven't, it's available on Amazon Prime, among other places.  

The hero of the story is George Bailey, a genuinely decent person who has lost his way, after his uncle Billy has misplaced a large deposit that their Building and Loan needs to continue to operate.  George takes responsibility for Billy's error but then despairs as there seems no way out of this thicket unless this money is found.  Clarence is George's Guardian Angel.   He helps George work through the various dilemmas, initially by almost drowning so that George has to save him.  Ultimately, it is George's wife Mary who does the heavy lifting, calling all of George's friends to ask them to chip in and help George out.  They do and then some.  George then has his faith restored and Clarence "earns his wings" for helping out this good soul to get on the right path again. 

In this story, Mr. Potter is the bad guy, the richest man in town, but totally uncaring for the others who live in Bedford Falls.  He is stingy and manipulative, a complete contrast to George.  The story I vaguely have in mind would take that at as a starting point, but then via the various happenings that the story depicts, Potter goes through a transformation.  He is unmarried and has no children.  What should he be caring about when he enters the afterlife?  The selfishness might be best understood if he expects to live a considerable while longer and the power he wields gives him personal satisfaction.  In the story as told, he doesn't have to confront that question.  How would his personality change if circumstances forced him to realize the end of his natural life was imminent?  Some alter ego would be needed to help Mr. Potter work through the moral dilemmas and reconcile himself both with his future in the afterlife and his earlier natural life.  Clarence's older cousin, also a Guardian Angel, is in position to do this.  

* * * * *

I have no skill as a screenwriter, so beyond this very brief sketch I am not going to attempt to write this sequel.  I welcome any and all to give it a try and consider what you come up with as an original work of your won, not a derivative of this post.  I want to encourage your creativity, not stifle it.  While we always need interesting new ideas, we especially need them now.

Instead, I want to make two brief points and then close.  One is that this idea of a highly significant life event fundamentally altering one's perspective is not novel.  Indeed, over the past two days I watched the mini-series, Prime Target (it's on AppleTV+) where the protagonist goes through such a transformation in the ultimate episode after a horrific experience in the penultimate episode.  (For the sake of those who might watch this, I don't want my post to be a spoiler.  I will say I thought the series was okay but not great.) I wonder how many other mini-series or movies feature a similar personal transformation in the lead character.

The other point, in case it is not obvious, is that Mr. Potter can be taken as a placeholder for some current day plutocrat.  We might then ask whether such a personal transformation might happen with one of them and what would that take?  Could it be orchestrated by others?  If so, how?  In my previous post, I briefly mentioned coercive means whereby a host of plutocrats change their perspective and thereby enable a credible impeachment of Trump.  But such coercion amounts to a kind of warfare.  Not feeling that necessary as of yet, one wonders whether there is a more benign alternative that might achieve such results.   

I don't want to try to answer that here.  I simply want to encourage others to be asking similar questions.

Should There Be A Remake Of Seven Days In May?

For those who are my age (and those even older) you may very well have read the book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.  I'm sure I read it, maybe in junior high school, or perhaps in 9th or 10th grade. I seem to recall it was quite a compelling read.  More will recall the movie, which starred Burt Lancaster as General James Mattoon Scott, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Kirk Douglas as Jiggs Casey, General Scott's adjutant, Frederic March as the President of the United States, Jordan Lyman; and Ava Gardner as General Scott's jilted lover, Eleanor Holbrook.  

The story is about a coup attempt in the U.S., a plot schemed by higher ups in the military, in which the plan is for General Scott himself to assume the Presidency once the coup succeeds.  General Scott is far more hawkish against the Russians than is President Lyman and with that General Scott has far greater popularity among the public.  A recent treaty with Russia, signed by the President, is viewed as a demonstration of his weakness.  The public is fearful that the Russians won't keep to their end of the bargain.  Jiggs Casey is not one of the conspirators in the plot attempt.  He learns about it by decoding the messaging that he receives on behalf of General Scott.  He then brings this information to the White House, so the President knows about the conspiracy.  The bulk of the story is about how the plot is then thwarted.

It is worthwhile to cast this story within the real events of the time.  The book was first published right around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The movie came out a couple of years later.   The JFK assassination happened the year in between.  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution happened earlier in the same year as when the movie came out.  I started junior high school a couple of years after that, when the Vietnam War was beginning to ramp up.  It took a while before I became aware of anti-war sentiment and the distrust of the military leadership that sentiment engendered.  So, it may be that how you read this book depended on when you read it.  But for me it was clear - Jordan Lyman the duly elected President, his advisers and Jiggs Casey as well were the good guys in the story.  General Scott, who exceeded his authority in plotting the coup, along with his fellow co-conspirators were the bad guys.  

If there were a remake of the story, it would need to be cast in the current moment.  And, at least from where I'm sitting, that means the story would have to be reversed in a critical way.  The coup plotters would be the good guys.  For the good guys to win in the story, the interesting part would then be how to construct a plausible coup attempt that has a chance of succeeding under the current circumstances.

* * * * * 

The above is the view from 64,000 feet.  I know from my teaching days that for learners such a view is not sufficient.  They need another view closer to the ground, an example that illustrates the more general proposition.  For that reason I'm speculating about a possibility, I dare not call it a likelihood, where the coup plotters come from entirely outside the Federal government and then exert their pressure indirectly on those within.

Here is the idea in a nutshell.  While a bunch of assassinations of key players would have visceral appeal to many readers (including me) pulling this off seems incredibly unlikely.  So a different path is needed.  Let's instead consider Impeachment.  Both of the previous Trump Impeachment Trials in the Senate were a mockery.  If there were to be a third such trial (as well as near simultaneous Impeachment Trials for others in the current Executive Branch) how might it be that guilty verdicts are obtained then?  My answer is that ahead of time a sufficient number of Senators would need to be blackmailed in a certain way - namely that donations to their campaigns as well as other largess they have been receiving would be entirely cut off if they voted the wrong way on Impeachment.  Who could make credible such blackmail threats?  The plutocrats (multi-billionaires) who operate behind the scenes could do this.  But why would they do this?  They, in turn, must be blackmailed or themselves kidnapped and forced into it.  They obviously wouldn't do it willingly, at least not at first.  

How do you turn blackmailers and kidnappers into the good guys?  Well, part of this should be considered a latter day Robin Hood story.  Criminal activity that robs from the rich and gives to the poor casts the criminals as heroes.  (Implicitly, there is a backstory of the rich becoming that way on the backs of the poor and then being quite stingy about it.  Robin Hood and his Merry Men are undoing this injustice.)  So, who gets to play this latter day band of Merry Men?

My candidate is some subset of major research universities.  They have the needed expertise in computer science (for hacking into bank accounts), in finance (for knowing how to manipulate funds without arousing attention from the authorities), in providing muscle (via ROTC and possibly other law enforcement preparation programs), and they have the connections with the high rollers who are on their governing boards and comprise their largest donors.  

Now a few preliminary questions need to be asked and answered before this candidate can be considered plausible.  

• Are these research universities in a good position to cast themselves as Robin Hood? At present, the answer is no, as I argued quite extensively in this post: Repricing - in Higher Education and in the Economy as a Whole.  But, apparently higher education is getting clobbered money-wise by the current White House.  If it wants to save itself in the eyes of the public it needs to recast itself in a credible way as a critical instrument toward rebuilding a middle-class society.  And it needs to recast itself to insiders at the university as well, particularly students and faculty.  Toward that end, I suggest a large group reading of Democracy and Education by John Dewey.
  
  
• Do the circumstances justify "biting the hand that feeds you" in having these universities turn on their large donors in the way sketched above?  I'd respond to this question in two different ways.  While the donations are large from the point of the universities' coffers, are they large when considered as a share of the donor's wealth?  If not, what else might be done to put that private wealth toward the public good?  And can donors be convinced of doing that purely by reasoned argument or is that a pipe dream?
  
  
•  Universities are supposed to be havens for free speech and open communication.  In such an environment, how does one keep word of the conspiracy from leaking out so as not to be thwarted by the current regime?  I don't have a good answer for this one.  I only know that the question needs a good answer.
  
  
• If the conspiracy were otherwise effective, would most liberals nonetheless object to it because the ends don't justify the means?
  
  

* * * * *

In this closing section, I want to get at some of my reasons for writing this post.   As with many of my posts, the main goal is to get the reader to think through the issues rather than to provide a blueprint for resolution of these issues.  Further, elsewhere I largely am not writing/commenting/publicly reacting to the current political news, this as a way to keep my emotions somewhat in check.  But I can't keep myself from doing a "what if" exercise of the type that I'm not getting from the little I do read in the news or from posts by my friends.  I spent all these years as an theoretical economist and then an ed tech administrator doing such what if exercises.  It's part of my persona.

From seeing posts in Facebook, evidently there is a lot of frustration with the current White House and a lot of the posts are protests of some sort.  I do understand the need to vent.  I yell at the TV when watching a basketball game and I think the ref made a bad call.  But do I really think my yelling at the TV will impact the game situation at all? 

So there is a reason to ask what coordinated fighting back looks like rather than individual venting.  In between might be coordinated protest, which is legal and ethical.  But is it effective, and if so, how long does it take to be?  Do we have the time available to allow it to work?  It seems to me that under the current circumstances it is reasonable to ask whether there are more expeditious means. 

Then, too, I don't think we can rely on the a purely political solution now.  The Democrats are too weak and in disarray as to how to address the present crisis.  So, shouldn't non-political solutions be contemplated even if they seem improbable at first?

One last point is that I apparently have a bug for Seven Days in May.  About a dozen years ago I wrote a post called ECOMCON, after having watched the movie again.  The underlying issue at the time was the treaty with Iran about them not developing nukes.  So, for me Seven Days in May serves as a good reference point for making argument.  But what about for later generations.  Would they want to watch the movie?  If so, would it entertain them?  I wish I knew the answer to those questions.

Putting Two And Two Together About The Current Trade War

I've read some pieces recently about Trump's misdirection and his taking actions to confound things so that others, the media and the press mainly but also some Republicans, don't understand the real intent.  Using that, I'm going to posit a simple idea that might explain things.

The idea is this.  Certain domestic industries are clamoring for protection.  The one that comes to mind is microchip production.  In the past, Silicon Valley companies have imported their microchips, possibly from a vertical integration arrangement where this critical input was produced abroad as part of a global supply chain.  Suppose that, as of late, the decision was made to bring that supply chain entirely within the U.S.  You may very well recall that this was a goal both for Biden and for Harris.

Now, the efficient thing to do in this case, assuming the government supported this goal, would be to place sector-specific tariffs to make the import of these inputs more expensive and thereby enable domestic production of the inputs to be more viable.  But that would be showing one's cards.  Trump does not play Indian Poker.  

So, instead, we have the current tariff morass, where the bulk of it simply offers cover for the desired protectionist policy.  Further, to make things more explicit, we really only want to apply tariffs to inputs that come from China, though one might imagine that China would itself use intermediaries to avoid the tariffs, if possible.  We don't have any desire to place tariffs on goods from Mexico or Canada that are not themselves imports from China.  

I want to note that this is all conjecture on my part.  I have no direct evidence about what I'm saying here.  But it does make sense to me.

Maslow Encore Une Fois

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correlation, Causation, and Inference in Big Time College Sports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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