My Wife, Equality, and That Which Is Not Seen

NOTE: My wife in no way put me up to this post. Rumors that my busy travel schedule and an accidental trip down the Midtown Direct line to Mount Tabor have me in the doghouse are completely false. More seriously, these are my opinions, not hers, which should go without saying but often doesn't.

Economists, especially of the rightward-leaning variety, like to cite Frederic Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window when they talk about the consequences of government spending, or how economic decision-making has invisible secondary effects, and lots of other things besides. (One of the nice things about parables, whether they come from Jesus or an economist, is that they can be applied pretty broadly.) This parable comes from an essay called, "That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen", and they show that a broken window, which some people might call an economic benefit because it forces the owner to spend for repairs, is actually a misallocation of resources because it diverts that spending away from a more productive channel. 

I'm now going to abuse that parable a little bit, and say that we most often observe the effect Bastiat is describing when it comes to well-meaning rules. So, here's where my wife comes in. She is "That Which Is Not Seen", the unnoticed victim of rules that are meant to protect women and in particular working mothers. In short, I believe that the rules and regulations meant to protect women in the workplace are in fact keeping her out of the workplace.

A bit of background. My wife, Kim Reed, is a very talented person who could be doing any number of things (check out her vastly more interesting blog if you want a sample) but has focused, career-wise, on product development. This is in essence the science of taking an idea from a designer or artist (or company bigshot, as the case may be) and figuring out how to get it made at commercial scale and at a cost the market will bear. She's done this for companies making curtain rods, dinnerware, watch bands and, most recently, high end jewelry. Kim felt like her job at Tiffany & Co. was a sign she had made it in New York, and that it would open up lots of options in her career. She felt that way when she got pregnant, even though she intended to return to work there after our son was born.

But she decided she wanted to take six months instead of three months, and Tiffany wasn't cool with that. They said they'd consider her for other roles when she was ready to come back, but somehow that hasn't worked out. My belief is that, in a company that is predominantly staffed by women of child-bearing age, they didn't want to set the "bad precedent" of allowing too much employee flexibility around maternity leave. And since the law says you are protected for 12 weeks, and then pretty much on your own, that makes 12 weeks the default, and woe be it if you feel like you need more time. 

Now, I don't begrudge Tiffany the right to make the best business decision for their company, and I suppose (although her reviews both there and everywhere else she's ever worked would make it seem unlikely) that they didn't consider her a particularly productive employee. But I do think that the laws that "protect" women treat them as a uniform group and define (and thus limit) what they can expect from a company. Twelve weeks is an arbitrary number, not some well-thought out limit on the needs of new mothers.

I wouldn't have thought much of what happened with Tiffany if it hadn't been for her subsequent experience in the job market. My wife has had a large number of interviews, and with a handful of companies has gone back multiple times, and left with the expectation of an offer. And a pattern has emerged. All of a sudden she stops hearing from the company, and either they completely ignore her (again, after multiple rounds of interviews taking significant chunks of her time) or give a non-answer as to why she is no longer being considered.

Here, I think, other rules that are meant to help women are actually hurting Kim. You are, as an employer, not allowed to discriminate against women with children. You aren't even allowed to ask about someone's family status or how it might effect their work. But you can't expect people not to think about it. What's more, once you hire someone, you risk an expensive and frustrating lawsuit if you let them go and there is a perception you might have done so because of their family issues. You might not be allowed to say any of this (and you're in it deep if you ever write it in an email or otherwise document it), but if you're hiring you can't help but think about it. And so I believe that a woman with a young child, who hasn't been working for a while, is now seen as a potential legal liability as much as a potential asset. And, if you decide not to take the chance, but can't articulate an approved reason to reject the person? Well, easier just to never call back and let the issue, as the said in Office Space, "work itself out naturally."

I normally try not to get into personal issues on this blog, but I think this is a great example of understanding how the mind works and how we react to incentives. The government, for understandable reasons, sets up rules that are meant to protect women in the workplace. But people don't necessarily respond to the intent of the law (which is to ensure women aren't treated worse because they have children) but rather to the effects of the law (which is to make it legally easier to deal with men or women without children). Women like Kim who have children have to behave within the strictures of the laws that have been created or else they are suspect, seen as a problem waiting to happen. 

I think that one of the greatest benefits to society in the last century has been the unlocking of women's potential to impact society for the better. We have, in essence, doubled our human capital. But a lot of what passes for "women's rights" is condescension that assumes all women want the same things or need the same protections. And I think, based on the evidence of Kim and many other women I've known, that if the genders competed on an entirely even playing field, us men are likely to get trounced.

Watching Our Nation Break in Two

NOTE: This is last in a series of four planned posts about how we make decisions as a society, and where our political leadership might be taking us. It is meant to be non-partisan, but my conservative-ness might slip through. In the first post,I discussed the difference between team thinking and crisis thinking, and how we seem to be demonstrating a team mentality while saying we are in a crisis. The second post considered the possibility that things aren't all that bad, but political marketing is making us feel the world is falling apart. The third post looked at whether we are waiting for a crisis we know must come, but is taking its sweet time to get here. This post will consider the possibility that our society is in fact splitting in two.

In 2004, the map you see to the left became a bit of a phenomenon. People fed up with the divisiveness of that presidential election (and particularly those bitter about being on the losing side) half-jokingly suggested breaking the country up into the blue "United States of Canada" and the red "Jesusland". This notion tapped into a deep feeling that we can no longer agree on the direction of the country, and it would be better if we divorced now and formed two ideologically coherent countries.

I haven't heard anyone advocating for the country to split lately, so it would be tempting to laugh off that map as a passing fancy. But the idea that the "other side" is not just wrong, but illegitimate, has if anything gathered steam since 2004. The Birther movement can be seen as a crude way to deny to Obama the legitimacy to even advance an argument. Equally crude, though nicely packaged, is this argument from Ron Rosenbaum that the Republican party is irredeemably and undeniably racist, and thus not a legitimate participant in our national debate. Lest you think I exaggerate:

In a way mainstream media outlets who promote a false equivalency between the two parties by failing to note at the very least the neo-racist supporters of the Republican Party are themselves complicit in the charade that the GOP is a morally legitimate entity. Not that racists don’t vote Democratic, and yes I know the GOP was, was, the party of Lincoln, but that was long ago in another country.

The distance between this statement and saying that anyone who votes for Mitt Romney is a racist is short indeed, and from there it is just a few more steps to an argument that any Republican elected, or any Republican law passed, does not have moral legitimacy.

If all of this is a little too high minded, take a look at your Facebook or Twitter feeds after the next debate. I'm pretty sure you'll see the liberals decrying Romney's desire to leave the poor and vulnerable unprotected to help out his rich cronies, and the conservatives attacking Obama's anti-American, socialist policies that are destroying the country's spirit and shredding the Constitution. 

So what? People disagree about politics, and they aren't always nice about it. At the end of the day, most of these arguments come and go, with no lasting impact on the unity of our nation. Our democracy has lasted almost 250 years by adjusting to the changing beliefs of its people: eventually we find common ground and move on.

There's one exception to this rule, and I think the example is instructive. As I wrote a year ago, in the years before the Civil War we had fewer and fewer common principles to help us reconcile our differences. Eventually, the differences of belief between the Union and the Confederacy were severe enough to provoke first succession, then war. The only way to reconcile these wildly divergent beliefs was for one side to crush the other, and force its beliefs upon the losers.

Is there a current schism anywhere near as severe as that in the time before the Civil War? I took a stab at capturing some of the differences between "Red Culture" (that associated with Jesusland) and "Blue Culture:

Obviously this is an over-simplification, but my point is that in ways big and small these cultures are wildly different, with very few areas of overlap. This does not feel like the description of two strains within one coherent society to me, but two antagonistic societies living side by side. It also feels like there is not much chance of one side convincing the other on any of these issues, as these views are based in deep beliefs and worldviews that are hard to challenge.

My sense is that Blue Culture is the more recent development of the two, one that has its roots in the trauma of the Great Depression and which fully took shape when the Baby Boomers challenged the moral consensus around religion, sexuality and gender roles that existed (somewhat uneasily) before the 1960s. That worldview has always defined itself in opposition to a more patriarchal, conservative America, which they felt left the disadvantaged to fall through the cracks. In the 1980's, conservatives began to push back, reasserting traditional values and worrying that the goals Blue Culture was advancing would sap American individuality and vitality. We now seemed to have reached something of a stalemate.

A few essays ago, I argued in essence that this stalemate was somewhat stable, that neither side would really move us that far from the common ground that we have somehow stumbled upon. But I think the sense of impending crisis, and the limits of deficit spending, will undermine this truce. Conservatives want to cut taxes to give individuals more control of their money. Liberals want to raise spending to extend social services to more people. For a long time, we could take turns from one administration to the next, but we can't paper over our differences this way anymore.

How will this end? I don't believe we have a second civil war in us. My guess is no Californian will want to take up arms to keep Georgia in the Union, or vice versa. And I also don't think we are going to suddenly resolve all of these problems, barring an external crisis that forces us to come together for survival's sake. I see two possibilities: one is that a financial crisis much bigger than the 2008 crash devastates the country, and our irreconcilable differences force a rapid and nasty divorce on us. The alternative (and the one I'm rooting for) is that we realize we're running in place and decide to stop, and we figure out a way to either split up amicably or devolve all but a few functions of the federal government to the state or regional level.

Sadly, I don't see America in its current form lasting my lifetime. That may be tragic, but it doesn't need to be. A country with a single citizenship, a single military, but two different systems of domestic governance, could be a good thing. It would ease most of the contentious debates we suffer through today, and would allow those who don't "fit in" on their side to migrate to the other territory. And it would acknowledge our shared heritage while not lying about how differently our two cultures view the world.

But since the odds of an amicable divorce seem so long, I'll end with a bit of a prayer: please, please let me be wrong.

The Crisis Slouching Towards Us

NOTE: This is third in a series of four planned posts about how we make decisions as a society, and where our political leadership might be taking us. It is meant to be non-partisan, but my conservative-ness might slip through. In the first post,I discussed the difference between team thinking and crisis thinking, and how we seem to be demonstrating a team mentality while saying we are in a crisis. The second post considered the possibility that things aren't all that bad, but political marketing is making us feel the world is falling apart. This post looks at whether we are waiting for a crisis we know must come, but is taking its sweet time to get here. The final post will consider the possibility that our society is in fact splitting in two.

I was in a small meeting with a group of a half dozen smart and experienced marketers here in New York City, when the conversation turned to the screwed up-ness of our society and our politics. In no time at all, about half the group was discussing the steps they were taking to prevent the government from seizing their retirement assets in the event of financial collapse, how much cash you should take out of the bank and keep hidden under the proverbial mattress, and whether a shotgun or a pistol is the better home defense alternative. And the half not participating all had a look on their face that said, not "look at the conservative nut jobs" but "geez, I probably should start thinking about this stuff." Doomsday preparedness has, it seems, achieved a sort of mainstream respectability it completely lacked not too long ago.

This failure of leadership has been widely noted by the public: consider how abysmally low are the approval ratings for Congress, who are after all directly elected by the people expressing their disapproval. We often explain this seeming inconsistency by saying that a lot of people like their congressman alright, but hate the results of the whole assortment of them. But what if people are voting for the party they find less objectionable, because they accept the narrative that the other guys are mostly to blame, without any real faith in the individual they are electing? (As a personal observation, I've never voted for anyone, for any office, feeling that that individual was worthy of support. I've voted against people I thought would be awful leaders, and I've voted for certain expressed positions without much confidence in the person expressing them.)

Is our doom hanging over our heads? The problem is that we can't be sure. Maybe this is just the extended darkness before the dawn. But the belief people seem to have, regardless of political affiliation, is not that things are going to get better, but that we pulled back from the precipice briefly, but the problems are only getting worse behind the emergency barriers we've erected.

Where that crisis comes from depends on your political affiliation. When I talk to liberals, they tell me that that this is a crisis caused by our business and financial elites. In their telling, the system is rigged to enhance their power and earnings, and their narrow-minded selfishness is wrecking the fairness and the shared prosperity of the American system. Conservatives will blame different elites: those in the government and the heights of culture who want to overspend other peoples' money and try to solve deep rooted societal problems through heavy-handed federal intervention that's doomed to fail. Interestingly, one side's hero is the other side's villain. Liberals think the government can constrain the greed of businessmen. Conservatives lament that by constraining businessmen, government has exacerbated our financial problems, keeping the 'job-creators' on the sidelines.

This public split may actually be a core reason why a future crisis seems inevitable. If we can't even agree on who is driving us to ruin, how can we stop it? And each side identifying a cohort of wrongdoers who align with their preexisting politics disguises another possible answer: our business, our political and our cultural elites have all failed us. Peggy Noonan has noted that we seem to have elites in all walks of life who want to be cool instead of being leaders.

What I guess I'm suggesting is that, if we take off the partisan blinders, we might find that our problems are in no small part due to an elite that has become self-perpetuating and self-serving. This elite shares certain assumptions (about the virtue of a meritocracy created by a flawed college admissions system, for example) but more importantly, certain relationships. The fact that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have four Ivy League degrees between them is often cited as an example of their talent and drive, but rarely as an indication that leaders from both parties tend to travel in the same rarified circles. Increasingly, the elites from all walks of life come from the same background, which means they are broadly more sympathetic to each other than to those left behind by the modern world. It also means they lack the necessary sense of urgency to hold off the crisis dragging towards us: everyone they know is probably doing fine.

The problems we face don't have painless fixes. But our elites gain power by telling their supporters that they don't need to bear the pain, that it is the responsibility of the other side. So as long as the crisis is held at bay, they can retain their power through these cheap arguments. Which perhaps explains why the crisis is slow in coming: if there are short term financial moves that can be made to forestall it, our elites will grasp it, no matter the long term consequences. Because every day that they are in power is a day they can enrich themselves, and be told how wonderful they are by their cronies and hangers-on.

If the gut feeling expressed by my work colleagues is right, the crisis is coming for us like a zombie: slowly, but relentlessly. Our elites aren't thinking of that eventuality, but are playing for their short term advantage no matter what might be looming on the horizon. And the bulk of citizens, who intuit that things are going off the rails, can't find anyone they trust to fix the problem when they can't even agree on who's to blame.

Is Political Marketing Making Us Crazy?

NOTE: This is a series of four planned posts about how we make decisions as a society, and where our political leadership might be taking us. It is meant to be non-partisan, but my conservative-ness might slip through. In the first post, I discussed the difference between team thinking and crisis thinking, and how we seem to be demonstrating a team mentality while saying we are in a crisis. This post considers the possibility that we are being manipulated by sophisticated political marketing. The following posts will examine the possibility that we are entering a slow moving crisis, and that we are in the process of separating into two distinct societies.

It seems like most people, despite their political leanings, agree that things are very bad right now. The economy is lousy, the world is an increasingly unsafe place, and there is a miasma of despair and anger that seems to have enveloped the country. But what if things aren't so bad? Or, to be a bit more specific, what if we're being made to think things are worse than they are by people who want to manipulate those feelings? And, if that's still too cryptic: what if the political marketing gurus being paid vast sums of money to get their candidates elected are trying to make us feel as terrible as possible to get us to vote the way they want?

Modern political consultants have the full range of data and analytics that other marketers have. This data is so powerful it can, for example, help Target determine when a woman is pregnant, and when she is due. So we should expect that political marketers know what issues drive candidate preference in what cohorts, what personal interests we have that campaigns might tap into (I was served a large number of Pet Lovers for Obama ads a few months ago) and even the factors that will make us more or less likely to go to the polls on a given day.

This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but combined with one other factor it becomes toxic. Namely, we don't much like our politicians right now. Recent polling found that almost twice as many people approve of the BP oil spill than approve of Congress.And while approval ratings for our presidential candidates are significantly higher, a lot of that is probably each team approving of their standard bearer. Fixing the reputation of politicians is going to require a long period of better performance and better behavior, and no individual candidate can do much about that in the short run. So the solution is to make sure that voters find your opponent more odious than you.

This is where we confront the big difference between politics and most other forms of marketing: politics is a zero sum game. Since what matters is not getting as many people as possible to vote for you, but to get one more person to vote for you than votes for any other candidate, politicians and their handlers get just as big of an impact from denying an opponent a vote as they do when they win one for themselves. You can't sell a Chevy just by making people hate Toyota, because they can always buy a Honda or a Ford. But Obama wins if he can make enough people hate Romney even if he is almost as unpopular, and vice versa.

So if we can accept that politicians have to navigate an environment where they, as a class, are disdained, and we accept that in a zero sum game the rewards for negative marketing are at least as high as those for positive marketing, and we accept that political marketers know an awful lot about our hot buttons and our voting behavior, then we can assume these marketers are following a strategy that will increase our misery and our belief that our country is falling apart. Why? Because they know that their base is primed to think the worse of the other team, so negative marketing about an opponent isn't going to turn them off. And they know voters who could go either way aren't inclined to think very highly of politicians, so it is easier to confirm that bias by sliming your opponent than it is to build yourself up while your opponent is sliming you. And lastly, they know that the opponent's base is never going to vote for them, so the best they can hope for is to make that base so disgusted that they choose not to vote at all.

We can see this dynamic at play in this year's debate over Medicare. Both sides are working as hard as they can to convince us that their opponent is going to wreck Medicare for seniors. Neither side acknowledges very directly that Medicare is endangered by rapidly rising costs and that painful decisions will have to be made, but rather imply that their plan is the only way to save the program. The negativity-to-solution ratio is dangerously high. Maybe that's why this Wall Street Journal column resonated with me: the author argues that we are being suckered into thinking the parties are further apart than they are, and that most of what we register as serious disagreement is really just noise.

But, you say, even if the Republicans and Democrats aren't offering serious solutions to our urgent problems, we at least know that we have urgent problems, right? Well, perhaps not. One under-discussed possibility is that the problems we have might not be so insurmountable. Maybe there are structural advantages the US has that will reassert themselves over time, or maybe the public is already waking up to the unsustainability of the course we're on and will back needed changes. As a country, we have faced seemingly impossible problems before, and have always managed to pull through and continue our march forward.

After all, the broad trend of human history is positive, and there are a number of reasons to think tomorrow will be better still. At this point, though, I should put my cards on the table: though I am confident we will continue to advance in the long term, I think the problems this country (and really the entire industrialized world) faces are too big to avoid serious pain in the shorter term. Marketing is a powerful tool, but it rarely conjures emotion from nowhere. Rather, it taps into and amplifies the feelings we already have. So our natural feelings of impending doom may be enhanced by the political back-and forth, but they are based in something real: namely, a concern that we've lost control of the country our forebearers built.

I'll explore the implications of that idea in my next two posts.

Crisis Thinking Versus Team Thinking

Note to readers: election season is a great time to think about how we think. How do we process the complex information we need about the state of the country and boil that down into picking a candidate? And how do those candidates try to appeal to us? This is the first of a series of posts on that topic. Today, we start with an argument about the two types of thinking that drive societal-level decisions. Second, we'll look at how campaigns use marketing techniques to force our attention and, in consequence, make the electoral choice seem more monumental than it may in fact be. Finally, we will look at whether we are in fact one society, or are slowly splitting in two, and what that means for our decision-making. 

Many writers, including Malcolm Gladwell in "Blink" and Jonah Lehrer (should I automatically write "the discredited Jonah Lehrer" from now on?) in "How We Decide", have put pen to paper on the subject of individual decision-making. But, if my sketchy education and brief Googling effort is any guide, writing about how society makes decisions is much less common. So, I'm going to engage in some unvalidated speculation about what I see as two different ways that societies make decisions about their future.

The first, and by far more common, type of group decision-making is what I'll call "team thinking". We engage in team thinking when we are trying to improve our position or build something in a relatively safe and stable world. Team thinking defines an "other" that is essentially familiar. The obvious example is our political system, which has increasingly created a bright line between "Republican" and "Democrat": you tend to be on your team, want your team to win, and will adjust your beliefs to fit in more often than not. (And, when you hold beliefs that aren't those of the "team", you'll tend to de-prioritize them: Jonathan Last has an interesting piece profiling the collapse of the pro-life Democrat caucus when Obamacare forced them to choose.) Why? Because it feels good to be on a team. It is a source of identity, it provides an instant bond with like-minded folks, and it provides a vehicle to amplify your perceived impact on the world. You may never achieve greatness in your profession, you may not ever save a life or win a trophy, but you get to bask in shared accomplishment if the candidate you support wins an election. (Or if the sports franchise you support wins a title, for that matter.)

Politics provides ample evidence that people come together in this way for the social benefits of being on a team as they do to coherently advance their beliefs. Churchill, widely considered a man of passionate and strongly held views, switched political parties not once, but twice. Ronald Reagan started out his political life as a Democrat. If political parties were mostly about advancing coherent agendas, and not about team thinking, we might expect that politicians and thinkers who grew disenchanted with their ideological home would tend to drift away slowly, eventually forming new parties and movements to reflect their ideologies. And yet, we more often see the dramatic flip from one to the other. (Why people switch is a whole other issue, but suffice it to say it seems most often that an individual is so alienated from his party one one or two key issues that he is willing to jettison support for others that seem secondary.)

Team thinking explains a lot about the current election, like why Tea Party voters are lining up behind Romney despite their loudly expressed reservations about him earlier, and why liberals seem to have forgotten about President Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo. Our guy might not be perfect, but that doesn't matter: he's better than the other team's guy, and he'll overall help us advance or defend our agenda. Think of decision-making in a team thinking environment as a game of tug of rope: you line up behind your captain and pull against the other side, and try to get as much movement as you can in your direction, knowing a moment later the other side will probably pull back.

A functioning society that has progressed beyond crushing despotism will generally exhibit some sort of team thinking, breaking down along the dominant fault line of its day. Often the teams are strictly political, but sometimes they become martial, as we can see in the history of England: the nobles were often aligned against the royal family to some extent, jockeying for power, and from time to time these disagreements were settled on the battlefield. But these battles weren't apocalyptic: they occurred when the political process couldn't contain the disagreements of the day, and when they ended, there were new political fault lines that quickly emerged. (Shakespeare got quite a lot of material from these shifting allegiances.) Eventually England's political system developed so that disputes could be more easily contained within it, decreasing and then ending the use of force to decide who should wield power.

It is fair to say that most of our societal decisions are made by team thinking: one team gets a bit more power, advances its agenda for a time, and then the other team rallies and advances its agenda. Sometimes one team fails often enough that it is replaced by a new team. (In American history, the Whigs were essentially replaced by the Republicans, which was a reorganizing of the old team along more coherent lines.) But every so often, team thinking fails and is replaced by crisis thinking, which has completely different characteristics.

A crisis occurs when a significant majority of a society feels threatened enough. The classic example is when a country is threatened by war from the outside: In World War II, the British formed a unity government under Churchill that no longer concerned itself with any of the typical divides that marked its political debates. The society oriented itself to victory at all costs. When Churchill, who was by this point again a Conservative, made alliance with the Soviet Union, he was hardly questioned for his choice to partner with a leftist government. Yet, famously, as soon as the threat was removed (actually before the war even officially ended) team thinking reasserted itself and Churchill, who thought he could assume the support of a grateful nation, was unceremoniously dumped as Prime Minister.

There are a few characteristics of events that trigger crisis thinking that we can identify:

1. Novelty: A crisis cannot be an ongoing political dispute that merely intensifies. A crisis erupts out of nowhere, and in the scramble to address it, the political teams are making decisions without their talking points and pre-constructed arguments.
2. Obviousness: If enough people are questioning whether a given event is in fact a crisis for the community, crisis thinking will likely not develop, and instead the question of whether the event is a crisis will be debated by the teams. To illustrate this point, consider terrorism. We suffered terrorist activity in the 1970's (the sacking of our embassy in Iran), the 1980's (the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon) and the 1990's (the attack on the USS Cole, the African embassy bombings), but none of these were considered crises important enough to make major changes to law and policy. After the destruction of the World Trade Center, though, we passed the Patriot Act, launched two wars, and turned air travel into a passage from Dante's Inferno. And at the time no one really questioned these decisions because our crisis thinking approach was engaged.
3. Scariness: If we don't see a situation as potentially threatening or lives, our wealth or our families, it almost definitely won't trigger crisis thinking. If you consider the terrorism examples above, none of the examples before 9/11 happened on US soil. And before the Twin Towers fell, people didn't feel that terrorism threatened their daily existence, that it could make the life we know in America disappear. Afterwards, most of us couldn't help thinking that we might die the next time we got on a train or went to the mall. We were scared, and scared people worry a lot less about tax rates and Supreme Court appointments.

The reason for this lengthy speculation on these two types of decision-making is that I think we are living in an interesting hybrid period. In 2008, we hovered on the edge of a crisis. The economy was collapsing in a way that made people wonder if their life savings were safe, or if they would ever find work again. But we stabilized enough that most of us decided our normal team thinking could resolve the rest of the problem. Meanwhile the steady drumbeat of bad economic news comes from around the globe. We are primed to think crisis, but we have it too good to resort to the harsh measures of crisis thinking. In the meantime, we are stuck with the dreary spectacle of politicians crying "catastrophe" at every opportunity, injecting a frantic yet unproductive energy into our debates. The result? We may be getting so cynical about it all that we'll have a harder time finding the necessary resolve on the day a true crisis hits.

The Relentless, Fruitless Search for Facts

In my younger days, I was something of a know-it-all. (I can hear my wife now, saying, "are you counting yesterday as your 'younger days'?) In school, or talking with my family, I couldn't resist lobbing in the facts of whatever was being discussed. From which, of course, I learned that you shouldn't do that if you want people to stay in the same room as you. To be honest, though, what I eventually learned is that much of what I thought of as facts, or more accurately as truth, didn't deserve that lofty title.

I was led to think about this yesterday when I had a brief chat with a respected colleague about the Republican convention, and in particular Paul Ryan. He liked Ryan, overall, but said (the following quote, being from memory, is not a fact), "I'm really disappointed that he lied about that GM factory closing. I don't know why he had to do that." Having seen Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz condemn him as a liar the night before, I told him that I thought the timeline was not as black and white as some were saying, and that Ryan hadn't played with the facts. 

But I had a further thought after we parted: we have created a political (and really a social) culture where opinions are valued, as my dad used to say, "like assholes...everyone's got one, and they usually stink." Contrasted to opinions are facts, which we say are the only things that really matter. So people on both sides of any debate work incredibly hard to have their beliefs, theories and explanations enshrined as facts, and the other side's declared mere opinion, or (in the case of Paul Ryan) smeared as mere falsehood.

Let's go back to the Paul Ryan speech to see what I mean. (The link has an interesting analysis of competing truth claims from NPR). He said: 

"President Barack Obama came to office during an economic crisis, as he has reminded us a time or two. Those were very tough days, and any fair measure of his record has to take that into account. My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, [Wis.], where we were about to lose a major factory.
"A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: 'I believe that if our government is there to support you ... this plant will be here for another hundred years.' That's what he said in 2008.
"Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that's how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight." (emphasis from source article)

So if we wanted to map it out a bit, we could say that Ryan, first, acknowledged that we have to acknowledge the President didn't have it easy, noted that the factory was imperiled, stated that then-candidate Obama offered a (somewhat conditional) pledge to save that factory, and then noted that the factory was soon closed for good. If you read NPR's analysis, or any other, I don't think you will find that anyone is saying those statements were, in the basic sense of the word, false.

The dispute, such as it is, can be found in this passage from the Washington Post's Fact Check: 

In his acceptance speech, GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan appeared to suggest that President Obama was responsible for the closing of a GM plant in Ryan’s home town of Janesville, Wis.
Obama gave his speech in February 2008, and he did say those words. But Ryan’s phrasing, referring to the fact the plant did not last another year, certainly suggests it was shut down in 2009, when Obama was president.
Ryan, in fact, issued a news release in June 2008, urging GM to keep the plant open after the automaker announced it would close it.
The plant was largely closed in December 2008 when production of General Motors SUVs ceased — before Obama was sworn in. A small crew of about 100 workers completed a contract for production of medium-duty trucks for Isuzu Motors, a contract that ended in April 2009.

To break it down, again, the writer claims that Ryan, "appeared to suggest" Obama's responsibility, then acknowledges Obama was accurately quoted by Ryan, then again says Ryan's phrasing "suggests" the plant was shut down in 2009, points out the plant was planned to be closed before then, finds that the plant was "largely closed" at the end of 2008, and acknowledges in fact 100 people were working in 2009. 

The first thing you might observe is that the "fact check" is longer and more ambiguous than the speech it attempts to clarify. The second is that most of the facts on offer are in fact opinions about what Ryan meant, or Clintonesque convolutions about what the word "closed" might mean. 

But what you might miss, in all of this, is that by the time we can all agree that there was no flagrant, intentional violation of established facts on Ryan's part (and if I haven't convinced you of that, please give up on me now) we have completely forgotten about the point he was trying to make. If I was inclined to be cynical, I'd say maybe that was the desired result: distract us from the ideas being discussed by raising the alarm that the truth is being hijacked. But I think there's a deeper issue: as a society, we've become extremely uncomfortable in thinking about and evaluating ideas.

Ryan's idea, if I can be so bold as to interpret it, is that government, held out by Democrats as an essential part of promoting innovation, creating jobs and building businesses, will in fact sap our vitality and harm our economy if it becomes too central. The anecdote he offers here resembles a small morality tale: an aspiring ruler promises a community that he can save their factory and their jobs, they enthusiastically support him, the factory closes anyway. The moral is that we should not put our faith in any leader, but rely on ourselves (and on the entrepreneurs who are held up as the people who can really create jobs.)

Now, none of this is factual, but that doesn't mean it is mere, useless opinion. It is an argument, a principle, a philosophy of governing, or (as Jonah Goldberg might say) an ideology. In a world where the facts alone cannot tell us which politician to vote for, we shouldn't look down our noses at belief systems that help us make sense of a complex world and determine a plan of action. In fact, they are absolutely essential, and choosing a belief system to follow is the proper task of this (and every) election. We used to be more comfortable talking about competing philosophies and using our values and life experience to choose between them, but now we dig, frantically, for the fool's gold of facts that aren't really facts at all.

I believe the desire to declare "facts" where none (or few) exist can be traced back to our respect for science. We see scientists answering some of the most complex questions of the natural world and want to do the same thing to the political and social worlds. While understanding that impulse, I would offer a note: we refer to the great revolutions of science with labels like, "The Theory of Evolution" or "The Theory of Relativity" because those breakthroughs are not facts. They are models that best explain the observations made by countless scientists, that are confirmed by abundant experiments. Saying that evolution is not a fact does not mean that it is on equal footing with Creationism: the vast preponderance of facts support evolution, while Creationism rests entirely on questionable religious authority. But it acknowledges that someday, a theory may come along that builds on what we currently know, and will better explain the facts than evolution does. 

There is no such preponderance of facts to support either "The Theory of Market-Driven Growth" (aka Republicanism) or "The Theory of Government-Guided Economic Stability" (aka Democratism). So place your faith not in the self-appointed fact checkers, but in your own ability to weigh the two candidates' philosophies and determine which one you trust.

Messaging verus Brand-Building: A Lesson from Politics

I've nothing original to say about the presidential race, so don't worry: this isn't that kind of a post. But I am curious about why our political debates seem so unpleasant and uninspiring, and why our trust in our leaders seems to be at an all time low. My contention is that we can track the problem to the constant polling and struggles to "win the news cycle": in other words an emphasis on messaging instead of--and in truth at the expense of--brand building.

David Brooks, in a recent column reinforcing a point made by Peggy Noonan, wrote about his "...attitude toward this presidential campaign: It’s incredibly consequential and incredibly boring all at the same time." He has a number of theories why, but I'd like to focus on one:

Third, increased focus on the uninformed. Four years ago, Barack Obama gave a sophisticated major speech on race. Mitt Romney did one on religion. This year, the candidates do not feel compelled to give major speeches. The prevailing view is that anybody who would pay attention to such a speech is already committed to a candidate. It’s more efficient to focus on the undecided voters, who don’t really follow politics or the news. 

Brooks doesn't get into how they target the uninformed, but I think we know: create a sensational claim about your opponent that fires up the media, and hope that the media will run with it to the point that it enters the consciousness of the uninformed voter. And, to drive the point home, run lots of ads echoing the attack.

As a marketer, I both understand this approach and am appalled by it. I understand because, unlike just about any other decision you make, presidential elections are a binary choice. The electorate "buys" one candidate or another. Individual voters have the option of staying home, but to a candidate's political operation, a non-voter is much better than a voter for the other guy, so that's alright. If, in contrast, I'm trying to sell a Toyota Camry, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to attack the Honda Accord, because the buyer can just go and buy a Nissan Maxima (or buy nothing, which is just as bad for you as if they buy a competitor.) You have to make a sale, so you might compare when you're better (especially when you're "best in class") but you won't just go negative.

But, as I said, I find it appalling that a campaign would go this route, not from any moral squeamishness (though many attacks cross a moral line) but because it is ultimately counter-productive. To be an effective political leader, you have to be a brand.

The ironic thing is that Barack Obama aspired to be a brand in 2008. In the classic marketing formulation, a brand should provide a rational, emotional and self-expressive benefit. How did Obama want to do this? His rational benefit was that he claimed the power to bridge an increasingly divided America. His classic line was, "there is no Red America and Blue America, just the United States of America." In other words, he was a centrist, a pragmatist, and would find solutions acceptable to both sides. You could argue that this was the "change" he often spoke of: not just the change from George W. Bush, but the change from ideological conflict to rational, solution-oriented governance.

The emotional benefit he offered was his other buzzword, "hope". This tapped into something deep within the country's psyche, because I'd contend we were feeling particularly hopeless after the wars, natural disasters and economic strains of the Bush years. But to achieve the emotional benefit he aspired to, Obama would need to deliver on the rational benefit. Part of our hopelessness was that our very system seemed to be failing.

Let me explain self-expressive benefits before I tackle what Obama offered: they are essentially what affiliation with a brand says about you. Nike has a famous self-expressive benefit: when I wear Nike gear, I'm showing the world that I'm a committed, hard-working athlete. Obama had a unique self-expressive benefit. His supporters were able to say, "I'm the kind of person who sees past labels (whether Democrat and Republican or black and white) and makes a visionary choice." A vote for Obama was saying you were on the side of tomorrow.

But a brand has to be very careful not to over-promise, because people don't like it when they fall for a brand only to feel it has let them down. I'd say Obama's failure (in the minds of a majority of Americans) to deliver on his promised rational benefit has tainted the emotional and self-expressive benefits he offered. If I was giving him advice, I'd say that his best bet is to go out with a certain amount of humility, and say, "I think we've accomplished some important things, but I pledged to change the attitude in DC and that is, to put it mildly, still a work in progress. I haven't done that as well as I wish I had. But one big initiative of my second term is going to be (pick issue with broad bipartisan support), and I hope if I am fortunate enough to still be the leader of this great country, that my Republican colleagues will sit down with me, share their thoughts, and give my proposals a fair shake." If he was really thinking about his brand, that issue would be deficit reduction, and he'd find a way to make a proposal that would make at least some Republicans say, "Damn, that's not such a bad idea."

But it seems obvious at this point that Obama's strategy is to say that Republicans are impossible to work with, and that they want only to help the rich and return us to the bad old days of George W. Bush's presidency. He doesn't seem to care that his message is poisoning what is left of his brand.

So, what about Romney? His challenge is that he is an essentially cautious man, and those types of executives tend not to focus on brand-building because good brands take a strong position, and by nature don't please everyone. Even the company he started, Bain Capital, borrowed the brand name of a famous consultancy. So it's not surprising that his brand is poorly defined. There seems some chance that the selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate might help him to define it, but his lack of brand-building before the pick means the pair is vulnerable to being defined as benefit-slashing, heartless tools of the wealthy. I'd advise them to make their rational value "sustainability", though you could equally say "preservation" could work: essentially, that we are going to find ways to sustain America's greatness and America's promise to her people. Our entitlements, our security, our freedoms and our place in the world could all be defined as unsustainable on the path we're on now. I'd relentlessly make the point that both Republican and Democratic leadership have made decisions that put our wealth, our freedoms, our safety net and our security at risk, and the Romney/Ryan administration will retrench us in a way that they are on sure footing.

That easily enables an emotional benefit of: "unleashing potential". People want to believe that we could do a lot better, that the system or the decisions of our leadership are hamstringing us. Give them faith that you have a solution.

Republicans typically try to tap into a self-expressive benefit of patriotism: I think it's fair to say a lot of Republicans harbor suspicions that Democrats like the America that they think will exist in the future, when we fix it, not the country that exists now. My guess is you'll see that again this year, but I think that'd be a missed opportunity. It doesn't appeal to anyone worried about their job or their family or their debt. I think they need to make people feel that a vote for Romney is a vote for optimism. That not all our options are miserable, that we can rearrange things so that more people are more successful and happier.

The trick is, to build that type of a brand the Romney campaign would have to stop focusing on Obama's flaws and say how he would make things better. And have the facts and conviction to make the case compellingly, and keep making it despite all the fleeting issues that will pop up during the campaign. But there is no reason to expect this to happen. Instead, we should anticipate the daily messaging efforts to continue. Here's Brooks again:

Both campaigns fervently believe that more spending leads to more votes. They also believe that if they can carpet bomb swing voters with enough negative ads, then eventually the sheer weight of the barrage will produce movement in their direction. There’s little evidence that these prejudices are true. But the campaigns are like World War I generals. If something isn’t working, the answer must be to try more of it.

 Maybe things will change, but it is more likely we'll keep getting messaged by both sides, and keep feeling worse and worse about where our politics and our country are going.

The Collapse of Our Institutions

A few months ago, I came across this article, compellingly titled "In Nothing We Trust", which catalogues our widespread lack of faith in the institutions of public life. Here's a sample:

People have lost faith in their institutions. Government, politics, corporations, the media, organized religion, organized labor, banks, businesses, and other mainstays of a healthy society are failing. It’s not just that the institutions are corrupt or broken; those clichés oversimplify an existential problem: With few notable exceptions, the nation’s onetime social pillars are ill-equipped for the 21st century. Most critically, they are failing to adapt quickly enough for a population buffeted by wrenching economic, technological, and demographic change.

The article goes on to highlight all the ways our institutions seem to be failing us. And who can deny that the pillars of civic life listed above are failing badly? Anecdotally, I speak to many people who feel as though we don't have the will or the ability to accomplish great things -- or even necessary things -- collectively.

The authors imply that this is a failure of adaptation: we need to change but we won't. But I think it is more fundamentally a failure of communication. We are increasingly incapable of telling others what we need and what we can offer. We don't have the shared assumptions, or the shared vocabulary, necessary to accomplish much institutionally.

An example: there was recently a dust-up about whether government created the Internet. An article by Farhad Manjoo ridiculed conservatives who challenged Obama's claim that the Internet was a fruit of government spending. He correctly points out that most of the fundamental technologies that allowed the Internet to develop were created by government agencies or government-sponsored research. But let's look at the original Obama quote that sparked the controversy:

“The Internet didn’t get invented on its own,” Obama said. “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

This was part of Obama's now (in)famous Virginia speech, where he uttered the often-quoted words, "You didn't build that." Conservatives have spent the month or so insisting that the speech revealed Obama holds to a liberal worldview that the government is the prime mover of society. Liberals pushed back by saying he was making a totally uncontroversial point about the role of infrastructure and basic research in allowing society to function and advance smoothly. But let's go back to the quote above: Obama uses the phrase "so that", implying that (to a conservative's ears) the purpose of the Internet was to allow private enterprise a new opportunity to make money. That's pretty clearly not true: the basic technologies of the Internet were invented to allow easier communication between a group of academics and researchers, and additional technologies and programs were, over decades, layered on top of it to create much of our current online experience. Conservatives are objecting both to the apparent diminishing of that private contribution, as well as the notion that government was far-sighted enough to develop the Internet for the private economy's gain. But again, liberals hear the same words and take away only that the government's efforts were a necessary precursor to private entrepreneurship.

The schism in the electorate exemplified by the above controversy suggest it is going to be near-impossible to get the two sides to agree on anything. Which leaves institutions two options: choose a side or try to split the difference. Choosing a side, of course, infuriates the other, while attempting to be "objective" just invites endless gotcha moments whenever one side thinks you've failed to live up to that ideal. It leads to a culture marked by scorekeeping and interminable squabbles over details rather than the progress that comes from a clear and widely accepted purpose. What we have now is two adversarial social tribes, each searching for a way to win.

To some degree, this tribal combat has always existed, but it is enhanced and made more toxic by information overload. Try to figure out, for example, the potential impacts of Obamacare on our budget and deficit. Read the Congressional Budget Office analysis, which alone will overwhelm you. (I'll be honest, I haven't read it all and don't plan to.) Now look at the responses from conservatives who criticize its more optimistic assumptions, and liberals who don't think the CBO credits certain cost-saving measures enough. Who's right? They'll all make at least superficially plausible arguments (unless you wade into the depths of the blogosphere) but there's no final answer. When there were relatively few information sources to choose from, consensus was at least possible, or you would have two or three arguments, a number manageable enough to consume and judge. Now, there's always another voice clamoring to be heard, and so most people throw up their hands and trust the folks representing their tribe to be right.

I'm taking a Coursera class on fantasy literature taught by Eric Rabkin, of the University of Michigan. For our first class we read Grimms' Fairy Tales, and he lectured that part of the purpose of the Tales was to forge the basis for a common German identity. The stories we tell each other, the fundamental beliefs that inform how we process information and make decisions, those are the basis for agreement and the starting point for institutions that can function well. Nowadays, though, we don't have any common stories, and even the words we hear mean different things depending on our politics. We seem doomed to fight over who is right while our institutions collapse around us.

A Bit More on Online Education and the Future of College

I often wait a week or two between when I find a topic and when I write about it, in large part because there are so many other interesting perspectives on any topic that I want to get a more complete picture. But my last post, on the ways online courses will change the way we think about education, went from seed to sprout more quickly, and I didn't get a chance to consider this post by Benjamin Lima. He writes about the unbundling of higher education (and uses the term the same way I use disaggregation), and makes some great points. First, that education is much more than a bundle of courses, it is a bundle of different benefits and experiences: 

A college education has traditionally bundled several different kinds of goods together: 

1. The curriculum: mastery of specific knowledge and development of more general reasoning, analytical, and communication skills.
2. The extra-curriculum: a network of friends and contacts, and experience gained from clubs, sports, internships and other activities.
3. The signaling process: validation of general talent or status by completing all of the above at a “better” or highly ranked college.
4. The college experience: everything that is personally interesting, enjoyable or rewarding about living in a certain place with certain people, and having experiences that are personally valuable to the college student, regardless of their value to anyone else or to society at large—everything from late-night conversations about the meaning of life, to road trips, to pranks, sports rivalries, and “school spirit.”

Traditionally, colleges provided all of these goods in a bundle, simply because the best way to provide them was to expensively gather a lot of students, faculty and resources in one place for several years at a time. But now, with the internet, is the logic of bundling starting to break down?

I think this is a great summary of why we consume college, and he goes on to note that the Internet can probably do a good job of unbundling #1 from the other three benefits, but those other three benefits still retain significant value. He additionally notes that the second and third benefits (arguably, at least) have value to society and are thus worth supporting in some way, while "the college experience" is essentially personal consumption, comprable to travel. Therefore, it is unlikely society will continue to subsidize it once it is unbundled from the other benefits. His conclusion, then, is worth noting:

Top colleges might be able to continue to use their vast resources (in the words of Kevin Carey: wealth, prestige, and exclusivity) to provide an expensive, valuable college experience (category 4) that helps attract top students, high-paying students, top faculty, and donations, in a self-reinforcing cycle as the rich get richer. This self-reinforcing cycle might very well increase the stratification among colleges, as fewer and fewer colleges are able to “play the game” and attract scarce “stars” among students and faculty. Over recent years, one could argue that this has already been happening, as top public universities in the U.S. are less and less able to compete with top private universities.  These top universities provide their students with bundle that includes both a lot of “college experience” to consume, and a high return on their human-capital investment.

If I was an administrator at, say, Providence College, this would terrify me. My alma mater is a good school, that offers a solid combination of the four benefits listed above. But it doesn't have the massive endowment of many schools in the Northeast, and it doesn't offer any elite academic programs, its alumni can't necessarily open a lot of doors for new graduates, the name doesn't cause HR directors to stop and take notice, and Providence, while wonderful, can't compete with Boston as a host for the full college experience. So how does it continue to fill its classrooms when those same students can virtually enroll in Ivy League courses? (If they hired me to do their strategy, I'd give a long look at doubling down on their Catholic identity, on the theory that there will always be parents who want their children to be morally educated and will steer them away from schools that indoctrinate their students in liberal secular humanism.)

Elsewhere, Walter Russell Mead, who inspired the original post, notes that studies indicate students learn as much from online courses as they do when they park their butts in the classroom, removing one obvious objection to online learning.

Online Education and Student Psychology

The always thought-provoking Walter Russell Mead wrote a little ways back about the coming revolution in education. (He also points out the challenge of building a viable economic model around online courses.) His thesis is that the advent of high-quality online courses and the ubiquity of the technology needed to access them will make education cheaper, more readily available, more customizable...just BETTER, for the most part. In his words: 

Online ed will accelerate rather than retard the transformation of American higher ed. Education needs to be cheaper and higher quality than most of it now is; there is no way universities can meet that demand without fundamental change.

 Mead has written about the topic at length, and sees expanding online education as a solution to the problem of the "higher education bubble" pointed out by Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) and others. The absurdity of paying so much for a degree that may not even reliably provide opportunities for well-compensated employment is now undeniable, but so is the reality that moving to online courses may dissolve the business model of bricks-and-mortar higher education, with unpredictable results.

However, the economics of online education is not my primary interest, it's the psychology. How will our perceptions of the value and importance of higher education change if it moves into cyberspace? (And how often do you hear anyone use that term anymore? I miss cyberspace...) A few thoughts:

1) The perceived value of an online education is likely to be lower even if, and maybe especially if, you earn your online degree from a prestigious school. Live attendance is likely to become a status marker, as well as enhancing the social bonds between those who did so while making them resentful of others who took what they will perceive as shortcuts. You can imagine an interviewer probing a candidate who lists MIT on their resume to see if they literally went there.

2) Pretty much every generation after World War II was brought up to function within an institutional setting. The basic model is that the institution (school, corporation, etc.) sets the rules by which success is judged, and the best rule followers succeed. But online education promises to take away the guiding role of institutions. Don't like what Harvard says a well-rounded education entails? Then take just the class or two from Harvard that you really have interest in, and don't worry about their degree. Feel constrained by what you need to do to get a psychology degree? Some university will probably help you design your own curriculum, pulling from a variety of sources, to help you achieve the education you want. This is a variation of the same disaggregation that has devastated newspapers, the music industry, and anyone else who makes money by bundling content. So what's the problem? We'll all be able to get our custom-fitted educations, and be more fulfilled, right? Well, while we might be comfortable mixing news from a bunch of different sources, educational institutions have a much more powerful claim to authority than the media does: their role is to teach us what we need to know. How, then, can we choose what classes we prefer without leaving holes in our education? My prediction is that students and professors will look for new ways to create virtual institutions that still set norms and aggregate classes into coherent programs of study. The alternative turns education into an overly self-centered exercise.

3) In an online educational world, we will see an odd race to the bottom to attract students with money to spend on education but without the wisdom to know what they really need to learn. Get ready for students taking classes on critical television analysis and the like. While many educators will no doubt look to online education as a way to positively influence more young minds, there will be many more who see that creating courses that pander to students' existing knowledge and interests is a quick way to make a buck. After all, a professor probably needs only a few hundred enrollees to make an online course a profitable venture. The division, already so familiar to anyone who goes to college, between people who are determined to push themselves (the minority) and those who navigate the easiest path to their degree, may be exacerbated.

4) The long-term psychological shift that is likely to play out is to greater, but more sporadic, consumption of education, with more value placed on utility and less on the badge value of the institution hosting the course. I'll use myself as an example. I went to a reasonably well-respected Catholic college, majoring in English, with the intent to be a journalist or writer. I'm now a marketer, and while the skills I learned have broad application to my work, I was never formally schooled on the ins and outs of my craft. I have no strong interest in an MBA and no ability to suspend my career to pursue a masters degree in Anthropology, which I'm otherwise interested in. Now, imagine I was living in a world of disaggregated higher ed. I may well have gotten an English degree, and maybe, if I could afford it, would have spent some time physically on campus. But at some point I might well have switched to taking classes online while I took my first steps into marketing. Then, periodically, as my career advanced, I would be likely to seek specific knowledge that might aid my advancement (and I'd feel pressure to take courses because a lot of other people would be doing it). Eventually, I might work with an institution to define a degree program incorporating some of the one-off classes I already took with a more focused course of study. And if I'm interested in pursuing a new career, I could take a course or two to test the water before I really commit. Suddenly your education becomes scalable to the scope of your ambition, because not everything needs to be oriented towards getting a degree.

In short, the short term reaction to disaggregated online education is likely to be mixed, with people's excitement tempered by online being seen as second rate and with a tendency to create courses that are easily marketed rather than rigorous, challenging options. But as we come to accept that the notion of young adults sequestering themselves on a campus for four years is an arbitrary, and maybe not even ideal, way to deliver education, I think we may see a culture that begins to prize relevant, on-demand learning over a lifetime. In response, traditional educational institutions for young people will be joined by new organizations poised to help adults identify and personalize more results-oriented educational programs.

And, if the casualty of this change is that many colleges cease to exist, or offer traditional on-site education, those campuses will be lovely communities to live in, with many amenities for those no longer burdened by massive student loan debts.

How Much Control Do We Have Over Our Brains?

There is a significant trend in neuroscience, and maybe even more so among the commentators who use that science to justify their political or social beliefs, of denying that we are really responsible for our own behavior. The usual argument goes like this: when a person does X, their brain scans light up in a certain way. People with brain damage to that area don't do X, or do it differently. Therefore we don't really have control of ourselves, our decisions or beliefs are just a function of our anatomy. I have written critically about these Just-So Science Stories here. Other writers (ok, better writers), in a political context, have pointed out that some liberal social scientists have started using this same approach to define conservatism as a disease.


However, just because science can be manipulated to support certain dubious conclusions doesn't mean there isn't a lot of interesting work being done in understanding how the brain works. And one such finding has to do with how a parasite in our brains might be responsible for our positive reactions to the scents of certain wines and perfumes. As writer Patrick House puts it:

Why is it that the elite French perfumers (known as “noses”) and sommeliers (“upturned noses”) of the world spend so much of their time inhaling cat effluvia from expensive glass bottles? A guess: It may have to do with a mind-control parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. The tiny protozoan may be getting into our brains and tricking us into liking cats—not to mention certain perfumes and wines.

In a recent study, Czech scientists gave men and women towels scented with the urine of various animals—horses, lions, hyenas, cats, dogs—which they rated for “pleasantness.” Turns out, men who tested positive for Toxo found the smell of cat urine more pleasant than men without Toxo. For Toxo researchers like me, this was a shock but not entirely surprising. Why? Toxo does approximately the same thing to rats.

You'll have to read the article to get the full theory of why Toxo does what it does, but the implications are staggering: a single-celled organism might be altering way our brain processes information from our senses. Think of it: could we find a bacteria that lowers the speed at which our neurons fire, influencing how fast we remember or respond to stimuli? Could we find a parasite that alters our hearing our sight?

Or think of the commercial issues. Some perfume and wine companies would presumably do better if more people were infected by Toxo. Maybe Chanel will start working with animal adoption organizations to try to get cats into more homes, increasing their likely customer base.

If we begin to discover that some significant portion of the way we perceive the world is influenced by outside organisms, will we attempt to purge them all to standardize the way the human mind works? Will we search for those with favorable impacts and try to infect everyone with them? Could this be the next frontier in pharmaceutical development? Or is this a one-off, and our mental machinery is basically unaltered by microscopic invaders? I guess we just have to wait and see.