Teatopia

I read an interesting article written by Elias Isquith in Salon entitled “Tea Party’s embarrassing irony: How it’s ideal nation rejects basic American Beliefs”, much of which is commentary on a piece written by Reihan Salam, a conservative pundit who in his article coins the term “Teatopia”. What he describes is essentially a childish pipedream of a Federalist America where power is shifted from the federal government to state governments. States would put in place structures that are requested by their populace and corporate lobbyists would now look to the states instead of a central government to bestow favors upon them. The beauty of this system, from a conservative standpoint, is that states would evolve populated by people sharing values and ideas of how their children should be brought up and taught. If you live in a state whose policies do not align with your values, you can just move to another state. In time, California and Vermont can become even more liberal and the Carolinas more conservative. One could offer public pre-K and K-12 or even publicly funded college education, whereas another could provide vouchers for charter, internet or religious schools. Politics would be a friendly affair because everyone in the states avows the same ideologies. The role of the federal government becoming minimal, federal taxes would shrink and state taxes rise. In such a world we would become “50 mini states where everyone agrees”. The issue Mr. Isquith has with this (Reihan Salam does not propose this structure but just describes it as the Tea Party dream) is that it is anathema to the notion of democracy. “Democracy, it should go without saying, is not a system designed to tackle the problem of what to do when everyone is on the same page. You don’t need to venerate and inculcate the principles of compromise, pluralism and cooperation in a land where nobody questions what to do or how to do it.” Unfortunately the dream described by Salam, though maybe unattainable and impractical, is real. A segment of the population has convinced themselves (or been convinced) that it must be “their way or the highway”. Sharon Engels, when she ran for the Senate said that if we can’t get what we want at the ballot box, we will have to resort to 2nd amendment remedies. Another Tea Party Republican lamented that “the reason we are where we are is because we did not hold to our principles and were willing to compromise”. There is no sense of needing to live within a community of people with varied priorities , values and cultures and figuring out how to accommodate as many of the diverse interests as possible. That, after all is successful governance. Not bunching people with common interests together and providing only for a segment of the community aligned with you. I would like to expand on this a bit. Setting the issue of democracy aside, to make progress and to improve anything, there need to be countervailing forces at play. To invent the lever there needed to be a desire to move a rock and an inability to move it adequately. Here the two forces are the desire and the inability. Lacking one or the other, there is no lever. In our political system, there has been a pull from the left and one from the right. One wanting change, the other to stand still. These countervailing forces acting together, allows us to progress yet within cautious restraints. Our system works. The Soviet Union lacked any opposition and thus collapsed as in time also do all other dictatorships. Today much is written about the advantages of divergent points of view developed through varied experience, education or discipline, in solving problems, developing systems and creating new stuff. This variety could reside in an individual who has been exposed to varied cultures, socioeconomic conditions and a range of occupations. Or it can exist in a team made up of individuals, each with their differences along these lines from other members. Even if not for the issue of democracy as described by the author, I would expect that a Teatopia, made up of pockets of like thinking people, would stagnate at best, or wither and die or more likely be taken over by a foreign power. Fortunately neither of the authors expects Teatopia to go beyond the stage of a pipedream, however real it is, and I agree. We survived the pull from the Left in the 60s and will survive the pull from the right in the early part of the twenty first century and be stronger for having felt these pressures.

Income Inequality

I read an article written by Robert T. McGee, Director of Macro Strategy and Research, US Trust, which I found interesting. It appeared in issue 26. 2014 of a US Trust publication entitled Capital Acumen under the title “Income Inequality: U. S. Versus the World. He starts out agreeing that income inequality has increase in the developed world over the last three decades. Included in his article is a chart showing the Per Capita GDP, the GINI (%) coefficient and the ratio of the richest 10% Average income to the Poorest 10%. (The GINI coefficient measures income inequality. 0% is the case where all households earn the same income and 100% if one household has all the income and the all the others have none. So the lower the coefficient the smaller the income inequality) He sites globalization and technology, changes in policies and institutions, and differences in education among the reasons. He points out that “the average person in the rich world would be among the best off with the same income in a poor country”. This fact draws immigrants from poor countries who take low paying jobs, into the US. He concludes that inequality is overwhelmingly caused by inequality between rich and poor countries rather than inequality within countries suggesting that inequality should be judged on an absolute rather than a relative scale. By the absolute measure, poverty is minimal in the rich world. He ends his opening salvo with “Other than the corrosive effects of envy, there is less reason to care if income inequality is high as long as the bottom decile has adequate income”. Following is a list of the top ten economies giving their Per capita income, GINI (%) and the ratio of the Richest 10% average income to the poorest 10%. United States, $ 51.7, 45, 15; China, $9.2, 47.4, 21.8; Japan, $35.9, 37.6, 4.5;Germany, $38.7, 27, 6.9; France, $35.3, 32.7, 8.3; United Kingdom, $36.6, 40, 13.6; Brazil, $11.7, 50.8, 37.1; Russia, $17.5, 41.7, 12.8; Italy, $29.8, 31.9, 11.7; India, $3.8, 36.8, 8.6l WORLD, $12.2, 39, 12. I have some real issues with his logic. Poverty is not an absolute. The idea of being poor goes beyond just do you have a roof over your head and some food in the stomach. By that standard, homeless guys sleeping in Shinjuku under the L in large cardboard boxes and begging for their meals are not poor. They have a roof over their heads and are not starving. Reality is that we humans have needs beyond these two and most of those are relative. The absolute argument is weak. The same logic says that by absolute measures a poor man today is better off than a rich man thousands of years ago. The cardboard box is more comfortable than a cold, damp cave; their life expectancy is much greater; they can see and be more aware of the world around them, read and write, flush their toilets, and of course they can watch TV. That being said, I would bet that a rich man then, as a rich man now, would be smiling more often than a poor man. In fact I saw a compelling argument (I think it was from the right) on TV supporting poverty in relative terms. It talked about the relatively low cost of living, specifically in Texas, where a poor man by national poverty standards could live quite well compared to someone with the same income in New York. The argument went further, justifying low wages, again because the cost of living is low. (I have some sympathy for that position.) I am also not sure about the point of immigrants from poor countries taking low paying jobs significantly contributing to the inequality. Where I live, I see many more Indian immigrants working as doctors, engineers and businessmen than I do bagging groceries in the Piggly Wiggly. I don’t know if this is still the case, but after the large expansion of land was finished, US emigration policy, (unless one was seeking asylum or had other unique circumstance only allow more educated and higher skilled immigrants into the country. I believe the lower skilled labor primarily entered through illegal means. As to the causes of inequality, Robert McGee, said “research at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found “trends in technology, policies and education”, were the key drivers of changes in wage inequality and employment in the United States, Germany, Norway and other countries”. “Policies and institutional effects such as declining unionization, product market deregulation, declining tax wedges and reduced unemployment benefit replacement rates were found to raise inequality, but also to increase employment.” He then goes on to says that growth in education not only reduces inequality but increases employment. “Shifting demographics have substantial effects on income inequality. These include increased female participation, smaller household structures (single parents), increased part time work versus full time work and an increased disparity in men’s earnings. Assortative mating, an increased tendency of comparably compensated partners to form households, can add to inequality in a society.” I can’t disagree with that except to give some possible explanations for these factors. Increased female participation was brought about by rising costs and stagnating family income pushing women into the workforce. This exacerbated the situating, with women’s increased participation the labor pool grew further driving down the market price for labor. I don’t believe the smaller household structure is primarily attributed to single parents. As a society advances, the marrying age increases and young people don’t immediately move from their parent’s home into a family, but spend some time living alone. With two members of a household forced to work, there is a willingness, if not a desire, for one member to work part time and part time work pays less and provides fewer benefits. I think that more and more people are living in homogeneous communities thus limiting the opportunity to meet people in different socioeconomic conditions. Mr. McGee goes on to write about income mobility citing a study by Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Harvard which says that the odds of a young person staying in the bottom decile today are not much different than they were 30 and 50 years ago. I would add that given the larger gap between the bottom and top 10%, when they move up from the bottom, they are not moving into quite as nice a spot. Also I think a more significant measure of mobility would be the odds of moving from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. My guess is that the odds would not be the same today. Ho goes on to say that in northern European countries it is easier to move from the bottom to the top, because of the smaller difference. My comment here is a “well duh”. He goes on to say the it is more appropriate to compare the United States, which has the largest income inequality of the 10 largest economies, to world inequality rather than the other large economies because we have the greatest diversity in our population, an unusually large share of the world’s richest most educated and entrepreneurial people. I’m not sure what he is saying here except maybe that “them that’s got, git”. The author concludes that “America’s income inequality is the natural outcome of being the land of opportunity” and ends with the right wing mantra: “The real issue is raising living standards and making opportunity for advancement as accessible as possible, It’s important that envy and resentment of success not stymie the effort to grow the economy, because the evidence is overwhelming that regardless of inequality trends, it takes a rising tide to lift all boats.” While the tide has risen and the yachts are at ever greater heights, I think it would be hard to convince the bottom decile that they are any better off in their dinghies.

"Showing Off"

I saw a presentation on TED Talks not too long ago that spoke about the human ability to adapt. The presenter suggested that there is a basic level of happiness, driven by brain chemistry, genetics and some other factors, though they may slowly change over time, determine part of the person’s character. If they encounter an event however pleasant or tragic, within a year they return to their inherent level of happiness, whether high or low. In a different talk I saw a cheerful paraplegic who participated in the development of a system that allowed him to control robotic devices with his eyes. He got a kick out of demonstrating this by flying a drone on stage from a remote location, Other dramatic examples of our adaptability I’ve run across come to mind. Years ago I saw a photograph of an old woman in a magazine, a push cart peddler during the German occupation in a Russian city. Her cart was set up beneath a tree from which a man was hanging by his neck. My first reaction was: “how could she be so callous?” But upon reflection, men hanging from trees, over time became the norm and she adapted. I remember the gasoline shortage in the seventies when we had to line up for gas. Before the shortage we would not even tolerate two cars in front of us but after only a couple of weeks, I would consider it a lucky day if I only had to wait one hour. I remember certain rules in place when I was stationed in Saigon in the mid-sixties. One of them was “don’t stand in groups on the sidewalk waiting for a bus, stay in a building till it comes”. From time to time there were incidents in the city where a hotel housing soldiers or a restaurant would get bombed and for a day everyone followed this rule. However, by the next day things were back to normal, everyone congregating on the sidewalk in bunches waiting for a bus or a taxi. The speaker also touched on the fleeting nature of joy derived from the acquisition of material goods. This happiness, he claimed, is short lived, lasting only a few days, weeks or months. I think the way we extend or repeat the pleasure is by “showing off”. We become accustomed to our trinkets no matter how grand or small. The vacation homes, the fast cars, a piece of art, a yacht or a nice piece of clothing are soon taken for granted and the happiness they once brought becomes a distant memory. By sharing these and the stories related to them we revive, at least momentarily, the pleasures they once offered us. The same can be said of even the more esoteric things that bring some happiness into our lives. Guiding someone on a sightseeing tour of a place that we were once fascinated by but now don’t even notice can bring its beauty back into our eyes or the marvel into our hearts. So don’t judge us showoffs so harshly. We are probably just trying to re-live past joys and not demonstrating our superiority.

Back to the Dark Ages

Following Is extracted from Merriam-Webster’s on line Dictionary. civilized adjective : marked by well-organized laws and rules about how people behave with each other : polite, reasonable, and respectful : pleasant and comfortable Full Definition of CIVILIZED : characteristic of a state of civilization ; especially : characterized by taste, refinement, or restraint See civilized defined for English-language learners » Related to CIVILIZED Synonyms ACCOMPLISHED, CULTIVATED, COUTH, CULTURED, GENTEEL, POLISHED, REFINED Antonyms BARBARIC, BARBAROUS, PHILISTINE, UNCIVILIZED, UNCULTURED, UNGENTEEL, UNPOLISHED, UNREFINED Restraint is the key word in the above definition. We humans have a number of forces combining to move us to action. There are the “animal instincts” inherent in our species, genetic pre-disposition passed down by our ancestors , cultural and familial habits handed down from generation to generation, and our individual brain chemistries and experiences over time. These forces lead us to act in our self- interest. Sometime this self-interest (Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”) aligns with the interest of society as a whole, but often it does not only, not align, but works in opposition to the general good. Over time as societies develop, these forces are brought more and more in line with the well-being of society, through individual restraint or those imposed by government, church, community or family. Men have a natural urge to mate from early teens and women have the ability to bear children even younger. As we have developed, in the more advanced societies we have come to realize that early childbirth limits the potential of a woman, and so we have enacted laws to limit the age for consensual sex and in the West, custom has driven the marriage age for women to the late twenties. Another natural urge is polygamy but laws and customs have enforced monogamy. Slavery has been banned and cruelty is declining either by law or custom as we become more civilized, and our understanding of ourselves and the world around us increases, more and more individual instincts are suppressed and there is an ever increased dependence on one another. In this country, countervailing forces have increasingly pushed back on advancing society and civilization while trying to shift the balance from societal good more to individual drives in the name of freedom. This push is coming from the Right and most strongly from the extreme religious Right. The effort to further increase the equality between the genders is seen as a threat to family structure. The right of women to decide whether to conceive or carry to birth is gradually being eroded state by state. The Right is against setting a minimum wage and some argue that nature within the free market should determine how much labor costs and how wealthy the wealthy and poor the poor. Furthermore, there are movements to totally deregulate the markets, leaving them unencumbered and the social good to chance. The right to carry firearms has been expanded and laws like Stand Your Ground (I have an image of a middle aged white guy with a big belly standing with his legs apart and arms crossed facing down punks, hoods and other scary people) are passed The right is trying to move us back to the “Wild West” days where not society, but each man is responsible for defending himself and his family. The religious fundamentalists are dismissing science and want our children to learn that the world was created in six days some six thousand years ago and politicians representing them are fighting any attempt to save the planet from manmade environmental catastrophes. Recently several states have even tried to legalize discrimination based on one’s religious beliefs. The World is experiencing change at an ever increasing pace. These changes; social, political, technological and environmental are making heads spin. And as with any change, there are risks and people are frightened. Conservatives politicians are stoking the fears and are trying to, not only stem the tide of progress, but move back the clock of civilization. The danger of this move is that as we did a millennium ago, we will slip into a modern version of the “Dark Ages” with its chaos and cruelty. That having been said, I am optimistic. Though the Conservatives are taking advantage of our fears and ignorance, cooler heads will prevail and our societies will continue to progress and we will continue to become ever more civilized, relinquishing more and more of our base urges for the good of all those we share this Blue Planet with.

Walking in Someone Else's Shoes

There is an old Native American (I think) proverb that says “don’t judge someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes”. Our human nature, however, is to judge, in particular the poor if we are not one of them. Far from imagining what it would be like in their shoes, we tend to look at their circumstances from our own point of view and assigning our own sets of priorities. We see people making decisions that to us seem incomprehensible and too often attribute them to character flaws; old ladies using their social Security money on slot machines; victims of Katrina wasting the couple hundred or maybe thousand dollars they received on the riverboat casinos; people who barely have enough to eat, smoking; barns and farmhouses in shambles; garbage strewn in the streets; the list goes on. We think “how can they? I would never live like that. I wouldn’t gamble what little money I have away and give up smoking and fix my barn and not allow garbage to accumulate in the street. There has to be something wrong with these people”. We think about what we would like to do in a given situation, but in reality, in that circumstance, most likely we would do something totally different. Given our genes, culture, experience and in particular, circumstance, we put thing in a particular order of importance. Our judgment of others assumes they have the same set of priorities, are in our settings and benefit from our experiences. The fact of the matter is that not only do they not, but our own priorities, settings and experiences are constantly changing. A child is born, we lose a job, win a lottery, become ill, we grow wiser or become more cynical. In reality as we go through life and as our surroundings and experiences change, so do our priorities. Things once thought to be of utmost importance can become trivial. Unfortunately we can never walk in someone else’s shoes. We cannot have an identical makeup or experience and even if we did, we cannot occupy the same space in time. The best we can do is try to imagine what might be important to someone given their set of circumstances. But even that is a poor approximation of a stroll in their shoes. The other day I read a piece in the Huffington Post by Linda Tirado who in the most eloquent way, tries to explain the thought process of a very poor person. From the article I think one can get a peek into their priorities and decisions, which from our perspective may have seemed lousy, but now start to be a little more understandable. Below is a link to that article. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-tirado/why-poor-peoples-bad-decisions-make-perfect-sense_b_4326233.html

Leadership

There are a few characteristics of a good leader. Among them are; courage, judgment and experience. To explain this I often used the “scraping of window panes” metaphor. Here the leader is on the inside of a room and there is something going on outside that they need to act on quickly. In front of them is a window with a number of panes all painted opaque. Were they clear, the scene would be apparent and the action obvious. A good leader starts by scraping a bit of the paint off of one pane and gets a glimpse of the scene. That small segment suggests they may want to scrape another bit of a pane at the far end. There is starting to appear a hint of an image. They scrape a bit of another pane, go back to the first and scrape a little more and then, though without a full picture, they see enough to make a decision. In the example above the leader exhibited a characteristic essential to good leadership. First and foremost they were willing to take a risk and make a decision without waiting for all the pieces of the puzzle to be in place. I have seen very capable people continue scraping each pane clear and see the entire scene before taking action. They are afraid of being wrong, whereas the leader above was willing to chance and make the decision. At this point I might add that for different actions there are different degrees of probability that are prudent. A surgeon need a very high probability and would be justified to scrape much of the window clear but most of us are in positions where we can afford to be wrong and often inaction is more consequential than wrong action. Another attribute required to make a decision with minimal scraping is experience. With experience one has seen many scenes outside the window and seeing only a few key pieces can imagine the full picture. People without the experience, though brave, need to clear a larger portion of the window to see the same amount of the scene to make a decision. The third attribute is judgment. As they scrape small segments of a pane and catch a glimpse of the scene, they need to decide where might there be another segment that will most probably lead them quickly to the whole picture. Someone, courageous and experienced but without good judgment, unable to figuring out where the most probable bit of a scene lies that will help form enough of a picture will need to scrape a large portion of many panes. Without the courage, judgment and experience, no matter how bright the individual, they will spend too much time gathering information or if not, see the wrong picture and though in positions of leadership, will not be followed.

The "Real" America

Sarah Palin spoke of the “real America”. The Governor while running for vice president, when visiting a rural area said it was good to be in the real America. I believe in all sincerity she sees the real America as the sum of the white and Christian rural parts of the country. A couple of weeks ago I went to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in an industrial urban city and there I saw, what I think is another real America. There were about one hundred people there of many ethnicities, races and socio-economic groups. There were Puerto Ricans and Latinos from Central and South American and Brazilians, some speaking fluent English others Spanish and Portuguese. There were African Americans and more recent arrivals from Africa. There were people of different European ancestries and people from the Middle East and Asia. There were laborers, students and businessmen in suits. Siting there waiting for my turn, Sarah Palin came to mind and I thought that had she been in this room, she would not have acknowledged this as America. I think one of our fundamental divides is between the urban and the rural. Each with different political interests and cultures and I think, like Sarah Palin, we don’t understand or recognize each other. I live in the suburbs, an area that doesn’t quite fit either the urban or rural, pretty much am isolated from both Sarah Palin’s and the America I saw at the Registry. I was fortunate to have had opportunities to live, though most of it in the suburbs, in my early years in very rural areas and my teenage years in a city. I first became conscious of this divide when I took a train from San Jose to San Francisco fifteen years ago, sharing it with a large variety of people. Based on that refreshing experience, more recently, when I had to go on business to San Francisco, I decided to fly into Oakland and instead of hiring a car, I took a bus to the train station and then a train across the Bay. Though brief, the exposure to the variety of races, ethnicities and cultures was enlightening. I propose that we all take an opportunity to spend time in an environment with people we are not accustomed to being around. Furthermore, when evaluating a politician running for an office where they will represent a diverse group, we should look at their record of time spent with the range of their future constituencies. Whatever you may think about our current president Barak Obama, he would have an impressive record on this dimension having been brought up by grandparents in the rural Midwest, spending time in Hawaii and Indonesia and working in the inner Chicago city. I find it interesting that people on the extreme right make fun of his work as a “community organizer” in the inner city. Better he should have been insulated in the real (business) world. Spending time with different people allows us to recognize their humanity on a more visceral level and become empathetic with their wants and fears. Not having had the firsthand experience, we tend to use our imaginations, with liberals exaggerating the plight and conservatives the lack of dignity. At the start of the first war with Iraq, I went to India on business for a few days. As I was accustomed, I went for an early morning walk and came across a group of squatters (I think they were “Untouchables”) living in shacks on the grounds of what appeared to be a government building of some sort. As I walked past, I saw two young people (I don’t recall if they were two men or a man and woman) squatting on the sidewalk, brushing their teeth and spitting the rinsing water into the gutter. My first reaction was to feel sorry for them, seeing the conditions they lived in. But as I approached them, they were talking and laughing with such gusto that I became jealous of them. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed so heartily.