We're always at war

I've been troubled by the recent rampage shootings. I've also been re-reading Sebastian Junger's Tribe. It reminded me of an unusual fact. Look at U.S. rampage shootings in the last three decades:

Notice anything unusual? Is it odd that, since 1986, the only year with no shootings was 2002, the year after our country was attacked? And there was only 1 per year in the years that followed, before it spiked again as the war became unpopular.

Here is another unusual fact: Israel has only had one mass shooting in recent years. The country is constantly at war. Does that give their lives more purpose?

For hundreds of thousands of years, tribes had to be prepared for war at any moment. But as Stephen Pinker illustrates in Enlightenment, we are living in, quite possibly, the safest time in human history. And yet, we cannot escape our longing for war.

As Scott Alexander notes, our levels of violence are about more than easy access to guns.

"The United States’ homicide rate of 3.8 is clearly higher than that of eg France (1.0), Germany (0.8), Australia (1.1), or Canada (1.4). However, as per the FBI, only 11,208 of our 16,121 murders were committed with firearms, eg 69%. By my calculations, that means our nonfirearm murder rate is 1.2. In other words, our non-firearm homicide rate alone is higher than France, Germany, and Australia’s total homicide rate."

I'm coming to the sobering conclusion that war is a part of the human DNA. And my fear is that, if we are not at war with an outside enemy, we will turn on ourselves.

And it isn't just the mentally disturbed, Islamic terrorists, or neo nazis. The most successful political campaigns are the ones that convince people that the other party is trying to destroy American democracy. So we create an enemy where none exists.

We are convinced that immigrants are coming here to take our jobs, rape our women, and sell drugs to our children. Or that republicans are going to increase inequality, establish a police state, only look out for the rich, and take away our healthcare, our unions, our rights. That democrats are going to turn us into a classless Marxist society where all hardworking Americans will be taxed to feed the lazy.

And we need your vote so we can fight them because we cannot let them win. 

The War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Things We Don't Like.

We need to create a system that satisfies our need for war. Repression until the point of rampages doesn't appear to be working.

Maybe it's like Nassim Taleb's idea of antifragility. Maybe men seek volatility in order to strengthen our evolutionary role as protectors. Too much peace weakens us, so something in our DNA convinces us that there is an enemy afoot.

The New(est) American Religion

In a wonderful critique of The Coddling of the American Mind (which, by the way, I loved), writer Aaron Sibarium writes:

"Give people too much freedom, and soon they’ll come crawling back to their chains."

The more I think about it; the more I think he's right.

John McWhorter writes a wonderful column about our new American religion, Antiracism. Some call it wokeness. But I believe the most inclusive term would be Social Justice. Either way, it shares some commonality with traditional religion.

McWhorter notes:

"It is inherent to a religion that one is to accept certain suspensions of disbelief. Certain questions are not to be asked ... The Antiracism religion, then, has clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin. Note the current idea that the enlightened white person is to, I assume regularly (ritually?), 'acknowledge' that they possess White Privilege." 

It seems that in an effort to free ourselves from the restrictions of religion, liberalism has only gone on to redefine a new religion. My concern is that it's hostility to heretics is approaching (or surpassing) hostility to other races and genders in contemporary times.

In one of his most popular blog posts, Scott Alexander comments on this ideological hostility.

"Someone finally had the bright idea of doing an Implicit Association Test with political parties, and they found that people’s unconscious partisan biases were half again as strong as their unconscious racial biases. For example, if you are a white Democrat, your unconscious bias against blacks (as measured by something called a d-score) is 0.16, but your unconscious bias against Republicans will be 0.23." 

He continues:

"Iyengar and Westwood ... asked subjects to decide which of several candidates should get a scholarship (subjects were told this was a genuine decision for the university the researchers were affiliated with). Some resumes had photos of black people, others of white people. And some students listed their experience in Young Democrats of America, others in Young Republicans of America.

Once again, discrimination on the basis of party was much stronger than discrimination on the basis of race. The size of the race effect for white people was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction); the size of the party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans."

How do liberals and conservatives feel about their children marrying a different race? I'm glad you asked.

 How about marrying outside one's political party?

To recap, 1% of consistent liberals would be unhappy if their child married a different race but 23% would be unhappy if they married a Republican and 31% would be upset if they married a gun owner.

23% of consistent conservatives would be unhappy if their child married a different race but 30% would be unhappy if they marred a Democrat.

I admire my college's goal of increasing racial diversity: It better prepares students for interacting with people of different cultures. But if political ideology is a more emotionally-charged topic, it might make more sense to increase diversity of thought to better prepare students for the real world.

What's going on?

Beyond Social Justice being the raison d'etre of liberals, I think there is another reason race gets more attention than politics. We have a long, documented history of racial injustice in this country. Although things have improved dramatically, SJWs are so sensitive to any perceived racial slight—with the image of Emmet Till's face burned into our minds.

What we don't have is a long history of political discrimination on which to draw. The reason blacks were treated so poorly was because it was, for the most part, acceptable. Currently it is, for the most part, unacceptable. We'd like it to stay that way, hence the racial sensitivity.

But political discrimination is different. It is acceptable. We are not yet sensitive to it.

The next recession will be like the last one. I don't mean a housing bubble; I mean it will be something no one sees coming. I think the current political climate is like that. It won't be until decades from now that we realize how poorly we treat our ideological opponents.

Toxic Society

A professor recently gave a talk about toxic masculinity. He described it has not showing emotion, engaging in risky behavior, and a desire for physical strength, suggesting this leads to substance abuse, aggression, abusing women, depression, and other health problems.

My question is: is this type masculinity toxic, or is our society toxic to this type of masculinity?

While I often agree with the phrase "prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child," there is one area I dissent. Our school system has moved into a structure that is more conducive to girls than boys. As a result, this hinders social and physical development at best and at worst leads to males being overrepresented in the school dropout, homelessness, and prison populations.

Maybe if these men liked school, they wouldn't end up homeless, in jail, or out of work. Maybe they wouldn't use drugs and assault women. Maybe they would feel like valued members of society and wouldn't give in to these toxic behaviors.

A Little Risk Goes a Long Way

We are hardwired for risk taking. Risky, rough-and-tumble play is actually a good an necessary thing for development. But we have eliminated it from our children's lives, which negatively impacts boys more than girls. Maybe that is why risky behavior turns more hardcore later in life; young boys weren't given the opportunity to navigate it.

Maybe instead of telling young men to stop being who they are, we should give them more freedom to develop social skills as youth so they don't feel alienated by society and turn toward toxic behavior.

Toxic just means Testosterone

The professor who gave the talk seemed to believe that young men choose these toxic behaviors because they think it is what society expects of them. I disagree. Research shows a correlation between high levels of testosterone and risk taking.

Sebastian Junger writes:

"Male violence is a problem across all societies, communities, and races, and the primary driver is testosterone, which declines steadily throughout a man’s adult lifetime. As testosterone levels go down, so do rates of violence and accidental death — which would not be the case if socialization alone were to blame."

I think we are wired that way and the "toxic" aggression and violence are a result of not having appropriate outlets for them.

I also disagree that stoicism and physical strength are, prima facie, toxic behaviors. In a great article about different cultures' rites of passage to manhood, the author asks the question of why young men go through these difficult tasks.

The disquieting answer, of course, is to prepare for war...Boys are “tempered” and “toughened” so they may fulfill the classic duties to procreate, provide, and protect that men have performed for millennia. Whether it’s marshaled to ward off the aggression of other males or to capitalize on weakness, violence is the leitmotif of manhood in countless cultures. 

We've moved past a society that needs all young men to be prepared for war, but we haven't solved the biological hardwiring that remains. My belief is that is will be easier, but not easy, to adapt our society to this need with some type of rite of passage for young men then it will be to convince young men to socially neuter themselves.

"In the fall of 1999, the journalist Susan Faludi published Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, in which she interviewed everyone from gang members to shipyard employees to even Sylvester Stallone to suss out the root causes of America’s “crisis of masculinity.” One possible cause: a postwar emphasis on consumerism and vanity. The modern man, Faludi wrote, has been sold the idea that masculinity is “something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources; that it is personal, not societal; that manhood is displayed, not demonstrated.”

Victim Blaming

Wait a minute, are you saying rapists should be absolved because it's society's fault for turning them into monsters? 

Well, no. I still believe in personal agency and accountability. Put those monsters behind bars. But I think that if we make tweaks to our institutions and social norms we can, in the aggregate, have a positive impact on these toxic behaviors. Society might be more, dare I say, equitable?

A Return to Walter Cronkite news?

In an essay about our growing partisan divide, Jon Haidt and Sam Abrams note:

American newspapers were quite partisan for most of history. But with the emergence of television in the post-war years, and with the popularity of newscasters such as Walter Cronkite, the nation had a few decades in which most Americans got the same news from the same few sources, particularly the three national television networks.

All that changed with the advent of cable television in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s. Now Americans can choose from hundreds of partisan news sources, many of which care more about arousing emotions than hewing to journalistic standards.

Is it possible this course reverses direction and media becomes consolidated again? Seems impossible, information is way too bottom up and widely accessible now.

But is it?

The big 4 (Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple) keep growing and swallowing up their competition. Jeff Bezos even owns the Washington Post. People regularly get their news from Facebook and Twitter, accessing it through Google Chrome on their iPhone.

I know, these are content aggregators and not content producers like NBC, ABC, and CBS. But what's to stop them from filtering content or eventually producing their own content?

We've already seen Alex Jones' Infowars get banned from pretty much every online platform. If the big 4 decide to ban unpopular messages, they can control the content to more palpable tastes. They might tone done dangerous rhetoric at the risk of drowning out important dissent.

I'm still not sure if this would be a good thing or not.

Who is brilliant?

In recent months, I've heard friends describe Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson as "brilliant."

That sounds bold. I am really reserved when using that term. But it got me to thinking: who would I think of as "brilliant" among living intellectuals.

I really enjoy and respect the thoughtfulness of writers like David Brooks and Conor Friedersdorf, but I don't think of them as brilliant.

David Foster Wallace comes to mind (okay, no longer living but still a contemporary intellectual) Same goes for Robert Pirsig, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, Nassim Taleb, Scott Alexander; I still feel I have more to learn about the Weinstein brothers, but probably them.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking are probably brilliant but maybe they just know a lot about a subject I know nothing of.

What about business and technology? Is Elon Musk brilliant? Jeff Bezos? Bill Gates? Or did they have one really great idea/invention?

I feel most comfortable assigning the word to writers. Probably because we have documented access to their thoughts and can confirm their brilliance.

My father-in-law is great at solving riddles and playing chess and would probably score high on tests that measure cognition. But he also gets his news from chain e-mails and thinks Obama is a closet Muslim. So even though he might be "smart," I don't really respect his opinion on most subjects.

In fact, I can think of many people with doctoral degrees or ivy league educations, and I don't respect their opinion either.

So what am I really talking about? I think I'm trying to describe people who are in my [extreme Robert DeNiro voice] Circle of Trust. It's my coterie of people whom I find thoughtful and careful in their analysis of a subject before weighing in on it. As Philip Tetlock would say, more "fox" than "hedgehog." 

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.