And Three For Me...

Part of what makes me a run-of-the-mill blogger, I suspect, is that I'm not a particularly good researcher. And I'm bad at noting things of interest when I first encounter them. Oh, well.

I was making the point to an acquaintance that one aspect of American individualism that the United States should be happy to jettison is the a general lack of investment in each others' success. And this is where my poor research skills came into play. There was a study, in which people were asked which scenario would make them happier: If they made X dollars a year and their neighbor made Y dollars a year, where X was greater than Y, or of they made A dollars a years and their neighbor made B dollars a years, where A was greater than X, but B was greater than A. So we can imagine a scenario where the subject would make $80,000 a year while the hypothetical neighbor made $60,000 on one side, and the subject makes $100,000 a year while the neighbor makes $120,000 a year. According to the researchers (at least as I remember it), people tended to prefer the first scenario, where both parties are worse off, but the subject is comparatively wealthier than the neighbor.

Color me greedy, but I don't see the point in begrudging someone else making it big if I'm going to come along for at least part of the ride. (Actually, I don't see the point in begrudging someone else making it big at all, but that's beside the point here.) Preferring to be less well off just to hold someone else farther down seems spiteful to me. (Which it isn't really, and I know that.)

In a zero-sum game, it would make more sense to me. Come to mention it, I wonder if there is zero-sum thinking going on here, even though the scenario specifically disclaims that avenue. In any event, I think that the United States would do better for itself were its people (as a whole) more inclined to see benefits for themselves in other people succeeding. If for no other reason than people would be more cooperative.

But maybe that's the part that's too much to ask at this point. The United States has accomplished a number of truly remarkable things, all while being a highly individualistic society. And as much I think that a bit more social-mindedness would be a good thing, I don't want the current system to simply stop working, because I understand how disruptive that would be, and how many people would be injured by such a turn of events.

I suspect that this makes me part of the problem; that unwillingness to desire the pain of others, even if that pain would bring about something that I claim to want. Maybe it's simply that I'm okay with the way things are; it's more a matter of good-better than bad-good. I don't know. In any event, I'd like to track down that study again. Because I suspect that it's not as simple as my memory makes it out to be, and maybe that's why it persists.

CRTease

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to win a debate (and in some cases to even have one) if one starts by accepting a hostile framing offered by an interlocutor. So I was somewhat surprised when I came across this in the I Side With political quiz:

My first response to this was: Why on Earth would one teach a graduate-level legal theory in K-12? (For those of you outside the United States who may not be familiar with the term, "K-12" refers to Kindergarten through 12th grade; pretty much the sum total of one's pre-college/university education.)

• Yes, we cannot end racism until we acknowledge that our institutions, laws, and history are inherently racist
• No, kids should be raised to be racially color blind instead of being taught they are inherently racist or disadvantaged based on the color of their skin

These are not accurate descriptions of Critical Race Theory.

A big part of the problem, as I see it, is that the idea of "disparate impact," the concept that a policy or process that is neutral on its face can have differing impacts on different groups because it doesn't take past differences into account, has gone by the wayside. Term "racist" (or "sexist" or "homophobic" or what have you) has expanded into the space that disparate impact used to occupy.

Another large chunk of the problem is that "racism" and "racists" tend to conjure up images of Confederates and Nazis, and no matter how much someone might say that racism is no longer simply the province of racial animus or bad intent on the part of individuals, that old definition (which, I would point out, was the one that I grew up understanding) dies hard.

And so "Critical Race Theory" goes from:

an academic concept that [...] race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

to:

kids being taught they are inherently racist based on the color of their skin

And the I Side With quiz goes along with this, offering no answer that allows the reader to actively reject the skewed framing that Conservative activists have placed around the topic.

And as much as I find these sorts of political exercises interesting, I also find, more and more often, that what I'm mainly learning about are the biases of the people who write them, or the biases they expect the people who engage with them to have. Which is, in the end, understandable. After all, these are people who rely on eyeballs, and bland neutrality seldom brings in the views.

Flowering

I always wonder what small gestures like this do, in the grand scheme of things. Do people in Ukraine, when they hear about them, feel comforted and supported? Does it remind Americans of a war abroad where it's understood that people could use their assistance?

Of course, I understand the primary beneficiaries are the person who placed the flags, and perhaps the people who make and sell them. But it would be a shame if that were the limit of it.
 

Factor of 10

I was reading a story today on gun violence in the United States, or rather, a story about one of the many people killed by gun violence in the United States. It ends, like many such stories do, with the author wondering why people are still allowed to keep and bear firearms, especially the semi-automatic replicas of military weapons so favored by mass shooters. The story was reasonably well-written, although I found it maudlin in places, which is also typical of the genre.

Semi-automatic "assault weapons," to borrow the media misnomer for them, are common bogeymen because they represent random, portable violence. A sudden hail of gunfire in places where there shouldn't be any gunfire. Places where, in the vast majority of cases, there isn't any gunfire. And that may be why the stories about them fail to gain traction. Because while it might be easy to frighten a suburban parent who imagines some unhinged student coming into their child's school, or a an urban sophisticate who believes that their money should buy them safety from random violence, the mass shootings that take up so much airtime when they happen are not the primary drivers of firearms-related deaths in the United States. Suicide holds that spot.

But they aren't even the primary drivers of gun homicides.

Among African Americans, the rate was 26.6 deaths per 100,000, a 39.5% increase over 2019. For white Americans, the rate was 2.2 per 100,000.

By raw numbers, there were 19,350 gun homicides in 2020, with African Americans accounting for 62% of the total and white people 21%.
U.S. gun deaths surged 35% in 2020, higher for Black people - CDC

The shooting at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York was an outlier. Not only in the sense that mass shootings are still rare occurrences, but in the fact that it brought attention to Black people killed by guns in the United States. But even then, it was only because of the circumstances of the shooting. Most of the nearly 12,000 Black people in the United States killed by gun violence are much less photogenic, or respectable, to the affluent Americans who drive the gun control debate.

The ones and twos of domestic violence, gang conflicts and petty crimes don't commonly create targets who can be easily and unambiguously canonized by media outlets looking for clicks. For many, it seems, the problem isn't that large numbers of homicides are committed with firearms; it's that the wrong people are dying. And once the coverage runs out of the people who the public thinks should be above being slain by high-velocity bits of metal, it goes silent. It does not attempt to marshal public sympathy for those that are widely seen as expendable, if not outright undesirable. And so the problem seems smaller than it is.

But this is the way of things. The United States is both geographically large, and humanly diverse. The physical and social distance that this often leaves between people can be vast. And that distance, more than anything else, is the primary enemy of progress, for a remarkably large set of definitions of "progress." People are unwilling to give up something that's important to them to protect people they care nothing, and know less, about, whether they place importance on the value of physical assets, some piece of their identity or even simply how they feel about the world around them.

And without being able to bring the United States closer together, the collective action that's really needed to solve the problem will be absent. Forcing a solution, and holding it in place until everyone decides that they like it is harder than it's given credit for. And therefore, not a good starting plan.

Just a Bit More

There is a Zillow billboard that I see on my way home from work. It reads: "Sell for more than the house next door." I saw a post on Reddit from a person complaining that a recent raise wasn't large enough considering how much the company owner made. And people wonder why inflation rises.

Just as no single raindrop feels responsible for the flood, no single person looking to maximize their home's selling price, angling for a raise or otherwise attempting to line their pockets sees their actions as contributing to overall inflation. But it's just these sorts of individual decisions that play a part. Granted, they don't directly play into choices by the Federal Reserve to increase the overall supply of money in the economy, which is a much larger single factor in determining a current level of inflation, but the money people want for themselves has to come from somewhere. And as people seek to raise the prices they are paid for their own assets and labor, other people are doing the same.

The ability to move through the world on a day-to-day basis without needing to understand (sometimes at even a basic level) how it works is both a blessing and a curse. It allows people to concentrate on the things in front of them in the moment, and, in so doing, allows society overall to be more efficient. The time and energy needed to make everyone an economist is, in many circumstances a waste, and cutting it out is better for everyone. But it means that people often don't understand their own part in events that happen around them.