AND IN THIS CORNER

So, the presidential campaign seems to be set:  Hillary vs. the Donald.  What a joy- ride it promises to be.  The thing is that these candidates are all too familiar to the American public.  Consequently, an institutional practice which we usually would see at the respective convention, the “meet” the candidate film, might not be so important.  This is the film that is shown just before the candidate addresses the bevy of Democrats or Republicans – the speech being the culminating event of the convention.  At least, that is what usually happens.  Trump promises that his convention will be different; it will be more entertaining, showtime.  And since these two candidates are very well known, can either candidate really reintroduce him or herself; can a campaign really “define” the opponent to its liking?  We’ll see what the attempt will be, assuming one or the other convention follows the usual script.

To the extent that such an effort is made – introducing the candidate and defining the opponent – certain psychological principles will be relied upon to guide producers in their efforts.  I have, in a previous posting, I’ll Get My Fix, reported that the cognitive psychologist, Drew Westen,[1] believes that people generally don’t reason over politics; rather, they feel politics.  It turns out, when it comes to thinking about whom to vote for or what policy position to accept and support, people in general let their gut feelings control their decision-making.  Successful producers of such efforts as an “introductory film” understand this, while those who are guided by notions of presenting a logical argument are not so successful.  That previous posting explains these mental operations a bit – check it out (posted on April 26, 2016).  It all has to do with your neurons working in association among themselves.

Westen, in describing these phenomena, uses two contrasting examples to illustrate this difference.  On the successful side, he cites the Bill Clinton film.  He judges that effort as one of the most successful ever.  He explains how footage of his “birth town,” Hope, Arkansas, and his meeting, as a teenager, of President Kennedy at the White House – an event sponsored by a youth group – engendered those emotional ties to which people could relate.  Here is the story of a poor kid, whose father died just before he was born, struggling to improve himself while the narration informs the audience that his professional commitment is to help others through his public service – he was governor of Arkansas at the time.  Westen then provides a counter example as he describes the film produced for John Kerry, the Ivy Leaguer, born to privilege and married to an exceptionally wealthy woman who has a foreign accent to boot.  While there is nothing wrong with having a wife with a foreign accent, the whole image was one to which the average American voter would have a difficult time relating.

In that previous posting, I pointed out that the electorate is fairly evenly divided into three groups:  30% Democrat, 30% Republican, and 40% not committed to either major party and open to persuasion.  This time around, this might not be the case.  Since the primary/caucus season drew so much attention, given the Trump factor and that it has been going on for a year now, – Trump announced his candidacy last June 16 – many more Americans have probably made up their minds; that is, their gut feelings have settled on a choice and that has been further reinforced by their adoption of the respective narratives the campaigns have been using about their candidate and the opposition.  Coming up this week, Trump is going to make notorious charges against Clinton on her schemes to become wealthy, entailing her official duties as secretary of state, and Clinton surrogates are attacking Trump on his attacks on a federal judge and intimating that he would use the power of the executive branch to intimidate the judiciary – a real no-no under our separation of powers principle.  Vice President Biden just yesterday claimed that that is what Trump threatened to initiate in his tirade against the judge who is presiding over the case in which Trump is being sued over matters concerning his defunct Trump University.  All of this is nasty and promises to get nastier.  The one thing I would add is that Trump, with his experience in show business, does have an advantage in this game of pricking emotions.  The result might very well rely on Hillary’s ability to adopt more emotionally laden messaging; she seems to be getting better at it.  She not only is evoking fear of a Trump administration, but also has taken a reflective demeanor and is able to communicate with an air of knowing what she is talking about – a quality which the punditry will help – whereas Trump seems to be limited as to how deeply he can expound on any issue.  Again, the important thing here is not how true this is, but how the candidate can generate or quell fear or other relevant emotions in the audience.

It is said that successful lawyers are successful not because they can muster the better argument, but because they can put on the better show that plucks at the existing emotional biases of the jury.  Well, in an election, the same principle holds, only we voters inhabit the jury box and the two candidates are the opposing lawyers.  Think more of Johnny Cochran than Daniel Webster or Henry Clay.  I would argue this truism has been true all through our history, but it has gotten worse.  When seeing on TV a Trump rally, for example, one can’t help feeling that we are witnessing a modern version of the Roman Circus.  An event lacking in any substance with a speaker spouting mostly banalities and noted for his outrageous and inconsistent messaging.  And, of course, a news media that has abandoned just about any claim at providing a public service – seeking eyes and ears to bolster its ratings and, therefore, its revenues – has broadcast every spectacle of this roadshow as it moved around the country.  There is more to come, and Trump has promised his convention will be something to remember – not so much an introduction, but a heightened effort to cater the inexhaustible demand for entertainment.  Let the good times roll?

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

BEING GOOD AIN’T EASY

Referring to the last posting, I made the point that the Protestant Reformation contributed to the strain in philosophic thinking that places our ability to “see” reality as a personal, subjective endeavor.  That is, our minds shape what we perceive.  I attempted to explain Immanuel Kant’s contribution to this development, and this posting will add to that explanation.  But first, let me add a few more thoughts to this Protestant thinking.  With this turn toward subjectivism, we can better understand those religions’ claims that the road to salvation was not via outward behavior, a social component of life, but through faith, a mental state.  The former has a social context; the latter has a solitary, internal context.  The Protestant way tends toward the lonely.  I accept this, but with a great proviso; my take of Protestant religions is their bias toward congregational structures, while Catholic structure is hierarchical with a well-defined vertical organization.  While both are social, to me the Protestant form is much more social.  Late in life, my mother took up membership in a Baptist congregation.  Most of her life she was a Catholic.  She sent me to Catholic school and, from time to time, she attended Sunday mass.  Those various Catholic churches never made any effort to contact her or to make her feel part of a parish, much less a community.  This was true in churches in New York City and in Miami, Florida.  Yet, in her old age – and I don’t know how it came about – she did join the Baptist group and they were actively engaged in engaging her.  She loved the minister and was involved with several of the church’s activities.  She became an active reader of the Bible and was disposed to talk to me about religious issues.  I suppose I was a source of some regret in that she was not able to convert me – oh well.  So, this notion of religious belief being so individually defined and such a lonely pursuit on the part of Protestants, I find less than accurate.  But its theology does feature this emphasis on faith – by the way, my Catholic training belittled this feature as a way to justify not meeting one’s social responsibilities, especially when it comes to taking care of the disadvantaged; it was seen as just one big rationalization.

Be that as it may, what else can we observe about Kant’s thoughts on subjectivism?  I pointed out that Kant wrote about the mind’s function in forming the information our senses observed.  It did so, according to Philip Selznick,[1] by utilizing a priori concepts.  Those objects are perceived, and then they conform to these concepts.  It was not Kant’s intention to initiate this level of subjectivism we have today, but he did it in three ways.  One, he argued that the mind provides the elements of necessity (cause and effect) and order (space and time).  These are the a priori concepts.  Our ideas are derived from these mental machinations and, therefore, they are derived objects.  This operates as follows:  we perceive and then we translate according to our past history and these wired-in concepts.  This permits us to impose our own order on any experience based on our unique past experiences and predispositions.

Two, we, through this history of perceptions and “translations” form theories about reality, about things-in-themselves.  The theories are postulates that take on a metaphysical quality.  They are not the real, but a representation of the real.  We strive to represent the real; we just can’t totally, but in the effort, we are tied to the real.  According to Kant, a compromise is formed between the real and our effort to see the real.  This ties us to reality; we are not out and about forming whatever view of the real our fancy happens to want.  We all, in our view of what is out there, have to accept unpleasant aspects.  Sometimes, we find out later that things aren’t as bad as we first perceived them to be and a newer postulated theory can take the place of the more distasteful image or belief.  Unfortunately, this can happen in reverse.  But the point is that in either case, we are dealing with our versions of the truth, not the truth itself.  The good news is that whatever we perceive, there is a real out there and that permits regularity in the course of our lives.

And three, and I believe this to be his most important argument, moral decision-making, due to the above mental functions, has to be autonomous.  By that I mean that it can’t be coerced.  We can’t be moral out of a fear of punishment but because it is rational to be so.  This rationality is based on a commitment to life itself.  Let me quote Selznick on this point:

For humans, to choose life is to choose rationality.  It follows that there can be no morality without the freedom to formulate rules and make decisions in accordance with rational principles.

The logic of morality, as Kant understood it, combines objective and subjective truth.  Moral choices are objective because rational judgment leads inexorably to conclusions that are independent of personal dispositions or beliefs.  On the other hand, moral choices are subjective in that they are freely made by duty-regarding persons who form their own judgments and make their own commitments.  Kant had no doubt about the objective basis of moral rules, but his embrace of self-determination had the more decisive effect on nineteenth-century thought (p. 65).

I would also add the twentieth-century as well.  Questions, consequently, would revolve around what it meant to be genuine, free, and able to make moral choices.  Let me conclude by pointing out the consequence of this contribution:  A result was a more vigorous concern with whether an individual is detached from his social surroundings by being ensconced in some moral abstraction.  Rationality would demand a level of concreteness and how moral choices affect the human condition.  We have the sense of moral dilemmas among values of commitment and duty – good values, at times, conflict in real life.  One can expect a serious level of commitment to do good – “good will” – even if dealing with reality, one might be bound to offend a good value to pursue a more important one.  Choices in such cases can be very difficult.  And, in this, the call is for fidelity and commitment to the good as well as rationality.

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[1] Selznick, P.  (1992).  The moral commonwealth:  Social theory and the promise of community.  Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press.

YOU KANT KNOW A MIRACLE

In my last posting, I brought up the effect that post modernism has had on critical theorists; that is, the strain of thought that has promoted the idea that we cannot be about the business of stating anything definitively about the world around us.  In their eyes, there seems to be a disconnect between what we see and what we know.  From where did this sort of thinking come?  Well, there is a line of thinkers stretching all the way back to the 1700s that laid the groundwork for this view.  It probably starts with David Hume, but this posting is going to share the thoughts of Immanuel Kant and his epistemology.

To establish the context a bit, there was an ongoing philosophical debate between philosophers who saw the way to seek truth was through the use of reason and those who counted on our ability to understand reality through perceptions.  Those who counted on reason saw our main tool in figuring out the nature of reality was our minds and the internal mechanizations we perform in our efforts to understand what is, be it the physical world or the supernatural world.  The second group, the empiricists, relied on their senses, what they saw, smelled, and/or tactilely felt.  This debate, in one form or another, has a long lineage.  One can consider the differences between Plato and Aristotle to be one version.  Anyway, it is into this backdrop that Kant contributed his thoughts.

With a nod to Hume, Kant accepted the former thinker’s claim that we cannot experience cause and effect relations.  From there, Kant’s argument begins by accepting and rejecting portions of both the reason based argument and the empiricists based argument.  He felt that in both these camps, there were understatement and overstatement.

Let us start with the empiricist side.  Kant claimed that we rely on our senses to “see” the world; it is through our senses that we acquire the material of our knowledge.  But immediately, our mind comes into play in that it provides the form in which the perceptions are received.  It is like water in a pitcher; the water conforms to the shape of the container.  So does the information our senses pick up; the mind shapes that information.  Some might use other analogies, such as the mind provides the “glasses” by which we view reality.  What is understood or registered in the mind is shaped by the mind in certain ways.  These ways do not, according to Kant, exist in reality, but are how we adopt the information.

So what does the mind add to this process?  Well, the mind is programmed to see the world through certain lenses (the glasses metaphor).  For one, we see things in terms of a certain context of space and time.  This framework he called “forms of intuition.”  We, according to Kant, cannot escape this disposition.  The framework imprints what is perceived and, if you will, translates the information into this language of time and space.  Kant likened this insight to the disruption Copernicus caused when he pointed out that the sun does not revolve around the earth, but that the earth revolves around the sun.  That bit of discovery had an enormous effect on how we saw reality.  Likewise, Kant felt understanding the mind’s function in defining how we saw reality equal to a Copernican Revolution. 

But the effect of the mind does not end there.  There is another inescapable disposition.  We see something happen and we automatically ask why it happened; in other words, we are disposed to look for cause and effect.  This claim is more in line with Hume’s contribution.  The important lesson is that there is a distinction between things as they are and things as they are to the person perceiving them.  Empiricists – that is scientists – today readily succumb to this claim.  They, in their research, do not contend that they discover cause and effect relations; they merely report correlation.  That is, they issue “X happens, Y happens” sort of statements – it is their theorizing that makes cause and effect contentions and even there, they are hypothesized.  They are never proffered as facts or truth and, ala Karl Popper, their job is to disprove assertions, not to prove them.

Are there any readily observable phenomena that indicate this disconnect to be true?  The cat example has been offered.[1]  Say there is a cat lying on the floor of a room and a ball rolls in her general direction.  What does the cat do?  Chances are, she will jump at it and begin to paw it around.  Now say an adult is sitting in that room and a ball rolls out; he or she is bound to question why this ball is rolling out here; who rolled it?  The mind of the cat shaped the information one way; the adult’s mind shaped it another way – same view, different mental operation.  A young child, on the other hand, will probably not do either.  He or she might just look at it, not knowing what to do.  Why?  Because the history of the child’s perceptions has not experienced this occurrence or anything like it before and hence, the information is novel.  There are no references to define what is happening.  His/her mind does not contain the material and, therefore, the information cannot be shaped.

An average person’s reason does not allow this lack of material to stymie its reasoning.  And with that, we enter another realm of this concern.  It seems that when confronted with novel or unperceivable aspects of our existence, assuming we have mostly worked out answers to most of our daily events, we still look for cause and effect.  Our reason might ask: where does reality come from; is it infinite; what is the fate of humankind?  Such questions ask about things we cannot perceive, but our reason – our mind – seeks cause and effect answers to such questions anyway.  The one question that drew a lot of concern from Kant was, is there a god?  Confronting this question, one is immediately aware that that question relates to a bit of potential reality we have not and cannot perceive.  Therefore, without being able to perceive the subject matter, we cannot “know” an answer.  We can believe in the existence of God only by faith.  And from all indications, Kant had a good dose of that.

I believe that what spurred a great deal of this line of questioning among philosophers during the years after the Enlightenment had to do with the Protestant Reformation.  Before this time, there was a good deal of uniform belief as to what constituted the real and a lot of that belief was defined by Catholic theology.  But once that was undercut, not by just one set of opposing religious views, but by a slew of them, the threshold was past.  Truth no longer was the inspired message from above, but to be “constructed” through our individual effort, via a good conscience, to determine the answers to the questions posed by our existence.  In that pursuit, we have our own, individual attempts to make sense of it all.  To do that, we had to work with the tools we had/have and, according to Kant, that was/is our ability to perceive and to reason.  Each has its role.  But these roles take place at the individual’s level and are apt to not only be inconsistent to the results of others, but also to be inconsistent for the individual over time.  People change their minds about what they believe to be true all the time. 

This quest to figure out how we formulate what we “know” or believe is still an active area of concern.  Recently, among psychologists and other social scientists, they have gained, for example, a newfound respect for emotions and their role in our reasoning processes.  It is this type of questioning we still are actively asking and investigating.  For practical and intellectual reasons, many find this questioning fascinating.

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[1] Gaarder, J.  (1996).  Sophie’s world:  A novel about the history of philosophy.  New York, NY:  Berkley Books.  This is a delightful review of western philosophers. 

FORMAL CRITIQUE OF CRITICAL THEORY

In this posting, I will reuse some already posted material.  I don’t usually do this – I think I did it once before – but there is a good reason for doing it here.  Early in the history of this blog, I reviewed the critical theory construct.  I identified it as the antithesis to the prevailing construct, the natural rights perspective.  Over numerous postings, I described and explained the elements of critical theory, not in order to be the definitive source of what it is, but to give you a good sense of what that theory was about and how it was influencing the field of civics education.  In addition, I critiqued the construct.  In this latter effort, I used Eugene Meehan’s criteria.[1]  I did not cite each criterion, one by one, and apply it to critical theory.  Instead, I used the criteria in a holistic way and shared what I believed was useful and not useful about critical theory.  In order to be complete, I would like this posting to be more formal in my evaluation and address some of the Meehan criteria more directly and unequivocally.  But first – and here comes past posted material – let me remind you – for first timers, introduce you to – Meehan’s criteria (plus two):

Meehan's criteria were designed to evaluate theories or explanations in the social sciences; i.e., he, in effect, gives us a set of questions to ask of models, theories, or constructs that serve to guide research in the social sciences.  The criteria can be summarized by the following list of concepts and their related questions:

·        Comprehension:  Does the construct explain as many phenomena as possible which are related to the area of concern?

·        Power:  Does the construct control the explanatory effort by being valid and complete in its component parts and in the relations between those parts?

·        Precision:  Does the construct specifically and precisely treat its concepts, making them clear in their use?

·        Consistency or Reliability:  Does the construct explain its components and their relations the same way time after time?

·        Isomorphism:  Does the construct contain a one to one correspondence with that portion of reality it is trying to explain?

·        Compatibility:  Does the construct align with other responsible explanations of the same phenomena?

·        Predictability:  Does the construct predict conditions associated with the phenomena in question?

·        Control:  Does the construct imply ways of controlling the phenomena in question?

In addition, I have added a couple of educational concerns:

·        Abstraction Level:  Is the construct’s abstraction of such a nature that students will be able to comprehend it?

·        Motivation:  Is the construct and its content sufficiently interesting that students will be motivated to study it?

So, how does the critical theory construct stack up against these criteria?  Here’s my judgement.  As I have tried to stress in my review of the construct, critical theory lacks precision.  For example, a main concept utilized by that construct, exploitation, and how the writers, who publish in this vein, use it, seem to lack any clear sense of what exactly is meant by it.  I used, in my descriptive text of earlier date, Johan Galtung’s definition at one point, but then provided another definition elsewhere.  Galtung’s view is that exploitation exists whenever any group in society is not advancing economically as rapidly as any other group.  So, theoretically, one can have a society in which everyone is advancing (all boats are being lifted), but if there is any group not rising as quickly as the rest, then that constitutes exploitation.  Paulo Freire, a writer I reviewed extensively in my description of how this construct can potentially affect civics curriculum, writes of the psychological aspects of exploitation.  Elsewhere, I chose a more restrictive definition.  That is, my definition retained, as a main factor, a lack of equality, but was more sensitive to the forces of supply and demand and what happens when policy makers simply ignore them in the pursuit of a more just system.  The final effect, with all these various views, is a serious lack of precision.  This is because one is uncertain as to what various writers mean by exploitation.  Surely, some cases of unjust treatment are squarely examples of exploitation, but there are some that one questions.  For example, a lot of questioning can be brought up regarding the distinction between cases when people need to share in any responsibility for their own plights; where is the line between unjust treatment and irresponsible behavior?  I’m sure this can be sorted out, but since there is no clear, singular expression of this construct in general, clarity in many of its expositions is illusive.

My foremost concern with this construct is its lack of comprehensiveness.  That is, there are other concerns that civics should address other than the exploitation of disadvantaged groups.  Yes, this overall concern should not be shortchanged in our civics curriculum, but good citizens need to know about other issues as well.  There are concerns over the defense of our nation, about the health of our economy, about technological changes and opportunities, about crime, civility, health care in general, relations with other nations, relations within our communities; the list goes on.  Being so focused on the mistreatment of the disadvantaged leaves little time for other legitimate areas of concern that a good citizenry neglects at its own peril.

In terms of predictability – and this refers to that branch of critical theory that relies more directly on Marxian thought – there has not been the predicted unfolding of historical forces the great thinker predicted back in the mid-1800s.  Perhaps enough time has not evolved for the Marxian scenario to play out; that is, maybe the inevitable overthrow by the working classes is yet to transpire.  But if nothing else, this points to this lack of precision or reliability.  More likely, it points to a lack of predictability.  I just don’t believe Marx was correct on this one. 

Along with this lack of being able to give us a dependable overall view of how our politics have evolved or promises to evolve, we can also cite other criteria in which this construct goes wanting.  These include precision, power, reliability, and compatibility.  This is particularly true for those who advance what I named, way back when, “critical pedagogy 2.0” or the reconceptualism branch of critical theory.  Let me just point out that most educators who ascribe to critical theory adhere to this line of thought.  A quip that I believe summarizes this view is to just marry Marxian thought with natural rights biases that idolize the individual and you have reconceptualism.  With reconceptualism and its reliance on postmodernism and post structuralism, there is a call for self-referentiality and a rejection of any grand narratives or ideologies.  It is subjectivism on “steroids.”  With this view, there is little hope for any resulting sense of a constant perception of what is or the desire to find such a perception.  Adherents call for a serious approach to seeking the truth through historical interpretation that relies heavily on contextualizing the information gathered and delving into subjective forces about historical characters and the researchers themselves.  This is far more complicated then what I can get into here, but what results is a less anchored sense of knowing anything.  Hence, such criteria as precision, power, reliability, compatibility become, for all intents and purposes, seriously less relevant.  The construct leaves a civics teacher, a person charged with teaching a subject matter that is quite prevalent in people’s lives, having very concrete effects, with a very uneasy sense.  There is a real government out there; there are very real consequences of what that government does, and the reactions that people report, as to those effects, are not so varied and discontinuous in content, at least within identifiable groups.  In addition, the action of politics is to funnel demands into singular policy.  An approach that renders the perception of citizens scattered and based on near total self-perceptions undermines any meaning of citizenship and a community of interests. 

I believe reconceptualism and its supportive philosophies have insightful contributions to make.  It is a well-spring of concerns by which, if implemented, is a source of legitimate criticism of “established truths,” be they the product of scientific research or other sources.  After all, how many scientific “truths” have been proved false?  Of course, a lot of that is a betrayal of a truly scientific approach, for a true scientist is about trying to prove those “truths” to be false.  Instead, we have had a recurring stream of what Bill Bryson reports, for example, when it comes to paleontology study:

Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this.  Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature.  It is a rare paleontologist indeed who announces that he has found a cache of bones but that they are nothing to get excited about.  Or as John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, “It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer.”[2]

So, I get the point; science has been used for a variety of reasons beyond truth seeking.  People have used it to advance without much warrant their careers and it has been used as a political weapon at all levels of social interaction, from the clinician who seeks a convenient course of action to a national set of politicians seeking some advantage for some constituency.  But let us not radicalize this concern.  Let us be aware and follow our reliance on science with a dose of skepticism, but let us avoid overdosing.  In terms of choosing content for a classroom, a school, a school district, a national curriculum, one needs more meat on that bone than what reconceptualism provides.  We need to be able to say more than, “Oh, that’s how I see it today” or anything that resembles that type of perspective.

With that, I complete my critique of critical theory.  I believe the construct offers serious insights and a much needed emphasis on the plight of those who do not share in our largesse.  It is also applicable at appropriate abstraction levels so that secondary students can grasp the main thrust of its content.  In my previous treatment of this construct, I did question its assumed motivational quality even among students who might be victimized by exploitation.  We witness too many citizens who flock to the very politicians who do not address their economic disadvantages, but are lured by more non-economic factors such as religious or nationalistic messaging.  But overall, I hope you agree, that I am a sympathetic admirer of what critical theorists have been able to accomplish even in the case of reconceptualism; after all, I do view the theories I have reviewed in this blog as constructs; that is, a constructed view of the truth – a reconceptualist notion.  But in the end, I am not an adherent.  If you wish to read more of what critical pedagogues have to say, let me suggest some names.  I believe these writers and their works would be a good start in delving into critical literature.  This list of writers includes, of course, Paulo Freire, but also Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Jonathan Kozol, Ivan Illich, John Holt, and Ira Shor (who actually based his writings on his own classroom experiences).  There are many others.

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[1] Meehan, E. J. (1969). Explanations in social science: A system paradigm. Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press.

[2] Bryson, B.  (2003).  A short history of nearly everything.  New York, NY:  Broadway Books, p. 442.

SAY BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A TRILLION?

Let me set a scene.  There is a young couple who are college educated, both have jobs and together, they make about $150,000 a year – not bad.  They have professional careers and expect their incomes will rise in the future.  They have been saving and their immediate goal is to save enough, about $60,000, to put toward a down payment on a house – they’ve been renting until now.  They think that a house valued at about $300,000 would be wise; they plan to have children and they want to put down roots in a community with good schools and amenable recreational facilities nearby.  So, a couple with that income wants to take on a debt – a mortgage – of about or just under 150% of their income.  Is that smart?  What would you recommend?

I would say that given their assets – some tangibles such as their cars, furniture, a healthy “rainy day fund,” and the like – and some non-tangibles – such as their education – this is a reasonable and prudent plan and if you resemble these two, good luck to you.  Of course, all of this is contingent on having reasonable interest rates, a job market for their type of skills that is stable, and many other factors.  Let’s just say that all those factors are prevailing at levels or rates that are not outlandish but within reasonable historical parameters.  So, having 150% of income debt can be seen as, at least, manageable and given the long term benefits such an investment will most likely accrue, I feel safe in saying that most people would find such an undertaking worth the risks entailed.[1]

Now, I will admit that making family budgets analogous to national finances is a hazardous thing to do.  But for those who feel aghast at the numbers associated with the national debt and prone to make such comparisons, let me chime in and add some numbers from Wikipedia.  The financial position of the US includes a total assets valuation of $269.6 trillion or 1576% of GDP (or for our purposes, another way of seeing our national income).  I don’t know if that counts some public assets such as our national parks or all that territory the US government owns throughout the country, but most concentrated in the western states.  On the other side of the ledger, the US has a total debt of $145.8 trillion.  I assume that combines the public debt, both at the national and state levels, with private debt which would include household debt such as our couple’s pending mortgage to corporate debt that reaches about $30 trillion dollars.  There are other sources such as non-corporate, business debt.  In terms of Uncle Sam, he’s in hock for about $14 trillion.  But all of that debt, public and private, pales in terms of our assets; that is, our net worth (assets minus debt) is $123.8 trillion dollars or 723% of GDP.  That’s a net worth figure at a per capita rate of $386,875.  Do you have your share?  If we are no longer great, which the Trump campaign intimates, it’s not because we are poor as a nation.  Our economy is run in a sea of money and, by the way, is not struggling like the vast majority of nations are.  They are still suffering from the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008-09.

Such numbers indicate to me that we can afford our debt.  Want to get rid of it anyway?  There are two obvious ways:  cut spending and/or raise taxes.  It is not hard to find a solution, but it is politically difficult to apply it.

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[1] Let me state the obvious:  I am not a financial adviser of any kind and this is not, in any form, advice.

HEY, WE WOULD LIKE YOU TO …

Let’s apply a positivist twist to a federalist claim.  That is, let us take one of federation theory’s tenets, derive a hypothesis from it, and see if in reality – the real world – the hypothesis is true.  Well, I am going to hedge a bit.  My experiment will not be well controlled, but the general gist of an experiment will be present.  And, it’s not my experiment; it’s Hahric Han’s.[1]  Actually, Han’s work is not an experiment at all; it’s a qualitative study in which she conducted extensive observations and interviews within an array of formal organizations, generally professional and environmental ones.  Her specific interest was to compare the relative success in eliciting activism among these organizations’ members.  She wanted to see the ability of these organizations to get members to participate in the different organizational processes that constitute the activities of the organization, such as working phone banks or soliciting membership.

Han began by dividing general strategies of these organizations into two types.  These types were transactional mobilizing and transformational organizing.  Generally, each type views soliciting activism fundamentally different in that transactional mobilizing counts on actively identifying latent talent among the membership and approaching the members so identified to take on organizational roles – a targeted approach – and transformational organizing casts a wide net, encouraging as many members to take on roles and then spending time and resources to develop the talents of those members once they are “on the job.”  The first is more exclusive in its approach and the latter is more inclusive.  The first relies on fewer resources of time and effort while the second has relatively high upfront costs.  The hypothesis would be, following the claims of federation theory, that the second approach would, in the long run, accrue higher returns for the organization than the first.  You would have more active members, members who, in fulfilling organizational roles, perform their roles in line with organizational expectations, and an overall more vibrant organization better able to fulfill its aims and goals.  What did Han discover?

While transactional mobilizing was better in matching roles to pre-held desires of members, transformational organizers were about transforming member desires and, through the personal interaction entailed in the “training,” developed more social interaction among the membership.  Transformational organizing was characterized by many person-to-person exchanges in the form of training sessions and meetings.  This was distinguishable from the transactional mobilizing approach that left engaged members more alone in doing their jobs.  By and large, these transactional settings were in organizations more prone to having less engaged memberships, while the transformational organizing ones experienced higher engaged memberships.  Higher engagement meant higher cognitive, emotional, interdependency styled work, but did not do away with autonomous efforts strategically pursued (how federal can this get?).  A result for the organizations that adopted the transformational organizing strategy was an organization more prone to enjoy many positive qualities such as a membership sharing more leadership skills and an atmosphere more conducive to engage in collective action.  Federation theory passed this “experiment.”

How generalizable are these results?  Well, as is often the case, more work needs to be done.  This study was limited to fairly professional organizations composed of middle to upper middle income subjects.  In terms of other demographic limitations, the observations and interviews were mostly of a white sample.  And of course, if further study were to conduct a truly experimental design, then many more controls would have to be in place.  Perhaps such a study would be impractical to conduct and the more qualitative protocol employed by Han would be the way to go with a more inclusive set of organizations.  But the path of research opened by Han is worth pursuing and it would be useful to see if the insights derived, assuming they mirror this initial study, further bolster the claims of federation theory.

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[1] Han, H.  (2014).  How organizations develop activists:  Civic associations and leadership in the 21^st century.  New York, NY:  Oxford University Press.  Information reported in this posting derived from a book review by Melissa R. Michelson found in Political Science Quarterly, fall, 2015, issue.

I GOT IT

A theme I have been exploring in this blog has been heuristic thinking.  You might think that I have been downgrading rational thinking.  I’m not, but the point is that rational thinking, which counts on extensive information gathering and calculations of that information is, one, simply not what people do and, two, not what people, in many situations, can do.  Oh; it turns out; heuristics seem to have a pretty good track record.  To remind you, heuristic thinking is the thought process one employs that is based on a “rule of thumb.”  Let me share an example that I think is very telling and refers to the best sport devised by humans, baseball.  The example is provided by Gerd Gigernzer.[1]

Assume you want to study how players catch balls that come in from a high angle – like in baseball, cricket, or soccer – because you want to build a robot that can catch them.  The traditional approach, which is much like optimization under constraints, would be to try to give your robot the complete representation of its environment and the most expensive computation machinery you can afford.  You might feed your robot a family of parabolas because thrown balls have parabolic trajectories, with the idea that the robot needs to find the right parabola in order to catch the ball.  Or you feed him measurement instruments that can measure the initial distance, the initial velocity, and the initial angle the ball was thrown or kicked.  You’re still not done because in the real world balls are not flying parabolas, so you need instruments that can measure the direction and the speed of the wind at each point of the ball’s flight to calculate its final trajectory and its spin.  It’s a very hard problem, but this is one way to look at it.

A very different way to approach this is to ask if there is a heuristic that a player could actually use to solve this problem without making any of these calculations, or only a very few.  Experimental studies have shown that actual players use a quite simple heuristic that I call the gaze heuristic.  When a ball comes in high, a player starts running and fixates his eyes on the ball.  The heuristic is that you adjust your running speed so that the angle of the gaze, the angle between the eye and the ball, remains constant.  If you make the angle constant the ball will come down to you and it will catch you, or at least it will hit you.  This heuristic only pays attention to one variable, the angle of gaze, and can ignore all the other causal, relevant variables and achieve the same goal much faster [making catching the ball possible], more frugally, and with less chances for error [a likely event given the number of complex computations described above].[2]

Please excuse the length of this quote, but I think it’s so cool.  Why?  Because I loved playing baseball and I, in an instinctive manner, applied the gaze heuristic on the streets of my New York neighborhood playing stickball some sixty or so years ago.  This is not such an outstanding achievement on my part; dogs apply the same heuristics catching Frisbees.[3]  What the example shows, among other things, is that some heuristics are part of our evolutionary wiring.  Yet some are taught and some are developed subconsciously due to their functionality – our subconscious mind notes that if we act this way, this other desired event will happen.

Now, what if our robot is not built to catch a ball but to carry you along in traffic (as in self-driving cars)?  Would you feel comfortable if that car functions with a set of heuristic formulas or would you want it to take into account as many variables as possible?  I can’t help thinking that this is part of the design thinking that those companies who are developing these cars are considering.  My point is:  we can’t make a blanket statement that all heuristic formulas are better than reasoned calculations.  I mentioned above that heuristics are formed by our mental makeup, our being taught them, or by our subconscious developing relations between events.  But there is another way:  we believe relations because our emotions dispose us to believe certain heuristics even when experience should teach us otherwise.  Gigerenzer quotes H. G. Wells:  “If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things:  reading, writing, and statistical thinking.”[4]  So part of a civics teacher’s job is to convince students that reality is complex; that in order to deal with that reality, a variety of thinking is needed, some rational and reasoned and some instinctive and based on hunches relying on as good a knowledge base as is practical given the constraints of the situation.  My hunch is that we don’t pay those who are to do this sort of thing enough compensation.[5]

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[1] Gigerenzer, G.  (2013).  Smart heuristics.  In John Brockman (Ed.) Thinking: The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 39-54).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] Ibid., pp. 50-51.

[3] Ibid.

[4]Ibid., pp. 40-41.

[5] Not asking for pay raise; I’m retired.