Socialism's Ascendency

With the rise in popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, socialism in America is having a moment. This always shocks me. We live in the wealthiest country in the world, maybe ever, and it was built on the backs of capitalism. Why would we turn on what made us who we are?

As it turns out, measuring what is best for everyone is really difficult.  Here is what I understand: the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism has done more to bring people out of poverty than any social assistance program.

Unfettered capitalism creates wealth and it isn't zero sum. Jeff Bezos didn't become rich by taking money from poor people; he created wealth (Of course there are people who acquire money through rent seeking, which does not create wealth and basically is taking money from the lower classes). Poor people today are much better off than poor people were 100 years ago.

So what's the problem? If there is so much more wealth year after year, why are people occupying Wall Street and cheering on socialism? I can think of two reasons.

Cost Disease

I admire the Democrats' goal of wanting to improve the lives of struggling Americans. If one is having difficulty making ends meet, there are really only two choices: make more or spend less.

What's odd is that Democrats only focus on one of those choices. You see it in their calls for a $15 minimum wage or a Universal Basic Income.

I get that median wages are stagnating*, but it doesn't help that the cost of living keeps rising (most notably in rent, health care, and tuition). Maybe that is the bigger issue.

From Slate Star Codex:

Even if you’re making twice as much money, if your health care and education and so on cost ten times as much, you’re going to start falling behind.

Regarding rising tuition:

Would you rather graduate from a modern college, or graduate from a college more like the one your parents went to, plus get a check for $72,000? (or, more realistically, have $72,000 less in student loans to pay off).

Control Rent

Cost disease is about more than just college. It affects housing as well, probably the largest expense in most Americans' budget. 

I wonder what a Democratic platform that focuses on reducing costs would look like. For starters, it would wind back urban zoning regulations that crowd out lower income housing in upper class neighborhoods. (I'm looking at you Seattle and San Francisco. You wouldn't need a $15 minimum wage if people could afford rent.)

Control Healthcare

It would also look at healthcare. It's great that Obamacare gave people access to healthcare that didn't have it before, but costs have skyrocketed.

How about implementing the Thaler/Sustein proposal of allowing people to waive their right to sue for malpractice to lower the cost?  Scott Alexander gives a good example of this.

I see this all the time in medicine. A patient goes to the hospital with a heart attack. While he’s recovering, he tells his doctor that he’s really upset about all of this. Any normal person would say “You had a heart attack, of course you’re upset, get over it.” But if his doctor says this, and then a year later he commits suicide for some unrelated reason, his family can sue the doctor for “not picking up the warning signs” and win several million dollars. So now the doctor consults a psychiatrist, who does an hour-long evaluation, charges the insurance company $500, and determines using her immense clinical expertise that the patient is upset because he just had a heart attack.

How about any of these ideas that cost no money and don't require big sweeping legislation? Can we give people more options to pay for the level of care they can afford?  What about Elizabeth Warren's effort to allow students to refinance their student loan debt?

If $15/hour is what it takes to meet the cost of living, why aren't Democrats looking at what is causing this high cost of living?

It appears that markets aren't operating as efficiently as they should be.

The Joneses

There might be another reason for all the socialism fervor. Here, psychology can help us. Throw out your employment rates, your GDP growth, your consumer price index, and all other measures of economic health.

Only one measure matters and it's the only one that has ever mattered: happiness.

As explained in The Happiness Curve, people don't notice changes in their day-to-day lives. They notice changes in relation to the people around them. So if your wealth increases but so does everyone around you, you don't notice. But when Mark Zuckerburg becomes a multi billionaire, you feel it and you are not happy about it.

It doesn't help that, post recession, wages for middle- and lower- class Americans have stagnated*. Add to that rising rents, ballooning college tuition, and exploding health care costs, and many people really are worse off than they were 50 years ago.

But even if we fix these things, people will still focus on the haves and feel the system is unfair. Comparing ourselves to the Joneses is natural and it's unrealistic to expect people to stop.

*After viewing this video by Russ Roberts, I'm no longer convinced that middle class wages are actually stagnating. However, that doesn't change the fact that the cost of living is rising.

The Next Generation of Donors

The Seven Faces of Philanthropy is an interesting book. The authors talk to major donors about their movitations for giving, pore over the responses, and identify seven personalities.

As a higher education professional, the one personality that seems to fit most of our donors (many of whom are alumni) is the Repayer. Repayers tend to have been constituents first and partners second. A typical Repayer has benefited from some institution and now supports that institution from a feeling of loyalty or obligation.

Most of our donors are also 55 and older. Most colleges struggle to get millenials to give; but just because they are paying off student debt doesn't mean they can't give something. It's more likely that they don't see themselves as Repayers.

Millenials don't trust institutions. Ergo, they won't support them. So asking them to support the annual fund so a college can go on college-ing is a lost cause.

However, they will support causes. They won't support the Red Cross because they believe in their mission but they will support the Red Cross' efforts to help Hurricane Harvey victims. Then they move on to the next cause, regardless of the charity doing the work.

This is where The Seven Faces of Philanthropy can help. When millenials give, they see themselves as (mostly) Altruists. Altruists give out of generosity and empathy to urgent causes and who modestly wish to remain anonymous.

The challenge for higher education is to market giving opportunities as causes. Talk to millenials as Altruists, people who's gift can directly improve someone's life.

My journey with Better Angels

When I first read about Better Angels—a non profit group whose goal is to depolarize America by, among other things, hosting workshops with 7 liberals and 7 conservatives to get people talking again and forming community-based alliances—my reaction was that this was similar to an idea I had percolating in the back of my mind.

The other similar group was Living Room Conversations. Although they had similar missions, their approach couldn't be more different. Living Room Conversations was very libertarian. Their message is: "Talk to a friend in your house. Here are some discussion points. Let us know how it goes."

BA's message is "Here is what you need to do and how you need to do it. Follow this blueprint."

I ultimately chose BA because I wanted to work off of a blueprint. I know I wanted to get people from my community together with opposing views so we could find common ground. But I wanted some sort of direction.

I became a dues-paying member, reached out to some people from my town about starting a workshop (with little success), and haven't done much since. While I love BA and their mission, I have a few concerns.

First, to sign up they make you chose a side: red or blue. I don't identify either way and don't like being put into a camp. Plus, this crowds out libertarians, greens, and other independents, who should have a voice as well.

Second, the few people I have talked to who have shown interest have the same problems that I do. We're all in our thirties, have young children, and are consumed by our expanding responsibilities. The workshop is a full seven-hour day. I have trouble finding a sitter for a two-hour stretch.

I attended a group meeting with local BA members and was struck by how relatively-young I was compared to everyone else; mostly empty-nesters and retirees. In other words, people who have time for a day-long workshop and recruiting local members. I'll return to this in a moment.

Thirdly, BA seems to have a goal of creating BA red-blue alliances all across the country. I think that is a shallow goal. They mention "depolarizing" and "getting people talking again" but I think it should be more ambitious.

My goal is to solve problems. Immigration, healthcare, guns, terrorism; these are all issues we want to solve but cannot without coming to a mutual understanding with our political opponents. In that respect, I view BA is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

For millenials, such as myself and the other young fathers I spoke to about BA, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. That is why the book New Power shows how young people are drawn to movements that allow for their own customization, like the Ice Bucket Challenge or AirBNB.

BA does not allow such customization; it's structure is top-down. As such, I worry that it's very nature will crowd-out millenials. Based on my own observations; it already has.

Why I read

Justin Theroux, not reading. Trust me, it will make sense.

At the beginning of Season 2 of The Leftovers, you see the protagonist Kevin Garvey constantly wearing earbuds and playing loud music.

The narration keeps you in the dark before the big reveal: Kevin is experiencing hallucinations of a women for whose death he feels responsible. The music is his solution for drowning out the hallucinations.

I mention this because it is the best metaphor for explaining why I am always reading a book, particularly nonfiction.

My mind's natural state is untethered, and will invariably drift toward depression. A good book— particularly a complicated one in which I am learning something new, something that, for a moment, makes the world a little more sensible—drowns out the noise of my depression.

Unlike medication, there are no side effects. Unlike therapy, there is no cost (as long as I can find the book in a library). My only vulnerability would be running out of books to read.

The Tragedy of Tribalism

In his book Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene talks about the Tragedy of the Commons and what he calls the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality. The former puts "we" above "I" to solve societal problems. The latter pits "we" against "them," creating societal problems. This is both the blessing and curse of tribalism.

I've argued before that we are good at naturally sorting ourselves into communities of like-minded thinkers (although the "community" aspect has been dying in the absence of religion and civic engagement). However, we are terrible at dealing with other tribes.

I believe that we might have a government system able to solve this problem. Our sovereign states and localities should be able to operate as different like-minded moral communities, with little overreach from the federal government. Government's role should be to address what we are not naturally good at: communicating between moral communities.

Let's take the multicultural metaphor of a salad. Instead of a melting pot, people are expected to stay a tomato, onion, or whatever belief or race they represent. But this only works if they are tossed in the same dressing. But what is this dressing that binds all these different beliefs, cultures, and tribes to America? This is the problem we can't solve on our own. It might take intervention from the federal government.

The best essays of the past 3 years

Each year there always seems to be one essay I read that sticks out from all the rest.

In 2016, it was a blog post about the effects of globalization by economist Russ Roberts. Even as a libertarian, Roberts is great at considering all sides of an issue. Libertarians have a habit of being overly rational, but he is great at understanding the emotional impact of people's lives.

Last year it was this essay by Jonathan Haidt, which is actually a transcription of a speech he gave. It's a great look at the current state of our polarized country, how we got here, and how we can find our way out of the mess we're in.

He lists things that tend to pull people together and things that tend to separate us. I should note that he references a study suggesting that immigration divides people. Since that time, I have read about several additional studies that either show no impact of immigration on what he calls "social capital" and even some studies that show immigration bringing communities closer together.

I think the best part is where he talks about Martin Luther King's concept of an American Civil Religion. Currently, there is a lot of focus from both sides of the political spectrum on what divides us. King cared about what united us.

"The civil rights struggle was indeed identity politics, but it was an effort to fix a mistake, to make us better and stronger as a nation. Martin Luther King’s rhetoric made it clear that this was a campaign to create conditions that would allow national reconciliation. He drew on the moral resources of the American civil religion to activate our shared identity and values."

For 2018, I think I already have a winner: Sebastion Junger's essay "The Anthropology of Manhood." For the first time in our country's history, men seem really lost. Junger does a great job of openly talking about why men are the way they are, and the pros and cons they bring to society.

"men are eminently disposable; kill most of the men in a society and it quickly recovers, but kill most of the women and it dies out within generations. Because of all these factors, a common definition of manhood throughout history has been a willingness to put the safety of others above one’s own."

He makes some points that seem especially prescient in the aftermath of the incel massacre:

"As these gender-specific jobs disappear, it becomes harder for men to know whether they have anything essential to offer society... But the only way to guarantee membership in a group is to be needed by it, so being unneeded can feel catastrophic... The national suicide rate is known to closely track unemployment, for example, and after the economic collapse of 2008, around 5,000 additional people in 54 countries committed suicide because they had lost their jobs. These were people who no longer felt needed." 

Like Roberts, Junger doesn't call to return to the way things were. Rather, he looks for new and healthy ways to adapt society to our natural traits.

My (Regretful) Unwillingness to Believe

I was rewatching Moon on Netflix last night. Spoiler: the protagonist is supposed to be alone in a space station on the moon and one day comes face to face with another person who talks and acts like himself, and claims to have the same identity as the protagonist.

The first time I watched Moon I believed the protagonist was delusional until the twist ending reveals they are just two of many clones awakened and then killed every three years, spending their short lives working at the station as free labor.

I am bad at predicting twists (I guess I prefer to get swept up in the moment rather than trying to guess where everything is going) but I think my rational brain just felt that delusion was more probable than cloning.

When someone makes an assertion I believe is misguided, I ask two questions that I am stealing from Neil Degrasse Tyson:

• What is your best evidence for this belief?
• What would it take for you to believe otherwise?

The latter question subtly asks the person to consider that they may be wrong; something the human mind is loathe to do on its own.

I was thinking about God the other day and what it would take for me to believe in him. At first, I thought that he would have to reveal himself to me and communicate with me for me to believe. However, I think I would make the same rationalization I made the first time I watched Moon. I would believe that there is a higher probability that I am delusional than having a conversation with God.

What about something experienced by many people at once that cannot be explained by science, like the Miracle of the Sun? Even then, it seems more probable that it would be a Black Swan-like event, something we have just never seen before and will understand eventually.

This disappoints me because I don't want to close myself off from changing my mind on a position.