Errors and Consequences

Despite the fact that there are many people, on any side of any given dispute, who are all in favor of "live and let live," the fact of the matter is that there will always be those who are quite vocal in their understanding that "incorrect" beliefs have consequences. This understanding, regardless of its accuracy or even reasonableness, is what so often drives so many discussions (online and in the real world) off the rails.

The problem, as in many other situations, is easier identified than fixed. When we fear the repercussions of the incorrect beliefs of others, we seek to ensure that they believe the correct things - and that those who would convince them again of incorrect things are silenced.

Religion is, despite what some people would tell you, a matter of faith. And having been raised Roman Catholic, I had always understood the quick and dirty definition of faith to be the belief in things unseen - or, to be somewhat more accurate about it, unprovable. Of course, "unprovable" is a nebulous term - what I find myself unable to prove might be very easy to verify for someone else.

For the most part, what any given person has faith in is of little interest to others. I have a certain amount of faith, for example, that Pluto is actually out there, cruising along in its distant orbital path. I'm pretty sure that no-one cares about this one way or the other.

Other times, however, people perceive consequences in the beliefs of others, and that's when things become dicey. A few years ago Bill Nye (the Science Guy) took creationists to task for teaching their belief that the world and its inhabitants are the results of specific acts of divine creation. Not so much, he says, out of the idea that such belief is never appropriate, but that teaching it to children helps close them off from the sciences, which is problematic in that the United States needs, in Mr. Nye's opinion, more scientists and engineers. While there are few people who have gone on record with the idea that there is a danger in not being a creationist, it doesn't take long to find people who are certain that an insufficient level of Christian belief (or at least lip service to those beliefs) invites divine retribution.

This is becoming salient again, due to Donald Trump's penchant for lying (or bullshitting, if you view it that way). There are growing calls for "the Media" to actively involve itself in fact-checking him. But, to take some of the latest statements that the President-Elect has made, the issue isn't the truth of falsehood of the statements themselves. When Donald Trump claims that there was election fraud to tunes of millions of votes in Virginia, New Hampshire and California and that "the Media" is helping to cover it up, what he's really doing is communicating to his supporters that he _is_ the legitimate President of the United States of America, and not someone who owes his victory last month solely to the election-distorting rules of the Electoral College. And, let us not forget, that "the Media" is dishonest and working against him. No matter what the results on an investigation into the election (not that one would ever happen) would conclude, Mr. Trump has no really option but to continue in that vein. And while Democrats and other factions of the American Left may look on slack-jawed at the brazenness with which Mr. Trump ignores "the truth," the simple fact of the matter is that no level of attacking or truth-squadding is going to change what's actually happening: that Donald Trump is feeding off of people's visceral, emotional reaction to feeling that they've been left behind in favor of others for the past eight years. The loss of Congress on the part of the Democrats left President Obama in the position of needing to resort to Executive Orders to advance his policy priorities, and those priorities turned out to be too narrowly tailored to garner the support of people in states that Hillary Clinton needed to win.

The fear of repercussions from Trump supporters believing wrong things isn't going to serve the Democrats well. At least, not as well as showing people in swing states how their policies will enhance their lives will.

Identity, Please

I've always wondered about Identity arguments and what drives them. Or, to be more precise, what drives people to make argumentative statements about other people's identities. That is, when people say: "People like you are bad; I'm not like you, therefore, I'm good." It strikes me as one of the few ways to one-up "People like me are good; you're not like me, therefore, you're bad," on the scale of Looking to Get Into it With Someone. Over the past couple of days, these sorts of arguments have popped up around me with an unusual level of regularity. Of course, in the long run, they're not terribly uncommon. In-group and out-group identification is endemic to the human condition, and it tends to resist our best efforts (which often aren't very strenuous) to do away with it. What's been interesting about my recent encounters with this phenomenon is that people have been defining the out-group in incorrect terms, sometimes due to admittedly intentional ignorance of what the out-group is about.

This behavior strikes me as simply bizarre, perhaps, I suppose, because I don't have an identity that I feel strongly enough connected to that I see any point in promoting it at the expense of others. And that's what I wonder about. After all, like most other people, I have any number of identities. Just none that strike me as worth picking fights over. Maybe it's just the people I encounter, but this gives me the feeling of being an outlier, and so I wonder what it is about identities that make them so central to others.

Sleazy Answers

Of course "Democrats Don’t Have an Easy Answer for the Rust Belt." Easy answers are vanishingly rare in politics, because all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, shipped and made into pies already. And what that means is that most of the answers that either party will be able to come up with are going to be painful for someone who has enough clout to say something about it.

But part of the problem that politicians have is the belief that the decisions that leave various segments of the public in the lurch are easy, and so undoing them would also be easy. This is how Donald Trump managed to gain traction with the idea that he would strongarm American companies that moved jobs overseas into moving them back. Mitt Romney used a similar tactic to with the Republican presidential primary in Michigan back in 2008. When the straight-talking Senator John McCain basically came out and said that a lot of the old manufacturing jobs were gone for good, Governor Romney quickly swooped in to say that they weren't.Of course, bringing jobs back onshore will have costs, and the people who have to pay them wouldn't be very happy about it, which is why it's unlikely that any American government that resembles the one we have now would do the work (and the arm-twisting) required to actually accomplish it.

In the end, the problem is a simple one - we've failed to adequately adapt to the growing efficiency of the world around us. As late as the 1950s, it was understood that advancing technology would lead to a system where the labor force participation rate would stay the same (or even increase) and salaries would stay roughly the same but people would have more leisure time. Instead, you could describe what happened as the people who owned businesses, large ones, generally, converted the extra leisure time into liquid wealth, and kept it for themselves. And given how long it's taken us to dig ourselves into this hole, it's likely to take quite a bit of time for us to excavate ourselves out again. But that's a long and painful process, hence the siren call of "easy answers."

While economists are often faulted for finding easy (and fictional) answers to problems, as the "assume a can opener" joke often pokes fun at, there is a maxim of economics that's helpful to keep in mind, and that is, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." But trade-offs rarely win elections, and so the easy answers will keep coming.

Analogizing

Back in 2004, I'd made a New Year's resolution. I was in London over the holiday, and being out of the country made me feel like an American in a way that I don't when I'm stateside. But as I tried to find an open Underground station, to get back to my hotel, I decided that I'd been too much of an observer of American politics, and that I was going to be more politically active.

Like a lot of New Year's resolutions that come to one on the spur of the moment, this one both started out remarkably well, but in hindsight was better in concept than it was in reality. The plan was to give both major parties a whirl. But I started with the Democrats, and by the time I was done, I had no energy or desire to repeat the process. And the one thing that really drove me up the wall about regular meetings with committed Democrats was not that their politics turned out to be consistently to the left of my own, but the constant language of victimization. They couldn't even have disagreements with one another, over what struck me as minor matters, without making whatever happened into a deliberate form of oppression, directed at them. Of course, as usual, I didn't know when I was well off.

When I first read this, when I saw it posted on Google+ a few days ago, it struck me as simply odd. But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that it struck me as completely ridiculous. In what universe does the simple act of voting for whichever of the major-party candidates that you think will do a better job of making lives better - both yours and others - count as "control?" Okay, I'm not a fan of "build the wall" or having a registry of Moslems. But I don't understand how voting for the candidate that people who worry that illegal immigration and terrorism are threats that we should be doing more about counts as "abuse." And while I understand street protests as a means of making one's grievances heard (although I'm of the opinion that protest is the last resort of the politically powerless), since when does calling a a president-elect's appointees "racist," booing his running mate or insulting him or his supporters qualify as "resistance?"

My impression of this piece drifted from "wonky" to "this is a completely inappropriate use of the language of abuse and resistance." But, a part of me gets it. We tend to give people we see as victims rights and privileges that the rest of us don't have access to - often because it's easier than actually fixing the problem; although sometimes because the problem defies fixing. But that habit, of allowing people who have been victimized permission to do things that are denied the rest of us, makes that label something worth having. As in here, were the idea that Trump supporters are abusers becomes a means of recasting what we otherwise consider to be bad manners into a noble pursuit.

Still, it is clear that the places that voted for Trump are under greater economic stress, and the places that swung most toward Trump are those where jobs are most under threat. Importantly, Trump’s appeal was strongest in places where people are most concerned about what the future will mean for their jobs, even if those aren’t the places where economic conditions are worst today.
Jed Kolko "Trump Was Stronger Where The Economy Is Weaker"

This is something that nothing to do with name-calling, booing, protesting or insults (or even sexism or racism). It's the simple fact that there are large numbers of people in this country who feel that the current path of the country, one that they perceived would continue under a Hillary Clinton administration, wasn't going to make them any more secure than the way they feel right now. And no matter how loathsome a character that Democratic voters, or they themselves found Donald Trump, he threw them a lifeline that the didn't feel was going to come from business as usual in Washington D.C.

Rare and Valuable

"Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It." Oooh... this could be interesting. And, unsurprisingly, it's beginning to make the rounds of social media. Let's see what it has to say.

In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable. Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag or repost a viral article. The idea that if you engage in enough of this low-value activity, it will somehow add up to something of high value in your career is the same dubious alchemy that forms the core of most snake oil and flimflam in business.

Okay, I can understand this point. Let's see where it goes next.

Professional success is hard, but it’s not complicated. The foundation to achievement and fulfillment, almost without exception, requires that you hone a useful craft and then apply it to things that people care about. This is a philosophy perhaps best summarized by the advice Steve Martin used to give aspiring entertainers: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you do that, the rest will work itself out, regardless of the size of your Instagram following.

Aha. And now we arrive at the crux of the matter. The idea that there is no way to use social media such that it becomes a useful craft that can be applied to things that people are about in ways that are rare and valuable. Right. Now that we have that sorted, let's see what his arguments are in favor of that premise.

None, apparently. And this is where this piece falls down. Because it never takes up the idea except in passing, that using social media cannot be, in and of itself, a useful craft and/or a way of applying a craft to things that people care about. In reality, almost no field of human endeavor qualifies as decidedly rare or valuable on its own. Talking to people is neither rare nor valuable. Neither is playing sports, painting pictures or playing poker. Just about everyone can do these things with some basic level of skill, and can learn to do them better. I've done each of them at least once in my life. But certain people, like Hillary Clinton and Rudolf Giuliani have earned millions of dollars for nothing more than getting up on stage and reading a speech that they likely prepared in advance. Likewise, top athletes in certain sports are making seven or eight figures annually, doing more less the same thing that grade and high-school kids do on the field next door to my apartment complex. I once watched a documentary on an artist who threw paint into jet engine exhaust, and allowed it to splash onto a canvas, and could pull down more than $10,000 for a piece - and people are still making art this way. And I suspect that we all know that winning the World Series of Poker can result in some pretty big prizes.

What makes the way people speak to audiences, play sports, create paintings or play poker into a useful craft that is applied to things that people care about in a way that makes them rare and valuable is not baked into the activity itself. Like I said, almost anyone can do them, to the degree that being unable to do any of them would likely be counted as a serious handicap. And what the author of the Op-ed, Cal Newport, never does is differentiate the use of social media from these other things - or any other things. Social media is a tool. To say that it is not possible to be skilled enough at using that tool to create "things that matter," is to place it into a very small category.

In the end, what Mr. Newport is really inveighing against is allowing unimportant things to distract us from putting in the 10,000 or however many hours it takes to become really skilled at something, and making sure that you're directing that towards things that other people value enough to pay for. Which is fine; it's perfectly sound advice. But the unique conflation of "social media" with "unproductive distraction" is an assertion that requires more than being stated to be proven. His New York Times piece is simply the latest entry in a long history of people looking down their noses at those who have the temerity to do something that they don't understand, and can't figure out how they themselves would make a living at. And they can't be bothered to find someone who is doing it, and ask them.

Mr. Newport has never had a social media account. Given that he tends to see them as merely gateways to professional ruin, that makes sense. But that doesn't then give one permission to claim that this understanding of social media is based on objective truth, rather than anecdote or personal experience. Because I can find countless stories about people who put everything they had into a particular endeavor, and because they were unable to separate their need to keep themselves entertained from what they hoped would be a lucrative career, they crashed and burned. But that was due to a lack of focus on their part. And while it may have been aided and abetted by their choice of entertainment/career, other people have taken that same paths and succeeded.