TRUMP THE OILY BIG GUYS

Despite the fact that I believe in holding political ideals, I do have a cynical side. I see politics, for the most part, as an arena in which the participants are trying to advance their selfish interests. They, especially the professionals, have to understand ideals if for no other reason as to be able to rationalize their activities in the language of ideals. Have you seen the ads that one of the energy associations is running bolstering the interests of fossil fuels by pointing out all the “good” things the use of these fuels accrues: good investments for your 401s, all the jobs they create and maintain, cheapening our energy costs, on and on. All of this is couched in the context of advancing the common good. And all of it is not spreading lies; fossil fuels have “fueled” our economic growth, but at a cost.

Science tells us that one of the costs has been the warming of our environment and that, in turn, has led to some very scary consequences. These include extreme weather and rising ocean levels that have been blamed for the flood damage we saw with Hurricane Sandy. Whether all of this is true or not, smarter folks than I will have to determine their validity. What I do know is that relative to my lifetime, I have not before seen the kind of weather events we have experienced in ever increasing occurrences in the last ten years. The rapidity of killer tornadoes, widespread droughts, hurricanes that are causing monumental damage, and stretches of inordinate high temperatures during the summer months are all taking place year after year. Something is going on and my money is on the explanations given to us by our scientific community.

Do you find yourself doubting these explanations? One question you might ask is: what moneyed interests are advanced by claiming the weather extremes are being caused by the use of fossil fuels? I can't think of any that represent much financial muscle. Oh, perhaps those companies that are trying to advance industries that run on alternative energy sources, but they don't hold a candle to the kinds of money the fossil fuel industries control. Surely, they don't have the types of grant money and propaganda facilities the gas and oil companies have. I've heard from the pro-fossil fuel side that a multi-billion dollar campaign is about promoting more expensive energy sources such as solar, wind, and thermal sources. Yet I haven't heard of names attached to such contributions, such as the Koch brothers on the other side. In terms of actual money sources we can identify, one can ask: how could they co-op the scientific community that is employed by institutions whose reputations are highly vulnerable to scandal, our American universities? They are in the business of finding truth and their success is highly contingent on maintaining high standards of scientific research.¹

And who is on the other side; who tends to support the researchers who produce the “studies” that counter the prevailing findings? I tried to find out, but all I found were industry supported researchers. My cynical side has a hard time accepting that kind of “science.”

Now let me digress a bit. I mostly don't like Donald Trump. His questioning of President Obama's birth certificate I found to be clownish and demeaning not just to the President, but to himself. So when I heard that he bought the Doral resort in Miami, I had mixed feelings. Why do I even care? I lived a large part of my life in the Miami area. The Doral golf tournament in Miami is, along with the Orange Bowl game, the occasional Super Bowl, and some other nationally televised events, the times that South Florida can “shine.” This past March the first golf tournament at Doral, since Trump redid the course, took place. Despite some problems – which I'm sure they learned from – the whole tournament was enjoyable to watch. So what does all this have to do with a warming environment and extreme weather?

According to the National Climate Assessment report issued this past Tuesday, South Florida is in danger of losses amounting to trillions of dollars due to rising ocean levels. It happens that the area's topography is flat and not much above sea level. The underground rock is limestone, a porous foundation. According to Broward County Commissioner Kristen Jacobs, “[i]t's remarkable. We get calls from people asking: 'It didn't rain, so why is my street underwater?' ”² Thirty percent of Broward County is 5 feet or less above sea level. The area has an old, in need of updating, water works which counts on gravity to work. Well, with rising ocean levels, the system is having problems and the result is water backup and salt water incursion. And one of the localities being seriously affected is Doral, Florida. Will Mr. Trump's party, the Republican Party, continue to lead the way in fighting public policy that will address the threats of global warming or will it take on the role of organizing the interests, like those of Mr. Trump, that are being threatened by extreme weather? Will they respond only to the interest that is directly rewarded by the status quo or will they take on the task of pointing out the dangers and solicit those business leaders who will find the coming years ever more expensive as they attempt to meet the challenges that weather conditions promise to bring?

At the time of Hurricane Andrew, we didn't make the connection between warming conditions and the destructive power of that storm. Since 1992, when South Florida was hit by Andrew, we can reasonably speculate that that storm was one of the first tangible examples of what we are seeing more frequently. I personally saw what such a storm can do: blocks after blocks of destroyed homes and untold tragedies to humans and animals. To use the word, inconveniences, to describe what followed doesn't do justice with what people had to endure. Since then we have had Katrina and Sandy. What's next?

And this is what I don't understand. Why is it that the Madisonian principle of varied interests does not come into play and check the single or lesser numbered factions whose interests are advanced but which negatively affect so many other interests – even monied interests? James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” and the other founding fathers did not trust the masses to produce good governance. They foresaw that if the system they created allowed for interests or factions to compete for favorable governmental policy, no one or only a few factions could control and get government to do what it or they wanted. Factions would check each other much like our three branches of government. But how bad does it need to get for the negatively affected factions to line up against a particular faction that is using its resources to advance those very conditions that are hurting all those other entities?

The summer before last, American farmers were significantly hindered by droughts. The conditions still exist in certain parts of the country. I heard of a local community beginning to recycle “used” water in order to meet the challenges of the extended drought. If the science is true, this is just one set of factions' interests whose advantage is being advanced by the neglect of developing alternative forms of energy. This is a well-heeled set of factions, but a set that is outnumbered both in terms of numbers and accumulated resources. For example, we now hear of the pending consequences to South Florida. We have communities destroyed by tornadoes and we have homes in California and other western states destroyed by inordinate numbers of forest fires. We have drought stricken farms across the country. Eventually, tourist areas will be affected – look at the Jersey Shore – industrial areas will be affected. We will all be affected by extreme weather.

The political question in coming years will be: how many of these devastating events do we need to go through before the party that represents many of these monied interests starts acting like a political party and represents these affected factions' true interests? Come on Trump, get real; your bottom line might have to take a significant hit. The National Climate Assessment states we still have time before the real costs start accumulating, but the costs are already being experienced. Now is the time to organize and target those pending interests that are and will be, to increasing levels, negatively affected by climate change.

1I recently heard that the Koch brothers have “bought” the economics department at my alma mater, Florida State University. I can't help thinking that such a link will undermine the reputation of that program.

2Koch, W. and Rice, D. (2014). Miami: Ground zero for global warming. Tallahassee Democrat (a USA Today article), May 8, (Section B), pp. 1 and 3, quotation on p. 1. The facts shared in this posting regarding South Florida are derived from this article.

LEARNING FROM SETBACKS

On my posting, dated April 21, I reported on the research of Carol S. Dweck. Dweck has derived a set of findings that might seem counter intuitive. She presents these findings as challenges to generally held beliefs which her research undermines with counter evidence. The first of these challenges is “[t]he belief that students with high ability are more likely to display mastery-oriented qualities.”¹ Common sense would seem to tell us that those students who are gifted with higher, natural ability levels would exhibit behaviors and attitudes that would in effect say, “bring it on” when faced with a difficult or daunting problem. They, one supposes, would relish such situations and when faced with a setback, they would find a way to overcome it. What Dweck found was that many of them exhibit more worry over failure and are more apt to question the possibilities of them solving or overcoming the obstacles before them. This sort of reaction, in turn, disposes them to a self-defeating pattern. Her research has led to important findings concerning the attitudes, particularly motivations, involved with difficult school work.

As I stated in that previous posting, a lot of what goes on with students faced with challenging work has to do with the particular view of intelligence that students and, for that matter, a lot of people in general hold. Do they believe intelligence is a fixed quantity or is it malleable and something a person can cultivate? Dweck found that a large portion of these students – and the population – believes intelligence to be a fixed resource. I indicated that I would have further comment on Dweck's findings. In this posting, I want to address the first faulty assumption, described above, that is just not true but held among too many naturally advantaged students.

This research indicates that for these students' vulnerabilities, the opposite of mastery is not a function of skill level or even past experiences of success. A sense of vulnerability is felt as helplessness. That is, these bright students, who, upon being challenged with a vexing problem, lack a sense of mastery and find themselves feeling the challenge as something beyond their control. These students express the situation as being denigrating to their intelligence. Their expectations plummet and their motivation to pursue a solution disappears. This is not the case for all high skilled students, but, in terms of Dweck's subjects, the rate was 50 percent. Why do so many of these opt to be negative, to be easily defeated in their quest to solve difficult problems?

What seems to be most at work among these students is their disposition to blame their lack of intelligence and voice the notion that they don't have what it takes to be successful in the situation they are facing. This reaction to setbacks is quite different from those who do hold mastery-oriented perspectives – the other 50 percent. Dweck reports that the “helpless” students did not perform any worse than students who were mastery-oriented. They often withheld formulating their defeated belief until encountering a setback or mistake even after experiencing earlier successes in which they maintained a positive view during those successes. But once an obstacle or failure was experienced, these students turned from a positive disposition to a negative one almost instantly. As opposed to mastery-oriented students, they had little to no belief they could solve the problems in the future – a third of them informed the researchers they could not solve the same problems, even after they did solve them, again. They also expressed boredom with the tasks and tried to deflect the failure by alluding to other areas in which they had been previously successful.

The patterns exhibited by mastery-oriented students were quite different. These students did not blame their intelligence for any failures – as a matter of fact, they didn't blame anything. Instead, they seemed to own the problem, engaging in self-instruction and self-incremental evaluations. Both of these activities were aimed at improving their performance. Setbacks were not disdained, but instead were often welcomed – they seemed to relish the challenge mistakes offered. This, in turn, led many to develop newer, more sophisticated strategies to attack the problem. Whereas the “helpless” students expressed failure as a reflection of their own lack of self-worth, mastery-oriented students did not talk this way. The self-defeated students saw failure in terms of risk, as a source for others considering them less worthy. Mastery-oriented students did not attach risk to their task or to the results of their efforts – they remained positive about themselves and their challenge. And one more thing: mastery-oriented students seemed to know more reasonably when to quit a problem either because they lacked the necessary sophistication or the problem was out of their league. Helpless students, the few who did not quit early, were more apt to stick to the problem beyond rational limits of time.

What does all of this work with bright students mean to the general population of students? One needs to remember that brighter students generally are faced with easy – for them – schoolwork most of the time. They go through the school day meeting one success after another. But what if they do face “difficult” work that, no matter how bright they are, will result in mistakes or failures? For example, what happens when these students face mathematics problems when they are confronted with new concepts or processes? By being able to focus on these encounters – and analyzing these students' reactions – researchers can gain insights about what other, less advantaged students might face on a more recurring basis. By being able to categorize two prevailing patterns – helpless and mastery – we can describe the patterns and begin to understand why a given student will follow one pattern as opposed to the other. One thing was clear from the research: a helpless response does lead to poorer performance and lower levels of productive results. The point is that helpless students adopt an unreasonable view of themselves in relation to the problem or task before them:

Students prone to the helpless pattern may easily react with self-doubt and disruption, deciding prematurely that they aren't any good in the subject. This would put them at a real disadvantage as school progresses, especially in areas of math and science that really ask the student to enter a new conceptual world.

This study showed that a helpless response could hamper learning of new material in a classroom setting, and made it even more important for us to understand the underlying causes of the helpless and mastery-oriented responses.²

My takeaway is to ask: if bright students become so disheartened and unreasonable, given a perceived challenge, what can we expect of lesser advantaged students? We need to work on conveying the true nature of learning and of academic content to all students. We need to have students see learning, given a particular content, not as something you can or cannot do, but as something you can work on and think about and try different approaches and angles, and enjoy working on. No matter how bright a student is, he or she will meet bewildering challenges eventually and he or she will make mistakes in trying to solve these challenges. What will the reaction be when this eventuality confronts the student? I am aware of an anecdotal case in which a young lady whizzed through her schooling – K through 12 and then four years of college – with practically straight As. She decided to enter a doctoral degree program in clinical psychology. There, she met her match and found herself unable to adjust to the new demands. Her “Waterloo” proved fatal to her academic career. While I don't know all the ins and outs of the case, I can't help believing that she fell into this helpless response mode – she voiced her inability to work in a more problem solving environment. For a more positive result, the student needs to understand that each of us has potential to improve. And also that even if at the moment the solution is not readily achievable – for appropriately gauged material – a student should be able to work it out and, by so doing, improve on his or her intelligence and opportunities.

1Dweck, C. S. (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press, p. 1.

2Ibid., p. 12.