FEDERALISM IS NOT JUST ABOUT STATES’ POWER

In this blog I have tried to make an important distinction, at least important to the overall aims of the blog.  The aim has been to introduce you to the construct, federation theory.  In our common parlance of politics, federalism is associated with a structural arrangement; that is, the arrangement between federated entities; in our case, the states, and a central authority that “governs” the relations among the federated entities, in our case the central or federal government in Washington, D.C.  Each level of government in our national arrangement claims sovereignty over various areas of governance.  Our constitution identifies those powers that were delegated to the central government, such as regulating interstate commerce, and the Constitution also states quite clearly that those powers not delegated to the central government, such as educating the young, are reserved by the state government or the people of the various states.  But of course, such language is always open to interpretation and debates as to what exactly is a delegated power, what its attributes are, and those discussions have been an ongoing aspect of our domestic politics ever since the original 1787 document was proposed and ratified.  These debates increased in intensity from time to time; no more so than the years following the Civil War.

We all know that one of the issues, if not the most important issue, that pushed our nation to that highly destructive war was slavery.  After the war, the victorious side, led by the radical Republicans, wanted to make sure that the dehumanizing conditions that characterized the “peculiar institution” were eliminated.  In 1866, (the war ended in 1865) the Republicans who controlled Congress passed and enacted, over a presidential veto, the Civil Rights bill of that year.  The new law addressed the questions of citizenship, its provisions, and the rights it guaranteed to the former slaves.  This law predated the eventual proposal and ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments which further solidified those guarantees.  My limited interest in this posting is the issue of how the law undermined the sovereignty of the states when it came to civil rights and how this tension really gets at the distinction this blog has made between the structural view of federalism and the more political/cultural view of federalism I have advanced by my introduction of federation theory.

On the one hand, by taking over a reserved power from the states, the governance over protecting civil rights from the states – a power which was generally viewed as a reserved power – the concern was that the central government was seriously threatening the entire federalist arrangement and setting up a centralized system much like what existed in most European countries.  The fear would be that this would, in turn, centralize so much power that the structural elements for despotism would be put in place.  One of our foundational values had been the demand for countervailing powers – such as in separation of powers among the branches of government and between the central and state governments.  Centralization would also provide for a removal of meaningful governance away from the people in their localities and vesting it in far off Washington.  There is no mistake; these concerns are central to federalism and a viable intrusion into state powers would place all these core values in jeopardy.

But let me provide another federalist concern, one that gets at the more political/cultural aspects of the equation.  Equality is central to federalist thought.  That is, a federal union is one of equal entities (parties) uniting to accomplish some goal or set of goals.  The instrument by which the agreement to join is stated and defined is a covenant or a compact – a solemn promise – in which the parties swear their allegiance.  Of course, that would be, for our nation, the US Constitution.  Prior to the Civil War and legally codified by the Dred Scott decision was the claim that those among us who either arrived from Africa or descended from those arrivals – blacks – were not among the people comprising that promise.  Therefore, they were not entitled to the rights and immunities guaranteed by the agreement.  Congress, after the war, wanted the legal instruments, law(s), to end this distinction.  By first enacting the Civil Rights Law of 1866 and later having the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution ratified, the aim was this change by legally defining the citizenship status of African-Americans as those of any other citizen.  To me, this is not a step away from federalism, but an important step toward it.  Not only would this clear up the unjust exclusion of African-Americans in our political partnership, but it would provide the language that led to other discriminated groups attaining their full-fledged status as equal citizens.  What groups?  To begin with, the post-Civil War amendments almost immediately were used to begin the discussion of granting women full citizenship status not only in terms of suffrage, but in terms of property rights.

But before we go too far in crediting the radical Republicans of the late 1800s with ushering in a more complete respect for the principles of federalism, the initial vehemence which characterized their efforts of the 1860s was short-lived and soon they were guilty of back-sliding.

Republican supporters of the Reconstruction amendments and the civil rights statute acknowledged the revolutionary changes they had wrought in American federalism by delegating plenary authority over citizenship and civil rights to the national government.  Before the Civil War, the states had exercised almost exclusive jurisdiction over fundamental rights.  Under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as Republicans understood them, Congress could conceivably supplant states in securing civil rights. … Republicans acknowledged the constitutional revolution in which they were engaged, they carefully avoided carrying this revolution to its ultimate conclusion of creating a unitary political structure.  Republicans did not wish to supplant the states in providing a foundation for ordinary civil and criminal justice.  On the contrary, they consciously preserved federalism by avoiding unnecessary intrusion on state authority over civil rights … [restricting] its protection of fundamental rights to situations in which states and localities failed to protect them.[1]

As the nineteenth century progressed, the national government became less concerned with the plight of the former slaves and the southerners instituted strict discriminatory and segregationist policies.  Of course, we are all familiar with the turbulent history which extends to our current times of race relations.  But, when we discuss the federalist nature of our union, we must remember that federalism is not just a structural concept; it is a whole construct of governance which includes ideas, ideals, and values concerning our views over citizenship, rights, and how we relate to each other.  I like to think of it, as I have often stated in this blog, as a grand partnership where ultimately all our interests are tied together.  It is a perspective of inclusion in a pluralistic land.

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[1] Kaczorowski, R. J.  (1992).  A revolution in federal civil rights.  In K. L. Hall (Ed.) Major problems in American constitutional history, Volume I:  The colonial era through reconstruction (pp. 584-592).  Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, p. 590.  Many of the historical facts of this posting are derived from this article.

TRUMPING THE PROCESS

Last August 18^th I posted a piece that reflected on our subconscious abilities.  I related experimental work about how we discern winning patterns in card “games” fairly quickly without much conscious figuring; they’re hunches, if you will.  And all of that mental work is done by our subconscious as it, much like a computer, reviews and analyzes a heavy dose of data – by some estimates, over eleven million bits of data.  Let me quote Malcolm Gladwell, “… [see the subconscious] as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as a human being.”[1]  I applied that ability to the initial developments of the present presidential race and commented on any early appeal Donald Trump had.  Well, the months have passed since those early days; a lot has taken place including name calling, immature references to body parts, fist fights, and a slew of candidates dropping out of the race.  We have five names left and the two nominees of the major parties seem to have been chosen even though there are outside chances that one or the other of the apparent winners could lose by some unforeseen development.  So has Trump trumped any chance for a more traditional campaign season between the conventions and election day?  It seems he has.

What seems to have happened, and I am not an expert on these matters, is that those early gut reactions to the candidates’ messaging have solidified.  Trump followers have become unyielding Trump supporters.  We are led to believe that due to his popularity among certain segments of the electorate, seldom voting segments, they have found their man and little to nothing will budge them from that support.  Many, the media tells us, don’t necessarily like many of his off-the-cuff comments, but they dismiss those in the same way they may say things at times or perhaps their neighbors would say things; that is, offensive comments they would probably take back if given the chance.  After all, a great part of his appeal is that he is neither a politician – a claim he could make when he first entered the race, but no longer – nor politically correct – a term the meaning of I am not exactly sure.  I believe, since politics is not what many people like to think about once a decision is made in that area of concern, a person is likely not to want to revisit it again.  Instead, it’s more fun to appreciate the “show” quality the Trump phenomenon provides.

While subconsciously developed hunches, especially by experienced commentators of whatever area of concern the hunch is about, tend to be uncannily accurate, they are subject to mistakes.  And the thing is, we are mostly not experts on most things about which we have to decide.  So let’s look into this subconscious mechanism we carry around. 

First, evolutionarily speaking, we as humans would not have survived if we had not augmented our ability to predict or form conclusions on the conscious level.  We needed this faster mode of decision-making to meet the challenges of the day.  By subconscious, the reference is not the Freudian sub-consciousness we have come to know about; instead, it is this calculating mechanism described above.  As such, we are dealing with an adaptive portion of the brain, dealing with quickly changing environments.  And hence, our survival ability, such thinking permits, developed over centuries.  Some of its functions include taking stock of the environment (with all its variety of information), issuing necessary warnings when needed, setting up short-term goals, and even sending the necessary internal signals to initiate action, all done in a very efficient manner.  That’s one very sophisticated bit of “hardware” with compatible “software” programing built in – truly, a biological wonder.

To illustrate these capabilities, Gladwell shares an experiment that demonstrates them.  In a study in which students were shown ten-second video tapes of teachers to students, the students were asked to rate how good the teachers were.  The study then compared these quick evaluations with student evaluations which were done toward the end of a term of the same teachers and found the correlation of results between the “ten-second” evaluations and the term-long evaluations overwhelming.  I would probably want to know what constituted a good teacher in these students’ minds, but the point is that in ten-seconds they were able to predict what students thought about those professors at the end of a semester, usually ten to sixteen weeks long.

Now, hunches based on quick judgements are fallible and knowing the subject under evaluation does help in these hunches – the more one knows, the better one’s hunches are.  Our subconscious mind can be misled, distracted, or otherwise given wrong information.  So that leaves us with two areas of interest in considering this other mind.  One, why are we, in using our subconscious, right when we are right?  And then, why are we wrong when we are wrong?  The practical concern would be:  how can we improve in using our subconscious computer?  I will further explore these questions in future postings.  If nothing else, a better understanding could lead us to selecting better political leaders than we seem to be doing currently.

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[1] Gladwell, M.  (2005).  Blink:  The power of thinking without thinking.  New York, NY:  Bay Back Books, p.11.

THE LANGUAGE OF EXCHANGE

I have in these postings written about a relationship among citizens that exists in an ideal federalist arrangement; that is, of a sense of partnership.  What I have not done is give this idea much substance other than to express that people in a partnership see the arrangement as one in which the advancement of one partner is the advancement of all partners.  It follows the call of the Three Musketeers:  one for all and all for one.  Of course, this is the ideal and, in its truest sense, not a reality that can be achieved in a society of any size where interests are constantly in competition.  Actually, we wouldn’t have it any other way.  Competition in the real world promotes excellence as one competitor tries, for the sake of earning some limited resource, to outdo the others so as to win the resource.  In business, this is profits, but it can also include status, recognition, and other rewards.  But even here, an understanding that such competition advances the common interest can give resulting relations a hue of federation in knowing that the advancement of the common good advances all citizens even if the short-term results can be disappointing as one loses a sought-after compensation or other positive result.

In a way, all this is a bit of irony.  Trying to do in your opponent can elicit a focused attempt to better someone else, but by doing so, the advancement of society is gained and even the “loser” can benefit by such a turn of events.  Consider the Wright brothers winning the competition to be the first to fly.  Yes, they won the competition at the expense of their competitors, but I am sure that their competitors benefitted by living in a world that cracked the secrets of flying, or at least their children or grandchildren did.  The point is that even if one ascribes to a federalist view of ideal citizen relations, that does not mean one condemns or even bad-mouths competitive contests among citizens particularly in the realm of economic activity.  What one would expect is that any associated behaviors in this competition are conducted under fair rules of engagement – rules that would truly advance the common benefit and give each competitor the fullest, yet equal, opportunity to win the competition.

Many values contribute to this ideal; one is trust.  Let me explain.  To begin with, this language provides metaphors that are useful in explaining this irony.  To an audience “raised” on natural rights imagery, placing trust as a sort of medium of exchange, one can illustrate basic relationships.  It also allows a civics teacher to metaphorically speak in market terms; terms that while metaphoric, are true to what federated expectations are.  I have stated that trust is earned, at least by prudent people.  This is the case if one is the dispenser of it or the receiver of it.  Yes, we do give others the benefit of the doubt in most social and economic transactions – one can probably add political to this list – but if the stakes become at all meaningful, one is dealing with a level of trust that has to be felt and such levels should only prudently be extended to those who by their past behaviors have demonstrated trustworthiness.  As an earned quality, one is dealing with a level of morality or goodness by some shared standard.  Even among thieves, one hears about a code of “honor among thieves.”  So, the first relevant metaphor is one of accounting.

Trust, in this view, represents moral credit, an asset not yet earned, per se.  Using George Lakoff’’s description of this relation (as I did in a posting from last May, Due Sentimentality):

When you do something good for someone, you give something of positive value to him [or her] and what you get in exchange is “credit.”  Credit for acting morally can accumulate.  It is a form of capital. …

To place your trust in someone morally is to give him [or her] advance moral credit, credit he [or she] will repay you by acting morally.  If someone that you place your trust in acts very immorally, then you “lose trust” in him [or her], that is, you lose the moral credit that you gave him [or her] in advance as prepayment for acting morally.  He [or she] is “discredited” and “morally bankrupt.”  “Trust” is a prepayment of moral credit for future moral action.  But in general, people do not trust just anyone.  To be trusted, a person has to “build trust,” to establish a history of being trustworthy, a moral credit rating.[1]

And with this basic understanding of trust, we have the introduction of justice, at least from this angle of “exchange.”  Justice can be seen as those developments in which moral accounts are settled, as in people getting what they deserve and in the process cancelling moral debts.

Lakoff points to the idea Martin Luther King used in his March on Washington speech when he claimed that the blacks who were marching in Washington to “cash a check”  and that within the history of our nation, the African-American race had not been treated with justice in this basic exchange of trust between blacks and the nation.  What is the exchange?  As stated by a Supreme Court justice, the exchange is implicit with citizenry:  allegiance as expressed by performing one’s duties as a citizen – a partner – for the protection of one’s rights as a citizen.  Rights are categorized as being of several types, e. g., life, liberty, property, but also the right to participate in the collective decision-making processes of the polity among other rights.  And what of the duties?  What are they?  Let me offer a list:  to obey the law, to defend, when called upon, the security and interests of the nation, to engage in one’s economic activities that while providing compensation, are aligned with the common good, willingly and conscientiously performing civic requirements (e. g., jury duty), and beyond the base line provisions of the implicit covenant or compact, assist and support legitimate familial and communal endeavors.  Under the language of the exchange, rights are property which can be earned or inherited.  So the exchange takes on a formulated structure.  Someone has a right, someone has a duty, and this reflects the exchange.

Rights need protecting or, in some cases, a medium by which they are experienced.  The main agent to see that they are protected or providing the medium of expression is government.  This service is not free.  We pay for that service by paying taxes.  Generally, fewer taxes means fewer rights.  By viewing taxes through this perspective, one adopts a counter natural rights language; a prevailing language espoused by self-appointed natural rights spokespeople such as Grover Norquist, who is famous for holding Republican representatives to never raise taxes.  In the natural rights language, taxes are castigated as being anti-rights.  They are a form of tyranny, despite the fact that the US has some of the lowest effective tax rates among developed nations.  While the language proposed in this posting, a more federated view, taxes take on the role of monetarily allowing the flourishing of rights among the different segments of the population, of the partnership.  Of course, the language does not promote an unbridled level of taxation, but it does support reasonable levels so as to protect and promote a level of rights that justly corresponds to the exchange between rights and allegiance.

So what is the result of not honoring King’s check?  What happens if allegiance is met with deficient protection and promotion of rights?  We have theft, if either the appropriate levels of rights or duties is not forthcoming, there is stealing.  If this stealing is pervasive, there is an immoral system and certain implications become real.  First, these notions of exchange and moral debt do not just appear among our social relations or within our conscious view of things.  Those functions are satisfied by institutions – the family, the schools, the churches, our businesses, our government – and so a community or nation depends on institutions to defend and promote the resulting supportive values related to the exchange.  Another implication of this exchange is that those who benefit most from it have more duties and that this heightened sense of duty is a moral claim.  It is so moral that we have codified in law as with a progressive taxes code.  To the extent that we promote laws that shield the more (most) benefited from rendering the higher rate of duty – as with implementation of a flat tax – such policy is immoral; it’s stealing.  Therefore, if those who benefit more accrue political power and use that power to avoid accompanying duties, they are engaging in immoral political action.

Of course, such language is speaking metaphorically; equally metaphorically as when one refers to taxes as a form of tyranny.  Speaking more objectively, one can have taxes so high that they are tyrannical, but one can also have such low taxes among favored or advantaged citizens that one can objectively describe the situation as stealing.  At least, that is how I judge the actions of some corporations that enjoy the protection of the US government while keeping enormous amounts of cash off-shore to avoid (?) taxes.  When the rates become so lopsided, one can legitimately ask: is there stealing going on?

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[1] Lakoff, G.  (2002).  Moral politics:  How liberals and conservatives think.  Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, pp. 55-56.

I’LL GET MY FIX

In my last set of postings, I delved into the field of punditry.  More specifically, I related what the political writer, Philip E. Tetlock,[1] had to say about predicting political events or developments.  One observation I made was that pundits aren’t necessarily in the business of changing minds.  Their audiences consist of people who pretty much agree with them.  Pundits serve to reinforce already held beliefs about the political world and, in addition, they can provide talking points.  To be open to new information and/or arguments is to take a reasonable approach to political thinking and calculating.  What it turns out to be, though, is that when it comes to politics and what people who have an interest in it tend to do is not think about politics, but rather feel about politics; that is, “[t]he political brain is an emotional brain” – so says Drew Westen.[2]

Let’s state that a bit differently.  If you view our thinking and deciding about politics and government as a dispassionate process – one in which we take in information, weigh pro and cons over possible courses of action or policy and reason what is best either for ourselves, our family, our community, nation, or the world, you’re wrong.  According to Westen, this is not how the human mind works.  Those in the business of politics, such as those working in political campaigns who assume that is how people think about politics, will not be successful.  Westen and his colleagues came to this conclusion from their research into political thinking; I mean political feeling.

For example, in 2004, during the presidential campaign that pitted John Kerry against George W. Bush, Westen’s team identified fifteen committed Democrats and fifteen committed Republicans, each subject supporting his/her party’s nominee.  The researchers showed them slides from which the subjects read information which depicted Kerry and Bush being dishonest, inconsistent, slimy, pandering, or simply acting poorly in some way.  Through accompanying questioning and scanning their brains, the researchers wanted to see how the subjects reacted to the information for each of the candidates.  To begin with, the reasonable response would have been to condemn the depicted behaviors equally along some standard for appropriate conduct.  By recording the subjects’ responses and then reviewing the information derived from the scanning, the researchers’ aim was to ascertain what was happening cognitively.  To guide this research, they proposed four hypotheses:  (1) the negative information would cause the neural circuits found to be associated with negative emotions to be activated; (2) overall activation in the brain would be geared at “regulating” emotions through such coping mechanisms as rationalization; (3) parts of the brain associated with conflict would be activated; and (4) parts of the brain associated with reasoning would not be activated since they expected the subjects to “reason” from their emotions.  The slides, for example, presented one candidate condemning the Iraq war and another slide showing him praising it.  They also saw the other candidate waxing-on about how we need to take care of the veterans while his administration cut funding for VA hospitals.  Summarily, the researchers found that the subjects found it easy to find fault with the candidate they did not support while only mildly finding fault with the candidate they supported.  But not only was this research able to record the inconsistency in the answers the subjects provided, it, due to the scanning, checked on how the brain physically responded to the information.

The first detection was expected; neurons associated with stress fired up.  This causes an unpleasant sensation within the subject.  To “handle” this, the brain attempts to deny the information causing the negative reaction – this reminds one of the five stages of grief.  It seems that this, if allowed to stand, is a way to turn off the unpleasant chemical business happening internally. What the researchers found interesting was how quickly the brain was able to do this type of mental gymnastics.  “The neural circuits charged with regulation of emotional states seemed to recruit beliefs that eliminated the distress and conflict partisans had experienced … [a]nd this all seemed to happen with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning.”[3]

If this weren’t telling enough, the researchers were able to detect another finding that surprised them.  Once the false conclusions were accepted by the subject and the neural circuits associated with unpleasant sensations deactivated, those associated with positive emotions were engaged – they fired up.  These partisan subjects’ brains not only found a way to stop feeling bad, but also found a way to feel good, and the neurons so activated substantially coincided with those stimulated in a drug addict when getting his/her fix.  Westen asks:  is there something to the notion of a political junkie?

If this is what a political operative is facing in a political campaign, what chances does reasoned debate have in the process?  The saving grace is that roughly about sixty percent of the population is partisan (just about thirty/thirty between the major parties).  That leaves forty percent not so committed to either one side or the other and, therefore, these people are subject to being influenced by well-run campaigns that can put together a good, well presented argument relevant to their needs.  Of course, to begin with, these are the same people who have less interest in politics.  People who are partisan become partisan by having this interest nurtured, usually from a very young age.  I attribute my interest, for example, to the interest my father expressed around the house (actually the New York apartment) I lived in during my early years.  Once one is exposed to such messaging, it usually comes with the bias built-in.  My father was a union painter who was very committed to his union.  Along with that, there was a partisan bias toward the Democratic Party – my first trip to Hyde Park occurred when I was eleven or so.  I suppose most strongly held partisan emotions are generated in similar ways.  As the years have gone by, I have tried to become more reasonable in my views of politics.  I still love FDR, but I have in this blog pointed out short comings attributed to the New Deal – you can judge how “dispassionate” I have become.  The point is that a civically minded citizen should be reasonable yet emotional enough about politics and the welfare of our commonwealth to be motivated to learn and become involved in our political activities.  This adds to the challenges of a civics teacher.

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[1] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] Westen, D.  (2007).  The political brain:  The role of emotions in deciding the fate of the nation.  New York, NY:  PublicAffairs, p. xv.

[3] Ibid., p. xiv.

SWANS, TURNS OUT, ARE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

I want to finish with Philip Tetlock’s[1] ideas concerning our abilities to predict our futures in the realm of social and political developments.  There are those among us who count on TV pundits and newspaper columnists to do that for us, assuming there exists a basic agreement between the consumer and provider of such a service.  In our midst, there are those who, with a heightened interest in political and social affairs, regularly take in the predictive insights of such commentators; the problem is, according to Tetlock, these dispensers of wisdom do not enjoy very good “batting averages” in being able to predict accurately.  Lucky for the pundits, their listeners are not so much interested in accuracy as they are hungry for general rationales and talking points for their already held beliefs.  By the time their failure to forecast becomes evident, the attention of their audience has moved on to other matters and so the mistakes go unnoticed.  I saw a video the other day in which President Obama spouts the predictions that pundits warned us about if the president were to be reelected in 2012.  To remind you, one was gas prices in the $5.00-$6.00 range and another was unemployment at levels nearing ten percent.  He then juxtaposed those figures with rates prevailing at the time he was giving this comparison.  Actually, the disparities made for a fairly humorous bit of comedy.

Tetlock’s castigation of these pundits was not so much critical of these predictors, but to address how we might approach this fine skill of forecasting in order to be more successful.  For better prognostication, it turns out, being modest in our ability to predict is helpful.  As I reported in my last posting, research indicates that being less than confident in this endeavor, unlike in playing golf, seems to up our chances of getting it right.  This modesty is enhanced by realizing that political realities are best anticipated with apprehension.  Over what?  Over what is referred to as “black swans.” 

Black swans are unexpected developments or events that disrupt the equilibrium of forces that are holding sway at any given time.  These swans appear recurrently, but without any regularity in terms of their timing.  It’s as if we are going along within certain patterns – for example, the patterns of our presidential campaign cycles – and boom, up comes a Donald Trump to belie all of our expectations as to what will happen next – have you picked out your Canadian domicile?  Tetlock goes on to describe this whole process by which one attempts to responsibly forecast the political future as a cloudlike endeavor as opposed to a clocklike endeavor.  That is, it’s best to see the whole movement of politics as clouds coming and going in no particular pattern, here and there, and not to see it as the fine, mechanical movements of a clock.

Tetlock next draws our attention to the type of mistakes these pundits can make.  But before I share these with you, I want to remind you of what a former secretary of defense once said:  there are things we know we know; there are things we know we don’t know, and there are things we don’t know we don’t know.[2]  Of course, black swans fall into the last category.  With this as context, let’s look at Tetlock’s two-pronged possible prediction outcomes.  There are false-positive mistakes and there are false-negative mistakes.  I will quickly add a third possibility, an accurate prediction.  A false-positive mistake would be an erroneous prediction of something going to happen.  Around this time every year, for example, I predict the Yankees will win the World Series.  I usually make a false-positive mistake, but my “batting average” is higher than any other type of similar prediction for any other professional franchise here in the US.  It is a prediction situation in which I know what I don’t know, namely how the baseball season will unfold.  That is, if there is a World Series this year, there will be a winner, but I don’t know which team will win; I believe a particular team will win, but I don’t know which one.  If I am wrong – heaven forbid – then I would have committed a false-positive mistake.  Implied in this prediction is the assumption, as I just pointed out, that there will be a World Series, but what if there is some development within baseball that I am not aware of that threatens that eventuality?  After all, I can remember a year when we didn’t have a World Series due to a player work dispute.  Now, I have no reason to believe that will happen this year, but say it does.  In my prediction of who will win, I didn’t predict a necessary precondition.  In other words, I didn’t predict something will not happen – playing the World Series.  That is a false-negative mistake.  It also demonstrates an unknown, unknown.  People who study this sort of thing point out that sellers of health insurance face this lack of relevant information all the time.  In selling you a policy, they don’t know what you are not telling them about your health or what you don’t even know about your health.[3]  As for what you know you know, even when the reality is not a hundred percent one way or another, you do know probabilities and can manage any entailed risk the situation presents, but in the world of political developments, those are often not with what one is dealing;  hence, the high occurrence of false-positive and false-negative mistakes in predicting future events or developments.

This gets us back to the poker player’s way of thinking about this game of predictions.  Probability studies come into play and the use of math becomes useful – i.e. visualizing the different possible hands one is confronting.  The irony is that such probability studies are highly dependent on a history of false-positive mistakes and false-negative mistakes as well.  It is the analysis of these mistakes, of reviewing how and why mistakes were made and placing numerical values to the correct factors, that ups our chances (and let me emphasize “chances”) of getting it right.  It turns out that mathematical algorithms have been developed and programmed into computers to work on these types of predictive projects and they actually, by a long shot, do better than their human counterparts.  There are a lot of simulated ways to test this.  For example, there is the playing of chess in which algorithm based programs beat the best players regularly.  But as Tetlock points out, this need not be a competition between humans and machines but a possible collaboration in which the use of machines can up our chances to get it right.  So while the political world is not clocklike, the use of exacting mathematics can enhance our ability to foretell where those clouds are apt to go and where those swans might be lurking.

Of course, the likelihood that the regular viewer of Fox News or MSNBC shunning the more flamboyant pundit for the drier math “nerd” to provide them with a view of the future might not be what is wanted.  I must say, I have seen the not nerdy Nate Silver on MSNBC.  He is one of the more mathematically based predictors who has been relatively very successful at predicting elections and does, apparently, rely on the type of analyses indicated above.  But of course, elections and their counting on votes and responses to survey questionnaires lend themselves readily to such algorithms.  But how about punditry that applies such rigor to foreign relations or welfare policies?  Can we stand watching and listening to this type of predicting, where nothing is “guaranteed”?  If we had measurable stakes such as predicting the stock market and other financial developments with such accuracy, perhaps our need for such forecasting would be enhanced.  Oh, I forget, we do have a personal stake but alas, these stakes are not so quantifiable.

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[1] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] The exact quote by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is:  “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

[3] For this limited point about health insurance see Huettel, S. (2014).  Behavioral economics:  When psychology and economics collide.  [A transcript]  Chantilly, VA:  The Great Courses/The Teaching Company.

CLOUDS WITH SWANS?

I want to take up the topic I introduced in the last posting, the ability to forecast social/political developments.  My focus was the role that pundits play in providing views of the future, an ability in which they have proven to be less than proficient.  My description of this dynamic is based on the thoughts of Philip Tetlock,[1] a Canadian-American professor and political writer.  I tried to stress the importance of pundits in our political culture in that they provide the rationales for opinion-leaders among the general populous.  Tetlock provides us with certain ideas about how we, and more specifically pundits, can improve on this business of forecasting.

To review his findings regarding pundits, he presents three conclusions:  their rate of success at predicting is a little better than chance; despite this deficiency, they are overly confident in their abilities to forecast and seldom do they express any change of mind or heart when confronted with evidence that they were mistaken.  Central to this back and forth system between pundits and their audience is the fact that the role pundits play is not to inform the audience but to reinforce already held beliefs.  My feeling is that what the pundits provide is not so much information or expert opinion, but phraseology and cherry-picked facts that support what has been established in their minds as being true, good, or bad.  Of course, reality about the social and political world does not help.  After all, that’s what the forecasting business is in business to predict, and one can very reasonably ask whether or not that world is predictable to begin with.

Tetlock uses the notion of Nassim Talib of the “black swan” approach to history.  First, most pundits on TV and columnists in the papers rely on history to provide the evidence they use to justify their conclusions.  Only rarely do they cite social science literature for backing; instead, they recall some historical incident or development that they present as analogous to the conditions they are analyzing.  I have already in this blog voiced my bias for historical research over social science research, but my bias is based on going beyond citing a case or two – a topic for another posting.  In terms of our pundits, it is beneficial to adopt this black swan view.  It encourages us to view history as a record of social relations being in an equilibrium for a time and then being hit by some highly disruptive event or development – the black swan.  Affected institutions take into account the swan and eventually create a new equilibrium.  Is this a way to view Donald Trump, for example, in our current presidential primary season?  Possibly.  But the Trump case illustrates what this phenomenon is like; no pundit forecasted the Trump factor in this political season.  And yet, what will be the consequences of Trump; what new equilibrium point will this candidate help establish?  Time will tell, but I can assure you he will cause changes in the Republican Party.

One consequence of this process that might be overlooked is that during periods of equilibrium, we seem to accept a new set of conditions as “normal” fairly quickly.  We, collectively, seem to have short memories.  The new resulting social environment lulls us into a sense that we can predict what’s coming.  Patterns establish quickly and within those patterns, the more informed and savvy observers can up their accuracy rates of telling us what is going to happen.  But it is not whether a new black swan will appear again, but when.  And as it appears, there goes all that ability to see what’s coming.  So the second consequence is that our ongoing attempts at predicting do have a pattern:  successful periods followed by almost complete disarray primarily due to our undeserved hubris in feeling we know what’s up until the arrival of a newer black swan.

So, one lesson is to be wary of any prediction that is stated in longer-term time frames.  Short-term forecasting is what pundits should be about and even there the listener should be leery.  Or stated another way, view this limited skill as being akin to the skills of a good poker player or hedge fund manager.  Seeing politics as poker has advantages.  For one, a “player” defines the possible events as a range of possibilities.  One can, under such thinking, view potential acts as a sampling universe, not as well defined as with a deck of cards, but more defined than the options entertained by the typical pundit one sees on TV.  This view of possibilities is a landscape of a type in which one’s preconceived assumptions are tested and worked out.  The goal under such an approach is to formulate reasonable probability estimates as a poker player visualizes possible poker hands, and as with poker and an accompanying good sense of learning from costly mistakes, this discipline provides one an avenue for improvement.  One can become better at forecasting, although Tetlock warns it does take time – beware of the young pundit.

As for what comprises the “deck” in politics, Tetlock provides another analogy: that of a cloud – as opposed to a clock.  The forecaster needs to disabuse him/herself of any notion that politics resembles a clock with regular movements.  The sense of a cloud, as it applies to politics, is seen as this conglomeration of events Tetlock describes as follows:

If world politics is more cloudlike – little wisps of clouds blowing around in the air in quasi-random ways – no matter how theoretically prepared the observer is, the observer is not going to be able to predict very well.  … [T]he cloudlike view would posit that the optimal forecasting frontier is not going to be appreciably greater than chance or you’re not going to be able to do much better than a dart-throwing chimpanzee.  One of the things we discovered in the [simulated studies] work was that forecasters who suspected that politics was more cloudlike were actually more accurate in predicting long-term futures than forecasters who believed that it was more clocklike.[2]

Modesty is a factor in proficiency levels when it comes to forecasting; that is, modesty is positively related to the ability to predict long-term political developments.

Does that mean heuristics are useless?  Not at all; the point is that when given the time one should put in the work; figure the probabilities as best one can and calculate what is likely to happen.  Heuristic hunches by the novice or uninformed are more in line with the accuracy of the chimpanzee referred to above.  Heuristic hunches by ideologues are just a bit better.  But heuristic hunches by those who have spent a professional lifetime studying a field of knowledge prove to be fairly accurate.  But even they, if given the time, do not rely on hunches; they put in the time.  And the time among political experts seems to be better spent in not looking at their field as this Newtonian world of predictable phenomena, but as those clouds that come in and out, here and there, and sometimes (with too regular a recurrence) they contain, metaphorically, a black swan to potentially disrupt their best efforts at any given time.  Good luck to them; good luck to us all.

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[1] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] Ibid., p. 26.

WITH LIMITED TIME, A DEPENDENCY

As a civics teacher presents his/her daily lessons, that teacher should keep in mind that in those seats in front of him/her are filled with future adults who will be engaged in a multitude of ways to make a living and that most of their future day-to-day concerns will not be about what their governmental officials will be doing.  They will be concerned with family finance, other family matters, jobs, what’s up with their friends, what’s going on at church, and how their favorite sports team is faring.  What a civics teacher should be about is trying to increase the concern that students have about the privileges and responsibilities attached to their role as citizens.  My attempts in this blog have been to encourage a theoretical slant to that view, one that holds on to a belief and an emotional commitment; that is, I would want that student to begin viewing his/her citizenship as an agreement, an agreement to be a partner with his/her fellow citizens in this project we call the United States of America.  This includes the view of the additional commitment of being a partner within his/her respective state (which in my case is the state of Florida). 

And as a partner, he or she is concerned generally about what is going on, what advances that partnership, and what adds to or detracts from the health of that partnership.  While all this is important, the average citizen can be reasonably pardoned if he/she cannot or will not engage in hours and hours of research related to those issues.  With all that goes on in daily lives, the amount of effort toward becoming knowledgeable and opinionated over these concerns – some being quite complex – will be limited.  How much time, on a daily basis, is it reasonable to expect the average citizen to expend on these civic concerns?  An hour or so?  That’s the time it takes to watch a round of the local news – which is mostly worthless in terms of these concerns – and the national news on TV.  We would hope the average citizen subscribes to the local paper and is able to spend some time at least skimming it for meaningful stories; you know, the ones that don’t cover the latest murder or “kitten up a tree” type of story.  There is an adage today that people don’t read the newspaper anymore, but instead “play” it with all the puzzles and games they print.  But there is always the percentage in the populous that has a heightened interest. 

They view and read more than just the minimum I just described – there is also that portion who views and reads a lot less.  But for those who go beyond the minimum but less than the amount political wonks put in, the function of the pundit is important.  These interested citizens go a bit beyond the hourly newscasts and skimming the paper; they watch news related networks like Fox News and MSNBC.  On those networks, there is a continuous stream of pundits.

And in turn, these citizens who watch and read more than the minimum and less than the “wonk” level, are important.  These citizens are important in that they still speak mostly in the language of the less informed but, being more informed, they can and do become influential among the general population.  People listen to them, if not the pundits, and how they decide to vote or think about an issue can have an augmented effect.  If you know little or nothing about a subject but feel compelled to act in relation to that subject, you might seek advice from someone you think knows more about it than you do.  At the same time, you will seek that advice from someone you can understand and whom you feel is not too different from where you stand in relation to that subject.  There is a literature associated with these phenomena.[1] 

So, if these citizens are influential and they, in turn, are influenced by pundits, how can we view these pundits?  Perhaps one way is to see them as forecasters.  We have weather forecasters and now we have political forecasters.  Their presentations follow a format; either they directly or by innuendo express what will happen if so and so is allowed to happen.  Their stock and trade is to convince viewers how prescient they are in warning the audience what will happen if the political universe is foolish enough not to follow their advice.  They might direct their comments about how good or bad a course of action is or will be, but the ultimate message is a warning.  For a better America, one should heed their opinion.  Of course, this general function can be extended also to columnists in the papers.  If you want to know about any bias on the part of these pundits, either from the network they are on or the paper that runs their column, one can guess quite accurately what side of the political divide they are on – there are exceptions and they are few in number.  What I want to focus on here is on how good a pundit is in forecasting and what some of the factors affecting this level of proficiency are. 

Philip Tetlock[2] provides an analysis of these aspects.  His overall judgment about how good these “political analysts” are in predicting is that they are not so good.  He grades them as poor at predicting beyond a year; they tend to think they know a great deal about what will happen in the future, a lot more than they actually do know.  It turns out that predictions termed as having eighty or ninety percent accuracy, in actuality are in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 percent.  By the way, I still feel that that rate is not bad.  But, he goes on, that when confronted with less than anticipated accuracy, these pundits do not “learn” from their mistakes and hold on to original claims or derived conclusions.  This means, Tetlock holds, that pundits are predicting only a bit better than chance; they are overconfident and do not benefit from their mistakes.  So right off the top, what the media should be about is benchmarking these predictions and if this were done, the thinking is that either these pundits’ modesty would increase or they would become better at their jobs.

But you might ask why, if the rate of accuracy is so low, does anyone listen to these people?  Well, this question is based on a faulty assumption.  It is based on the notion that people listen to become informed, to become educated.  No, this is not the reason.  People listen to pundits to have their already formed prejudices reinforced; they listen to those who already agree with them on the conclusions – what they believe to be true or good or bad – and can provide the arguments and selected facts that bolster those opinions.  Add to this the pundit’s trick to couch predictions in iffy language – such as, “there could be” statements – and the combination is enough of a hedge to allow the system to sustain itself.  But as we look into this form of political communication, we find even more layers to it.  For example, we find that both pundits and listeners are highly reluctant to question, much less change, their basic assumptions.  They might be willing to dabble with the truth or wisdom of those beliefs on the fringes of their belief structures, but the central tenets are untouchable.  They rationalize when confronted with direct hits on those beliefs.  For example, they might emphasize even greater harm if their advocated position is proven to be misguided, as in we’d better not tempt an even worse outcome by going down a particular road (we’d better not negotiate with Iran because it will use its leverage to bolster terrorists).  This is done when their warnings do not have anything to do with the issue at hand (currently preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons).

In the next posting, I want to pick up on Tetlock’s treatment of this question over forecasting and look at what a teacher can emphasize when instructing students on the role and function of pundits.  Such instruction, for example, can point out a benchmark system that students could utilize and then analyze a set of political pundits from various positions on the political spectrum over an amount of time (sounds like a great term paper project).  But this area has been understudied by the general media although there have been some attempts to judge the factual veracity of what pundits and politicians say in the media.  But since pundits play an important role for our citizenry, civics classrooms need to shine more light on what is going on with these “experts.”

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[1] See for example Lloren, A. and Wuest, R.  (2016).  Are opinion leaders better represented?  Social Science Research Network, retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2733045 .

[2] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.