Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?

This post has two different sources that served as stimuli.  One of those is the Opinion piece in the New York Times from a few days ago, How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do.  This is other than how things have been historically and it serves as a contributing factor in the Democrats struggle to find an identity.  The other source I reached a bit more indirectly.  I was watching Season 3 of the Diplomat on Netflix.  (The show itself is a bit too absurd for my taste, but it does fill the time till I find something else that appeals to me more.). In the casting Allison Janney is the President of the U.S. and Bradley Whitford plays the First Gentleman.  

Almost immediately, my thoughts turned to The West Wing and it occurred to me that many members of the Professional Class likely were fans of The West Wing, so that if arguments were put forward in language familiar to viewers of that show, those arguments would apt to be persuasive.  I thought of one particular episode where President Bartlet plays simultaneous chess with both Sam and Toby, who are in different rooms.  And the chess games really just serve as a cover for more serious discussion.  With Sam, in particular, the President urges, "See the whole board."  (This is from Season 3, Episode 14, Hartsfield's Landing.)

I thought that seeing the whole board was a good metaphor and that member's of the professional class, most of whom are highly educated, would like to hear arguments about their own political identify that helped them to see the whole board.  Also, as part of the character's background President Bartlet had been a  Nobel Prize winning economist.  This might make members of the professional class more receptive in receiving economic arguments concerning their political identity, though from my years of teaching economics I know there is a real risk that too much drill down will put the audience to sleep. So, in the ideal, a high level overview would be presented and the drill down would be made available to those who want it but not be included in that overview. 

As it turns out, many of the points I want to put forward, I've actually made many years earlier, first as a reaction to the TEA Party, where I was appalled by their narrow-minded selfishness, and then up and through the Presidential election of 2016, where Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote but Donald Trump won the Electoral College and thus became President.  Plus, by making these points prior to the present context, I'm credible on at least one point - I've been thinking about these issues for some time, so the ideas haven't been hastily constructed to fit the current circumstance.  The earliest of these, posted in April 2011, was meant as a bit of humor, Raise My Taxes --- PLEASE!  But the subsequent post, The Lanny Tax Plan - Sort of, was intended to be serious.  Item (F) in the plan is closest in spirit to what I want to write about here and is a good way to introduce the ideas, giving substantive meaning to the word "embrace" in the title of this post.

(F) Raise marginal tax rates gradually for all households starting at the 80th percentile, $100,000 a year, in such a manner that reaching the 98th percentile you have the Obama proposal to eliminate the Bush cuts. That is the burden of tax increases should be much more broad than is being proposed at present. The message needs to be shared burden, not punitive on the rich.

Now let's get to the tasks at hand needed to "see the whole board." They are:

• Characterize the current situation so it is amenable for analysis.
• Consider the relevant history on how we got here.
• Propose an immediate solution that would ameliorate the situation, i.e., perform a Machiavellian analysis rather than engage in wishful thinking.
• Consider why the participants would persist with this solution in the long term, i.e., ask about the ethical considerations and, in particular, focus on social responsibility as a prime motivation.
• Ask what actions might the participants take that would convince others that their commitments are genuine. This is necessary to get others to join in.
• Anticipate pushback from those who stand to lose if this solution takes effect.  Consider what measures might effectively counter this pushback.
• Likewise, take Murphy's Law seriously and then consider in advance how to prevent things going wrong, also taking seriously that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  In other words, do a SWOT analysis on the proposed solution.

Let's proceed to the analysis.

Framing

Beginning with the obvious, so we can move past it, members of the professional class who are Democrats clearly are anti-Trump and anti-Trumpism.  They would like to see that defeated soundly, in a way where successors don't emerge and instead there is some return to "normalcy." That said, I want to take a longer term view, so will frame things somewhat differently that I hope is nonetheless sensible to the reader.  

America is a plutocracy de facto while it is a democracy de jure.  The plutocrats control Congress mainly via their control of the Republican party.  Economically, the plutocrats are the main beneficiary that results from this control, so it comes as no surprise that whenever the Republicans are in power tax cuts that favor the rich are a big part of the agenda.  

But, because we remain a de jure democracy, these Republicans still need to get elected and there are far too few plutocrats to get that done on their own.  They must rely on rank and file voters for this.  At this level of abstraction, one might wonder why these rank and file voters don't demand a slice of the economic pie for themselves.  In fact, they have been distracted from doing so by a massive amount of propaganda aimed to stoke their anger and keep them in an ongoing state of agitation.  When I was a kid, we learned in school about Yellow Journalism, which was prominent during the Spanish-American war. More modern media has greatly intensified the effectiveness of the approach.  The movie Network, which came out in 1976, was prescient in this regard. Social networking online has only magnified the effect further.  Contentious social issues of one sort or another are the red meat that the plutocrats throw to their rank and file dogs, who chew them up.  The rank and file are emotionally addicted to this role of propaganda to stoke their fires.  From the viewpoint of an outsider looking in, the rank and file are being played by the plutocrats in this way, so as not to ask for pecuniary reward. 

Professional class members are far from blameless, however.  In a recent post entitled, Crass Warfare, I wrote a bit about my own financial situation.  After voicing concern about the possibility that I will need quite expensive long-term care, as I went through the experience where my mother required it, I wrote:

But apart from that, modest changes in either income or expenditure have no impact on family well being and mostly money matters are not on my mind, even while I'm the one who files the tax return annually.

If that's even within the ballpark of how many members of the professional class think about their own financial situation, then it at least partly explains why social issues seem to have become a prominent concern.  Yet the Democrats are often perceived as hypocritical this way and sometimes the criticism comes from other than the Republicans.  For example, consider this piece by Richard V. Reeves, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich, which takes on zoning restrictions in housing as one evident point of such vulnerability. Yet it doesn't take on the source of the pretending itself, that they literally might not realize how well off they are, for as Daniel Kahneman explains in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, people have difficulty imagining beyond their own immediate experience.  And again taking myself as representative, I grew up in a middle class household in the 1960s.  Even if my material well being is much more advantaged now than it was then, I still feel myself middle class in outlook. Kahneman refers to this as WYSIATI (What you see is all there is). 

But in a quite different vein, organized labor is far weaker than it was 50 years ago and thus doesn't have as much voice within the party.  There are multiple voices, which together may seem like noise rather than a coherent message.  And now the Democrats largely appear in disarray, with only a handful of exceptions to suggest otherwise.  This is not the path toward electoral control by getting working class people to switch parties.

When I started my first real job as an assistant professor at Illinois, 45 years ago, I soon learned about voting your pocketbook, as I would occasionally argue state and national political issues with colleagues who were Republicans.  (At the time that meant they were anti-regulation.)  The idea that voters will express selfish preferences is at the heart of economic models of politics and I became quite familiar with the approach.  But there is an older idea, noblesse oblige, that says privilege conveys social obligation.  As a kid, I learned this idea from JFK's Inaugural Address:

Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.

An embrace of democratic socialism by members of the professional class would then be a kind of noblesse oblige, in the spirit of JFK.  Perhaps it should be termed "profess oblige" to make it sound distinctive, so that it will engage both members of the professional class and other voters as well.  For in order that this be truly effective it must convince other members of the professional class to behave likewise, and that must happen en masse in a way that's visible to all.  

This is far from a trivial matter, as with every issue regarding voting and social participation there is a need to overcome the free-rider problem.  In other words, if my social class as a whole is collectively making significant contributions and my individual contribution is negligible relative to the total because I'm only one of many in my social class, then the collective contribution should still be effective even if I don't make mine. So, acting selfishly, I have incentive to hold onto my money and not make a contribution.  The free-rider problem can be overcome by social conscience, if enough people possess it and act on it.  Among those who haven't acted on it yet, one might imagine that a sense of urgency could cause one to act or that peer pressure could also do so.  But something else would be needed to make it persist, habit the likely explanation or some other reenforcing mechanism.

Let's make one more point here and then move onto the next section.  This will take a lot of time, both to happen initially and then to persist.  We have a tendency to want solutions that work readily at the snap of one's fingers.  That can't happen here.  This is the long game and members of the professional class need to understand that in order to play it well.  

History

Readers need to learn about the history of income distribution in the U.S. and the history of tax rates, so they have a foundation for the ideas expressed here.  They should also learn some of the history about electoral politics.  One thought on that score is to consider voter participation, which from my eyeball look at the data has been pretty abysmal.  Might non-voters be attracted to vote if the Democratic party as a whole embraced Democratic Socialism?  Another thing to look at are the episodes where Democrats had control of both the White House and Congress.  Those experiences have been fleeting.  As surely the full agenda of Democratic Socialism can't be accomplished within just two years, what can be done to make full control of this sort more enduring? 

With an anecdotal approach to our history, one might get much of the message across.  For instance, we are now enduring this insanely long shutdown of the Federal government where Food Stamp benefits will likely be cut.  Consider the contrast to the present in the situation near the end of World War II, where the G.I. Bill was passed, showing that our government then was willing to invest in ordinary Americans.  Yet as compelling as the anecdotal approach may be, it can be seen as cherrypicking the anecdotes.

So, one might prefer to look at actual data, which for the variables I suggested above are numerical.  Below I will provide a suggestive look at such information.  Eventually, one will need a more exhaustive and carefully done look, yet constructed in a style where readers can make good meaning of what is being presented.  Let's begin.

I originally constructed the following in a post entitled, Socialism Reconsidered - Part 2.  The table was constructed with data about household income.  I got these data from Wikipedia, which got them from the Census.  The data are divided into quintile bands, with the amounts showing the upper limit of each band.  I computed the numbers in blue, which show the differences in the upper limits of consecutive bands.  Notice that they rise over time  and themselves look like an income distribution, reflecting that the higher income households are getting further away from the median income household during this time interval. 

The time period that is shown gives the years when the economy was recovering from the burst in the housing bubble, which is what precipitated the global financial crisis.  While the financial system was saved, many who had been living in houses with underwater mortgages were dispossessed.  They were obviously upset by that - the rich get their debts forgiven but ordinary folks do not.  Obama was President at the time and it may be that there was little he could do other than what was actually done, given that he had so little support from Republicans in Congress. The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, after a considerable period of debate within Congress and ultimately without a "public option." Only one Republican member of the House voted for it.  No Republicans in the Senate supported it.  One wonders now how many Trump supporters are on Obamacare and if they are aware of this history.

I have it on my to do list to update this table with more recent years of data as well as years earlier.  Yet I've been vexed by the thought that if the table has many more rows, then simply eyeballing it will not be possible and the message from the data may be entirely lost.  So I reflected about some way to get out of this difficulty.  Eventually I came up with this post, A Simple Statistic for Measuring Income Inequality.  The household income distribution is skewed.  While at lower incomes it looks like a bell curve, there is a very long upper tail reflecting that higher incomes are increasingly spread out. 

My statistic is the ratio of Median/Mean household income.  With a bell curve, this ratio is 100%.  With a skewed distribution as I've described it, the ratio is less than 100%.  This spreadsheet shows annual results for the statistic from 1953 through 2022.  Note that it says family income rather than household income.  Apparently the Fed divides households into two groups, family and non-family. As the data for the former were available, that's what I went with.  So, a good chunk of the population is missing in these results.  Nonetheless, I think because they can be readily eyeballed the results are interesting.  The decline in the statistic starts in the 1970s, where the decline is modest.  It is precipitated in the 1980s and continues thereafter. In my mind the decline in the statistic is a ready way to see the hollowing out of the middle class numerically.

Yet the reader should be cautioned.  I've shown this post to some economist friends who were not impressed by it at all.  Focusing only on variables of the center, median and mean, implies missing all the other information inherent in the full distribution.  So, perhaps I'm oversimplifying with this presentation.  But as I wrote in my post about the statistic, I think the Gini Coefficient is too complex for the general population and consequently too many readers would be lost if that is what was presented.  So, I will leave it there and move on to consider tax rates.

The Federal Income Tax is a complex beast and comparing changes with it over time is a non-trivial matter.  Nonetheless, we can make some headway by breaking it up into deductions, on the one hand, and tax brackets and tax rates, on the other.  Here I'm only going to focus on the latter, though if at some later point in time one wants to contemplate the more egregious of the former, then do note that the Carried Interest Deduction is probably at the top of the list. The table below is from a post entitled, Ask What You Can Do For Your Country.  For the category, Married Filing Jointly, it gives focal incomes in $50,000 increments, inflation adjusted, (there is an error in the labelling, where it should say Taxable Income rather than AGI) and then gives the amount owed to the IRS, first reported in 1980 and then in 5-year intervals after that.

Note that in 1980 Jimmy Carter was still President.  The reader should be able to fill in who was President for all the subsequent years.  Eyeballing of the table reveals there has been a general decline in average tax rates over time, more so at high incomes.  The reader should note that with the initial tax cut under Reagan, efficiency arguments were advanced to justify the action - the economy would grow faster and thereby have the tax cut pay for itself.  This argument was given by the Laffer Curve, though I believe many economists didn't buy that argument.  Subsequent tax cuts after 1980, I believe, didn't receive such justification.  They were simply part and parcel of the Republican dogma. 

The table clearly needs updating so we can better talk about the current situation.  Yet even with only those years that do appear the table is intended to get the reader to ask, is there a socially desirable set of average tax rates?  With that, note that under Clinton average tax rates rose at higher incomes, which was one reason why the government achieved a budget surplus in the tail end of his tenure.  (There was also the boom generated from the dot.com bubble, an additional important factor.)   We tend to think of tax policy changes as based on where rates are at present and then consider increments or decrements based on the political feasibility in changing rates. But doing it this way makes it seem there is no set of rates that is fundamental.  Might voters feel otherwise?  My own opinion is that the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001 were pure give away and of no efficiency benefit whatsoever.  Others, of course, are entitled to their own opinion about it.

Let's wrap up this section with a bit of history on voting.  A table on voter participation rates during years with Presidential elections is given in the table in this post, Socialism Reconsidered - Part 3.  It hovers in the mid 50% range.  And we should note that participation rates during the primaries and out year elections tend to be lower.  For more than a decade I've participated in early voting and for the last couple of years that's been via vote by mail.  Of course, I'm a retiree.  Would non-retirees be more likely to participate if these options were generally available?  Thinking of this differently, is there mileage to be gotten by playing the participation rate card?  Or is that a political loser?  We know that members of the professional class participate at a much higher rate than does the general population.  So they are over-represented while the poor are under-represented.  Maybe the question should be framed still differently.  Would the Democrats effectively raising the participation rate help to favor them in elections?  Conversely, what about efforts in this direction that were largely ineffective?  

Finally, look at the table presented here on Party divisions of Congress.  When Jimmy Carter was President, for one term only 1977-1981, the Democrats were the majority in both houses.  In contrast, when Bill Clinton was President, the Democrats were the majority in both houses only for the first two years.  Thereafter the Republicans were the majority in both houses.  Under Obama, again the Democrats were the majority in both houses the first two years, then for the next four years it was split with the Democrats the majority in the Senate and the Republicans the majority in the House, while for the last two years the Republicans were the majority in both houses.  Under Biden, the House was majority Democrat the first to years and majority Republican the last two years.  The Senate was closer to being evenly divided, as a few independents played the role of swing voters.

The lesson I'd like to draw from this is that if there is a political agenda that will take multiple terms of Congress to accomplish, there is a need to get voters aware of the importance of this agenda and perhaps to not be so upset if the entire agenda hasn't been completed all at once, so they continue to vote in support of the agenda.  This will require quite a change from the historical norm and thus should be thought of as an enormous challenge to rise to.

Initial Proposal

Let's imagine that members of the professional class send a public message, a draft of which is below.  The message is meant as an encouragement for the leadership among the Democrats to embrace Democratic Socialism and for all voters who would benefit from such a move economically to vote for the Democrats in future elections.  The message needs to be credible.  As they say, talk is cheap, so mere talk won't cut the mustard.  There must be actions taken that are sufficiently costly as to signal that these members are serious in their intent.  Let's call the taking of such a costly action an embrace.

We now want to consider the embrace of Democratic Socialism as an innovation and consider how innovations diffuse a la Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.  In particular, I'd like to ask who will play the role of Connectors and Mavens.  The former can't be very well known Democratic Socialists, at least not at first, as the embrace by others would be too self-serving for them.  It must be various experts from within the professional class - top journalists, lawyers, doctors, university professors, etc.  What would it take for there to be early adopters within this group, if the proposal became known to them?  I don't have a good answer to that question, which is a current weak point in the argument. But if some are identified I'd imagine they'd make brief individual videos intended for an audience within a given field and then a group discussion to highlight the commonalities in their views, say recorded in Zoom and reproduced for all to see, with the hope that these would gather a large viewing and that some fraction of the viewers would then themselves embrace.

The embrace itself would be a payment of money toward a Demonstration Project.  The Demonstration Project would benefit foodbanks, homeless shelters, school organizations, and other charities at various locations around the country.  It would time to do this in a balanced manner, regardless of whether the locale was Red, Blue, or Purple.  Ultimately, the aggregate of what is given to these various organizations must line up with the amount contributed to the Demonstration Project.

To make matters concrete, the amount of the donation would be the difference in the income tax owed if the rates tax were those of 1995, inflation adjusted, compared to the actual tax paid during the past year.  There would need to be a tax calculator that readily produced those amounts and have this information bundled with the receipt for the donation.  There would also need to be the highest level of information security so that the individual's identity is certified as legitimate, on the one hand, but is not publicly revealed, on the other, to avoid harassment of the individual after the fact.  Then the full pool of donations, absent the names of the donors, can be made public to show what part of the professional class has made the embrace.  Independent auditors need to certify the entire process.

I haven't said this yet, but the project would certainly accept donations from very rich donors, who indicate support for the underlying ideas even if they are not members of the professional class. It might or might not accept modest donations from others in the population, depending on whether that can be done in an inexpensive manner.  Surely it would be good for others to show their support for the project, but that will likely have little impact on Democrat leaders to adopt Democratic Socialism as the core of the party platform and it likely won't persuade too many Trump supporters to switch party allegiance.  

With that as background, below is a draft of the message that members of the professional class will implicitly sign when they make donations to the Demonstration Project.

I, who am relatively well off financially, want to convey to the Democratic Party leadership that I willingly embrace a substantial tax increase on my household in order to help restore America to a middle-class society.  Toward that end I urge the party leadership to embrace Democratic Socialism as the core of the party platform.  I also want to urge voters who would benefit economically from this embrace to vote for Democrat candidates.  They need to understand that many of the very rich in the country will be against this, but if we secure solid majorities in Congress and the Presidency as well, then we can pass laws that promote Democratic Socialism, which will very well include substantial taxation on the rich, even though many of them will perceive it as punitive.  So be it.  We are a democracy where it is the will of the majority of the people that should speak, not the will of the majority of the dollars.

Let me close this section by noting that I didn't mean to pooh-pooh the role played by prominent Democratic Socialists, inside and outside of government.  And my hope is that political infighting would be minimal in determining how a leadership coalition would work, should the embrace move forward.  But I also want to say that I think a youth movement among the leadership would be welcome.  I am soon to turn 71 and consider myself a geezer.  I know that I don't have the needed vigor to be part of such leadership, even if I can write a sketch of the plan, as in this post.  If the post does persuade others, then it will be time for a baton pass to those who are more vigorous in order to move the project along.

Confronting Murphy's Law

As I referred to The West Wing early in this post, let me do so again to say that sometimes we are our own worst enemy.  After finishing up one bit of business, President Bartlet would often ask others in the Oval Office, what's next?  We're all used to having a broad agenda and going from one item to the next on it, even if those items are apparently unrelated.  In particular, if there is some early success with the embrace of Democratic Socialism, the longtime Democrats who are angry and tired from Trump's attacks on various social justice programs will feel impelled to undo some of that and address others with new initiatives.  But those who switch over from supporting Trump very likely didn't do that to address social justice issues.  If there is only a little of that maybe it's okay and the coalition can remain intact.  I don't know.  But why risk it, especially early on?  At present Democratic Socialism will be the New New Thing for the party.  But even as it becomes the Same Old, Same Old, this a word of caution that sticking with it might be the right play and doing anything else will be seen as being too greedy.  I'm not a political insider on this, but I will say that polling about it may not be enough, especially if people's attitudes on this score change significantly over the business cycle - in particular, a recently laid off person is likely to be resentful about a variety of things.  It's not that writing this paragraph will eliminate the problem entirely.  But it is good to be aware of it ahead of time.  

The Smack of the Republican Attack Dog

How much did the propaganda around Benghazi and Hilary Clinton's email determine the outcome of the Presidential election in 2016?  That was a rhetorical question to get the reader to realize there likely will be some sort of propaganda response to the ideas presented in this post, if there is any sign of an initial uptake of them.  What that propaganda response will be is beyond me, but as with the previous section, it seems to me better to appreciate the likelihood of it happening than to ignore it in the planning.  The obvious question then is this.  Are there forms of self-protection that might be taken to minimize the impact of such attacks so that current Trump supporters who would benefit from a move to Democratic Socialism are not swayed by those attacks?   The only thing that occurs to me now is that much of the Demonstration Project leadership should come from outside national politics.  Trying to impeach private citizens for expressing themselves is fraught with difficulty.  Arguing that elected officials have violated their oath of office is a different matter.   Maybe the rules have changed on this since Trump has returned to the White House.  But at least early on, I would play it as if the rules are not different.

Wrap Up

My stated goal with this post was to provide a see-the-whole-board presentation of what members of the professional class embracing Democratic Socialism would look like and then what it might achieve.  My hidden agenda was to get these ideas off my chest, as I've been sitting on these thoughts for a while now.

My difficulty in writing this piece was in determining whether I'm giving too much detail or not nearly enough.  Perhaps the answer varies from reader to reader.  

I know of one immediate criticism - there is too much wishful thinking in the piece.  No doubt, there is some.  I hope to get some early feedback from some friends and then perhaps make some modifications in the writing based on that.  

I always wonder with pieces of mine like this one, if it isn't entirely wishful thinking why hasn't somebody else come up with it already?  The only answer I have is that it seems most people are caught up in current events.  I think it is necessary to step away from current events to consider the ideas presented here as a real possibility.  It is why I've referred to many of my earlier posts, all of which were written before 2020, with the exception of the post on the simple statistic about income inequality.  

Here is one last point.  Being willing to to pay more in income tax to embrace Democratic Socialism is one thing.  Taking a leadership role in the Demonstration Project is quite another.  The people who would qualify for it based on their reputations are likely incredibly busy already.  This project will demand intense attention. Making that sort of commitment is huge.  I do hope there are people who will step up to it.  And I hope that happens soon. 

An Analog Mind in a Digital World

I spend an inordinate amount of time these days doing word puzzles.  As the solutions can be computer generated, one might wonder why the puzzles have such a hold over me.  My favorite puzzle these days is Letter Boxed, which I try to solve in two words, making it more of a challenge to find such a solution.   In this puzzle, consecutive letters within a word must be on different sides of the box, so words with double letters are not allowed, but more importantly many other letter combinations that seem natural also are not allowed.  I will use today's puzzle, depicted below, to try to illustrate why solving this puzzle has such a hold on me.

Experience with this puzzle suggests the first step, which is to note the vowels, in this case there are all 5 of them, and then to note the challenging letters, which I would say are the "x" and the "v" though some of the other consonants might prove challenging as well.  At this point, the aim is to find a long word, using as many different letters as possible, which includes all of or at least most of the challenging letters.  

Now, here is the thing.  Intuition is a key bit in coming up with a word to try.  And it is that intuition plays such an important role for me, which makes me want to come back and try the puzzle again the next day.  But intuition doesn't work in one big Gestalt.  Instead, there is an initial guess of a plausible solution.  After an entire life of the mind doing this sort of thing in various contexts, it remains a mystery to me how I come up with that initial guess, whether it is transparent or shows some insight into the matter at hand.  In this case, the initial word I tried was "extensive" which has 9 letters but the "e" appears three times, so there are 7 distinct letters, not bad but not great either.  Plus the consonants that are missing, "b" and "h" are moderately difficult to match with the remaining vowels, "a", "o", and "u".  If this is the solution then I either need to find a word that starts with "e" and which includes the remaining 5 letters or a word that ends in "e" that includes those remaining 5 letters.   I try it for a while but I don't make any progress with it.  This suggests I need a different long word, perhaps one that includes a "b" or an "h".  

Now a bit of an aside.  If this was teaching a class rather than solving a puzzle for fun, I would make a point that failure as intermediate product is necessary for learning, and that getting a wrong answer that seemed possible in advance offers clues as to the direction one should take to find the right answer.  I believe this is a key lesson as to how people think, but most students don't master this lesson because they want to get to the right answer straight away and they're too impatient to let the full process play out.  Frankly, I believe that students using AI as a tool only makes this worse, though I'll admit that is purely intuition on my part and is not based on experience, as I stopped teaching after fall 2019, well before the AI tools became generally available.   In any event, one gets better as a thinker with practice of the sort I'm describing here and the guess as to what to try next gets more well honed.

The next word I tried was "exhaustive", which swaps the "h" for the "n" in "intensive", and then includes both the "a" and the "u".  Those added vowels were a bonus for me as I was focused on the consonants.  The remaining letters then are "b", "o", and "n" with the "o" and "n" on the same side of the box so they can't be used consecutively.  So, as much as my brain wants to use "bone" as the other word, that just won't work.  And for a few minutes that fact becomes frustrating to me.  But then a possibility emerges and eventually I find a longer word that does work, "bovine". Further, since "bovine" contains "ive" (though not in that order) it is now possible to use "exhaust" rather than "exhaustive" as the second word.    

I have found a Website that generates solutions by computer to Letter Boxed and every once in a while it says there are no two-word solutions.  If I've tried the puzzle for more than an hour and haven't made any progress, I want to know whether I should stop or not.  Obviously, if there is no solution I should stop.  (And once, I found a two-word solution when it said there was none.) But if there is a solution, I might very well persist for quite a while longer.  With learning situations other than word puzzles, over time one develops a sense of whether a solution can be found via persistence or if, to the contrary, the problem is just too hard for me to solve.  If the former holds then there is still the matter of putting in the time that's needed to find that solution.  This, I'm afraid, isn't nearly as much fun as is coming up with the spark of an intuition.  But having the required patience is an important lesson too.

Not quite 30 years ago, I attended a workshop for WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) instructors, which I thought was the best workshop I ever attended regarding pedagogy.  If memory serves, part of that workshop was getting those in attendance to make their own personal writing process explicit.  Writing the first draft of something, I've found, shares these bits about sparks of intuition and about persistence to produce a full narrative.  I wonder if others describing their thinking process would be of value, especially to make it less of a mystery to younger people.  

And I wonder whether the process I've described in this post makes me part of a breed that is going extinct.  I hope not, but I'm afraid otherwise. 

If I Were Running the Yankees

Matty Alou was once a Yankee too. 

I watched all of the Yankee games in the Playoffs, after not watching them much at all during the regular season.  I confess that I was bummed out by their mid-season swoon, but I became optimistic after that.  The last series with Toronto was hard for me to stomach and much of what I say here stems from that.

But first, some general comments.  We need more microscopic statistics, for pitching and hitting those need to be on a pitch-by-pitch basis.  With that, pitch quality needs to be assessed.  In particular, if the pitch has intended spin, did it do what it was supposed to do or did if flatten out and hang in the zone?  Speed and location also matter.  Given how much attention has been given to Aaron Judge's game-tying home run in the third game of the series, where the pitch was definitely inside, we need a better idea of what pitches outside the zone are hittable and whether swinging at them is better than taking them (or not).    We also need to know how pitch quality correlates with pitch count and the number of times the batter has faced the pitcher.  

For the Toronto series, in particular, I'd like to know how Gil, Fried, and Rodón performed on pitch quality, whether Toronto batters just made good swings on good pitches or if there were too many bunnies thrown. If it was bad pitching, worse than during the regular season, then the obvious cause is the added pressure of the playoffs, especially when you're playing for the Yankees.  On this, I haven't any brilliant thoughts other than that it's better to have experienced it beforehand, and make whatever inner adjustments one must make to get through it better the next time.  Luke Weaver may be a different story.  The New Yorker had a recent piece with the subject - Roger Angell writing about Steve Blass in the mid 1970s.  Weaver might be another instance of the Steve Blass phenomenon.  I don't know.  I'd like to see him try to work through it.  He was pretty awesome a year ago.  

Now, getting to the offense, I think the Yankees underutilized an asset - speed.  Grisham, Bellinger, and Chisholm all are very fast runners.  They are also all left-handed hitters.  But none of them have a particularly high on base percentage.  They swing for the downs much of the time.  What about, instead, trying to bunt for a base hit? I think this should be a regular feature of the Yankees offense with these players and they should put in the time during the offseason developing that skill. Indeed, Judge might bunt for a hit once in a while, to show leadership and encourage his teammates this way.  

There is also making a contact swing and trying to go the other way.  Bellinger does choke up on the bat, but then his swing has quite an arc to it.  Can he and the others learn to make a flatter swing and be comfortable at the plate doing so?  This goes as well for Volpe, who is right-handed.  He is also a fast runner and he has this same issue of swinging for the downs much of the time.  I conjecture that the added pressure of the playoffs makes that sort of swing more likely.  So possessing a flat and shorter swing would be a way to combat the pressure.  That seems to be what the Blue Jays did.

There are two Yankee hitters whom I wouldn't try to change, as far as their approach at the plate.  One is Stanton, whose swing is idiosyncratic, plus he's getting up there in years.  The other is Wells, who is a dead pull hitter but did okay in the Playoffs.  As the primary catcher, he's got his hands full with other things. So I'd leave his hitting alone.

The first base position and how that will be handled is something I'm still puzzling about.  Ben Rice looked like an awesome hitter against Boston.  But Toronto seemed to expose his weakness against the splitter.  Weaknesses do get amplified under pressure.  And then, his defense is okay but not great.  Goldschmidt is more reliable defensively and more predictable as a hitter.  I don't like the idea of platooning them, but maybe that's what the team needs to do.

I haven't mentioned third base yet.  It seems the Yankees have options there.  Oswaldo Cabrera was on the IL and didn't appear in the playoffs.  I liked watching him play and hope that the Yankees keep him in their plans.  If so, some of the others who appeared at third during the Playoffs won't be there next year.

Getting back to statistics, there should be won-loss percentages against each team played, home and away.  There may be a sense that Yankees were good because they won a lot at the end of the season.  But they played mediocre teams then.   There may also be a sense that sometimes a team goes on a hot streak while at other times it is in a slump.  A win or a loss should factor in how the other team is doing this way.   The overall idea is to get a sense of how good the team is beyond the win-loss record.  

The last thing I'll say here is about camaraderie among the players, coaches, and manager.  We fans don't get to observe this.  But in one brief interview with Aaron Boone, he seemed to say that Ryan McMahon has high marks in this dimension.  If the players themselves got to choose who would make the team and who would be in the starting lineup, would they be influenced by this camaraderie factor?  And, if so, would they be frank with each other about team weaknesses as well as team strengths?  I would hope so.  It's my belief that this team, largely with the same personnel, can be better if they shore up their weaknesses.  Raising the OBP of the players not named Judge would be a good indicator that they've done so.  Having improved pitching against high-quality opponents would be another such indicator.