The Enemy of the Good

The Atlantic's David Graham has outlined the backlash to the way the Trump Administration has implemented the Paycheck Protection Program. In short, the legislation was written with significantly broader eligibility requirements than many would like, and this has triggered withering criticism that the PPP has enriched the already wealthy while ignoring "the people." In the end, Mr. Graham concludes: "The backlash against a successful government program is why the United States can’t have nice things."

I would disagree with this assessment, although perhaps not on the merits. It's true that there appears to be an expectation that government can, and therefore should, perfectly calibrate the assistance it gives, so that only the "deserving" are aided. (This is something that predates the PPP. And it's valid to be critical of the fact that when it comes to individuals, there seems to be a greater willingness to err on the side of withholding assistance.) And it's true that widespread criticism of government missteps tends to lead to an ethos of "don't just do something, stand there;" if only the perfect is at all acceptable, then nothing will happen until the people in charge of crafting it are convinced that it is absolutely above reproach. But in that, the backlash is a symptom, not the disease. The United States can't have nice things because it doesn't want nice things; it only wants perfect things. And it believes that it can get them. If only the perfect is an acceptable alternative to the status quo, then the status quo will tend to reign, because the perfect is difficult to attain in a world in which people themselves are commonly, if not universally, imperfect. If sweeping legislation must be quickly written and enacted while also complying with a specific, and often complex, understanding of the demands of justice, or be otherwise panned as worse than having done nothing, doing nothing becomes a very attractive option.

To a certain degree, having nice things requires accepting at least some of what one has as "nice." Being able to compare a real item, be it a physical item like a car or a more abstract item like legislation, to an ideal is a recipe for disappointment, because ideals, by definition, are freed from the requirement that they operate in the real world and be implemented by real people. They can simply be called in existence, and assumed to be workable. And if unexamined, idealized, conceptualizations of items become the definition of "nice," then nice things will become vanishingly rare, by any standard. Because the nice things that pass reality's muster won't measure up, and the ideals are unlikely to ever be anything other than ideals.

Dragging

Systemic racism doesn't just hurt individuals and limit their opportunities — it also creates a lasting drag on the economy, writes Atlanta Fed chief Raphael Bostic, the first Black president to lead a regional Fed bank.
Fed examines racism's economic toll

Unfortunately, it's not much of an examination. While A Moral and Economic Imperative to End Racism does note that racism means that people impacted by it contribute less to the economy than they could have otherwise, that simple observation seems fairly straightforward. It's fairly easy for anyone to claim that someone languishing in long-term unemployment would be contributing more in a well-paying job.

But it seems unlikely that if the United States actually needed greater economic contributions "in the form of work product and innovation" from it's citizenry, that it wouldn't have found a way to put its currently excess labor force to work and realize those contributions. The problem that racism causes for a national economy isn't that it lowers GDP. If anything, it's that the discontent that a skewed distribution of poverty creates siphons resources away from more productive uses. Between police overtime and insurance claims for burned-out vehicles and buildings, there are clear expenditures that would have been better spent on more productive activities. But while the Glazier's Fallacy might state that the money spent replacing cars is poorly spent overall, the simplest answer to that is that if the protestors would simply accept their lot, there would be no need for added expense. And even so, it's a shift of economic activity, rather than a straightforward drain. And so the idea that systemic racism is a drag on the economy is not as clear-cut an idea as it might seem.

Because the demand for labor, goods and services is not infinite, racism doesn't have to mean that a society is willfully leaving money on the table, simply to spite some or another sector of the populace. If there is a presumption of rationality, then growing the demand for people to contribute work product and innovation is how one defeats racism. And if there isn't a presumption of rationality, then pointing out a hit to GDP is unlikely to work in the first place.

Reliance

The SARS-2 coronavirus pandemic had prompted from fairly radical measures from governments worldwide as they attempt to slow or stop the spread of the disease while medical science applies itself to the task of searching for a vaccine. There has been some amount (although not as much as one might think from watching or reading the news) of pushback against such measure here in the United States, from people who cite the American values of freedom, liberty and independence as reasons to do they will.

This, in turn, has lead to a what seems to be a cottage industry of articles that seek to define (or redefine) these terms in relation to community and one's responsibilities to the community. Which I understand. When people live in communities such that an individual's actions can have consequences for the whole, there is a push for people to sublimate their individual interests in favor of those of the group.

Generally speaking, when it comes to an individual, terms like freedom, liberty and independence don't necessitate being completely cut off from groups of people. But they do mean that the associations are voluntary. And for most people, that simply isn't the case. It's exceedingly difficult for a person today to be genuinely independent of other people; the infrastructure that supports most people is expansive. And this makes it not only the work of many different individuals, but nearly impossible to truly escape. While it's not impossible to be a hermit, and create a life for oneself completely "off the grid" and self-reliant, it's a lot more difficult that it was 200 years ago.

When David Brooks set off a teapot tempest with his article "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake," he was clear on what he felt were the advantages of an older model that offered greater social connection. What he glossed over were the reasons why people walked away from it. The piece starts with a recounting of a scene from the Barry Levinson film Avalon. "The big blowup," we are told, "comes over something that seems trivial but isn’t: The eldest of the brothers arrives late to a Thanksgiving dinner to find that the family has begun the meal without him." Said eldest brother bridles at the disrespect, and Mr. Levinson confirms to Mr. Brooks that it was, in fact, disrespectful for the family to start eating prior to the brother's arrival. Nothing is mentioned about whether it was disrespectful of the bother to not ensure that he was on time.

The American colonies sought independence from Great Britain because they felt that the relationship was one-sided. Great Britain expected its overseas holdings to meet their obligations, yet, in the eyes of the colonists, the Crown shirked its responsibilities to its faraway citizens. One expects, of course, that King George the Third and his court saw things somewhat differently.

Such is the same today. It's all fine and good to lecture people on their responsibilities to the collective. But people are going to push back against that if they believe that the collective feels no responsibility to them. Some of this is going to be inevitable, and some is going to seem distinctly unreasonable; there is always someone who's definition of "tyranny" is having the majority vote against them on where to order an expensed office lunch. But the collective ignores the discontent of its constituents at its own peril. One can imagine that Great Britain would have been much better off had it maintained the fledgling United States within the greater Commonwealth. But it is the habit of people to more attuned to what they feel they are owed than to what others may understand their debts to be. And as the United States slides further and further into factionalism, one of the side effects is that people no longer believe that the nation as a whole feels any need to look out for them. And for some, being abandoned is also a form of independence.

Belonging

I think I was in grade school when this first occurred me. I understand, that if a pre-teen can have this insight, that it might seem blindingly obvious, but, as my father always told me, "'Obvious' is something so crystal clear that you're the only person who see it." So I'm discussing it here today.

When I was in grade school, I had a lot of prejudiced classmates. Of the sort that we would likely call "ethno-nationalist" today. Americans were simply better than non-Americans, and Whites were better than non-Whites. They, as White Americans, were therefore better than everyone else. And their rationale for being better was that they could rattle off, from memory, lists of White Americans who had accomplished Great Things, and their argument to others was the inability to rattle off a more impressive list was proof that they weren't as good.

"Well, sure," I would say in response. "But what have you done, that makes you as good as those people?" About this point is where tempers would flare.

But to me, the point was clear; people judged themselves as better than other people based on membership in a group that had important members, rather than having actually done important things themselves.

The difference between a third-grader and a thirty-year-old in doing this is noteworthy, but perhaps not critical. The thirty-year-old may be convinced that their membership in a particular nationality or ethnicity means that their current less-than-ideal circumstances are the result of them being cheated of their birthright. For the third-grader, it's the establishment of the idea that they have a birthright, and that others should respect that. Both are ways of dealing with scarcity, but for children, that scarcity may not only be an idea, a concern for the future.

Past the Post

One of the weird things about the United States (although I suppose that it may be true for other countries, as well) is an apparent tendency for people to view competitive situations as if they were being judged against static benchmarks, rather than how other people perform.

This often comes up when talking about job hunting. Or hiring, for that matter. There is an impression that for people who can pass a given benchmark for competence, demand for their services is effectively unlimited, and therefore, not being chosen is an indicator of lack of competence. But this isn't the way the hiring process works, especially now, when it's an employer's market. An employer may list a certain set of requirements in order to be considered, but I've never come across an employer that has committed to hiring everyone who meets the bar. There is almost always a set number of openings to be filled, and once the interviewing is done, people are ranked until the open roles is met. In an employee's market, it's possible that employers lower the requirements, or take the top person(s) interviewed, but then again, the stated requirements for the role are somewhat secondary.

This isn't a new phenomenon, or one limited to employment. For all sorts of areas in which a certain level of exclusivity is desirable, but the appearance of élitism is not, there is a tendency to act as those entrance relies on attaining a simple benchmark, rather than being the first to obtain a scarce open spot. I suspect that it has something to do with the somewhat common idea that "average" or "commonplace" should be considered a synonym for "hopelessly mediocre." But in the end, it's likely just another manifestation of a desire to see the world as just. If success is available to unlimited numbers of people, so long as they can reach some or another benchmark, then people can congratulate themselves on their success, and convince themselves that anyone else can do it.