We have already discussed the two benefits of markets – efficiency and liberty. Win/win trades increase output, in terms of net happiness as measured at the level of the individual, by using the same inputs. And they allow us to decide freely with whom we will trade and for what.
And we have talked about two of the three fundamental flaws of markets. They overweight the individual over the group. No matter how much we want to protect the sick, markets have no mechanism for responding to that group-level desire; they only respond to individualistic interests. And markets overweight the prevailing distribution of resources, meaning that who will trade with whom is a function of what we each have to begin with . If you are stuck with the lead hat, no one will trade with you. There is no mechanism within a market to allow the poor to trade their way to wealth.
Now we look at the third fundamental flaw of all markets.
Favoring the instrumental over the intrinsic
If you were my friend, and you had a car and I didn’t, would you drive me to the airport? I think you probably would, if you had the time.
And when we got to the airport, and I pulled out $40 to pay for your time, what would be your response? If you were a struggling graduate student, you might say something like “Naw, just give me a couple of bucks for gas.” But would you take the money I was offering to compensate you for your time and effort?
Some of you might, but my guess is that the vast majority of people would not take the money. In fact, if I insisted, I would predict that most of you would feel somewhat insulted by the offer. “I didn’t drive you to the airport to make money. I did it because I was your friend, and you needed my help.” The motive for your efforts was the intrinsic value of friendship, not the instrumental value of making money. And, when I offered you the money, you felt badly by the reduction of that friendship into some kind of payback.
If you are an economist, you are probably thinking right now “Well, I would take you to the airport in exchange for the possibility that you might take me some place in the future.” Seeing everything as a matter of an exchange is one of the downsides of spending too much time studying markets, where everything is a trade.
Is that why you drove me, in order to have an option on my future energy to call upon? If so, then you would only pick friends with sufficient resources to make the friendship “worthwhile.” Is that how you pick your friends? I think not.
I remember sitting in a room filled with economists who were listening to a presentation by a budding economist who had discovered that women whose first child was a boy had gained 15 pounds more weight by the time they were forty than women whose first child was a girl. The question on the table was “Why is this the case?” The answer that most of the people in the room liked was that a women with a boy child had a stronger bargaining position vis-a-vis her husband, and so could “afford” to gain a bit more weight without threatening her position.
Really? I said. Is that how you all see marriage? When I questioned this theory, I was told by the roomful of economists that there is plenty of scientific evidence that marriage is just such a bargaining process.
While I believe strongly in the give and take that is marriage and while there is no doubt a lot of financial aspects of being married, I am not fond of thinking of it like a marketplace bargain. Isn’t something lost in the conversion of the intrinsic value of a marriage into the instrumental value of a financial bargain?
Yes. So, I believe that you answered my need because you are my friend, and you acted out of friendship, not because it was a good investment strategy.
What if you were a taxi driver?
OK, now imagine that you are a taxi driver, and you drive me to the airport. When we get there, I take your hand warmly and give you a big smile. “That was a great time,” I say, “let’s do this again soon. Maybe with the families next time?”
Sorry, but you want your $40. Not because you didn’t have a good time, and not because you don’t think I am a fine person, but because your motive was the instrumental value of “making a living.” You didn’t drive me to the airport because I was your friend, but because I was your customer in an exchange relationship.
And the point is that “Motive counts!” There is nothing wrong with being a taxi driver, but it is different from being a friend.
The motive behind Medicare
This is what we miss when we thoughtlessly decide to “privatize” programs that were otherwise motivated by concern for “the other.” In the middle part of the 20th Century, a large number of poor people in the US were the aged, struggling to meet their increased healthcare needs, and ruining their financial condition in the process. We passed Medicare in 1965 in part because we cared about these people and wanted to provide them a way to avoid poverty caused by medical need.
How cynical do you want to be? Because you can see the passage of Medicare as a step toward more governmental control over the economy, as a means of spending tax money to support hospitals and doctors, as a hand-out to the elderly by politicians who know that the elderly vote in disproportionate numbers, as a way for “forty-somethings” to avoid having to pay for Mom and Dad’s medical bills. In other words, you can interpret this action as an instrumentality; we passed Medicare for the elderly so that the rest of us could realize some gain.
But you can also see it as a caring effort by the community, through its agent, the government, to lift our parents out of poverty. And, at that level, Medicare has been a stunning success, as the elderly are no longer a large portion of the poor. And we ought to feel Good about that, the creation of our intrinsic commitment to that population.
The third fundamental flaw
So, when we privatize Medicare, as the right wing are proposing, we are taking that intrinsic value and turning it into an instrumental exchange relationship.
That’s the third fundamental flaw of all markets. Because the basis of all markets is “voluntary exchange,” they have no mechanism for valuing things for themselves (“intrinsic”) but only for what they can get you in exchange (“instrumental”).
Yet, motive counts.
Do you want to get your healthcare from a person or a hospital that you believe is motivated largely by the desire to care for you? Or would you get the same or better care from a doctor who was a shrewd bargainer and saw you as a means to make more money?
I propose that there is a difference between “Making money in order to care for people” and “Taking care of people in order to make money.” Sure, the caring doctor or hospital has to worry about the bottom line, but the making of money is the means to the end of caring. While the for profit hospital is using the provision of healthcare as a means to the end of profit.
Motive counts. And if markets only respond to the instrumental, then they are probably a poor choice for allocating healthcare motivated by the intrinsic desire to be a more caring society.
Getting closer
OK, we are getting closer to being able to apply all of this to a proposal to convert Medicare from a universal, single payer system for our elderly into a market-like transaction through issuing vouchers for the purchase of private insurance.
But first we need to spend some time talking about bicycles. Because markets only work if there is “consumer sovereignty,” and, in the next part blog posting, we will look at a market for bicycles in order to illustrate that point.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Monday, December 21, 2015
Vouching for healthcare, Part 2
Medicare vouchers?
Should we give people 65 and over a voucher to buy health insurance, rather than pay for their care through Medicare? Take note, because this is what some conservatives are going to propose as a market-like alternative to traditional Medicare. To see why this is a bad idea, you really need to dig down a bit into how markets work and how, sometimes, they don’t work. I started this in Part 1; given how long ago it was that I posted that essay, you may want to go back and reread it.
What we saw in Part 1 is that after two people trade in our “hat marketplace,” they are both happier, and that means that the total amount of happiness within the market goes up. After two trades, our total happiness, as measured by Δ∑IUj (“the change in the sum of all individual utility, from the first person to the last person”) went up from 9 to 25.
How markets work
This is how markets are expected to work. Voluntary exchange leads to win/win trades, which means that both parties to the trade end up happier, and so the net happiness of all of us in the market is improved.
At Time 1, total utility went up, but we still had the same 9 hats. At Time 2, after the second trade, total utility went up again, but again we got the increase in utility from the same 9 hats.
If a particular process increases the amount of output (additive happiness) while maintaining a level amount of input (9 hats), we call the result “efficiency.” We are getting more production from the same amount of input. Here is how that looks:
T0: 9 units of happiness
9 hats
T1: 16 units of happiness
9 hats
T2: 25 units of happiness
9 hats
Each trade leads to more individual happiness, but the happiness still comes from the same number of hats.
This is why, when markets work well, they promote efficiency. Win/win trades do this automatically. And markets promote liberty, because they run on voluntary exchange. If the main things you want from your allocation system are liberty and efficiency, markets are an excellent choice.
How do we help Ed?
But Ed is dying from his head condition, without a hat to protect him. All of us in the market place see his plight, and most of us feel badly for him. Ed notices that your hat is made of hard plastic, and would give him just the protection he needs. He approaches you to trade, but you value your hat fairly highly (+7) and don’t like his hat at all. You see his problem, but you didn’t cause it and don’t see any obligation to help him by giving up your hat for him.
All of us in the marketplace see this dynamic and, if asked, would urge you to trade, for Ed’s safety. A few of us approach you and suggest that you trade. You decline. More and more of us implore you to act, but you say “let Ed solve his own problems, or look to charity from someone else.”
Apparently, you are a Republican.
(I have been telling that joke for more than 30 years. At the beginning, it got laughs. By the late 80's, after years of the Reagan presidency, a growing number of students were vaguely offended, and the laughter of some was a bit embarrassed. More recently, I run into much less knee-jerk sympathy for Republicans. Probably a change for the Good.)
There is no "us"
Why don’t all of us in the market get together and make you trade? Well, that doesn’t happen in a market. In fact, it can’t happen. There is no concerted group action within markets and there is no political power to “make” any one do anything. The best markets deliver efficiency and liberty by being “free.” No coercion.
And no “us.” Note that the expression we have been using to sum up utility in our market only asks people, as individuals, to judge their individual circumstance. There is no “we” in Δ∑IUj.
Markets overweight the individual over the group
So, we have now run into the first “fundamental flaw” of all markets. Every market overweights individual values over the priorities of the group. Since markets are based entirely on individual win/win trades, there is no medium for expressing what the community might want. We may be saddened, as a group, for your refusal to come to Ed’s assistance, but there is no mechanism within a market for us to do anything about it.
And what about Tracy, who was stuck with the solid lead hat? She would love to trade, but no one will trade with her. How will she remedy her situation?
Well, she won’t. She has no way to trade herself upwards because she has no goods to trade. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t own boots.
Markets overweight the prevailing distribution of resources
Here is the second “fundamental flaw” of all markets – they inevitably overweight the prevailing distribution of resources. In other words, at any given moment, who has what within the market will, to a large extent, determine the trades that will take place. If you start with nothing to trade, the market will by-pass you entirely.
The rich will, therefore, stay rich and the poor will, perforce, stay poor.
So, we see that the sick and the poor (Ed and Tracy) have no way to use the market to address their needs, due to these fundamental flaws of the market.
In Part 3, we look at the third fundamental flaw of any market, that markets “overweight the instrumental over the intrinsic.” It all has to do with the difference between being my friend and being my taxi driver. But more on that in the next posting.
Should we give people 65 and over a voucher to buy health insurance, rather than pay for their care through Medicare? Take note, because this is what some conservatives are going to propose as a market-like alternative to traditional Medicare. To see why this is a bad idea, you really need to dig down a bit into how markets work and how, sometimes, they don’t work. I started this in Part 1; given how long ago it was that I posted that essay, you may want to go back and reread it.
What we saw in Part 1 is that after two people trade in our “hat marketplace,” they are both happier, and that means that the total amount of happiness within the market goes up. After two trades, our total happiness, as measured by Δ∑IUj (“the change in the sum of all individual utility, from the first person to the last person”) went up from 9 to 25.
How markets work
This is how markets are expected to work. Voluntary exchange leads to win/win trades, which means that both parties to the trade end up happier, and so the net happiness of all of us in the market is improved.
At Time 1, total utility went up, but we still had the same 9 hats. At Time 2, after the second trade, total utility went up again, but again we got the increase in utility from the same 9 hats.
If a particular process increases the amount of output (additive happiness) while maintaining a level amount of input (9 hats), we call the result “efficiency.” We are getting more production from the same amount of input. Here is how that looks:
T0: 9 units of happiness
9 hats
T1: 16 units of happiness
9 hats
T2: 25 units of happiness
9 hats
Each trade leads to more individual happiness, but the happiness still comes from the same number of hats.
This is why, when markets work well, they promote efficiency. Win/win trades do this automatically. And markets promote liberty, because they run on voluntary exchange. If the main things you want from your allocation system are liberty and efficiency, markets are an excellent choice.
How do we help Ed?
But Ed is dying from his head condition, without a hat to protect him. All of us in the market place see his plight, and most of us feel badly for him. Ed notices that your hat is made of hard plastic, and would give him just the protection he needs. He approaches you to trade, but you value your hat fairly highly (+7) and don’t like his hat at all. You see his problem, but you didn’t cause it and don’t see any obligation to help him by giving up your hat for him.
All of us in the marketplace see this dynamic and, if asked, would urge you to trade, for Ed’s safety. A few of us approach you and suggest that you trade. You decline. More and more of us implore you to act, but you say “let Ed solve his own problems, or look to charity from someone else.”
Apparently, you are a Republican.
(I have been telling that joke for more than 30 years. At the beginning, it got laughs. By the late 80's, after years of the Reagan presidency, a growing number of students were vaguely offended, and the laughter of some was a bit embarrassed. More recently, I run into much less knee-jerk sympathy for Republicans. Probably a change for the Good.)
There is no "us"
Why don’t all of us in the market get together and make you trade? Well, that doesn’t happen in a market. In fact, it can’t happen. There is no concerted group action within markets and there is no political power to “make” any one do anything. The best markets deliver efficiency and liberty by being “free.” No coercion.
And no “us.” Note that the expression we have been using to sum up utility in our market only asks people, as individuals, to judge their individual circumstance. There is no “we” in Δ∑IUj.
Markets overweight the individual over the group
So, we have now run into the first “fundamental flaw” of all markets. Every market overweights individual values over the priorities of the group. Since markets are based entirely on individual win/win trades, there is no medium for expressing what the community might want. We may be saddened, as a group, for your refusal to come to Ed’s assistance, but there is no mechanism within a market for us to do anything about it.
And what about Tracy, who was stuck with the solid lead hat? She would love to trade, but no one will trade with her. How will she remedy her situation?
Well, she won’t. She has no way to trade herself upwards because she has no goods to trade. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t own boots.
Markets overweight the prevailing distribution of resources
Here is the second “fundamental flaw” of all markets – they inevitably overweight the prevailing distribution of resources. In other words, at any given moment, who has what within the market will, to a large extent, determine the trades that will take place. If you start with nothing to trade, the market will by-pass you entirely.
The rich will, therefore, stay rich and the poor will, perforce, stay poor.
So, we see that the sick and the poor (Ed and Tracy) have no way to use the market to address their needs, due to these fundamental flaws of the market.
In Part 3, we look at the third fundamental flaw of any market, that markets “overweight the instrumental over the intrinsic.” It all has to do with the difference between being my friend and being my taxi driver. But more on that in the next posting.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Vouching for healthcare, Part 1
Author’s aside:
I have a number of things I want to say about public policy making. Some of it seems a bit “academic” and some of it is right out of the pages of yesterday’s Times. Apparently, the second type of posting is more popular than the first type, based upon the pageviews the postings get. But I don’t want to give up on the slightly deeper ideas that have helped me, and the thousands of students I have taught over the years, to understand what might really be happening in public policy making. However, I also don’t want to put lots of you to sleep. So, I am going to try to publish at least two posts per month, one on “current events” and one on ideas that illuminate the import of those events. I hope you all read both, but “to each his own.” If you are new to the blog, you might want to go back and check out some of the earlier “ideas” stuff.
Tomorrow, I'll post on why we shouldn't give up on working for progressive change, no matter how badly some of the current participants stink. Today, markets.
So, lets talk ideas.
One of the ideas that the right wing is going to pursue in the next few years is replacing Medicare’s simple single-payer system, used successfully and cheaply throughout the developed world, with a voucher system. (Yes, they balk at calling it a voucher system, but we know what they mean!)
If you live in Wisconsin or Cleveland or a handful of other jurisdictions in the US, you have seen something similar to this in vouchers for public education. Here is how Medicare vouchers are supposed to work.
Everyone over the age of 64 will get a voucher from the government, and they will be told to go out and purchase their own health insurance with that voucher. If they want to spend only the value of the voucher, they will get a bronze (or maybe tin?) insurance policy. If they wish to spend more money on their healthcare insurance, they could get a gold or platinum policy, limited only by their desires and their resources available to meet those desires.
Then, we will have set up a market place for health insurance for the elderly. And (irony alert) we all know that markets are the best way to allocate any resource. Markets, we know, are the most efficient allocation system, and the most supportive of individual freedom. We also know that government programs, like Medicare and Medicaid (and all those programs in the 32 other developed countries with centrally-controlled payer systems), are inherently inefficient and will provide awful care, and make us take whatever care we are given, usually from a terrible doctor that we have to wait months to see.
How much of that last paragraph is true? How well do markets work to allocate health care? Are they inherently preferable to government-run systems?
I want to spend a few blog posts trying to talk about this policy debate: what to allocate through markets and what to allocate through government. If you want to read more about what we will be talking about, check out Tragic Choices by Calabresi and Bobbitt, as the central themes of the following analysis is taken from that book. Not the most interesting book you will ever read, but it made me think, when I first read it almost 40 years ago. Or just keep reading here.
Our marketplace for hats
First, we have to understand how markets work. Lets see if we can use a small barter-based market for hats to gain some insight. We will see that markets are, indeed, efficient and promote liberty. But at a cost, because they don’t allow us to achieve common goals, they overweight the prevailing distribution of resources (the rich get richer. . . ) and they can’t deal with things that are “intrinsically” valuable, and insist upon trying to turn them into things that are “instrumentally” valuable.
To pursue these ideas, we have to start by thinking small, because large markets are notoriously difficult to understand. Lets start with this market for hats.
Assume that you and I are part of a group of nine people who each have a hat. They come in all sizes, shapes, designs and levels of utility. We are about to start a market place for these hats, but before we do, we want to know how happy each person is with their hat.
So, all of us value our hat, maybe on a scale of -10 to +10. I like my hat. It is vaguely referential to Indiana Jones, and fits me perfectly. I would value my hat at 7.
Wait. Seven what? We can’t say “seven dollars,” because we haven’t introduced money into our market place. Economists talk about “utility,” the value that individuals gain from possessing some resource. We could call it “seven utils,” but lets just say that I value my hat at 7 points. Or, I have seven units of happiness.
You have a silly-looking hat, in my opinion. But you seem to really like it. It covers your head well, it seems to provide some protection against the elements. I would trade that hat in a second, but I don’t think you are going to want to. To each his own. You value your hat at 7, too.
Nadiah has a solid gold hat. She is very happy. Very. It doesn’t feel all that great to wear, but it is solid gold, and she knows she is set for life. This hat, thinks Nadiah, is a solid 10.
Tracy has a hat made of lead. She is very unhappy. The hat has no use whatsoever. Tracy values it as -9. (She is saving minus ten for when she gets stuck with a radioactive hat.)
Ed has a head condition. He is not well. And the condition is getting worse. It is the sort of thing that could be fixed if he had a protective hat, one that covered his whole head and would protect him from the elements. But he has a feathery, froo froo thing. -10.
Paul values his hat at +1. Not great. Could be worse. A bit too small.
Sherry values her hat at +4. Above average, she supposes. But she really likes my hat, and hers suffers in comparison.
Celia doesn’t particularly care for her hat. It scratches a bit, because she has a small head, and it doesn’t fit well. -1.
Patrick has a hat that doesn’t suit his personality well, as far as he sees. It is sporty, and he is a bit of a nerd. But it keeps the rain off. +2.
So, where are we in our nine person marketplace?
Values at Time 0
Person IU
You +7
Me +7
Nadiah +10
Tracy -9
Ed -10
Paul +1
Sherry +4
Celia -1
Patrick +2
Total 9
Here comes the magic
In the table we have the utility that each individual assigns to their hat at the beginning, which we will call Time 0. Lets call the value each person has “IU,” for “individual utility.” If we want to know how much our marketplace values our hat resources, we just add up everyone’s individual utility. The math expression of this is:
∑IUj
This is the “sum of the individual utility, starting from the first person in the group and going to the last person, or the 'jth' person.” It is a way of describing, in a mathematical expression, the total value of what you get when you add the individual values of a group of things.
In our example, we have 9 points of utility in our market place.
Now lets see what happens when we let people start trading. Because trading is what markets are all about. The key to understanding markets is to follow the impact of “voluntary exchange.” If you don’t have voluntary exchange, you don’t have a market.
The first person who wants to trade is Sherry. She wants to trade with me, because she loves my hat, and only likes her hat. I look at her hat and value it at -1. Sorry, no trade.
Sherry then looks around some more, and she sees the solid gold hat. Of course, she wants to trade, but Nadiah isn’t trading with anyone in our market.
Finally, Sherry approaches Patrick. She offers to trade. Patrick accepts. He thinks her hat is just his style, and she likes the way his hat looks on her head. Patrick now values his new hat at +6, a step up. And Sherry is happier, too, at +7.
Did you notice what just happened? Nobody forced Sherry and Patrick to trade. This was a voluntary exchange. And Sherry could only trade with someone that wanted to trade with her. Yet, after their trade, something magical happens. ∑IUj goes up!
Patrick gained 4 points of IU. And Sherry gained 3 points. At Time 0, our little marketplace had 9 units of value. But now, at Time 1 after our first trade, we have 16. We have the 9 that we started with and the extra seven that came about because of the trade.
So, at Time 1, after the first trade, something special happened to ∑IUj. It got bigger. We can express this change like this:
Δ∑IUj = 7
Delta is the math symbol for change. So, at Time 1, the change in the sum of the individual utility in our marketplace, through all of the people, equals 7.
The magic happens again
Let’s see that happen again. Celia has a hat that is too big, and Paul has a hat that is too small. At Time 2, they trade. Notice that nobody made them do it. Strictly voluntary. Celia is 4 points happier, and Paul is 5 points happier.
Δ ∑IUj = 9
And the magic happens again. From Time 1, after the first trade, where our total added up happiness was 16, our total now adds up to 25.
It seems that every time two people engage in voluntary exchange, the change in the sum of individual utility goes up. That is expressed as:
Δ∑IUj > 0
Every time a trade takes place in the market, the change in the sum of the individual utility is positive, greater than zero. And that makes perfect sense, because, since this is all about voluntary exchange, only win/win trades are going to take place. No one would trade unless they perceived a gain from it, so all parties are always happier after the trade.
This is, indeed, one of the marvels of the marketplace. But of course, there is a darkness embedded in our little scenario. How shall Ed live? More on that in the next blog in this series.
I have a number of things I want to say about public policy making. Some of it seems a bit “academic” and some of it is right out of the pages of yesterday’s Times. Apparently, the second type of posting is more popular than the first type, based upon the pageviews the postings get. But I don’t want to give up on the slightly deeper ideas that have helped me, and the thousands of students I have taught over the years, to understand what might really be happening in public policy making. However, I also don’t want to put lots of you to sleep. So, I am going to try to publish at least two posts per month, one on “current events” and one on ideas that illuminate the import of those events. I hope you all read both, but “to each his own.” If you are new to the blog, you might want to go back and check out some of the earlier “ideas” stuff.
Tomorrow, I'll post on why we shouldn't give up on working for progressive change, no matter how badly some of the current participants stink. Today, markets.
So, lets talk ideas.
One of the ideas that the right wing is going to pursue in the next few years is replacing Medicare’s simple single-payer system, used successfully and cheaply throughout the developed world, with a voucher system. (Yes, they balk at calling it a voucher system, but we know what they mean!)
If you live in Wisconsin or Cleveland or a handful of other jurisdictions in the US, you have seen something similar to this in vouchers for public education. Here is how Medicare vouchers are supposed to work.
Everyone over the age of 64 will get a voucher from the government, and they will be told to go out and purchase their own health insurance with that voucher. If they want to spend only the value of the voucher, they will get a bronze (or maybe tin?) insurance policy. If they wish to spend more money on their healthcare insurance, they could get a gold or platinum policy, limited only by their desires and their resources available to meet those desires.
Then, we will have set up a market place for health insurance for the elderly. And (irony alert) we all know that markets are the best way to allocate any resource. Markets, we know, are the most efficient allocation system, and the most supportive of individual freedom. We also know that government programs, like Medicare and Medicaid (and all those programs in the 32 other developed countries with centrally-controlled payer systems), are inherently inefficient and will provide awful care, and make us take whatever care we are given, usually from a terrible doctor that we have to wait months to see.
How much of that last paragraph is true? How well do markets work to allocate health care? Are they inherently preferable to government-run systems?
I want to spend a few blog posts trying to talk about this policy debate: what to allocate through markets and what to allocate through government. If you want to read more about what we will be talking about, check out Tragic Choices by Calabresi and Bobbitt, as the central themes of the following analysis is taken from that book. Not the most interesting book you will ever read, but it made me think, when I first read it almost 40 years ago. Or just keep reading here.
Our marketplace for hats
First, we have to understand how markets work. Lets see if we can use a small barter-based market for hats to gain some insight. We will see that markets are, indeed, efficient and promote liberty. But at a cost, because they don’t allow us to achieve common goals, they overweight the prevailing distribution of resources (the rich get richer. . . ) and they can’t deal with things that are “intrinsically” valuable, and insist upon trying to turn them into things that are “instrumentally” valuable.
To pursue these ideas, we have to start by thinking small, because large markets are notoriously difficult to understand. Lets start with this market for hats.
Assume that you and I are part of a group of nine people who each have a hat. They come in all sizes, shapes, designs and levels of utility. We are about to start a market place for these hats, but before we do, we want to know how happy each person is with their hat.
So, all of us value our hat, maybe on a scale of -10 to +10. I like my hat. It is vaguely referential to Indiana Jones, and fits me perfectly. I would value my hat at 7.
Wait. Seven what? We can’t say “seven dollars,” because we haven’t introduced money into our market place. Economists talk about “utility,” the value that individuals gain from possessing some resource. We could call it “seven utils,” but lets just say that I value my hat at 7 points. Or, I have seven units of happiness.
You have a silly-looking hat, in my opinion. But you seem to really like it. It covers your head well, it seems to provide some protection against the elements. I would trade that hat in a second, but I don’t think you are going to want to. To each his own. You value your hat at 7, too.
Nadiah has a solid gold hat. She is very happy. Very. It doesn’t feel all that great to wear, but it is solid gold, and she knows she is set for life. This hat, thinks Nadiah, is a solid 10.
Tracy has a hat made of lead. She is very unhappy. The hat has no use whatsoever. Tracy values it as -9. (She is saving minus ten for when she gets stuck with a radioactive hat.)
Ed has a head condition. He is not well. And the condition is getting worse. It is the sort of thing that could be fixed if he had a protective hat, one that covered his whole head and would protect him from the elements. But he has a feathery, froo froo thing. -10.
Paul values his hat at +1. Not great. Could be worse. A bit too small.
Sherry values her hat at +4. Above average, she supposes. But she really likes my hat, and hers suffers in comparison.
Celia doesn’t particularly care for her hat. It scratches a bit, because she has a small head, and it doesn’t fit well. -1.
Patrick has a hat that doesn’t suit his personality well, as far as he sees. It is sporty, and he is a bit of a nerd. But it keeps the rain off. +2.
So, where are we in our nine person marketplace?
Values at Time 0
Person IU
You +7
Me +7
Nadiah +10
Tracy -9
Ed -10
Paul +1
Sherry +4
Celia -1
Patrick +2
Total 9
Here comes the magic
In the table we have the utility that each individual assigns to their hat at the beginning, which we will call Time 0. Lets call the value each person has “IU,” for “individual utility.” If we want to know how much our marketplace values our hat resources, we just add up everyone’s individual utility. The math expression of this is:
∑IUj
This is the “sum of the individual utility, starting from the first person in the group and going to the last person, or the 'jth' person.” It is a way of describing, in a mathematical expression, the total value of what you get when you add the individual values of a group of things.
In our example, we have 9 points of utility in our market place.
Now lets see what happens when we let people start trading. Because trading is what markets are all about. The key to understanding markets is to follow the impact of “voluntary exchange.” If you don’t have voluntary exchange, you don’t have a market.
The first person who wants to trade is Sherry. She wants to trade with me, because she loves my hat, and only likes her hat. I look at her hat and value it at -1. Sorry, no trade.
Sherry then looks around some more, and she sees the solid gold hat. Of course, she wants to trade, but Nadiah isn’t trading with anyone in our market.
Finally, Sherry approaches Patrick. She offers to trade. Patrick accepts. He thinks her hat is just his style, and she likes the way his hat looks on her head. Patrick now values his new hat at +6, a step up. And Sherry is happier, too, at +7.
Did you notice what just happened? Nobody forced Sherry and Patrick to trade. This was a voluntary exchange. And Sherry could only trade with someone that wanted to trade with her. Yet, after their trade, something magical happens. ∑IUj goes up!
Patrick gained 4 points of IU. And Sherry gained 3 points. At Time 0, our little marketplace had 9 units of value. But now, at Time 1 after our first trade, we have 16. We have the 9 that we started with and the extra seven that came about because of the trade.
So, at Time 1, after the first trade, something special happened to ∑IUj. It got bigger. We can express this change like this:
Δ∑IUj = 7
Delta is the math symbol for change. So, at Time 1, the change in the sum of the individual utility in our marketplace, through all of the people, equals 7.
The magic happens again
Let’s see that happen again. Celia has a hat that is too big, and Paul has a hat that is too small. At Time 2, they trade. Notice that nobody made them do it. Strictly voluntary. Celia is 4 points happier, and Paul is 5 points happier.
Δ ∑IUj = 9
And the magic happens again. From Time 1, after the first trade, where our total added up happiness was 16, our total now adds up to 25.
It seems that every time two people engage in voluntary exchange, the change in the sum of individual utility goes up. That is expressed as:
Δ∑IUj > 0
Every time a trade takes place in the market, the change in the sum of the individual utility is positive, greater than zero. And that makes perfect sense, because, since this is all about voluntary exchange, only win/win trades are going to take place. No one would trade unless they perceived a gain from it, so all parties are always happier after the trade.
This is, indeed, one of the marvels of the marketplace. But of course, there is a darkness embedded in our little scenario. How shall Ed live? More on that in the next blog in this series.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Are Trump’s followers just stupid?
I found myself last week getting pretty depressed about the state of politics in the US. Really? More than half of the Republicans would prefer the next President to be either Trump or Carson? Really?
In one of my undergrad classes, I let slip that I was worried that the American public might just be getting more stupid. Not a pedagogically sound statement, but I am worried about the possibility. My apologies in advance for the harsh language, but I think it is important to use it to make the point.
Not polite to use this word
I know it isn’t polite, but let’s face it, some percentage of any population is not very smart. Might this proportion be increasing? I used to call this fear the “Dukes of Hazards” concern. There was a time in TV history where the number one TV show was an inanity about two “country boys,” their ridiculous, gas guzzling car, and their scantily clad female cousin. All of which had to be insulting to any self-respecting rural resident. If that is what the American people most want to watch, something was seriously wrong.
Today, according to PPP, the polling company, 54% of Republicans think Obama is a Muslim, and another 32% said they weren’t sure. Last year, Gallup found that more than 4 in every 10 Americans believe that God created the Earth in a week, in its present form and about 10,000 years ago.
The good news is that a majority of American’s believe in the necessity to act on climate change. But according to HuffPo, more people believe Fox News’ views on climate change than believe President Obama’s.
We could go on. I am guessing you all have your own data points that cause you incredulity. There does seem to be evidence that the country is getting more and more stupid.
Maybe something else is going on
But today I retracted my statement in class. I don’t think this is necessarily evidence of an increasing portion of Americans with limited critical thinking skills. More likely, this is the result of 50 years of the right wing learning to reach out to, to incite and to activate whatever the portion of American’s that are stupid.
That is one of the main things they have been doing for the last many decades. Opposing Medicare as the greatest threat to our freedom back in 1962. Championing “state’s rights” (with all its racist overtones) in the mid-60's. Promising peace with honor in Viet Nam, and then delivering neither. Reagan promising to triple the defense budget, balance the federal budget and decrease taxes, all at the same time. George H.W. Bush wanting us to address our pressing social needs with voluntarism. George W. Bush and Cheney misleading us into the worst foreign policy blunder certainly in 100 years, maybe of all time. Palin saying almost everything she has ever said. Every rightist economist and politician telling us that the problem with our economy is taxes, “Taxes I tell you!” Trump promising to round up 11 million people and send them “away.”
None of these are going to be attractive positions to people with critical thinking skills. (OK, lots of really smart people bought W’s and Cheney’s malarkey. The exception that proves the rule, I suppose.) In a myriad ways, the right has been selling anger and frustration and hate to the not very smart, and it has worked well for them.
Trump might be their Frankenstein’s monster
But they are possibly going to rue that strategy. Trump’s success is the peak of this decades-long campaign to activate the stupid. He might end up being their Frankenstein’s monster. His campaign is likely to dim the Republican brand, and if he were to win the nomination, he is very unlikely to win in the general election. (Of course, I and many others said the same thing about Reagan in the summer of of 1980. If Trump does become President, all bets are off, and I might go back to my original hypothesis. Canada, maybe?)
So, my new hypothesis is that American’s aren’t getting any more stupid. It is just that that group has been empowered by the right-wing in this country, been handed a platform and a megaphone, and we are just hearing from them more.
Still, it is a dire set of events. If right wing positions are based primarily on ignorance and lack of education, we can try to provide facts and instruction. But if the leading edge is stupid, that is a much bigger problem.
There is a tendency toward hopelessness faced with such a problem. But we who are not stupid can’t give up, can’t allow ourselves to give in. We still have to fight, and maintain hope that the large majority of the people who respond to facts and to rationality and to science can be organized to oppose a government that caters to the stupid.
Stupidity is probably not growing, and is probably not insurmountable. It is just another thing we have to overcome, along the way.
In one of my undergrad classes, I let slip that I was worried that the American public might just be getting more stupid. Not a pedagogically sound statement, but I am worried about the possibility. My apologies in advance for the harsh language, but I think it is important to use it to make the point.
Not polite to use this word
I know it isn’t polite, but let’s face it, some percentage of any population is not very smart. Might this proportion be increasing? I used to call this fear the “Dukes of Hazards” concern. There was a time in TV history where the number one TV show was an inanity about two “country boys,” their ridiculous, gas guzzling car, and their scantily clad female cousin. All of which had to be insulting to any self-respecting rural resident. If that is what the American people most want to watch, something was seriously wrong.
Today, according to PPP, the polling company, 54% of Republicans think Obama is a Muslim, and another 32% said they weren’t sure. Last year, Gallup found that more than 4 in every 10 Americans believe that God created the Earth in a week, in its present form and about 10,000 years ago.
The good news is that a majority of American’s believe in the necessity to act on climate change. But according to HuffPo, more people believe Fox News’ views on climate change than believe President Obama’s.
We could go on. I am guessing you all have your own data points that cause you incredulity. There does seem to be evidence that the country is getting more and more stupid.
Maybe something else is going on
But today I retracted my statement in class. I don’t think this is necessarily evidence of an increasing portion of Americans with limited critical thinking skills. More likely, this is the result of 50 years of the right wing learning to reach out to, to incite and to activate whatever the portion of American’s that are stupid.
That is one of the main things they have been doing for the last many decades. Opposing Medicare as the greatest threat to our freedom back in 1962. Championing “state’s rights” (with all its racist overtones) in the mid-60's. Promising peace with honor in Viet Nam, and then delivering neither. Reagan promising to triple the defense budget, balance the federal budget and decrease taxes, all at the same time. George H.W. Bush wanting us to address our pressing social needs with voluntarism. George W. Bush and Cheney misleading us into the worst foreign policy blunder certainly in 100 years, maybe of all time. Palin saying almost everything she has ever said. Every rightist economist and politician telling us that the problem with our economy is taxes, “Taxes I tell you!” Trump promising to round up 11 million people and send them “away.”
None of these are going to be attractive positions to people with critical thinking skills. (OK, lots of really smart people bought W’s and Cheney’s malarkey. The exception that proves the rule, I suppose.) In a myriad ways, the right has been selling anger and frustration and hate to the not very smart, and it has worked well for them.
Trump might be their Frankenstein’s monster
But they are possibly going to rue that strategy. Trump’s success is the peak of this decades-long campaign to activate the stupid. He might end up being their Frankenstein’s monster. His campaign is likely to dim the Republican brand, and if he were to win the nomination, he is very unlikely to win in the general election. (Of course, I and many others said the same thing about Reagan in the summer of of 1980. If Trump does become President, all bets are off, and I might go back to my original hypothesis. Canada, maybe?)
So, my new hypothesis is that American’s aren’t getting any more stupid. It is just that that group has been empowered by the right-wing in this country, been handed a platform and a megaphone, and we are just hearing from them more.
Still, it is a dire set of events. If right wing positions are based primarily on ignorance and lack of education, we can try to provide facts and instruction. But if the leading edge is stupid, that is a much bigger problem.
There is a tendency toward hopelessness faced with such a problem. But we who are not stupid can’t give up, can’t allow ourselves to give in. We still have to fight, and maintain hope that the large majority of the people who respond to facts and to rationality and to science can be organized to oppose a government that caters to the stupid.
Stupidity is probably not growing, and is probably not insurmountable. It is just another thing we have to overcome, along the way.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
What do Trump and Sanders have in common?
It certainly isn’t their policy positions. But I think they do have something very compelling in common. One way to explain it is to characterize what their opponents are doing.
Painting by number
Hillary and Jeb are engaged in “paint by number.” Remember this activity? You were given a drawing with spaces containing little numbers, and you would fill in the numbered areas with the paints that had the corresponding number. Your only challenge was to stay within the lines. The result is a simulacrum of a painting. Here’s an example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22paint+by+number%22&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CGIQ7AlqFQoTCPi5kMqsrscCFQhJkgodkBMBNA&biw=1280&bih=689#imgrc=NIDdOR_tpkxRGM%3A
It’s not a horrible thing to look at, but it is a bit sad. Actually, more than a bit.
And that is what Jeb and Hillary are doing, painting by number. They find out, from polling and focus groups and campaign strategists, what people want to hear or how best to phrase their own views, and then offer us a sad portrait of themselves.
Actual leaders
But Trump and Bernie are actual leaders. They actually say what they think. And that is why they are so popular at the moment, because the American public wants leaders, and wants them desperately.
The last time we saw this phenomenon was in 1992, when George H.W. Bush, a “paint by number” politician and Bill Clinton, probably the best paint by number guy EVER, were opposed by Ross Perot. Perot was a feisty rich guy who said what he thought, which was often a bit odd and always caustic, yet he got lots of support, because we want actual leaders who tell us what they really think, not what they think we want to hear. At the time, I said that the American people were so thirty for leadership that they would drink battery acid!
Interestingly, sometime during the campaign, Perot’s “serious people” suggested to him that he might actually win! And so he started hemming and hawing, giving the kind of “no answer answer” that sounds so familiar to us all. And his popularity plummeted. Yet, he still got almost 19% of the popular vote.
Far from paint by number mediocrity, Trump is like a Jackson Pollack manqué, throwing splotches of paint all over the place, leaving a mess. But it is an original mess, a mess he appears to be authentic about, “his mess.”
And Bernie is saying what he really thinks, with force and commitment. He may not be painting a masterpiece, but the result is something that comes from his head AND his heart, and people can hear that.
Trying to lead
So much of the beltway media, horribly removed from the average American, have been trying to make sense of Trump and Sanders by attempting to identify that portion of the Republican and Democratic coalitions to which they are appealing. Whose numbers, they wonder, are they painting?
But I believe their appeal is much more basic. They are painting their own pictures, not bothering to consult with “serious people” or pollsters. They are trying to lead.
By the way, isn’t this also why such oddities as Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are getting their 15 minutes now? They, too, sound like they are offering an honest picture.
Could Hillary and Jeb learn this and actually become the leaders they say that they are? I think not. Both have spent too much time learning to exquisitely paint by numbers, and would have no idea of what to do with a blank canvas.
If history repeats itself, Jeb and Hillary will become the candidates, and one of them will become President. Of course, I hope that is Hillary. But I would really prefer to support someone with a flair for painting, someone with an authentic picture to offer us, someone, like Bernie, who will lead by telling us what they really believe, and then let us decide to follow them.
That is the lesson that the political class could learn from Trump’s and Sanders’ successes. But, instead, they are too busy trying to figure out if we want a number 5 on the tree trunk or a number 6.
Sigh.
Painting by number
Hillary and Jeb are engaged in “paint by number.” Remember this activity? You were given a drawing with spaces containing little numbers, and you would fill in the numbered areas with the paints that had the corresponding number. Your only challenge was to stay within the lines. The result is a simulacrum of a painting. Here’s an example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22paint+by+number%22&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CGIQ7AlqFQoTCPi5kMqsrscCFQhJkgodkBMBNA&biw=1280&bih=689#imgrc=NIDdOR_tpkxRGM%3A
It’s not a horrible thing to look at, but it is a bit sad. Actually, more than a bit.
And that is what Jeb and Hillary are doing, painting by number. They find out, from polling and focus groups and campaign strategists, what people want to hear or how best to phrase their own views, and then offer us a sad portrait of themselves.
Actual leaders
But Trump and Bernie are actual leaders. They actually say what they think. And that is why they are so popular at the moment, because the American public wants leaders, and wants them desperately.
The last time we saw this phenomenon was in 1992, when George H.W. Bush, a “paint by number” politician and Bill Clinton, probably the best paint by number guy EVER, were opposed by Ross Perot. Perot was a feisty rich guy who said what he thought, which was often a bit odd and always caustic, yet he got lots of support, because we want actual leaders who tell us what they really think, not what they think we want to hear. At the time, I said that the American people were so thirty for leadership that they would drink battery acid!
Interestingly, sometime during the campaign, Perot’s “serious people” suggested to him that he might actually win! And so he started hemming and hawing, giving the kind of “no answer answer” that sounds so familiar to us all. And his popularity plummeted. Yet, he still got almost 19% of the popular vote.
Far from paint by number mediocrity, Trump is like a Jackson Pollack manqué, throwing splotches of paint all over the place, leaving a mess. But it is an original mess, a mess he appears to be authentic about, “his mess.”
And Bernie is saying what he really thinks, with force and commitment. He may not be painting a masterpiece, but the result is something that comes from his head AND his heart, and people can hear that.
Trying to lead
So much of the beltway media, horribly removed from the average American, have been trying to make sense of Trump and Sanders by attempting to identify that portion of the Republican and Democratic coalitions to which they are appealing. Whose numbers, they wonder, are they painting?
But I believe their appeal is much more basic. They are painting their own pictures, not bothering to consult with “serious people” or pollsters. They are trying to lead.
By the way, isn’t this also why such oddities as Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are getting their 15 minutes now? They, too, sound like they are offering an honest picture.
Could Hillary and Jeb learn this and actually become the leaders they say that they are? I think not. Both have spent too much time learning to exquisitely paint by numbers, and would have no idea of what to do with a blank canvas.
If history repeats itself, Jeb and Hillary will become the candidates, and one of them will become President. Of course, I hope that is Hillary. But I would really prefer to support someone with a flair for painting, someone with an authentic picture to offer us, someone, like Bernie, who will lead by telling us what they really believe, and then let us decide to follow them.
That is the lesson that the political class could learn from Trump’s and Sanders’ successes. But, instead, they are too busy trying to figure out if we want a number 5 on the tree trunk or a number 6.
Sigh.
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Black lives matter.
Isn't it reasonable?
Recently, Martin O’Malley, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was confronted by demonstrators while giving a speech. They chanted, “Black lives matter.” O’Malley agreed that black lives matter, but added that “white lives matter, all lives matter.” He was criticized for this statement, and is planning an apology.
Some of you may be thinking, as Jeb Bush did, “Why are we apologizing for saying that all lives matter?” Isn’t that an obvious and reasonable statement?
Not if you are Jewish
But if you are Jewish, you should understand how important it is to not fall into this easy trap. More people die in any given month around the world than died in the Holocaust. Of course, Jewish lives matter, but put in context, isn’t it only one set of deaths among many?
If you are Armenian, more people around the world die in a week than perished in the Genocide of 1915. Why should those Armenian lives matter more than the lives of others?
If you are Irish or Italian, why still give any special attention to the discrimination that your people were met with when they came to American? Everybody has troubles.
Do lives in Darfur matter? Of course, but there are an order of magnitude more people all over the world who died in poverty at the same time as the Darfurians were being massacred. Let’s not pay inordinate attention to the part and lose sight of the whole.
You get the idea. The argument that “all lives matter” misses the point. It misses the special attention that needs to be paid to the systematic racism that has resulted in the many killings of unarmed black people and has caused the failure of our justice system to respond accordingly. And it misses that this is merely a symptom of a much, much larger pathology in our country.
We shouldn't forget
As a Jew, I don’t ever want the rest of you to forget the monstrous impact of anti-Semitism, particularly as it continues to make itself heard loudly in Europe and elsewhere. And in the crazed comments of America's recent homicidal maniacs. The Holocaust was a special, unspeakably monumental moment in our history, and it must not be softened by questionable comparisons. Beyond the tragedy of the deaths is the real, traumatic pain that the Holocaust caused on a generation of Jews, my parents’ generation. If you try to “put it into perspective,” you will, inevitably, diminish the specialness of the evil and the loss.
To say in response to “black lives matter” that all lives matter is to similarly diminish the lived experiences, in pain and fear and anger, of African-Americans, diluting it into a larger whole. But the black experience in America, like the Holocaust, is special, too, and must be respected. “Attention must be paid.”
My heart and soul ache at the knowledge that three of my great-uncles perished in the Holocaust, severing their limbs from my family tree. And a fourth, with a number tattooed on his arm, barely survived the camps. Every year I say a yahrzeit blessing to keep their memory, and, to some extent, that pain alive.
So, too, my heart and soul ache for the 400 years of injustice of the black experience in American, which has not ended. I know I don’t do enough to address that injustice. But, at the very least, I can acknowledge it and show solidarity to those who are doing something about it, by affirming that black lives matter. To all of us. And very much to me.
Recently, Martin O’Malley, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was confronted by demonstrators while giving a speech. They chanted, “Black lives matter.” O’Malley agreed that black lives matter, but added that “white lives matter, all lives matter.” He was criticized for this statement, and is planning an apology.
Some of you may be thinking, as Jeb Bush did, “Why are we apologizing for saying that all lives matter?” Isn’t that an obvious and reasonable statement?
Not if you are Jewish
But if you are Jewish, you should understand how important it is to not fall into this easy trap. More people die in any given month around the world than died in the Holocaust. Of course, Jewish lives matter, but put in context, isn’t it only one set of deaths among many?
If you are Armenian, more people around the world die in a week than perished in the Genocide of 1915. Why should those Armenian lives matter more than the lives of others?
If you are Irish or Italian, why still give any special attention to the discrimination that your people were met with when they came to American? Everybody has troubles.
Do lives in Darfur matter? Of course, but there are an order of magnitude more people all over the world who died in poverty at the same time as the Darfurians were being massacred. Let’s not pay inordinate attention to the part and lose sight of the whole.
You get the idea. The argument that “all lives matter” misses the point. It misses the special attention that needs to be paid to the systematic racism that has resulted in the many killings of unarmed black people and has caused the failure of our justice system to respond accordingly. And it misses that this is merely a symptom of a much, much larger pathology in our country.
We shouldn't forget
As a Jew, I don’t ever want the rest of you to forget the monstrous impact of anti-Semitism, particularly as it continues to make itself heard loudly in Europe and elsewhere. And in the crazed comments of America's recent homicidal maniacs. The Holocaust was a special, unspeakably monumental moment in our history, and it must not be softened by questionable comparisons. Beyond the tragedy of the deaths is the real, traumatic pain that the Holocaust caused on a generation of Jews, my parents’ generation. If you try to “put it into perspective,” you will, inevitably, diminish the specialness of the evil and the loss.
To say in response to “black lives matter” that all lives matter is to similarly diminish the lived experiences, in pain and fear and anger, of African-Americans, diluting it into a larger whole. But the black experience in America, like the Holocaust, is special, too, and must be respected. “Attention must be paid.”
My heart and soul ache at the knowledge that three of my great-uncles perished in the Holocaust, severing their limbs from my family tree. And a fourth, with a number tattooed on his arm, barely survived the camps. Every year I say a yahrzeit blessing to keep their memory, and, to some extent, that pain alive.
So, too, my heart and soul ache for the 400 years of injustice of the black experience in American, which has not ended. I know I don’t do enough to address that injustice. But, at the very least, I can acknowledge it and show solidarity to those who are doing something about it, by affirming that black lives matter. To all of us. And very much to me.
Friday, July 10, 2015
We have forgotten how transformational leadership works
In this morning’s paper, the editors of the New York Times did it again. In an article about some of Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ left-leaning positions, the authors wonder whether the country is ready for such radical notions as taxing the rich in order to afford universal healthcare, infrastructure maintenance, affordable college and humane policies that support child-rearing. They ponder whether these supposed leaders are out of step with the mood of the citizens. Isn’t Bernie hopelessly out of touch with voters? Won’t Clinton have to moderate her proposals in order to match the country’s centrist tendencies? If you want to lead, they imply, you have to figure out first what the people want to hear.
A presidential wannabe
Well, how “out of step” is the rhetoric of the right-wing? For instance, here is a presidential wannabe talking about an expansion of government support of healthcare:
Let’s take a look at Social Security itself. Again, very few of us disagree with the original premise that there should be some form of savings that would keep destitution from following unemployment by reason of death, disability or old age. And to this end, Social Security was adopted, but it was never intended to supplant private savings, private insurance, pension programs of unions and industries.
In our country, under our free-enterprise system, we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to chose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other.
In this country of ours took place the greatest revolution that has ever taken place in the world’s history; the only true revolution. Here, for the first time in all the thousands of years of man’s relations to man, a little group of men, the founding fathers, for the first time, established the idea that you and I had within ourselves the God given right and ability to determine our own destiny.
Write those letters now, call your friends and tell them to write. If you don’t, this program will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day we will wake to find that we have socialism, and one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
A Southern governor
And here is another presidential wannabe, a Southern governor, telling us to beware of the government in Washington:
To realize our ambitions and to bring to fruition our dreams, we must take cognizance of the world about us. We must re-define our heritage, re-school our thoughts in the lessons our forefathers knew so well, first hand, in order to function and to grow and to prosper. We can no longer hide our head in the sand and tell ourselves that the ideology of our free fathers is not being attacked and is not being threatened by another idea . . . for it is.
We are faced with an idea that if a centralized government assume enough authority, enough power over its people, that it can provide a utopian life . . that if given the power to dictate, to forbid, to require, to demand, to distribute, to edict and to judge what is best and enforce that will produce only "good," it shall be our father . . . . and our God.
It is an idea of government that encourages our fears and destroys our faith . . . for where there is faith, there is no fear, and where there is fear, there is no faith. In encouraging our fears of economic insecurity it demands we place that economic management and control with government; in encouraging our fear of educational development it demands we place that education and the minds of our children under management and control of government, and even in feeding our fears of physical infirmities and declining years, it offers and demands to father us through it all and even into the grave.
It is a government that claims to us that it is bountiful as it buys its power from us with the fruits of its rapaciousness of the wealth that free men before it have produced and builds on crumbling credit without responsibilities to the debtors . . . our children. It is an ideology of government erected on the encouragement of fear and fails to recognize the basic law of our fathers that governments do not produce wealth . . . people produce wealth . . . free people; and those people become less free . . . as they learn there is little reward for ambition . . . that it requires faith to risk . . . and they have none . . as the government must restrict and penalize and tax incentive and endeavor and must increase its expenditures of bounties . . . then this government must assume more and more police powers and we find we are become government-fearing people . . . not God-fearing people.
We find we have replaced faith with fear . . . and though we may give lip service to the Almighty . . in reality, government has become our god. It is, therefore, a basically ungodly government and its appeal to the pseudo-intellectual and the politician is to change their status from servant of the people to master of the people . . . to play at being God . . . without faith in God . . . and without the wisdom of God. It is a system that is the very opposite of Christ for it feeds and encourages everything degenerate and base in our people as it assumes the responsibilities that we ourselves should assume.
Its pseudo-liberal spokesmen and some Harvard advocates have never examined the logic of its substitution of what it calls "human rights" for individual rights, for its propaganda play on words has appeal for the unthinking. Its logic is totally material and irresponsible as it runs the full gamut of human desires . . . including the theory that everyone has voting rights without the spiritual responsibility of preserving freedom. Our founding fathers recognized those rights . . . but only within the framework of those spiritual responsibilities. But the strong, simple faith and sane reasoning of our founding fathers has long since been forgotten as the so-called "progressives" tell us that our Constitution was written for "horse and buggy" days . . . so were the Ten Commandments!
Who are these people?
It might test your knowledge of current right-wing ideologues to try to guess who these people are, who are offering such familiar, fear-mongering tropes. Any ideas?
Well, don’t bother. Because these words are more than 50 years old. The first few paragraphs were from a 1961 recording of Ronald Reagan, on an LP produced and distributed by the AMA, to get garden club members to oppose Medicare. The second screed is from George Wallace, in his 1963 inaugural address as governor of Alabama.
Those two statements were, in the Sixties, considered far, far outside of the mainstream. Reagan and Wallace were considered crack-pots by the overwhelming majority of thoughtful commentators.
Yet, the familiarity of these statements today is no fluke. Fifty years ago, there were transformational leaders who believed deeply in their ideals and the threats that they saw of government hegemony. They didn’t base their opinions on what the latest polls indicated would “sell” to the American public. They said what they believed, and, over the years, taught the public to believe in the same thing. They shifted the center of gravity of public opinion far, far to the right. They (and their corporate supporters) transformed public debate.
They made it possible for Nixon to win and govern from the right. They set the groundwork for the “Reagan Revolution” and Bill Clinton’s elegy for “big government,” and W’s public policy panacea of “tax cuts for the rich.” Their ability to transform public debate was a heritage to which Obama paid homage, but never realized.
We need transformational leadership
What is needed today is similarly transformational leadership, to lead Americans back to a more balanced view, that some things are best done by markets and some things are best done by government. That when corporations are too big to fail, then they are too big. That when our richest people are unimaginable rich, and when more than half of our families are not “getting by,” it is time to redistribute the wealth our system has produced. That, while America has to be a leader for democracy around the world, it can not be democracy’s sole enforcer. That infants have a right to be free of hunger, that children have a right to a good education, that teenagers have a right to a hope-filled future, that young adults have a right to rewarding jobs, that all of us have a right to healthcare.
The question to me is not “Do Bernie and Hillary have to move to the center?” but are they the transformational leaders that we need, to move the center of gravity of public debate back to a reasonable position?
It is not the case, as the Times’ authors believe, that real leadership seeks out positions that are supported by public sentiment.
Transformational leadership precedes public opinion.
A presidential wannabe
Well, how “out of step” is the rhetoric of the right-wing? For instance, here is a presidential wannabe talking about an expansion of government support of healthcare:
Let’s take a look at Social Security itself. Again, very few of us disagree with the original premise that there should be some form of savings that would keep destitution from following unemployment by reason of death, disability or old age. And to this end, Social Security was adopted, but it was never intended to supplant private savings, private insurance, pension programs of unions and industries.
In our country, under our free-enterprise system, we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to chose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other.
In this country of ours took place the greatest revolution that has ever taken place in the world’s history; the only true revolution. Here, for the first time in all the thousands of years of man’s relations to man, a little group of men, the founding fathers, for the first time, established the idea that you and I had within ourselves the God given right and ability to determine our own destiny.
Write those letters now, call your friends and tell them to write. If you don’t, this program will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day we will wake to find that we have socialism, and one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
A Southern governor
And here is another presidential wannabe, a Southern governor, telling us to beware of the government in Washington:
To realize our ambitions and to bring to fruition our dreams, we must take cognizance of the world about us. We must re-define our heritage, re-school our thoughts in the lessons our forefathers knew so well, first hand, in order to function and to grow and to prosper. We can no longer hide our head in the sand and tell ourselves that the ideology of our free fathers is not being attacked and is not being threatened by another idea . . . for it is.
We are faced with an idea that if a centralized government assume enough authority, enough power over its people, that it can provide a utopian life . . that if given the power to dictate, to forbid, to require, to demand, to distribute, to edict and to judge what is best and enforce that will produce only "good," it shall be our father . . . . and our God.
It is an idea of government that encourages our fears and destroys our faith . . . for where there is faith, there is no fear, and where there is fear, there is no faith. In encouraging our fears of economic insecurity it demands we place that economic management and control with government; in encouraging our fear of educational development it demands we place that education and the minds of our children under management and control of government, and even in feeding our fears of physical infirmities and declining years, it offers and demands to father us through it all and even into the grave.
It is a government that claims to us that it is bountiful as it buys its power from us with the fruits of its rapaciousness of the wealth that free men before it have produced and builds on crumbling credit without responsibilities to the debtors . . . our children. It is an ideology of government erected on the encouragement of fear and fails to recognize the basic law of our fathers that governments do not produce wealth . . . people produce wealth . . . free people; and those people become less free . . . as they learn there is little reward for ambition . . . that it requires faith to risk . . . and they have none . . as the government must restrict and penalize and tax incentive and endeavor and must increase its expenditures of bounties . . . then this government must assume more and more police powers and we find we are become government-fearing people . . . not God-fearing people.
We find we have replaced faith with fear . . . and though we may give lip service to the Almighty . . in reality, government has become our god. It is, therefore, a basically ungodly government and its appeal to the pseudo-intellectual and the politician is to change their status from servant of the people to master of the people . . . to play at being God . . . without faith in God . . . and without the wisdom of God. It is a system that is the very opposite of Christ for it feeds and encourages everything degenerate and base in our people as it assumes the responsibilities that we ourselves should assume.
Its pseudo-liberal spokesmen and some Harvard advocates have never examined the logic of its substitution of what it calls "human rights" for individual rights, for its propaganda play on words has appeal for the unthinking. Its logic is totally material and irresponsible as it runs the full gamut of human desires . . . including the theory that everyone has voting rights without the spiritual responsibility of preserving freedom. Our founding fathers recognized those rights . . . but only within the framework of those spiritual responsibilities. But the strong, simple faith and sane reasoning of our founding fathers has long since been forgotten as the so-called "progressives" tell us that our Constitution was written for "horse and buggy" days . . . so were the Ten Commandments!
Who are these people?
It might test your knowledge of current right-wing ideologues to try to guess who these people are, who are offering such familiar, fear-mongering tropes. Any ideas?
Well, don’t bother. Because these words are more than 50 years old. The first few paragraphs were from a 1961 recording of Ronald Reagan, on an LP produced and distributed by the AMA, to get garden club members to oppose Medicare. The second screed is from George Wallace, in his 1963 inaugural address as governor of Alabama.
Those two statements were, in the Sixties, considered far, far outside of the mainstream. Reagan and Wallace were considered crack-pots by the overwhelming majority of thoughtful commentators.
Yet, the familiarity of these statements today is no fluke. Fifty years ago, there were transformational leaders who believed deeply in their ideals and the threats that they saw of government hegemony. They didn’t base their opinions on what the latest polls indicated would “sell” to the American public. They said what they believed, and, over the years, taught the public to believe in the same thing. They shifted the center of gravity of public opinion far, far to the right. They (and their corporate supporters) transformed public debate.
They made it possible for Nixon to win and govern from the right. They set the groundwork for the “Reagan Revolution” and Bill Clinton’s elegy for “big government,” and W’s public policy panacea of “tax cuts for the rich.” Their ability to transform public debate was a heritage to which Obama paid homage, but never realized.
We need transformational leadership
What is needed today is similarly transformational leadership, to lead Americans back to a more balanced view, that some things are best done by markets and some things are best done by government. That when corporations are too big to fail, then they are too big. That when our richest people are unimaginable rich, and when more than half of our families are not “getting by,” it is time to redistribute the wealth our system has produced. That, while America has to be a leader for democracy around the world, it can not be democracy’s sole enforcer. That infants have a right to be free of hunger, that children have a right to a good education, that teenagers have a right to a hope-filled future, that young adults have a right to rewarding jobs, that all of us have a right to healthcare.
The question to me is not “Do Bernie and Hillary have to move to the center?” but are they the transformational leaders that we need, to move the center of gravity of public debate back to a reasonable position?
It is not the case, as the Times’ authors believe, that real leadership seeks out positions that are supported by public sentiment.
Transformational leadership precedes public opinion.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Thinking carefully about free trade
We are told by serious people that boosting international trade is good for everyone. We should, they say, all want to support trade agreements, like the currently touted Trans-Pacific Partnership. The freer that international trade becomes, the better off we all are.
Then we find out that one of the “everyones” that are benefitting is the tobacco industry, whose shill, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, uses trade agreements to bully other countries into backing off of tobacco control policies, lest that country find trade with U.S. commerce to be endangered. (They really are doing that! New York Times, June 30th.)
Is free trade good for us, as a country? Or is it a threat to American jobs for working class folks? Can the answer to both of these questions be “Yes?” It depends on your definition of “what is Good for us.”
Bear with me as we do a little math.
How economists think
Economists believe that we can capture this notion, of “what is good for us,” by adding up all of the happiness before and after an event. If the total happiness increases, then the event must have been a good thing. What they are talking about can be captured by this expression:
△∑IUj > 0
Something is good to do if the change in the sum of all individual utility, from the first person through the last person (the “j’th” person) is positive.
To understand this expression, we first need to understand what economists think of as “us.” The basis of a good market, they say, is voluntary exchange. When two parties trade with each other, freely, then both are happier after the trade. That makes sense. When you buy a new Le Creuset pot, you are happier than before you bought the item. And the company is happier than before they sold it to you.
And the rest of us, who are not involved in your purchase, feel pretty much the same as we did before. Our individual happiness (economists refers to this as “utility”) stays constant, before and after the trade. So, we are all as happy as before, and you and the company are both happier. There has been an increase in the amount of individual happiness or individual utility as a result of the trade.
After every voluntary trade, we have an increase in the total happiness of all of the individuals in the society. Let’s see if we can boil this down to the formula.
Deriving the formula
Before the Le Creuset purchase, everyone had some level of individual utility. Some people were very happy with their current situation, some people were very sad, and everything in between. You could ask everyone to rate their current status of individual utility (IU), and then add that up:
∑IUj
This is the sum (represented by the Greek “sigma”) of all individual utility (IU), starting with the first person and then going all the way to the last person (presented by that little “j”). This is where we started before the purchase.
After the purchase, you and Le Creuset are happier, and everyone else feels the same as they did before. So, the sum of all of the individual utility in our society went up after the trade. Hence, the expression:
△∑IUj > 0
This is how economists think about “us.” We are a bunch of individuals, who can be happy or not happy or something in between. To gauge whether doing something was a Good thing or a Bad thing, you merely have to measure the state of individual utility before and after the action, and if the change in the sum of all individual utility goes up (is greater than 0), we did a Good thing.
So, free trade “makes us richer.” It is Good for the society “as a whole.” In other words, when we maximize the amount of voluntary exchange that takes place across borders, the change in the sum of all of the traders’ utility increases. Consequently, free trade is better than restricted trade.
Too simplistic a yardstick
But notice that the yardstick we are using is somewhat limited. For instance, △∑IUj > 0, because it is merely additive, does not need to keep track of whose utility went up and whose utility went down, as long as the total movement in utility was positive.
So, might you lose your job as a result of more free trade? Might lots of people? That might happen, in fact probably will happen, and it would be a significant decrement in your individual utility. But if some other people make lots and lots of money as a result of this trading, their high level increase in individual utility gets added to your lower decrement, and the net is positive. Therefore, the action that lost you your job was a Good thing. The sum of individual utility across the society went up, even if yours went down.
What we are fighting for, in the current debate over trade policy, is whether and how these distributional impacts should be captured. You, and those like you, have suffered enormously. Your livelihood is gone, transferred oversees. You don’t want free trade because you fear this happening.
To an economist, your loss of individual utility is overshadowed by the greater good that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce realizes, as it promotes American tobacco companies oversees. If the rich get rich enough off of free trade, your loss is a necessary sacrifice. Some employment dislocation is just a price we have to pay for a larger Good.
Notice that the loss and the benefits are not experienced by the same people. But △∑IUj > 0 doesn’t have any term inside of it for “distributional effects.” “Who gets what” is not the point, as long as somebody gets enough.
Obama, the Democrats and unions
When Obama is arguing for free trade, he is saying that open markets increase the total wealth of the American people. And when the Congressional Democrats and union leaders are against free trade as currently practiced, it is because they know that that total growth, even if it does come, will be at the expenses of working people, and to the benefit of the already well-off.
So, maybe we need to consider international trade from a more wholistic viewpoint. Not just that it increases the simplistic “sum of individual utility,” but that it might carry with it distributional impacts that ought to be considered and ameliorated. But that would take some complex law-making, not consistent with the President’s desire for “up and down votes” under “fast track authority.”
More trade is a Good thing. But it looks like it is something that we have to do thoughtfully and carefully. That doesn’t sound like a “fast track” kind of approach.
By the way, notice that △∑IUj > 0 only considers value that occurs at the level of the individual. Public policy that produces benefits at the level of community have no place in that formula. There is an “I” in the formula, but no “us.”
And anything that might be difficult or impossible to measure is not going to be considered either, since you can’t add up what doesn’t have a number attached to it.
Also, mightn’t you have strong feelings about the trading behavior of others, like my view that selling cigarettes is morally egregious? The assumption that we are all morally neutral about trading in which we are not involved is invalid.
These problems, with the limits of economics as currently practiced, will be addressed in subsequent blogs.
For now, let's have more trade, but on terms that benefit working people, not just the rich.
Then we find out that one of the “everyones” that are benefitting is the tobacco industry, whose shill, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, uses trade agreements to bully other countries into backing off of tobacco control policies, lest that country find trade with U.S. commerce to be endangered. (They really are doing that! New York Times, June 30th.)
Is free trade good for us, as a country? Or is it a threat to American jobs for working class folks? Can the answer to both of these questions be “Yes?” It depends on your definition of “what is Good for us.”
Bear with me as we do a little math.
How economists think
Economists believe that we can capture this notion, of “what is good for us,” by adding up all of the happiness before and after an event. If the total happiness increases, then the event must have been a good thing. What they are talking about can be captured by this expression:
△∑IUj > 0
Something is good to do if the change in the sum of all individual utility, from the first person through the last person (the “j’th” person) is positive.
To understand this expression, we first need to understand what economists think of as “us.” The basis of a good market, they say, is voluntary exchange. When two parties trade with each other, freely, then both are happier after the trade. That makes sense. When you buy a new Le Creuset pot, you are happier than before you bought the item. And the company is happier than before they sold it to you.
And the rest of us, who are not involved in your purchase, feel pretty much the same as we did before. Our individual happiness (economists refers to this as “utility”) stays constant, before and after the trade. So, we are all as happy as before, and you and the company are both happier. There has been an increase in the amount of individual happiness or individual utility as a result of the trade.
After every voluntary trade, we have an increase in the total happiness of all of the individuals in the society. Let’s see if we can boil this down to the formula.
Deriving the formula
Before the Le Creuset purchase, everyone had some level of individual utility. Some people were very happy with their current situation, some people were very sad, and everything in between. You could ask everyone to rate their current status of individual utility (IU), and then add that up:
∑IUj
This is the sum (represented by the Greek “sigma”) of all individual utility (IU), starting with the first person and then going all the way to the last person (presented by that little “j”). This is where we started before the purchase.
After the purchase, you and Le Creuset are happier, and everyone else feels the same as they did before. So, the sum of all of the individual utility in our society went up after the trade. Hence, the expression:
△∑IUj > 0
This is how economists think about “us.” We are a bunch of individuals, who can be happy or not happy or something in between. To gauge whether doing something was a Good thing or a Bad thing, you merely have to measure the state of individual utility before and after the action, and if the change in the sum of all individual utility goes up (is greater than 0), we did a Good thing.
So, free trade “makes us richer.” It is Good for the society “as a whole.” In other words, when we maximize the amount of voluntary exchange that takes place across borders, the change in the sum of all of the traders’ utility increases. Consequently, free trade is better than restricted trade.
Too simplistic a yardstick
But notice that the yardstick we are using is somewhat limited. For instance, △∑IUj > 0, because it is merely additive, does not need to keep track of whose utility went up and whose utility went down, as long as the total movement in utility was positive.
So, might you lose your job as a result of more free trade? Might lots of people? That might happen, in fact probably will happen, and it would be a significant decrement in your individual utility. But if some other people make lots and lots of money as a result of this trading, their high level increase in individual utility gets added to your lower decrement, and the net is positive. Therefore, the action that lost you your job was a Good thing. The sum of individual utility across the society went up, even if yours went down.
What we are fighting for, in the current debate over trade policy, is whether and how these distributional impacts should be captured. You, and those like you, have suffered enormously. Your livelihood is gone, transferred oversees. You don’t want free trade because you fear this happening.
To an economist, your loss of individual utility is overshadowed by the greater good that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce realizes, as it promotes American tobacco companies oversees. If the rich get rich enough off of free trade, your loss is a necessary sacrifice. Some employment dislocation is just a price we have to pay for a larger Good.
Notice that the loss and the benefits are not experienced by the same people. But △∑IUj > 0 doesn’t have any term inside of it for “distributional effects.” “Who gets what” is not the point, as long as somebody gets enough.
Obama, the Democrats and unions
When Obama is arguing for free trade, he is saying that open markets increase the total wealth of the American people. And when the Congressional Democrats and union leaders are against free trade as currently practiced, it is because they know that that total growth, even if it does come, will be at the expenses of working people, and to the benefit of the already well-off.
So, maybe we need to consider international trade from a more wholistic viewpoint. Not just that it increases the simplistic “sum of individual utility,” but that it might carry with it distributional impacts that ought to be considered and ameliorated. But that would take some complex law-making, not consistent with the President’s desire for “up and down votes” under “fast track authority.”
More trade is a Good thing. But it looks like it is something that we have to do thoughtfully and carefully. That doesn’t sound like a “fast track” kind of approach.
By the way, notice that △∑IUj > 0 only considers value that occurs at the level of the individual. Public policy that produces benefits at the level of community have no place in that formula. There is an “I” in the formula, but no “us.”
And anything that might be difficult or impossible to measure is not going to be considered either, since you can’t add up what doesn’t have a number attached to it.
Also, mightn’t you have strong feelings about the trading behavior of others, like my view that selling cigarettes is morally egregious? The assumption that we are all morally neutral about trading in which we are not involved is invalid.
These problems, with the limits of economics as currently practiced, will be addressed in subsequent blogs.
For now, let's have more trade, but on terms that benefit working people, not just the rich.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Transitive Morality
Can someone be a secular idealist and still be a Good person? Of course they can. But that is not the point.
New York Times editorials
Some aggressive atheists and many not-so-aggressive advocates of secularism have sought to defend their position against the criticism that “people who don’t believe in God can’t have a moral compass.” This defense was discussed again in an article by Molly Worthen in the NY Times last week. (“Wanted: A Theology of Atheism,” by Molly Worthen, The New York Times, May 30, 2015.) And it was supported by a series of letters, published this morning (June 7th) on the Op Ed page.
I know lots of secular idealists. (I defined this back in my blog post “Why Secular Idealism is Insufficient,” http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/04/why-secular-idealism-is-insufficient.html.) These are people who don’t believe in any kind of transcendent reality; this materialism makes them secular. But they do believe in moral priorities, which makes them idealists. And all of my friends and colleagues who fit this bill are kind, caring, trustworthy and moral people. There is nothing in my worldview that makes this problematic. So, I don’t believe that being a secular person means that you can’t be a Good person.
(I do believe that thinking that there are moral priorities is difficult to reconcile with a thoroughly materialistic view, but that is not what I want to address here.)
My problem with secular idealism is that it allows us to make only extremely limited prescriptive statements about how others should behave. It is not a “transitive morality.”
The importance of transitive morality
Why is that important? Well, somewhere around a third of the women and girls on our planet are treated not much better than animals or property. Their dignity and their natural rights are denied by the societies and communities in which they live.
And American corporations have exhibited morally reprehensible conduct in support of selling tobacco products and arguing against environmental controls. Some former manufacturers of asbestos containing products knew that the manufacture and installation of their products was dangerous, but bribed scientists to keep the data hidden.
And awful people around the world prey on the innocent and powerless around them, for their own power, profit and glory.
And politicians like Hastert, Livingston, Hyde and Gingrich led cynical campaigns to impeach a President for sexual peccadillos that were no worse than their own behaviors.
And a ghastly number of children in the US, not to mention around the world, are hungry, as you read this, because we haven’t summoned the moral courage to demand justice from ourselves and others.
These are hideously immoral actions. Do we have a responsibility to act? Are you willing to accept the world’s monumental mistreatment of women and girls as something we can’t do anything about? After all, a secular idealist might say, that is their custom, their culture, and who are we to judge them? At most, we might hope to educate them, but we certainly can’t intervene. On what moral basis would we support such intervention?
Exactly. If there is no transcendent ground for morality, you might very well develop your own moral principles and live by them, but you are not able to act upon situations in which other people’s moral priorities are palpably offensive. Your moral priorities may govern your own behavior, but they form no basis for prescriptive views of the behavior of others.
The ability to be prescriptive
This is what I mean by a “transitive morality.” Does my moral philosophy allow me to prescribe and proscribe behavior by others? If so, then there is a transitive quality to my morality. The reason our moral priorities need a transcendent ground is so that we can offer moral condemnation of the behavior of others and demand correction. Only moral priorities that transcend time, place, culture, can legitimately form the basis of corrective actions.
The final letter this morning in the Times suggests that everything will be fine as long as we all live by some version of the Golden Rule. Yes, that would be fine, if we all did. But what if others don’t agree with you that this is a good moral position? What if some people wish to force others to conform to a specific moral code, and are willing to punish misbehavior by death?
What empowers the notion that we should not do what we would find hateful in our neighbors is that that notion is grounded in a tradition that respects the transcendental nature of moral values. As long as there are immoral people in the world doing horrible things, and as long as we choose to act together in response to that immorality, we will need a transitive morality to call their immoral conduct into question and to unite us as a community in opposition to it.
Righteousness without self-righteousness
And, yes, I understand that believing in a transitive morality opens the door for my moral views to oppress others. That is a responsibility that I, that we, have to live with. We can not be so scared of self-righteousness that we walk away from the responsibility to be righteous.
Of course people who don’t believe in God can be moral people. But can we, as a community, unite to act against immorality at home and abroad without a transcendent ground for our common moral priorities? Of course not.
New York Times editorials
Some aggressive atheists and many not-so-aggressive advocates of secularism have sought to defend their position against the criticism that “people who don’t believe in God can’t have a moral compass.” This defense was discussed again in an article by Molly Worthen in the NY Times last week. (“Wanted: A Theology of Atheism,” by Molly Worthen, The New York Times, May 30, 2015.) And it was supported by a series of letters, published this morning (June 7th) on the Op Ed page.
I know lots of secular idealists. (I defined this back in my blog post “Why Secular Idealism is Insufficient,” http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/04/why-secular-idealism-is-insufficient.html.) These are people who don’t believe in any kind of transcendent reality; this materialism makes them secular. But they do believe in moral priorities, which makes them idealists. And all of my friends and colleagues who fit this bill are kind, caring, trustworthy and moral people. There is nothing in my worldview that makes this problematic. So, I don’t believe that being a secular person means that you can’t be a Good person.
(I do believe that thinking that there are moral priorities is difficult to reconcile with a thoroughly materialistic view, but that is not what I want to address here.)
My problem with secular idealism is that it allows us to make only extremely limited prescriptive statements about how others should behave. It is not a “transitive morality.”
The importance of transitive morality
Why is that important? Well, somewhere around a third of the women and girls on our planet are treated not much better than animals or property. Their dignity and their natural rights are denied by the societies and communities in which they live.
And American corporations have exhibited morally reprehensible conduct in support of selling tobacco products and arguing against environmental controls. Some former manufacturers of asbestos containing products knew that the manufacture and installation of their products was dangerous, but bribed scientists to keep the data hidden.
And awful people around the world prey on the innocent and powerless around them, for their own power, profit and glory.
And politicians like Hastert, Livingston, Hyde and Gingrich led cynical campaigns to impeach a President for sexual peccadillos that were no worse than their own behaviors.
And a ghastly number of children in the US, not to mention around the world, are hungry, as you read this, because we haven’t summoned the moral courage to demand justice from ourselves and others.
These are hideously immoral actions. Do we have a responsibility to act? Are you willing to accept the world’s monumental mistreatment of women and girls as something we can’t do anything about? After all, a secular idealist might say, that is their custom, their culture, and who are we to judge them? At most, we might hope to educate them, but we certainly can’t intervene. On what moral basis would we support such intervention?
Exactly. If there is no transcendent ground for morality, you might very well develop your own moral principles and live by them, but you are not able to act upon situations in which other people’s moral priorities are palpably offensive. Your moral priorities may govern your own behavior, but they form no basis for prescriptive views of the behavior of others.
The ability to be prescriptive
This is what I mean by a “transitive morality.” Does my moral philosophy allow me to prescribe and proscribe behavior by others? If so, then there is a transitive quality to my morality. The reason our moral priorities need a transcendent ground is so that we can offer moral condemnation of the behavior of others and demand correction. Only moral priorities that transcend time, place, culture, can legitimately form the basis of corrective actions.
The final letter this morning in the Times suggests that everything will be fine as long as we all live by some version of the Golden Rule. Yes, that would be fine, if we all did. But what if others don’t agree with you that this is a good moral position? What if some people wish to force others to conform to a specific moral code, and are willing to punish misbehavior by death?
What empowers the notion that we should not do what we would find hateful in our neighbors is that that notion is grounded in a tradition that respects the transcendental nature of moral values. As long as there are immoral people in the world doing horrible things, and as long as we choose to act together in response to that immorality, we will need a transitive morality to call their immoral conduct into question and to unite us as a community in opposition to it.
Righteousness without self-righteousness
And, yes, I understand that believing in a transitive morality opens the door for my moral views to oppress others. That is a responsibility that I, that we, have to live with. We can not be so scared of self-righteousness that we walk away from the responsibility to be righteous.
Of course people who don’t believe in God can be moral people. But can we, as a community, unite to act against immorality at home and abroad without a transcendent ground for our common moral priorities? Of course not.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Driverless cars and my screwed up phone
Anything perfect in your life?
Do you have anything in your life that is both complex and works perfectly? Any piece of equipment or software? Or any social organization, like at work or in your community?
I don’t. I have a lot of things that work well in my life, some things that work very well. But nothing is perfect. And the more complex, the less likely to be perfect.
Here is why I am asking. Google is involved in two things that are deeply inconsistent, and at least one of which asks us to trust our lives to their ability to develop something that is highly complex and is perfect, or near perfect. I am referring to the “driverless car.”
At the same time that they are asking us to rely upon their ability to turn out this perfectly safe product, they have just screwed up my smart phone.
Screwing up my phone
I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which I have had for more than a year, and which I like a lot. Recently, I was required to download the next version of the Android operating system that the Note 3 runs on. This is Android 5.0 or “Lollipop.”
Immediately, I started having problems with the phone. My email wouldn’t send sometimes. It took forever for my email list to come up. My battery life has diminished substantially. Random apps start when I was doing something else entirely, like disengaging from my calendar, and the phone would pop up. Some apps simply didn’t work. Apps would not remember their default status, like my calendar remembering that I like it in “week” mode. Widgets would disappear, only to reappear after I had restarted the phone.
When I called my service, AT&T, the nice woman heard my complaint, and asked me what kind of phone I had. When I said “A Note 3,” she said, “Yeah, I thought so.” Is there anything I can do about this, I asked. “No. There will probably be a fix come out soon.” Do you have any information on how long “soon” will be? “No. There does not seem to be anything planned.”
Great! So, you make me upgrade (a misnomer) and then the “upgrade” is a pain in the butt, and then you tell me, well, you may just have to live with that.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor irritation. And the quintessential rich white person problem. I have, in fact, checked my privilege.
From the same people who brought you a screwed up phone. . .
But at the same time that Google’s imperfection has screwed up my phone, they want us to buy a car that drives itself. Really? You can’t get my phone to work well, and you want me to trust your car will work just fine? Because, if the driverless car works as well as my phone, we are in for some huge problems.
Yes, I know that I am not a perfect driver. Nor are the rest of you, who insist upon using the same roads as I. But moving to driverless cars will probably not be an improvement, just a transition from the screw-ups human drivers make to the screw-ups that computer coders make.
When I first heard that people were going to start selling driverless cars, my reaction was one of incredulity. Doesn’t everybody have as many examples of imperfection in their lives as I do in mine? (See my posting on imperfectibility, http://tinyurl.com/n79d6os, and the two-part posting on the limits of measurement, http://tinyurl.com/mku4cnv and http://tinyurl.com/kf4dywp.) Who really believes that a bunch of geeky, socially isolated twenty-somethings living in the unreality of Silicon Valley are, no matter how smart they might be, likely to produce something, like a driverless car, which by its nature has got to be really, really close to perfect?
Sooner or later, I am sure that the Google guys will figure out how to make my phone work better. They’re not incompetent. But neither are they perfect.
So, I ask you again. Am I the only one with abundant evidence in my life that things that human beings do are never going to be perfect, and that the more complex they are, the less close to perfect they will be? And, if I am not, then why are we even thinking about letting Google and others put driverless cars on our roads?
Do you have anything in your life that is both complex and works perfectly? Any piece of equipment or software? Or any social organization, like at work or in your community?
I don’t. I have a lot of things that work well in my life, some things that work very well. But nothing is perfect. And the more complex, the less likely to be perfect.
Here is why I am asking. Google is involved in two things that are deeply inconsistent, and at least one of which asks us to trust our lives to their ability to develop something that is highly complex and is perfect, or near perfect. I am referring to the “driverless car.”
At the same time that they are asking us to rely upon their ability to turn out this perfectly safe product, they have just screwed up my smart phone.
Screwing up my phone
I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which I have had for more than a year, and which I like a lot. Recently, I was required to download the next version of the Android operating system that the Note 3 runs on. This is Android 5.0 or “Lollipop.”
Immediately, I started having problems with the phone. My email wouldn’t send sometimes. It took forever for my email list to come up. My battery life has diminished substantially. Random apps start when I was doing something else entirely, like disengaging from my calendar, and the phone would pop up. Some apps simply didn’t work. Apps would not remember their default status, like my calendar remembering that I like it in “week” mode. Widgets would disappear, only to reappear after I had restarted the phone.
When I called my service, AT&T, the nice woman heard my complaint, and asked me what kind of phone I had. When I said “A Note 3,” she said, “Yeah, I thought so.” Is there anything I can do about this, I asked. “No. There will probably be a fix come out soon.” Do you have any information on how long “soon” will be? “No. There does not seem to be anything planned.”
Great! So, you make me upgrade (a misnomer) and then the “upgrade” is a pain in the butt, and then you tell me, well, you may just have to live with that.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor irritation. And the quintessential rich white person problem. I have, in fact, checked my privilege.
From the same people who brought you a screwed up phone. . .
But at the same time that Google’s imperfection has screwed up my phone, they want us to buy a car that drives itself. Really? You can’t get my phone to work well, and you want me to trust your car will work just fine? Because, if the driverless car works as well as my phone, we are in for some huge problems.
Yes, I know that I am not a perfect driver. Nor are the rest of you, who insist upon using the same roads as I. But moving to driverless cars will probably not be an improvement, just a transition from the screw-ups human drivers make to the screw-ups that computer coders make.
When I first heard that people were going to start selling driverless cars, my reaction was one of incredulity. Doesn’t everybody have as many examples of imperfection in their lives as I do in mine? (See my posting on imperfectibility, http://tinyurl.com/n79d6os, and the two-part posting on the limits of measurement, http://tinyurl.com/mku4cnv and http://tinyurl.com/kf4dywp.) Who really believes that a bunch of geeky, socially isolated twenty-somethings living in the unreality of Silicon Valley are, no matter how smart they might be, likely to produce something, like a driverless car, which by its nature has got to be really, really close to perfect?
Sooner or later, I am sure that the Google guys will figure out how to make my phone work better. They’re not incompetent. But neither are they perfect.
So, I ask you again. Am I the only one with abundant evidence in my life that things that human beings do are never going to be perfect, and that the more complex they are, the less close to perfect they will be? And, if I am not, then why are we even thinking about letting Google and others put driverless cars on our roads?
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
My "next chapter"
In case you are wondering why I seem so happy these days, allow me to explain.
I am pleased to announce that I have been offered an appointment on the faculty in the Department of Health Systems, Leadership and Policy at Loyola’s Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing. I will be teaching in the undergraduate program in Health Systems Management (US healthcare, management, law and policy, ethics) as well as working with other faculty on a variety of projects. I will also maintain an appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences of the Stritch School of Medicine, where I will teach health policy in the MPH program, help develop the JD/MPH program and a 4+1 MPH degree, and work on curriculum development and community engagement. You can contact me at dswartzman@luc.edu, which I am now using as my main email.
I couldn’t be more excited about this new phase in my career. I will be part of terrific faculties focused on health policy, quality of healthcare, and social justice. It will be an opportunity to continue my teaching and writing (on ethics and policy through my blog at danswartzman.blogspot.com and on management of health organizations through preparation of a textbook in that area). And it will provide an excellent “home base” for the project many of us are working on to investigate the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the Chicago area.
I will, however, have to figure out how what it will be like to teach undergraduates. Suggestions are welcome!
Plus, this Fall, I will become the Chair of the Ethics Section of APHA. We are working on four ambitious projects: revising the Ethics Code for APHA, assuring the teaching of public health ethics in all accredited institutions, working with journal editors to increase the quality of scholarship in the field, and becoming an important part of APHA’s policy development processes.
And my thanks to all of you who have given me so much support over the last few years, as I begin this “next chapter” in my work.
I am pleased to announce that I have been offered an appointment on the faculty in the Department of Health Systems, Leadership and Policy at Loyola’s Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing. I will be teaching in the undergraduate program in Health Systems Management (US healthcare, management, law and policy, ethics) as well as working with other faculty on a variety of projects. I will also maintain an appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences of the Stritch School of Medicine, where I will teach health policy in the MPH program, help develop the JD/MPH program and a 4+1 MPH degree, and work on curriculum development and community engagement. You can contact me at dswartzman@luc.edu, which I am now using as my main email.
I couldn’t be more excited about this new phase in my career. I will be part of terrific faculties focused on health policy, quality of healthcare, and social justice. It will be an opportunity to continue my teaching and writing (on ethics and policy through my blog at danswartzman.blogspot.com and on management of health organizations through preparation of a textbook in that area). And it will provide an excellent “home base” for the project many of us are working on to investigate the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the Chicago area.
I will, however, have to figure out how what it will be like to teach undergraduates. Suggestions are welcome!
Plus, this Fall, I will become the Chair of the Ethics Section of APHA. We are working on four ambitious projects: revising the Ethics Code for APHA, assuring the teaching of public health ethics in all accredited institutions, working with journal editors to increase the quality of scholarship in the field, and becoming an important part of APHA’s policy development processes.
And my thanks to all of you who have given me so much support over the last few years, as I begin this “next chapter” in my work.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Decades, Part 2
The Eighties
John Lennon was shot in 1980, which might be a convenient dividing point for the beginning of the next decade. A personal turning point for me was the night of the Carter/Reagan debate and the day after. That evening, my wife and I saw Carter embarrass Reagan. The President wasn’t as glib as his challenger, but his understanding of the complexity of the problems we faced were highlighted by the simplistic worldview with which Ronald Reagan saw or, at least, portrayed the world. We both felt a bit sorry for Reagan. How odd, then, to find out in the newspapers and on TV the next day that most people thought that Reagan had won the debate rather handily.
For its on-going impact on the future of U.S. policy making, our decision to elect Ronald Reagan as President is the clear beginning of the Eighties. And here, finally, is the key thesis of this brief historical review:
The Eighties began in November of 1980, and they haven’t ended!
As I write this, we are in the middle of the 35th year of the Eighties. I had real hope that the Eighties had ended when we elected the first black man as President. He promised to be a transformative leader. But he has not delivered on that promise. While I am happier with Obama as President than the alternatives, he has shown himself to be a complete creature of the Eighties. I believe the general attitude that makes up this horrible decade was not pushed aside. For now, the Eighties continue on.
It is still a minority position to criticize Ronald Reagan. A few years ago, the television viewing public selected Reagan as “The Greatest American,” over Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. (Other top ten nominees were Elvis Presley and Oprah Winfrey, underlining the need to not take these results too seriously.) Reagan is given credit (inappropriately) for “ending the Cold War.” He supposedly “revolutionized” our view of the role of government in our lives. If he is the cardinal figure of the Eighties, how bad could they be?
But Reagan, his entourage and his disciples have left the country with an intellectual legacy that is highly problematic. As a result, we have raised a generation of Americans who think that life is perfectible and we don’t have to make any tough choices, that all problems start and end with the actions of individuals, that the measure of our country’s success is how much money is left in each individual’s pocket, that our complex problems don’t require serious choices, but can be fixed with simple-minded solutions.
Their absurd and disingenuous promises to balance the budget, lower taxes and triple defense spending pandered to the desire of citizens to “have it all.” Their over-reliance on the marketplace as the solely acceptable mechanism for the distribution of goods and services fostered an unseemly measure of selfishness and greed. Their decrying government as “the problem,” never “the solution,” defined all social ills as arising from individual behavior and subject only to individual corrections. If the world was a dangerous place, it only needed to be threatened into submission, and peace would simply follow.
The “ambient” ideology of the Eighties
Ronald Reagan’s legacy is the “ambient” ideology of the Eighties, a legacy which remains largely unquestioned in policy debate today. That ideology is based upon:
1. An extreme individualism
2. Uncontrolled selfishness or greed
3. Unquestioned glorification of the private sector
4. Demonization of collective action
5. Unquestioned faith in the perfectability of human endeavors
6. Simple-mindedness in proposed solutions
7. Disingenuousness in policy proposals
In the last 35 years of the Eighties, this ideology has become, in Daniel Quinn’s language, “ambient”; that is, it has been stated so often and by so many, that it is very difficult to notice its pervasiveness. Poverty will be eliminated by poor individuals working harder to get jobs. The economy will flourish only if we all pursue our own self-interests. “Greed is good,” says the slick-haired, expensively tailored corporate raider, Gordon Gecco, in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.
Our image of a hero is someone who “survives” made-up contests, set in a primordial locale, through deceit and dirty-dealing. All problems have complete solutions, and no choices are difficult, as long as we maintain our faith in God, country and the marketplace. You want to lower the federal deficits? Cut taxes for wealthy shareholders. You want to stimulate employment? Cut taxes for corporations. You want to clean up the environment? Cut taxes for corporate polluters.
But isn’t this exactly what I was looking for in my youth? Isn’t this a “good guy/bad guy” world that the Eighties is defining? To a sad extent, that is true. Sad, because it is a worldview that shares its lack of complexity with the simple, half-hour situation comedies and black and white horse operas that made such entertaining television in the Fifties. But it is wholly uneducated by the lessons that we should have learned in the Sixties and the Seventies, that all of our big social problems are complex, that they are going to require shared sacrifice to address, that progress is achievable but slow, that, since these challenges are “group level” problems, we are all going to have to work together, as a community, to make that progress, and to make things better. And that government is the legitimate agent of the community in addressing those problems.
One of the subtle and most pernicious messages of the Eighties is that “Doing Good” is somehow misguided. If Gecco is right and “Greed is Good,” because it drives the engine of commerce, then altruism is suspect. The dominant ideology of the Eighties teaches that we can care for our families, and maybe for our neighbors, but that caring for “the other” is just misplaced psychological need. And when called upon to help, we rely upon voluntarism. Calling upon the community to meet these “group level” challenges, through its agent, government, is very passé, so Sixties.
One of the most pernicious consequences of Eighties thinking is how we react to those for whom the system has not worked. If we are all running a race on an un-biased race course, to use the cliche, then whomever wins deserves to win. The dangerous corollary, which we see expressed so often today, is that those who didn’t win are not deserving.
Giving up or embarrassed silence
Ask a child of the Eighties why they want to get a graduate degree in public health or social work or education. They will hem and haw, look down at their shoes, stumble through a half-hearted defense of “career advancement.”
Don’t you want to do something Good for other people, you might ask. Well, yes, they will say, but it is too hokey to put it that way. Wanting to integrate into your professional life the doing of Good for others is now a source of embarrassment. Welcome to the Eighties!
For us children of the Sixties, the seemingly endless Eighties make an almost convincing case for giving up. For caring children of the Eighties with the moral imagination to see beyond the ambient ideology, the only worldview they have known embarrasses them into silence.
One of the theses of these blogs is that there is a rich and powerful intellectual foundation for caring for “the Other,” for pursuing “the Public Good.” Rather than give up or shrink in mortification, we should embrace these ideas and recognize the nobility of the calling to which we are responding. Doing Good is a good thing to do, and I intend these postings to make clear why that has always been and why it continues to be true. Rather than moving to the back of the bus, those of us who wish to be champions of moral priorities must demand that our leaders make the choices necessary to address the community’s needs.
But, I will argue, the public policy making institutions of our country have pulled back from the willingness to make moral choices, and that the consequences of that are severe and pervasive.
Rejecting the pervasive ideology that says Doing Good should be left only to individual behavior, to “a thousand points of light,” to enlightened self-interest as expressed in the marketplace, is a struggle to many of us. But it is a struggle worth facing. If there is an intellectual foundation for not giving up, for not being embarrassed, then finding it will empower that urge so many of us feel, the urge to care for the other. The urge to choose the public good.
But this won’t happen without leadership. The task of transformative leaders is to pull us out of the Eighties, and to establish a progressive center of policy debate that is respectful of community and governmental action.
Do you think that is do-able? Is leadership powerful enough to get us to that point? We will talk about that in the next posting.
John Lennon was shot in 1980, which might be a convenient dividing point for the beginning of the next decade. A personal turning point for me was the night of the Carter/Reagan debate and the day after. That evening, my wife and I saw Carter embarrass Reagan. The President wasn’t as glib as his challenger, but his understanding of the complexity of the problems we faced were highlighted by the simplistic worldview with which Ronald Reagan saw or, at least, portrayed the world. We both felt a bit sorry for Reagan. How odd, then, to find out in the newspapers and on TV the next day that most people thought that Reagan had won the debate rather handily.
For its on-going impact on the future of U.S. policy making, our decision to elect Ronald Reagan as President is the clear beginning of the Eighties. And here, finally, is the key thesis of this brief historical review:
The Eighties began in November of 1980, and they haven’t ended!
As I write this, we are in the middle of the 35th year of the Eighties. I had real hope that the Eighties had ended when we elected the first black man as President. He promised to be a transformative leader. But he has not delivered on that promise. While I am happier with Obama as President than the alternatives, he has shown himself to be a complete creature of the Eighties. I believe the general attitude that makes up this horrible decade was not pushed aside. For now, the Eighties continue on.
It is still a minority position to criticize Ronald Reagan. A few years ago, the television viewing public selected Reagan as “The Greatest American,” over Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. (Other top ten nominees were Elvis Presley and Oprah Winfrey, underlining the need to not take these results too seriously.) Reagan is given credit (inappropriately) for “ending the Cold War.” He supposedly “revolutionized” our view of the role of government in our lives. If he is the cardinal figure of the Eighties, how bad could they be?
But Reagan, his entourage and his disciples have left the country with an intellectual legacy that is highly problematic. As a result, we have raised a generation of Americans who think that life is perfectible and we don’t have to make any tough choices, that all problems start and end with the actions of individuals, that the measure of our country’s success is how much money is left in each individual’s pocket, that our complex problems don’t require serious choices, but can be fixed with simple-minded solutions.
Their absurd and disingenuous promises to balance the budget, lower taxes and triple defense spending pandered to the desire of citizens to “have it all.” Their over-reliance on the marketplace as the solely acceptable mechanism for the distribution of goods and services fostered an unseemly measure of selfishness and greed. Their decrying government as “the problem,” never “the solution,” defined all social ills as arising from individual behavior and subject only to individual corrections. If the world was a dangerous place, it only needed to be threatened into submission, and peace would simply follow.
The “ambient” ideology of the Eighties
Ronald Reagan’s legacy is the “ambient” ideology of the Eighties, a legacy which remains largely unquestioned in policy debate today. That ideology is based upon:
1. An extreme individualism
2. Uncontrolled selfishness or greed
3. Unquestioned glorification of the private sector
4. Demonization of collective action
5. Unquestioned faith in the perfectability of human endeavors
6. Simple-mindedness in proposed solutions
7. Disingenuousness in policy proposals
In the last 35 years of the Eighties, this ideology has become, in Daniel Quinn’s language, “ambient”; that is, it has been stated so often and by so many, that it is very difficult to notice its pervasiveness. Poverty will be eliminated by poor individuals working harder to get jobs. The economy will flourish only if we all pursue our own self-interests. “Greed is good,” says the slick-haired, expensively tailored corporate raider, Gordon Gecco, in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.
Our image of a hero is someone who “survives” made-up contests, set in a primordial locale, through deceit and dirty-dealing. All problems have complete solutions, and no choices are difficult, as long as we maintain our faith in God, country and the marketplace. You want to lower the federal deficits? Cut taxes for wealthy shareholders. You want to stimulate employment? Cut taxes for corporations. You want to clean up the environment? Cut taxes for corporate polluters.
But isn’t this exactly what I was looking for in my youth? Isn’t this a “good guy/bad guy” world that the Eighties is defining? To a sad extent, that is true. Sad, because it is a worldview that shares its lack of complexity with the simple, half-hour situation comedies and black and white horse operas that made such entertaining television in the Fifties. But it is wholly uneducated by the lessons that we should have learned in the Sixties and the Seventies, that all of our big social problems are complex, that they are going to require shared sacrifice to address, that progress is achievable but slow, that, since these challenges are “group level” problems, we are all going to have to work together, as a community, to make that progress, and to make things better. And that government is the legitimate agent of the community in addressing those problems.
One of the subtle and most pernicious messages of the Eighties is that “Doing Good” is somehow misguided. If Gecco is right and “Greed is Good,” because it drives the engine of commerce, then altruism is suspect. The dominant ideology of the Eighties teaches that we can care for our families, and maybe for our neighbors, but that caring for “the other” is just misplaced psychological need. And when called upon to help, we rely upon voluntarism. Calling upon the community to meet these “group level” challenges, through its agent, government, is very passé, so Sixties.
One of the most pernicious consequences of Eighties thinking is how we react to those for whom the system has not worked. If we are all running a race on an un-biased race course, to use the cliche, then whomever wins deserves to win. The dangerous corollary, which we see expressed so often today, is that those who didn’t win are not deserving.
Giving up or embarrassed silence
Ask a child of the Eighties why they want to get a graduate degree in public health or social work or education. They will hem and haw, look down at their shoes, stumble through a half-hearted defense of “career advancement.”
Don’t you want to do something Good for other people, you might ask. Well, yes, they will say, but it is too hokey to put it that way. Wanting to integrate into your professional life the doing of Good for others is now a source of embarrassment. Welcome to the Eighties!
For us children of the Sixties, the seemingly endless Eighties make an almost convincing case for giving up. For caring children of the Eighties with the moral imagination to see beyond the ambient ideology, the only worldview they have known embarrasses them into silence.
One of the theses of these blogs is that there is a rich and powerful intellectual foundation for caring for “the Other,” for pursuing “the Public Good.” Rather than give up or shrink in mortification, we should embrace these ideas and recognize the nobility of the calling to which we are responding. Doing Good is a good thing to do, and I intend these postings to make clear why that has always been and why it continues to be true. Rather than moving to the back of the bus, those of us who wish to be champions of moral priorities must demand that our leaders make the choices necessary to address the community’s needs.
But, I will argue, the public policy making institutions of our country have pulled back from the willingness to make moral choices, and that the consequences of that are severe and pervasive.
Rejecting the pervasive ideology that says Doing Good should be left only to individual behavior, to “a thousand points of light,” to enlightened self-interest as expressed in the marketplace, is a struggle to many of us. But it is a struggle worth facing. If there is an intellectual foundation for not giving up, for not being embarrassed, then finding it will empower that urge so many of us feel, the urge to care for the other. The urge to choose the public good.
But this won’t happen without leadership. The task of transformative leaders is to pull us out of the Eighties, and to establish a progressive center of policy debate that is respectful of community and governmental action.
Do you think that is do-able? Is leadership powerful enough to get us to that point? We will talk about that in the next posting.
Decades, Part 1
Sometimes you wonder if it is possible for a progressive agenda to be argued for and implemented in the US at this time. The central tendency of the public debate is so far to the right, and there seems to be so little room for moving things leftward. Some bright spots appear on the national scene, like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown, and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, but it is hard to work up much hope for their success. There is a consistent voice for progressive policies from MSNBC, albeit one not listened to by all that many people. And Barach Obama, circa 2007, gave us all some hope for transformative leadership. But that seems like a long time ago.
For decades, I have been telling my students that we are stuck in a timewarp, a skewed and corrupted decade from which exit seems difficult. Let me explain.
The Fifties
I grew up in the Fifties. In the Fifties, I grew up thinking that there were good guys and bad guys. The child of a Holocaust survivor, I knew that Hitler was a bad guy. So were Stalin and Khrushchev. The Communists were the biggest bad guys we faced. Television provided me with a long list of good guys, fathers who knew best, masked cowboys who captured outlaws, superheros who fought for truth, justice and the American way. The science fiction books I read non-stop had good buy/bad guy plots; you rooted for the good guys and were happy when the bad guys lost, as they always did. The President of the United States was one of the chief good guys. Over the next few decades, this easy understanding of “good” and “bad” became more complicated.
Decades are not numerical. They are cultural. So, the Fifties probably didn’t start in 1951, the year of my birth. I believe they probably started in August of 1945, when we used the atomic bomb on Japan. We ended the war, but we began the Cold War. With that explosion, America became a dominant force on the world scene.
The Sixties
I grew up in the Fifties, but I came of age in the Sixties. You can get a lot of discussion on when the Fifties ended and the Sixties began. Maybe when President Eisenhower warned us of the “military-industrial complex.” Or when we elected Kennedy. A good argument could be made for the unheralded moment in 1962 when U.S. troops first accompanied Vietnamese forces on a raid. We might choose November of 1963, when Kennedy is shot.
But the cultural tone that enlivened the Sixties can’t have started without the music. I think the best date for the beginning of the Sixties was February 9, 1964, when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show.
The Sixties turned out to be quite a challenge for those of us who believed in the potential triumph of the good guys, but ultimately the lesson was that “doing Good” was still a worthy goal, and that struggles for justice and reason could prevail. As the Sixties started, the country was already deeply and, apparently, inextricably involved in the Viet Nam War, but most of us didn’t know it, as the Good Guy in Chief had not shared this information.
Of course, good guys wouldn’t have pursued a war they knew was unwinnable, at extraordinary cost to our treasury and the inexcusable loss of life on all sides. Good guys would have told us the truth about our interests and our prospects. When the total bill of that misadventure is calculated, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the cost to American policy-making of the cynicism that arose as a result of those lies.
While the Sixties were a time of social conflict, they were also a time of great idealism. We learned that a struggle for civil rights could move a powerful and, at times, deeply prejudiced majority to cede rights to a minority. We declared a war on poverty, recognized that women were a minority group, turned the nation away from an ill-conceived war. We virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly by paying for their healthcare through Medicare. We promised healthcare for some of the poor, with Medicaid. And the early successes of the fledgling environmental movement demonstrated that caring for the future of our ecological niche might have broad appeal.
Even the War provided some hope, as a generation learned that sometimes being a good guy meant you had to “take it to the streets” and, if you did, others would listen. It was a generation that learned two important lessons: if you aren’t cynical enough, you will be a victim of those in power, but if you are too cynical, you will be paralyzed to work for change. Changing the world was a valid and admirable ambition, and many young adults decided to try to blend this calling into their professional plans. Some of us decided that we needed to “do Good” as our life’s work. Being an efficacious good guy seemed a noble and an obtainable goal. We went to the Moon in the Sixties, and, after all, if we can go to the Moon. . . .
The Seventies tried to change that view.
The Seventies
There is some reasonable debate on when the Sixties ended and the Seventies began. Arguable candidates are the early 1968 Tet Offensive, when the notion that the War was winnable became hard for almost everybody to hold onto. Later that year, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy did great damage to our hope, but their messages continued to inspire us.
Maybe the Sixties ended the day we first elected Richard Nixon. After all, good guys wouldn’t have appealed to our North Vietnamese enemies to delay peace talks until after the Presidential election, or secretly bombed Cambodia, or broken into the offices of their political opponents and then covered up their involvement. But in that first election, Nixon did promise to extract us from Viet Nam, and in his first term he did establish, by executive order, the U.S. Environmental Protection.
A compelling case could be made that the Kent State killings in May of 1970 should mark the end of the Sixties. Many of us still can’t see the picture of the student wailing over the body of her fallen friend without an urge to cry along with her.
Maybe the Sixties ended when the Beatles split up. That would provide some sense of balance. But by then, their catalog of music was voluminous and so much an unquestioned part of our lives that their break-up didn’t seem to end anything with finality. Forty years later, that catalog is well-known by kids the age we were when the group called it quits. Nothing really seemed to end with their decision.
My best guess is that the Sixties ended in November of 1972, when we re-elected Richard Nixon in an overwhelming landslide over an opponent, George McGovern, who was widely ridiculed at the time, but whose proposed policies have almost all been adopted by future administrations.
My, but the Seventies tried to grind out of us our faith in the potential achievement of “the Good,” but they couldn’t quite do it. The Watergate scandal gave us an uncomfortable look into the unseemliness of presidential behavior, but it also showed that the bad guys still lose, or at least resign in disgrace.
A whirlwind of inflation buffeted us and the gas lines of the energy crisis reduced our sense of exceptionalism. We started the Seventies with that most cynical of foreign policies, Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik, where it didn’t matter how bad a country or its leader was behaving, they would get our support if our interests demanded it. And no matter how much an international good guy might struggle, if their struggle did not advance our global interests, they were irrelevant.
That foreign policy has played out to America’s horrible disadvantage over the intervening decades, as the rest of the world has come to see us as cynical and self-centered and greedy, hardly the archetype good guy. But the Seventies also brought us a catalog of federal environmental laws, Supreme Court decisions that recognized reproductive rights, and Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, where the central organizing principle was human rights.
For a brief moment in the latter part of that decade, we stood for something noble on the world stage. Yes, there were a lot of bad guys around the world. And, yes, sometimes we had to associate with them, and at other times we had to fight them. But our eyes would be focused in the long run on supporting the birthrights of all humans to food, shelter, education, healthcare, meaningful work.
The values embedded in the Carter domestic and foreign agendas gave many of us children of the Sixties hope, even as we were daunted by the problems we faced: stagflation, interest rates that made home ownership difficult, energy costs, environmental degradation, competition with the Soviets, and the early foreshadowing of Islamicist violence in the Iranian embassy takeover. We were daunted, but we also had a sense that we were led by people who were doing their best to be good guys. When the Seventies ended, our hope was bruised, but we were still ready for a fight.\
Then came the Eighties.
For decades, I have been telling my students that we are stuck in a timewarp, a skewed and corrupted decade from which exit seems difficult. Let me explain.
The Fifties
I grew up in the Fifties. In the Fifties, I grew up thinking that there were good guys and bad guys. The child of a Holocaust survivor, I knew that Hitler was a bad guy. So were Stalin and Khrushchev. The Communists were the biggest bad guys we faced. Television provided me with a long list of good guys, fathers who knew best, masked cowboys who captured outlaws, superheros who fought for truth, justice and the American way. The science fiction books I read non-stop had good buy/bad guy plots; you rooted for the good guys and were happy when the bad guys lost, as they always did. The President of the United States was one of the chief good guys. Over the next few decades, this easy understanding of “good” and “bad” became more complicated.
Decades are not numerical. They are cultural. So, the Fifties probably didn’t start in 1951, the year of my birth. I believe they probably started in August of 1945, when we used the atomic bomb on Japan. We ended the war, but we began the Cold War. With that explosion, America became a dominant force on the world scene.
The Sixties
I grew up in the Fifties, but I came of age in the Sixties. You can get a lot of discussion on when the Fifties ended and the Sixties began. Maybe when President Eisenhower warned us of the “military-industrial complex.” Or when we elected Kennedy. A good argument could be made for the unheralded moment in 1962 when U.S. troops first accompanied Vietnamese forces on a raid. We might choose November of 1963, when Kennedy is shot.
But the cultural tone that enlivened the Sixties can’t have started without the music. I think the best date for the beginning of the Sixties was February 9, 1964, when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show.
The Sixties turned out to be quite a challenge for those of us who believed in the potential triumph of the good guys, but ultimately the lesson was that “doing Good” was still a worthy goal, and that struggles for justice and reason could prevail. As the Sixties started, the country was already deeply and, apparently, inextricably involved in the Viet Nam War, but most of us didn’t know it, as the Good Guy in Chief had not shared this information.
Of course, good guys wouldn’t have pursued a war they knew was unwinnable, at extraordinary cost to our treasury and the inexcusable loss of life on all sides. Good guys would have told us the truth about our interests and our prospects. When the total bill of that misadventure is calculated, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the cost to American policy-making of the cynicism that arose as a result of those lies.
While the Sixties were a time of social conflict, they were also a time of great idealism. We learned that a struggle for civil rights could move a powerful and, at times, deeply prejudiced majority to cede rights to a minority. We declared a war on poverty, recognized that women were a minority group, turned the nation away from an ill-conceived war. We virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly by paying for their healthcare through Medicare. We promised healthcare for some of the poor, with Medicaid. And the early successes of the fledgling environmental movement demonstrated that caring for the future of our ecological niche might have broad appeal.
Even the War provided some hope, as a generation learned that sometimes being a good guy meant you had to “take it to the streets” and, if you did, others would listen. It was a generation that learned two important lessons: if you aren’t cynical enough, you will be a victim of those in power, but if you are too cynical, you will be paralyzed to work for change. Changing the world was a valid and admirable ambition, and many young adults decided to try to blend this calling into their professional plans. Some of us decided that we needed to “do Good” as our life’s work. Being an efficacious good guy seemed a noble and an obtainable goal. We went to the Moon in the Sixties, and, after all, if we can go to the Moon. . . .
The Seventies tried to change that view.
The Seventies
There is some reasonable debate on when the Sixties ended and the Seventies began. Arguable candidates are the early 1968 Tet Offensive, when the notion that the War was winnable became hard for almost everybody to hold onto. Later that year, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy did great damage to our hope, but their messages continued to inspire us.
Maybe the Sixties ended the day we first elected Richard Nixon. After all, good guys wouldn’t have appealed to our North Vietnamese enemies to delay peace talks until after the Presidential election, or secretly bombed Cambodia, or broken into the offices of their political opponents and then covered up their involvement. But in that first election, Nixon did promise to extract us from Viet Nam, and in his first term he did establish, by executive order, the U.S. Environmental Protection.
A compelling case could be made that the Kent State killings in May of 1970 should mark the end of the Sixties. Many of us still can’t see the picture of the student wailing over the body of her fallen friend without an urge to cry along with her.
Maybe the Sixties ended when the Beatles split up. That would provide some sense of balance. But by then, their catalog of music was voluminous and so much an unquestioned part of our lives that their break-up didn’t seem to end anything with finality. Forty years later, that catalog is well-known by kids the age we were when the group called it quits. Nothing really seemed to end with their decision.
My best guess is that the Sixties ended in November of 1972, when we re-elected Richard Nixon in an overwhelming landslide over an opponent, George McGovern, who was widely ridiculed at the time, but whose proposed policies have almost all been adopted by future administrations.
My, but the Seventies tried to grind out of us our faith in the potential achievement of “the Good,” but they couldn’t quite do it. The Watergate scandal gave us an uncomfortable look into the unseemliness of presidential behavior, but it also showed that the bad guys still lose, or at least resign in disgrace.
A whirlwind of inflation buffeted us and the gas lines of the energy crisis reduced our sense of exceptionalism. We started the Seventies with that most cynical of foreign policies, Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik, where it didn’t matter how bad a country or its leader was behaving, they would get our support if our interests demanded it. And no matter how much an international good guy might struggle, if their struggle did not advance our global interests, they were irrelevant.
That foreign policy has played out to America’s horrible disadvantage over the intervening decades, as the rest of the world has come to see us as cynical and self-centered and greedy, hardly the archetype good guy. But the Seventies also brought us a catalog of federal environmental laws, Supreme Court decisions that recognized reproductive rights, and Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, where the central organizing principle was human rights.
For a brief moment in the latter part of that decade, we stood for something noble on the world stage. Yes, there were a lot of bad guys around the world. And, yes, sometimes we had to associate with them, and at other times we had to fight them. But our eyes would be focused in the long run on supporting the birthrights of all humans to food, shelter, education, healthcare, meaningful work.
The values embedded in the Carter domestic and foreign agendas gave many of us children of the Sixties hope, even as we were daunted by the problems we faced: stagflation, interest rates that made home ownership difficult, energy costs, environmental degradation, competition with the Soviets, and the early foreshadowing of Islamicist violence in the Iranian embassy takeover. We were daunted, but we also had a sense that we were led by people who were doing their best to be good guys. When the Seventies ended, our hope was bruised, but we were still ready for a fight.\
Then came the Eighties.
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Chocolate Mint Cake
Chocolate Mint Cake
by Dan Swartzman
My mother used to make this for every birthday celebration in our house. It was my father’s favorite. I think she got the recipe from a Pillsbury Bake-Off in the 1950's. The interesting part of the recipe is that you make the frosting, and then you convert half of the frosting into the rest of the cake. Plus, anything with a brick of cream cheese in it can’t be all bad!
I didn’t make this case for 25 years, just kind of forgetting about it. When I finally made it again, it was so popular with my family that Arlene was angry with me for withholding it from them for so many years. This recipe makes a layer cake, but I have also done it as a sheet cake. Sami usually makes it as cupcakes. Never tried that, but I bet they would be great.
Ingredients
1 package (8 oz) of cream cheese
½ lb of butter, room temperature
½ t of vanilla
½ t of peppermint flavoring
6 cups (about 1.5 lbs) of powdered sugar
1/4 c hot water
4 squares (4 oz) of unsweetened chocolate
1/4 c of butter, room temperature
3 eggs
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1½ t baking soda
pinch of table salt
3/4 c milk
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Cream the cream cheese, ½ lb of butter, vanilla and peppermint flavoring in a mixer. (Don’t be tempted to add “just a bit more” of the mint extract. A little goes a long way. I tried the recipe using spearmint flavoring once. Don’t do that.) Set aside.
Put the chocolate in a double boiler and melt completely. Cool slightly.
While the chocolate is melting, sift the powdered sugar into a large bowl. Add half of the sugar to the cheese mixture and mix gently. Then add the rest of the powdered sugar and the hot water into the mixer bowl, alternating between the two (using the standard approach: 1/3 dry, ½ of wet, 1/3 dry, ½ of wet, 1/3 dry).
After the chocolate has cooled a bit, add it into the mixing bowl and mix until the chocolate and the rest of the mixture is homogenized, scraping the side of the bowl when needed.
The result is the frosting for the cake.
However, you now take half of this mixture and put it into a bowl and set it aside. (I usually eyeball this, but it causes some anxiety to do so, and I keep promising myself I will divide it by weight or by volume. I recommend that, but I haven’t ever done it. If you leave too much as frosting, the cake will be small. If you take to much for the cake, there will not be enough frosting. Either measure or do what I do – live on the edge!)
Into the half of the mixture that is left in the mixer bowl, add in the 1/4 cup of butter. Then beat in each egg, one at a time until it is thoroughly mixed in. (About a minute.)
Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt. Add into the blender, alternating with the milk. (Follow the standard approach, above.) Do this on low speed.
Mix until everything is combined, scraping the sides as necessary. You have now made the batter.
Put the batter into two 9" cake pans. Bake in center of the oven for about 25 to 35 minutes. Use the toothpick method to see if it is done.
Let cool for 10 minutes, then take out of the pans and put on a cooling rack. When completely cooled, ice as a layer cake. (Don’t try to ice it before it is cooled, or the frosting will break into a terrible mess.) Keep it in the refrigerator if it is going to be a while before you serve it or if it is especially hot out.
This cake freezes very well. Cut into slices and place on a sheet pan. Freeze solid. Wrap loosely with wax paper, and then place in a freezer bag. Defrosts in seconds.
The whole house will smell of chocolate and mint. One of the side benefits of this recipe!
by Dan Swartzman
My mother used to make this for every birthday celebration in our house. It was my father’s favorite. I think she got the recipe from a Pillsbury Bake-Off in the 1950's. The interesting part of the recipe is that you make the frosting, and then you convert half of the frosting into the rest of the cake. Plus, anything with a brick of cream cheese in it can’t be all bad!
I didn’t make this case for 25 years, just kind of forgetting about it. When I finally made it again, it was so popular with my family that Arlene was angry with me for withholding it from them for so many years. This recipe makes a layer cake, but I have also done it as a sheet cake. Sami usually makes it as cupcakes. Never tried that, but I bet they would be great.
Ingredients
1 package (8 oz) of cream cheese
½ lb of butter, room temperature
½ t of vanilla
½ t of peppermint flavoring
6 cups (about 1.5 lbs) of powdered sugar
1/4 c hot water
4 squares (4 oz) of unsweetened chocolate
1/4 c of butter, room temperature
3 eggs
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1½ t baking soda
pinch of table salt
3/4 c milk
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Cream the cream cheese, ½ lb of butter, vanilla and peppermint flavoring in a mixer. (Don’t be tempted to add “just a bit more” of the mint extract. A little goes a long way. I tried the recipe using spearmint flavoring once. Don’t do that.) Set aside.
Put the chocolate in a double boiler and melt completely. Cool slightly.
While the chocolate is melting, sift the powdered sugar into a large bowl. Add half of the sugar to the cheese mixture and mix gently. Then add the rest of the powdered sugar and the hot water into the mixer bowl, alternating between the two (using the standard approach: 1/3 dry, ½ of wet, 1/3 dry, ½ of wet, 1/3 dry).
After the chocolate has cooled a bit, add it into the mixing bowl and mix until the chocolate and the rest of the mixture is homogenized, scraping the side of the bowl when needed.
The result is the frosting for the cake.
However, you now take half of this mixture and put it into a bowl and set it aside. (I usually eyeball this, but it causes some anxiety to do so, and I keep promising myself I will divide it by weight or by volume. I recommend that, but I haven’t ever done it. If you leave too much as frosting, the cake will be small. If you take to much for the cake, there will not be enough frosting. Either measure or do what I do – live on the edge!)
Into the half of the mixture that is left in the mixer bowl, add in the 1/4 cup of butter. Then beat in each egg, one at a time until it is thoroughly mixed in. (About a minute.)
Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt. Add into the blender, alternating with the milk. (Follow the standard approach, above.) Do this on low speed.
Mix until everything is combined, scraping the sides as necessary. You have now made the batter.
Put the batter into two 9" cake pans. Bake in center of the oven for about 25 to 35 minutes. Use the toothpick method to see if it is done.
Let cool for 10 minutes, then take out of the pans and put on a cooling rack. When completely cooled, ice as a layer cake. (Don’t try to ice it before it is cooled, or the frosting will break into a terrible mess.) Keep it in the refrigerator if it is going to be a while before you serve it or if it is especially hot out.
This cake freezes very well. Cut into slices and place on a sheet pan. Freeze solid. Wrap loosely with wax paper, and then place in a freezer bag. Defrosts in seconds.
The whole house will smell of chocolate and mint. One of the side benefits of this recipe!
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Telling my parents' stories, in portrait and in landscape, Part Two
A Second Telling, In Landscape
After my classes had heard the first telling of my family’s stories, I suggested that I wanted to tell the stories again. Only this time, I want to make clear how much of the outcome was due to the intervention in my family’s lives of other people. The first time the stories were told in “portrait.” Now I want to tell them in “landscape.”
There were the Russian soldiers who stopped Josef and Rosa as they fled Odessa, and who exhibited sufficient humanity to be charmed by three-year-old Alex’s bravura. Yes, they robbed my family, but they let them live. So many other fleeing Jews were not so “well treated.”
My grandmother Rosa was staying with gentile friends in Warsaw, waiting for my father to come get her. Those friends were risking their lives housing a Jew, as were the Polish farmer and his wife who took my feverish father in and cared for him and lied to the soldiers for him. If any of them had been found out, they would have been killed, summarily. They and their entire families
When my father and grandparents made it to Lithuania, they were welcomed into a community of Jewish refugees funded largely by the Joint Distribution Committee, an international coordinating body of Jewish philanthropy. Jews from around the world and throughout recent decades had given money that “the Joint” might be able to help my father and his parents.
Zwartendijk and Sugihara
The Curacao visa came by way of Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch diplomat in Lithuania. Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese official whom many consider “the Japanese Schindler,” had asked his superiors in Japan for permission to help the Jews. They refused. But he did it anyway. He saved as many as 10,000 Eastern European Jews by granting them the “paper” with which to travel across the Soviet Union to possible freedom.
I had long suspected that my father was someone that was helped by Sugihara. Many years ago, on a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., while entering the names of my great uncles Adam, Henrik, and Leon Szwarcman into the database of Holocaust victims and Solomon Szwarcman’s name into the list of survivors, I casually asked the man at the desk if he knew how I could find a list of names of those who got Sugihara’s visas. “Well, we have the list right here,” he said.
He handed me the twenty or so pages bound unceremoniously in a black cardboard folder. There I found the names: Josef Szwarcman, Aleksandr Szwarcman and Golda Szwarcman. He made copies for me, and I walked with eyes brimming with tears towards the quiet “Hall of Remembrance.” I sat and wept uncontrollably, for more than 20 minutes, holding the photocopied pages, sobbing over them.
Sugihara appears to have been a man of character. He was part of the consular team representing Japan in Manchukuo (at the time my mother was growing up in Harbin), and ended up in Europe because he asked to be reassigned, in response to the atrocities he witnessed during that occupation. He had nothing to gain by helping the Jews of Eastern Europe, and reportedly his career suffered when the truth came out.
This man, who couldn’t have anticipated my existence, was in every way responsible for it. He had sufficient moral imagination to care for “the other,” these Jewish farmers, oddly clothed, marching with their scrolls, praying in their dead language. Tribal people from the American West or Sub-Saharan Africa might have been more foreign to him, but even they might fit better with Japanese feudal mythology.
And yet, as different as they might be, he cared about them. One estimate is that there are 40,000 descendants of the Jews that Sugihara cared about. And all of my father’s story and mine, all of the successes of the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and now the great-great-grandchildren of Josef and Rosa, are made possible because of that caring, because of Chiune Sugihara’s moral imagination.
Shanghai’s Jews
When my father got to Shanghai, he and his parents were given food and shelter by the Jews who were already there. At the end of the 19th Century, hundreds of Jews, mostly from Iraq, seeking business opportunities, ended up in Shanghai and prospered. They were of a different branch of the religion and a very different social class than their co-religionists from Eastern Europe and might have looked down their noses on their apparently ignorant, mostly rural cousins.
Instead, they donated money and goods and time to assure that the newly arrived had a chance to start fresh. Also helping with the relocation was HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Decades of contributions to HIAS by anonymous Jews were now used to feed, clothe and shelter my father and his parents.
And there was the Henkin family, who were willing to overlook the brashness and over-confidence of this young man and who offered him a job and a career as a salesman. It was Mr. Henkin who advised my father to take hair-nets, not currency. (I have always suspected that he might have been the source of the $700, too.)
A lifelong community
My mother had similar encounters with helping communities. She fled Siberia for the unknown in Harbin. She arrived as a toddler, but on the first day of class, she was adopted by her desk mate, Luba Patent, Luba’s loud brother Joe and their friends Vera and Nura. All members of Harbin’s resident Jewish population, they took in this little hick shiksa and made her part of their extended family. She became a sister, a full-fledged member of their community. I grew up with the children of these friends as my cousins. Friendships that were made when my mother was four lasted for almost 80 years across two continents, until only death ended them.
America
In the “ambient” American mythology, Alex and Tamara and Eric and Alice would cross the Pacific and arrive penniless, knowing no one, but, spirited and plucky and talented, would persevere from hard work alone. In fact, without trying to take anything away from my parents’ talents or pluckiness, I know that, when they arrived in San Francisco, they were met by representatives of HIAS and by “the Joint.” Both organizations made sure that they had a place to stay, food to eat, clothing and medicine for their children, a sense of security. Someone from the Joint found two possible jobs for my father, one in Seattle and one in Houston.
And aren’t these provisions, available to my parents without request, the birthrights we ought to promise to every human being: shelter, food, clothing, healthcare, safety, work?
Once my father was established as a salesman, his customers became a community, too. They looked forward to his visits, opened their homes to him, invited him to their children’s weddings. One child of a former customer visited my elderly father in a suburb of Chicago, 2,000 miles away from this son’s home, because “Alec” was an important part of their “family.”
Of course, much of my father’s success was due to his knowledge of his products, his understanding of his customer’s business and his ability to communicate this to them. But thinking he was successful on individual achievement alone is to ignore the community of good will and caring in which his work was embedded.
Communities for Eric and Alice
I could go on. My brother benefitted from the insight and good management at NCR, who looked past his lack of education and saw the talent in him. He married into a warm and loving clan that took and still takes very seriously the notion of “family.” If anyone ever wanted to find a group to capture in a documentary on the role of family in the stability and prosperity of its members, Janie’s family would be the perfect focus.
My loud and “foreign” parents were always welcomed with warmth and grace by Jane’s parents. When Jane’s mother insisted on staying at the family farm in Minnesota, in spite of her blindness and the lack of any family members near by, the entire family, children and grand-children, scattered across the western half of the country, re-arranged their lives so that there was always some one who could stay at the farm with Mrs. Wiggert.
My sister, so deserving of help, got the assistance she needed, because generations of people who had contributed to Brown University made possible a fully paid scholarship for the education of this quiet, talented immigrant girl from 3,000 miles away. And those same funds paid for the fledgling computers from which she found her profession.
Communities for me and my children
My children, too, benefitted from the thousands of alumni of their elite colleges whose contributions helped us afford their tuition. I could name, as could you, a dozen teachers and mentors who paid special attention to my development. There is a legion of friends, mentors, teachers, communities that are, in part, responsible for my success and that of my brother and sister and our children and grandchildren.
As I have hinted above, I imagine that working closely with my father could, at times, be a bit thorny. But Ray and Jeanette Wachter, the owners of the business for whom he worked for 25 years, supported him and his work. And his family. It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I learned that it was the Wachters who actually sent me to law school. Every semester when the tuition bill came due, my father found a bonus waiting in his paycheck. They never let me know that they did this; they never made themselves available for my thanks. They died before I knew. But my schooling, my career, are made possible by, are built upon their decency and caring. Upon their moral imagination.
We, all of us, stand on the shoulders of historical and geographical communities. Yes, our success is ours. But it is also, always, an expression of the caring of these communities in which we are inevitably embedded. When we only tell our stories in portrait, we miss this contribution.
By telling family stories twice, once in portrait and once in landscape, we can all regain contact with the moral imagination of those communities in which we are embedded. After all, to the unnamed and unknown people who helped my parents survive and whose compassion is responsible for my existence, I am “the truly other.” But for the moral imagination of generations of caring people, none of us would prosper.
We should all tell our family's stories. Twice. Maybe your stories are not quite as dramatic as my father's and mother's, but the same thing will happen. You will connect with the people and the communities that were the foundations upon which your family succeeded.
In a way, my father was right. The American Dream isn’t a myth. It is the illusion of solely individual achievement that is the fairy tale. We have been telling the myth solely as portraiture, while ignoring the landscape. Of late, Americans seem to have forgotten that there is no success without community, that embeddedness in community is our common and universal experience, that when someone fails, it is quite likely, in part, a failure of his or her community, and that we forget this basic truth at our peril, for people who don’t understand the debt they owe to community are bound to neglect it.
After my classes had heard the first telling of my family’s stories, I suggested that I wanted to tell the stories again. Only this time, I want to make clear how much of the outcome was due to the intervention in my family’s lives of other people. The first time the stories were told in “portrait.” Now I want to tell them in “landscape.”
There were the Russian soldiers who stopped Josef and Rosa as they fled Odessa, and who exhibited sufficient humanity to be charmed by three-year-old Alex’s bravura. Yes, they robbed my family, but they let them live. So many other fleeing Jews were not so “well treated.”
My grandmother Rosa was staying with gentile friends in Warsaw, waiting for my father to come get her. Those friends were risking their lives housing a Jew, as were the Polish farmer and his wife who took my feverish father in and cared for him and lied to the soldiers for him. If any of them had been found out, they would have been killed, summarily. They and their entire families
When my father and grandparents made it to Lithuania, they were welcomed into a community of Jewish refugees funded largely by the Joint Distribution Committee, an international coordinating body of Jewish philanthropy. Jews from around the world and throughout recent decades had given money that “the Joint” might be able to help my father and his parents.
Zwartendijk and Sugihara
The Curacao visa came by way of Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch diplomat in Lithuania. Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese official whom many consider “the Japanese Schindler,” had asked his superiors in Japan for permission to help the Jews. They refused. But he did it anyway. He saved as many as 10,000 Eastern European Jews by granting them the “paper” with which to travel across the Soviet Union to possible freedom.
I had long suspected that my father was someone that was helped by Sugihara. Many years ago, on a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., while entering the names of my great uncles Adam, Henrik, and Leon Szwarcman into the database of Holocaust victims and Solomon Szwarcman’s name into the list of survivors, I casually asked the man at the desk if he knew how I could find a list of names of those who got Sugihara’s visas. “Well, we have the list right here,” he said.
He handed me the twenty or so pages bound unceremoniously in a black cardboard folder. There I found the names: Josef Szwarcman, Aleksandr Szwarcman and Golda Szwarcman. He made copies for me, and I walked with eyes brimming with tears towards the quiet “Hall of Remembrance.” I sat and wept uncontrollably, for more than 20 minutes, holding the photocopied pages, sobbing over them.
Sugihara appears to have been a man of character. He was part of the consular team representing Japan in Manchukuo (at the time my mother was growing up in Harbin), and ended up in Europe because he asked to be reassigned, in response to the atrocities he witnessed during that occupation. He had nothing to gain by helping the Jews of Eastern Europe, and reportedly his career suffered when the truth came out.
This man, who couldn’t have anticipated my existence, was in every way responsible for it. He had sufficient moral imagination to care for “the other,” these Jewish farmers, oddly clothed, marching with their scrolls, praying in their dead language. Tribal people from the American West or Sub-Saharan Africa might have been more foreign to him, but even they might fit better with Japanese feudal mythology.
And yet, as different as they might be, he cared about them. One estimate is that there are 40,000 descendants of the Jews that Sugihara cared about. And all of my father’s story and mine, all of the successes of the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and now the great-great-grandchildren of Josef and Rosa, are made possible because of that caring, because of Chiune Sugihara’s moral imagination.
Shanghai’s Jews
When my father got to Shanghai, he and his parents were given food and shelter by the Jews who were already there. At the end of the 19th Century, hundreds of Jews, mostly from Iraq, seeking business opportunities, ended up in Shanghai and prospered. They were of a different branch of the religion and a very different social class than their co-religionists from Eastern Europe and might have looked down their noses on their apparently ignorant, mostly rural cousins.
Instead, they donated money and goods and time to assure that the newly arrived had a chance to start fresh. Also helping with the relocation was HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Decades of contributions to HIAS by anonymous Jews were now used to feed, clothe and shelter my father and his parents.
And there was the Henkin family, who were willing to overlook the brashness and over-confidence of this young man and who offered him a job and a career as a salesman. It was Mr. Henkin who advised my father to take hair-nets, not currency. (I have always suspected that he might have been the source of the $700, too.)
A lifelong community
My mother had similar encounters with helping communities. She fled Siberia for the unknown in Harbin. She arrived as a toddler, but on the first day of class, she was adopted by her desk mate, Luba Patent, Luba’s loud brother Joe and their friends Vera and Nura. All members of Harbin’s resident Jewish population, they took in this little hick shiksa and made her part of their extended family. She became a sister, a full-fledged member of their community. I grew up with the children of these friends as my cousins. Friendships that were made when my mother was four lasted for almost 80 years across two continents, until only death ended them.
America
In the “ambient” American mythology, Alex and Tamara and Eric and Alice would cross the Pacific and arrive penniless, knowing no one, but, spirited and plucky and talented, would persevere from hard work alone. In fact, without trying to take anything away from my parents’ talents or pluckiness, I know that, when they arrived in San Francisco, they were met by representatives of HIAS and by “the Joint.” Both organizations made sure that they had a place to stay, food to eat, clothing and medicine for their children, a sense of security. Someone from the Joint found two possible jobs for my father, one in Seattle and one in Houston.
And aren’t these provisions, available to my parents without request, the birthrights we ought to promise to every human being: shelter, food, clothing, healthcare, safety, work?
Once my father was established as a salesman, his customers became a community, too. They looked forward to his visits, opened their homes to him, invited him to their children’s weddings. One child of a former customer visited my elderly father in a suburb of Chicago, 2,000 miles away from this son’s home, because “Alec” was an important part of their “family.”
Of course, much of my father’s success was due to his knowledge of his products, his understanding of his customer’s business and his ability to communicate this to them. But thinking he was successful on individual achievement alone is to ignore the community of good will and caring in which his work was embedded.
Communities for Eric and Alice
I could go on. My brother benefitted from the insight and good management at NCR, who looked past his lack of education and saw the talent in him. He married into a warm and loving clan that took and still takes very seriously the notion of “family.” If anyone ever wanted to find a group to capture in a documentary on the role of family in the stability and prosperity of its members, Janie’s family would be the perfect focus.
My loud and “foreign” parents were always welcomed with warmth and grace by Jane’s parents. When Jane’s mother insisted on staying at the family farm in Minnesota, in spite of her blindness and the lack of any family members near by, the entire family, children and grand-children, scattered across the western half of the country, re-arranged their lives so that there was always some one who could stay at the farm with Mrs. Wiggert.
My sister, so deserving of help, got the assistance she needed, because generations of people who had contributed to Brown University made possible a fully paid scholarship for the education of this quiet, talented immigrant girl from 3,000 miles away. And those same funds paid for the fledgling computers from which she found her profession.
Communities for me and my children
My children, too, benefitted from the thousands of alumni of their elite colleges whose contributions helped us afford their tuition. I could name, as could you, a dozen teachers and mentors who paid special attention to my development. There is a legion of friends, mentors, teachers, communities that are, in part, responsible for my success and that of my brother and sister and our children and grandchildren.
As I have hinted above, I imagine that working closely with my father could, at times, be a bit thorny. But Ray and Jeanette Wachter, the owners of the business for whom he worked for 25 years, supported him and his work. And his family. It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I learned that it was the Wachters who actually sent me to law school. Every semester when the tuition bill came due, my father found a bonus waiting in his paycheck. They never let me know that they did this; they never made themselves available for my thanks. They died before I knew. But my schooling, my career, are made possible by, are built upon their decency and caring. Upon their moral imagination.
We, all of us, stand on the shoulders of historical and geographical communities. Yes, our success is ours. But it is also, always, an expression of the caring of these communities in which we are inevitably embedded. When we only tell our stories in portrait, we miss this contribution.
By telling family stories twice, once in portrait and once in landscape, we can all regain contact with the moral imagination of those communities in which we are embedded. After all, to the unnamed and unknown people who helped my parents survive and whose compassion is responsible for my existence, I am “the truly other.” But for the moral imagination of generations of caring people, none of us would prosper.
We should all tell our family's stories. Twice. Maybe your stories are not quite as dramatic as my father's and mother's, but the same thing will happen. You will connect with the people and the communities that were the foundations upon which your family succeeded.
In a way, my father was right. The American Dream isn’t a myth. It is the illusion of solely individual achievement that is the fairy tale. We have been telling the myth solely as portraiture, while ignoring the landscape. Of late, Americans seem to have forgotten that there is no success without community, that embeddedness in community is our common and universal experience, that when someone fails, it is quite likely, in part, a failure of his or her community, and that we forget this basic truth at our peril, for people who don’t understand the debt they owe to community are bound to neglect it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)