Good Reads

What does it take to be a "good news consumer?" Pew research asked this question, and posted a short article on the answers recently. While a plurality of people (some 32 percent) didn't answer, and a about 10% gave an answer that Pew coded as "Other," the most popular answers are listed below, in order of popularity:

1. Be discerning or skeptical
2. Follow the news or stay informed
3. Get news from quality sources
4. Research or fact check the news
5. Get news from a variety of sources
6. Get news from a variety of perspectives
7. Not share inaccurate information
8. Use the news to make decisions

I suspect that I would have fallen into the other category, because the first thing that comes to my mind is to understand the difference between being informed and being entertained. While I agree with the 3% of people who gave an answer of "Use the news to make decisions," I don't generally find most news to be actionable in that way. It's interesting, occasionally very much so, but things like "The U.S. threatens to revoke the Palestinian U.N. ambassador's visa," "Can the West survive ‘drastic’ Colorado River cuts?" or "Trump's priorities are in deep trouble after his revenge tour" don't have anything in them that I need to, or can, act upon.

And in that sense, they're not really all that informative. Not because the information wasn't new, but because there isn't much I can do with it, when it comes to decision-making. And this doesn't even touch upon the stereotypical "if it bleeds, it leads" type of story, which may give people a certain sense of danger, but doesn't offer anything in the way of solutions.

Now, I'm aware that my own news diet is particularly sparse when it comes to actionable information because I don't follow the news consistently enough to pay to subscribe to anything. And if one really wants information that's useful in making decisions, paying for it is the way to go. I've been toying with the idea for some time, but I'm the sort to go for a few days without really checking in on things, and in a situation where what's really being paid for is temporary access, that's a recipe for wasting money. I'm also unenthusiastic about trial periods that require credit cards, and automatic renewals, in the hope that I'll simply forget to cancel and become a recurring revenue stream. (But I understand the incentive structure. And the fact that this is a case where pretty much everyone is doing it.)

Am I a "good news consumer?" I suspect not. While I understand the difference between actionable news and the sort of things one reads as a diversion, I'm not really motivated to seek out "news I can use," as it were, and that limits my intake to things that I don't really gain much by learning. Perhaps I should rectify that.

Here "We" Go Again

Cure cancer... really? That's pretty big news, I wonder why it hasn't gotten out farther.

I think I'd like to nominate the human willingness to pass the buck as the most annoying thing. This is the sort of post that one makes to bask in the likes, upvotes and other forms of Internet applause that come from calling out a problem and laying it squarely at the feet of people who have better things to do than read social media posts by some rando.

"Greed and billionaires" are wonderful targets specifically because most people won't be bothered to stand up for them, and it allows for feel-good slacktivism; the audience can feel good about themselves for being supportive of the stand being taken, but that support comes at absolutely zero cost to themselves. "Billionaires" aren't going around with vacuum cleaners, sucking the money out of everyone's pockets: they're investing in and/or running businesses offering goods and services that everyday people want. Things that people like me (and yeah, I'll own this) would rather have. Would an end to world hunger, global climate change and cancer (I'm still dubious about that last one) be good? Absolutely. Is it worth more to me than the books I just bought the other day? Apparently not.

And I'm not the only one. There are any number of people who would rather spend their money on things that they feel enhance their material well-being than fund capturing human potential. That's how investors and board chairs and chief fill-in-the-blank officers become billionaires in the first place.

There's an idea that a bunch of wealthy people could get together, shell out a bunch of money and make the world a better place overnight, and still remain fabulously wealthy. (Whether or not that would actually be the case, I don't know.) Which is really just another way of minimizing the costs to others of the things that people want.

Presuming that there are cures for cancer that are waiting on nothing more than enough funding to float down from the heavens, it's somewhat within the power of the public at large to solve these problems. Wealthy people became so because the current rules allow for it. So step one is to change those rules.

But that becomes a collective action problem. The legislative majorities needed to enact such policies would require that a pretty good-sized chunk of the populace, at least here in the United States, put aside their differences and work together towards a common goal; and believe that they can reach that goal without inflicting unreasonable amounts of pain on themselves or otherwise doing something unpalatable.

And that's why it becomes easy to blame "billionaires." They could supposedly make all of these problems go away with sweeping acts of charity, and criticizing them for not doing so conveniently does away with all of the arguing and messiness that enduring solutions would entail.

Error Handling

When I was younger (a rather long timeframe, these days), I too would indulge in attempting to refute other people's ethical frameworks by coming up with a situation in which the correct thing, as presented by them, conflicted with my own ethical intuitions. There are a lot of different ways of answering this tactic, but one that I'm somewhat surprised that I never encountered is just to say: "Yes. And..?"

If the goal is to determine what some or another system of ethics says about something, what does it matter what a critic's intuitions says about the matter. The perception that the ground is level can easily lead someone to an understanding that the Earth is flat; and the most common response to this is, basically, to tell that person that their intuition is wildly incorrect, and leave it at that. So why is this not a more common tactic in ethics?

Of the approximately eight quadrillion variations on Phillipa Foot's Trolley Problem that people have come up with, a common one is to posit a doctor who has six patients, five of whom are in dire need of organ transplants, while the sixth has healthy organs. Leaving aside the real-world logistical problems of such an act, a common knock on Utilitarianism is the idea that it says that it's ethically acceptable to kill the sixth patient so save the others. But I'm not sure why an actual Utilitarian would care: If killing patient six is the ethical thing to do, it's the ethical thing to do.

After all, the idea that other people's ethical intuitions are faulty when they disagree with one's own is not particularly controversial: the idea that the Trail of Tears was ethically unjustified, and that the people who supported the forced migration were wrong is mostly taken as given today. To argue that people at the time wouldn't have supported it if it had been ethically suspect would likely go nowhere.

So I wonder why so many people seem uncomfortable admitting to disagreements with other people's ethical outlooks. If the point behind the study of ethics is to get to a correct understanding of right action, it shouldn't matter if people feel validated by it.

Evaluated

I saw a social media post today claiming that Alphabet was now "worth $4.8 trillion." Considering that I didn't see any reporting on that anywhere, I'm dubious about that number, but it started me thinking. Just how does one determine how much a company is "worth."

After all, it wouldn't be possible to simply hand over $4.8 trillion and just own Alphabet... if a significant number of shareholders were all looking to proactively sell, the price would immediately drop. Likewise, if someone (or an organization) with a remarkable amount of liquidity decided to buy up a significant portion of the shares, the price would rise. Stock prices are generally set between buyers and sellers, and valuations are generally determined on the basis of some average of the transactions that take place over a given timeframe. So, at least as far as I'm concerned, the statement that "a given company is worth some number of dollars," doesn't really tell us anything.

Except, maybe, about investors. It occurs to me that to value a company is to presume that it's possible (at least in theory) for all of the shares to change hands over a reasonable span of time. Leaving aside for a moment the changes in share price that such a shift would bring about, any valuation implies that some amount of money is currently tied up in the company's stock. Some of it can be thought of as not being "real," since it doesn't matter how long the stock has been held by it current owner; if it hasn't been sold recently, and isn't currently for sale, no-one has to actually produce the money to buy it... but the owner is credited as having grown wealthier all the same.

And that wealth is counted just like money in the bank would be. A lot is made of wealth inequality, but it's rare to hear about how much of that wealth is represented simply in terms of an expectation that, if someone were to sell something, they would be able to receive a certain amount of money for it. But if all of these expectations were added together, how would that compare to the amounts of hard currency there is? Could people actually buy all of these companies at their stated valuations? Or do expectations represent the bulk of modern money supplies? 

Euphemized

I was listening to an episode of The New York Times "The Opinions" podcast recently, and the topic was theft as a form of political action. The podcast coined the term "microlooting" for this activity, which I suspect is known to most people simply as "shoplifting." The New York Times being part of the "mainstream media," the term has quickly become a front in the United State's culture wars, with Conservative outlets being quick to jump on the practice as yet more proof of Liberal moral turpitude (not to mention un-Americanism). But for me, the real problem with shoplifting as a form of "direct action" is that it does nothing to solve the problem, and framing it as some sort of political protest obscures that point.

In 1978, when Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, the highest marginal income tax rate was 70%, payable on income over $108,300. In 2024, the rate was 37%, payable on income over $609,350. This represents about a 50% cut in the rate, given that $108,300 in 1978 was about $531,400 in 2024 dollars. Sneaking lemons out of Whole Foods does nothing to address this simple fact.

Politicians have been offering up tax cuts as a means of purchasing political support for my entire adult life by this point, and people have gone along with it, because a lowering of taxes feels like some sort of relief of their own feelings of poverty; until wealthy people, whose taxes also went down, started pulling away from them. There would be much more money for public services if tax rates went back to where they had been in 1978, but no-one wants that; the general feeling that "someone else" should be paying for it is fairly deeply ingrained in American culture by now.

The problem with large-scale direct action and political protest in the United States is not the collective action problem that it's made out to be. It's a social trust problem. The Right and Left of American politics have very different idea of what an ideal society should look like, and their mutual animosity tends to lead each to want to place the costs on the other. Both are effectively faith-based approaches to issue of governance that regard the other as heretical. And both of them are beholden to large segments of the American public that are basically looking out for themselves.

Because when Amazon was offering better prices than brick-and-mortar retailers due to not collecting sales taxes for whichever state the buyer was in, or Uber and Lyft were undercutting taxi companies by simply not following the rules those companies had to follow, the public's silence on this was taken as approval. And now that people are saying to wealthy executive and investors "Okay, now share some of the take with the rest of us," they come across as surprised that the answer is mostly "No."

High levels of income and wealth inequality are solved in the same way that housing shortages (and resulting high prices) are solved: one doesn't let the situation get to that point in the first place. Because there are now a lot of people whose material comforts explicitly rely on the current status quo, and many of them aren't in "the 1%." And they're going to turn out to protect their interests. This is just how loss aversion works.

Many people in the United States feel that political apathy is something that they're entitled to, and therefore, shouldn't have to pay a price for. But everything has a price, and deferring payments rarely make them go away.