Wagers, Motivation and Public Humiliation

When I worked at a small agency in Boston, I found myself hanging out in a bar with a friend and colleague, getting a bit tipsy as we talked shop and played Golden Tee. Everything was pretty casual until we decided it would be fun to bet over the result. Eventually, we hit upon a unique wager: the loser would have to go up to our boss during a meeting, inhale deeply, and exclaim, "Wow, Jack, you smell AMAZING!" Suddenly the game took on a manic intensity: the stakes had focused our inebriated brains.

I bring this up, first, to embarrass the person who lost the bet and then backed out of doing it, and second to note the power of a wager to raise the stakes in any activity. If someone asks me whether I could run a 5k, I'd shrug my shoulders because I really could care less. But if someone bets me $100 that I couldn't finish one, I'm going to hit the road and be out training tomorrow. It isn't that I really, really need that money, but that I really, really like to win.

It is that insight, that people's desire to win (or to see their friends humiliated) that is driving a new approach from everything from weight loss to fundraising. And we are very creative about the types of wagers that we make. One interesting way to set up the competitive dynamic is actually to bet on yourself, and make that bet public. That's essentially what Stickk.com is doing: they pioneered the idea of a commitment contract. Here's how it works: you set a goal, for example to lose twenty pounds or run a marathon., and you set up a contractual penalty if you fail to reach the goal. One common approach is to donate some money to a charity you dislike, like an avid meat-eater sending $100 to PETA. The donation is placed on hold, and only made if you fail to reach your goal. Then you set up a referee who validates that you accomplished the challenge, and you can invite friends and family to watch your progress. 

How successful is it? According to Ogilvy PR's site: "StickK.com is doing well in helping people achieve their goals. For people who use the website to set and achieve weight loss goals, for example, there is a reported 85%-90% achievement rate." If validated, that is a far higher rate than programs like Weight Watchers and even prescription weight loss aids. It proves that people don't like losing money, but also that they don't want to be seen as losers once they've made the public bet with themselves.

More recently, a site called moolta.com has taken this idea and applied it to fundraising. The mechanism is a little different than Stickk: here, users raise money by being willing to take on absurd challenges. As nocamels.com explains:

Would you take a shower in a public fountain? What if your friends would donate $50 if you did it? A just-hatched startup called Moolta wants you to challenge your friends to do wildly crazy things, record their antics and post them to their platform. What’s in it for the dare accepters? The dare is a fundraiser — in most cases for charity.

The interesting thing about this model is that the donors are essentially paying to "win" a bet, but the daredevil who does (and records!) the act is really winning by proving his commitment to a cause and his personal fearlessness in public. And when you think about our social media-driven world, people are trying hard to be seen as creative, fearless and unconventional all the time. Moolta has combined a clever way of raising money for charity with a novel opportunity to create viral content.

Clearly, wagers and humiliation are motivating in at least two ways: in the Stickk model, avoiding humiliation and loss is meant to drive desired behavior change. In Moolta's approach, people can bet on their friends' willingness to humiliate themselves for charity, and those friends are liberated to act ridiculously by the fact that they're doing it for a good cause. We love betting on and against each other so much that there is plenty of room for both to thrive.

Big and Small and Branding (with free advice for the Republican party)

Partially because of a pitch I just finished working on, where our ideas played with the notion of bigness, I've been thinking a lot about big and small. Specifically, I think these two words have an interruptive value: they can make you stop and reconsider things.

A classic example is the 'Think Small' ad to the left. The assumption the car buying public made at the time was that bigger is better, but this ad challenged the notion head on. It forces you to ask an obvious question: why, exactly, do I want or need a bigger car? Many people, I believe, answered it by saying they were shopping for bigness because of social pressures and not because they really wanted it. And so a smaller car made them feel not just frugal, not even smart, but like an individual. The word small didn't just mean physically smaller, but psychologically smaller, moving from a collective level of decision making to a personal one.

An interesting counter-example can be found in the cell phone business, where Samsung seems to be trying to stake out a place for itself as the 'big' smartphone maker. It starts, of course, with making a phone so big that some people question whether it is even practical, but a look at their ad will also give you a sense that (even though they don't use the word) they are trying to link that physical bigness to a sense of transformation, of expanding possibilities. It subverts the trend towards smallness that tends to rule in the technology space. But I think being more explicit about the value of bigness in a space that so often devalues it would have potentially been a lot more disruptive than their reliance on the oft-abused stand in, free.

Why are the notions of big and small so powerful in branding when used correctly? I think we can trace that back to the interplay between our desires for stability and progress. Our default position is to stick with what we know and our comfortable with. But we also don't like being stuck with something outdated, so we tend to assume certain trends: that cars will keep getting bigger or cell phones will keep getting smaller. In other words, we assume progress is linear and predictable, and buy accordingly. Marketers use those assumptions to keep selling new versions of their products. But sometimes products come along that flip the trend assumptions on their heads. What is a savvy marketer to do? Challenge the trend head-on, and give people reason to think that the trend is arbitrary or played out. Your departure from the norm isn't then lesser, or even just different, but bold, better: in short, a sign of radical, unexpected progress people can get excited about.

At some point in thinking about this topic, the wires in my brain that think about marketing got crossed with those that think about politics. It might have been this article that Jonah Goldberg wrote about federalism, and how absurd it is for the federal government to interfere in local disputes about things like the proper care arrangements for the six-toed cat population of Key West, Florida. He writes:

Federalism reduces partisanship by shrinking the importance of the federal government. It increases happiness by maximizing the number of people who get to live the way they want to live.Unfortunately, proponents of federalism tend to start the conversation with the really big issues: gay marriage, drugs, guns, abortion, etc.I'm for making all of those things local issues wherever possible, too. But, admittedly, those questions are complicated or emotionally freighted. Some questions do cut to the heart of what it means to be an American.  But many don't. So let's start there.

This struck me as an interesting idea for shaking up the political status quo. However, it has a branding problem. Support for federalism is often associated with the big issues he outlines, and supporters of local decision making are demonized: if, for example, you support federalism in the case of gay marriage, you are really a homophobe who wants to deny civil rights. If you support federalism in gun laws, you are really trying to take firearms from law abiding citizens one state at a time.

So, even though I am a supporter of federalism even in the case of big issues, I agree with Mr. Goldberg that we should start with the less controversial issues. I would go further to say that the taint that has been put on the word 'federalism' might require politicians to think of a new way to promote this cause.

A model for this would be the 'Big Society' movement launched by the Conservative party in the UK. They call this, "a massive transfer of power from Whitehall [the seat of their national government] to local communities." It plays off of the notion of 'Big Government', the idea that in an increasingly tumultuous and challenging world, we need a central power to set the rules that will make things fair and happy for more people. However, I think the challenge we face isn't that people don't like 'government', but that they increasingly don't like 'big'. So implying that society is going to get big implies shifting that stress to a different place.

Almost any institution that gets the word 'big' affixed to it is loathed. Not just Big Government but Big Business (and its tributaries like Big Finance and Big Pharma) and Big Labor. The word, in the context of institutions, has come to imply imbalance and heavy-handedness: the individual is simply too small to push back if one of these forces is arrayed against them. It also suggests facelessness. Who do you appeal to if Big Business screws you over? People are just tools of the system. Any individual bureaucrat might be nice enough, but if he can't help, there's nothing you can do. (Check out this article on rebuilding after Sandy for an example.) People are fed up with Big, and a lot of them feel like it's holding them back.

In the last election, a lot of people seemed to view Obama versus Romney as a choice between Big Government and Big Business, or as a choice between the poor and the rich. Neither of those formulations seemed to favor Romney. So, my promised free advice to Republicans: be the party of Small. Right now, they try to embrace Small Business, which is a start, but what about Small Decision-Making (the label might need work, but I mean keeping decisions and laws local as outlined in the libertarian argument above). What about Small Finance (breaking up Too-Big-To-Fail Banks and treating hedge fund earners like the rest of us)? I'll let someone else find the name, but what about acknowledging that there are only a few issues where government needs to dictate a uniform standard of morality to all 50 states and 300 million Americans? And of course Small Debt, which is self-explanatory.

The beauty of this platform, which I'll call the Freedom to Live Small, is that it allows people to campaign on big and popular principles while acknowledging that local beliefs might not support each manifestation of those principles. So a Republican in New Jersey can be personally in favor of tight gun control, but respect the right of Texans to live differently, and not be a hypocrite. I actually think it would be pretty refreshing to hear a politician on either side of an issue, instead of grandstanding, say, "We believe in X in my state, have passed laws that support it, but I see no reason to impose that belief on the entire country."

But the psychological benefits of Smallness go beyond any particular law that might be enacted (or avoided). It is a promise that we'll have fewer anger-fueled national arguments, that a flawed educational or economic theory won't hamstring the entire country for a generation if it is implemented, that we won't live our lives buckling under the pressure of one powerful institution after another. It is a promise that we can increase the level of mastery over our own lives, that smaller is simpler.

Maybe I'm crazy, and there's not much to this idea. If so, just chalk it up to me being a Big bullshitter.

Mortality, Money and Other People

The data might not be this clear-cut, but clearly the US is an outlier.

How much is your life, or your health, actually worth? I'm sure you'd put a pretty big number on it. If, for example, you needed to borrow $100,000 to cure a chronic, life-altering disease, I would bet you would do so. Where you place your personal cutoff point when health care is no longer worth the money will vary, but at some point almost everyone will decide that it is better to accept your mortality than to expend your family's wealth in pursuit of life-extending care.

But what if I re-phrased the question? What if I asked how much your life and your health should be worth to some third party who is obligated to pay for your care? It is much less likely you would say, "you know, the government/insurance company has wasted enough money on me, it's time to let go." No, if you are entitled to care from someone else, you will want as much of it as you can get.

I think the above chart (which, in updates to the blog posts where I originally saw this now point out, is a display of GOVERNMENT spending, and may have other inaccuracies) is showing what happens when that psychological truth is given free reign. In the other countries shown, there is an understanding that the government will impose limits on what will be paid for in the interest of fairness and frugality. In the US, by contrast, there are very few limits. This leads Matthew Yglesias to argue that the much-maligned death panels are actually just what we need. As he puts it:

The "death panels" charge was a potent one for a reason. But not only is this health care spending on the elderly the key issue in the federal budget, our disproportionate allocation of health care dollars to old people surely accounts for the remarkable lack of apparent cost effectiveness of the American health care system. When the patient is already over 80, the simple fact of the matter is that no amount of treatment is going to work miracles in terms of life expectancy or quality of life.

To clarify, again, Yglesias was writing when he thought the chart captured ALL healthcare spending in each country, but surely adding in non-government spending on elderly patients would not invalidate his general point. Namely, that the decisions other countries make about what care is economically justifiable, which we would call "death panels", are the only way to constrain the growth in healthcare spending when the government is footing the bill.

But the reason the death panel argument is so potent is that we in the US understand healthcare as an entitlement, full stop. Politicians have sold Medicare, Medicaid and now Obamacare as a guarantee of full care. Think about this statement by President Obama: "I'm running because I believe that in America no one should go bankrupt because they get sick." That is a pretty remarkable statement, when you stop and think about it, because healthcare is enormously expensive. And as a practical matter, he doesn't mean it: someone who opts for experimental procedures, who tries a costly drug to tread a disease for which it is not indicated, or even someone who chooses a doctor outside of their insurance plan can all still go bankrupt. What he really means is that no one who follows the rules and limits the government imposes on healthcare will go bankrupt because they get sick, but that's not what most people hear. And so when the government tries to impose or extend those limits, people get very angry. And, as has been noted extensively in political commentary, older people vote.

There isn't a happy ending to this story, because people don't like giving up something they think they've been promised. But the only way out of the healthcare mess we're in is to make people feel they're making a financial tradeoff when they consume healthcare. One simple suggestion: the government could give tax credits (or even cash awards) to seniors who are among the lowest consumers of Medicare. Eventually, we could seek to establish a lifetime dollar target for an individual's government health benefits. People who die under that number would pass on some percentage of the difference to their estates. Or, we could provide an annual grant to seniors to buy coverage, and they pocket the difference if they find a cheaper option. (This is essentially Paul Ryan's Medicare reform proposal.) 

None of these changes would be painless, and there is a large contingency that wants to maintain the status quo no matter the costs. But a system that pretends there are no limits on what we can afford to cover, and implies there are no limits on how much care it is even rational to get, encourages people to seek out the maximum amount of care instead of the care that makes sense for them, their families, and their finances.

I know, in writing this, that I might be thought cruel. In other words, that I'm saying we should let people die if they're poor. But I'm not: what I'm saying is by creating a system that encourages the view that you should do everything possible to stave off death, no matter the financial or personal toll, we've driven people to disbelieve in their own mortality and have outsized expectations for what medicine can do. In contrast, I would recommend this piece on how doctors die: people who truly understand medicine, health and the human body are much less inclined to seek end-of-life care.

There is dignity in accepting when our life has run its course. One of the under-discussed benefits of giving more control of our health decisions back to us is that we will more clearly make our own decisions about when to keep fighting and when to let go. With no death panels required.

Persistence and Resilience

"You've got to be persistent."

My son is at the point in his development when he wants to run and play every waking moment. Keeping up with him takes a constant effort and a saint-like willingness to endlessly chase him and keep him from accidentally killing himself.
The only thing that will keep him calm for any decent block of time is The Best of Elmo 2. At this point, I have memorized every word on that video.

It consists mostly of famous musicians appearing to sing a song with Elmo, but stuck in there is a brief clip of David Beckham talking about the importance of persistence. It is a simple lesson, but one that I hope sinks in for my son. And it also made me think that maybe I've been a bit too pessimistic about our country recently, including in posts like this. But the best argument in favor of optimism for our future is that American society celebrates and rewards persistence.

Persistence, if you're not willing to watch David Beckham's explanation of it, is simply the willingness to keep trying to solve a problem that doesn't seem solvable after the previous attempt. It is a comfort with starting fresh, with reinvention. And America has been a magnet for persistent people, who are willing to dig as deep as they have to for an answer. And not just our Edisons, our Fords, our Wright Brothers: most everyone who got off a boat to make a new life here was jettisoning old assumptions and comforts to try something new, and was ready to keep trying until they found success. We still have an abundance of these folks, and I feel sure that if things got rough enough, we'd see more of a concerted effort by them to get involved and devise some new solutions.

I think a second element is required to solve big, complex problems: resilience. Some people, I think, might believe the two concepts are similar, but resilience is in many ways a precursor to persistence. The word actually comes from the Latin resili which means to spring back or rebound. Resilient things and people thus have the ability to return to their original state when they become deformed: exactly the opposite of getting bent out of shape. So you need resilience individually to return to your optimistic starting point and try again, but more importantly you need to live in a resilient society, one that doesn't get too distorted by bad laws or bad leaders. The US has, in the Constitution and the system of government built by it, an extraordinarily resilient political system. It has allowed a wildly diverse people over a huge expanse of territory to adapt to changing times and emergent challenges. Though we can't take for granted that it can solve every problem, it would be unwise to bet against it in any particular moment of crisis. As Glenn Reynolds wrote recently, if the federal government becomes overbearing or dysfunctional, we can evolve towards more localized decision-making that can ratchet down some of the national-level disagreements that today seem so resistant to resolution.

Nassim Taleb has been writing about something like this when he talks about antifragility. Basically, he's saying we need to design our institutions so that crisis and even failure makes them stronger, instead of destroying them. He also outlines five ways to build antifragile organizations that should be read by anyone high up in government or business. (I do think the transparent attempt to make 'antifragile' a business buzzword is a little sad, though I'll probably be using it in a presentation at some point next year.) Regardless, one point he made really stuck with me:

Some businesses and political systems respond to stress better than others. The airline industry is set up in such a way as to make travel safer after every plane crash. A tragedy leads to the thorough examination and elimination of the cause of the problem. The same thing happens in the restaurant industry, where the quality of your next meal depends on the failure rate in the business—what kills some makes others stronger. Without the high failure rate in the restaurant business, you would be eating Soviet-style cafeteria food for your next meal out.

 As a country we've been pretty good about learning from our mistakes: having 50 states means the folks in 49 of them can watch one try something new, and copy the ideas that make things better. A lot of the fear people have about recent trends is that we seem to be making the same mistakes over and over again. Consider how many fiscal crises we've had in the last five years, and how similarly all of them have played out. If we lose our resilience/antifragility, we're in deep trouble.

I grew up in Monroe, Connecticut, one town over from Newtown. A lot of my family lives in that tragedy-stained town, and I think it offers cause for both hope and alarm if we consider what it tells us about our persistence and resilience. On the one hand, we've had a steady stream of these tragedies in recent years, and we haven't been resilient enough to find a new approach to our laws or our culture that would help, and we haven't been persistent enough to stay focused on the issue after it fades from the newspaper headlines. Yet, when you see how the people of that town are handling the horror they've been through, you can't help but believe we still have a reserve of these qualities. They are helping each other, finding creative ways of getting the surviving children back to class, and raising money for the victims' families.

May we apply their example to the equally challenging, but far less awful, issues that face our government and our economy.

The Empire of the Elite

The most recent election gave me the nagging feeling that I, and most everyone I know, was being played for a fool. The so-called fiscal cliff debate has finally confirmed it for me. I was foolish to believe, against the evidence of my own experience, that our leaders care about us or are even particularly concerned with being our leaders. What we are witnessing right now is the latest round of a great, global game of Empire. The people we think of as our leaders should more properly be viewed as our rulers.

This is not, by the way, an Illuminati-like argument that there is a cabal secretly controlling the world. It is rather to say that the natural state of man is not participatory democracy, but leadership by an elite, and that natural state is reasserting itself. And the elite we have is, all things considered, considerably kinder and gentler than previous versions. But the fact remains that they are ruling us, and their goals are not our goals.

Now, this is a huge topic, and I am at risk of getting lost in it, so I'm going to quickly lay out my thesis and give you a couple of arguments in support of it. My basic theory is this: in the 1800's, the Europeans, and especially the British, created the first global system. People from those countries were the only ones who had a chance to be rulers, but the colonies created opportunity for many people who otherwise would have been trapped by their class to rise. This was one strand of the meritocratic model.

At the same time, the United States was neither ruled or ruler, but a democracy (although a far from perfect one) where people were free to pursue their own goals. This was a second strand of meritocracy. But after World War II, the European empires were destroyed and the US was ascendant, although facing an existential foe in the USSR. The US, then, adopted a modified form of empire: it didn't rule directly, but provided economic goodies and military protection for those who played along. It also allowed the most talented people from other nations to come here and join an elite that would either build wealth here or take their knowledge back home. The meritocracy was thus globalized, but at the same time our exposure to the first strand of meritocracy (which essentially held that the most powerful or talented should administer the world for the greater good) began to modify our own more individualistic conception of success.

The result is ably described in this quote from a 2011 article in The Atlantic Monthly:

[T]he rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home.

The key word in that paragraph, by the way, is competition. Our elite are consumed with getting into a position of global prominence and then beating their fellows in the great game of wealth and power accumulation. They are not, with few exceptions, primarily concerned with building national or local prosperity. They are building a global empire of the elite, and we are its subjects.

The conversation around the fiscal cliff is a clear indicator that our national politicians, and the media and business leaders that surround them, are more concerned with power than outcomes. The entire conversation, from the President on down to David Gregory on Meet the Press this morning, is driven by who gains political advantage from a deal, or lack thereof. Only rarely do you hear anyone even mention the underlying issues of debt and spending that have gotten us to this point, and the conversation almost instantly breaks down over whose numbers are more important, and moments later we are back to looking at who is winning the polls.

The politicians on both sides work for, and want to be part of, the elite. That's why they're willing to raise taxes on income before they'll go after taxes on investment. Because the bankers and hedge fund managers who pay those low taxes on their earnings all went to the same elite schools as the politicians, attend Davos with those politicians, and go to costly fundraisers with (and often for) those politicians. The politicians know these people and care about them in ways they could never know or care about most of their constituents. Now, this isn't to say every politician is this way, but certainly enough are that it distorts our civic life profoundly.

Since this global elite is so focused on money (as a numeric indicator of power, if nothing else) it is not surprising that financiers would be at the heart of the matter. Many made the argument that a global financial system that is so complex and intertwined that the collapse of any large institution could destroy the worldwide economy should be dismantled. I have never heard a coherent argument against this position, I am sure it polls incredibly well around the world, and the banks go on more or less untouched, and they even manage to do things like help Iran launder money in the search for profits.

Again, I'm not saying we're being oppressed or horribly mistreated by these rulers, merely that they are making the decisions they think are best for "the people" without really caring about what the people want, and that they are increasingly adept at extracting wealth from us without giving much of value in return. This elite has managed to avoid a shooting war in and amongst the developed nations for over 70 years, and has, I think, done some good in reducing the impact of extreme poverty. Their record isn't all that bad compared with some other ruling classes we could look at.

It is just good to keep in mind that this global ruling class is ultimately running the show, that it neither feels connected to or much worries about the middle class in the countries it happens to inhabit, and that it feels no compunction about being very well-compensated for its efforts. If nothing else, it will help you make more sense of seemingly manufactured events like the fiscal cliff.

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.

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.

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.

All Patriotism is Local

Peggy Noonan writes, teasingly, about a resurgence of patriotism in our country. As someone who thinks the Samuel Johnson line, "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel", is one of the most abused sayings in English, I would welcome such a development. But I say teasingly because there doesn't seem to be any data to support that proposition, and my personal experience hints that, if such patriotism exists at all, it is an inch deep. She writes:

The untapped patriotism out there—if it were electricity, it would remake the grid and light up the world. And it’s among all professions, classes and groups, from the boardroom to the Tea Party meeting to the pediatric ICU.

We think patriotism reached its height after 9/11, but I think it is reaching some new height now, and we’re only beginning to notice.

But how is that patriotism manifesting itself? In ever-more-bitter national politics? In endless wrangling over a government solution to economic problems that are fundamentally due to our failure as a people to work hard, be thrifty and innovate? If the result of this patriotism is that 2012 becomes a year remembered for the most bitter presidential election in history, then I say our patriotic energies were wasted no matter the outcome.

What we seem to have forgotten is that "love of country" is an abstraction until it is tied to particular behavior in a particular place. The college grad who does "Teach for America" is helping a small number of kids in a certain city. Same with the person who does Habitat for Humanity on the weekends: it's not 'humanity' that they help, but a small number of families who get much-needed homes. We only talk about these larger abstract terms because we want a convenient shorthand to describe similar actions taken by thousands or millions of people.

So the reason I think Noonan's patriotism is so paper-thin is that most people will not be doing anything concrete to act on it. There's simply no outlet for their energy, because all of the focus is on who's running the show as President, and what the federal government should do (or fails to do). Well, guess what: anyone reading this is not going have any influence on whether Obama or Republican X becomes the next leader of the free world, or what they do in that role.

Which brings me, I suppose, to both why I am a conservative and why I'm something of a hypocrite. I think the best hope for our country is to get back to people directing their patriotic and political energies to the local, to the concrete. If Mitt Romney or Rick Perry or Herman Cain wins an election in 13 months, that doesn't mean anything has been solved, or improvement in our economy or culture is much more likely. People need to start making changes locally that can bubble up and improve the country as a whole. I'm a conservative because I think that government, at the national and sometimes even at the state level, impedes that happening by nationalizing every problem and convincing people that someone in Washington will 'do something' for them. I'm a hypocrite because I don't do enough locally to back up that conviction. (But, I hope to here in beautiful Maplewood.)

A million people doing something for their town or their neighbor is going to accomplish a lot more than a million people campaigning for a president or a party. If you love your country, help your neighbor.

Agony and Ecstacy

World, say hi to Graham. He's new. And it is entirely fair to say that he's occupied the vast majority of my thoughts for the last four days. But when I haven't been wondering what it means when he does that little shaky twitchy thing he does, or trying to figure out if he's objectively cute or whether I'm just believing everyone who tells me that because I'm over the moon for him, I have had a few moments to think about fatherhood and child rearing in this crazy world we live in.

The first thing I've noticed about having a new baby is that you are not allowed to have your own emotions about it. You are told by everyone from the doctor to your friends to the woman who cleans your hospital room that you are feeling as happy as you ever have in your life. Which is, at some level, true. But I have to admit the dominant feeling I had was one of awe. I am in awe that I could have had anything to do with making something as great as Graham. But I am even more in awe of the responsibility that has been bestowed upon me by society. How can anyone live up to the task of giving a new human being a chance to reach whatever potential he has, without smothering him in the effort?

That thought made me realize there were many times I was entirely too hard on my parents. There's no good answer to that question, so you're bound to offend your child either by not doing enough for him or by not giving him the independence he deserves. (Now, I'm still not willing to admit that I was wrong and my parents were right in any particular argument, but I can appreciate their motivations.)

I've also become profoundly aware that the world has acquired a greatly enhanced ability to cause me pain. Anything that happened to Graham would be completely devastating. In fact, I don't even want to write about this or think about it anymore: let's move on to the flip side. What's that? Simply that every achievement or triumph or happiness that Graham has going forward will provide me a deeper satisfaction than anything else I can imagine. Even the other day, when the lactation consultant noticed his fast-darting eyes and said, "Wow, he's really observant, you're going to have a smart one on your hands," I wanted to run a victory lap. I've been searching for an analogous feeling, and the only one I can think of is that sensation when you sit down to watch one of your sports teams at the start of a season, and follow them obsessively through a whole year until they win the championship. There is a feeling that you've been given happiness for free, that you've been swept up into something bigger than your own striving and seen it come to a perfect conclusion.

So that's what gets balanced in parenthood: the happiness of meeting your child with the overwhelming sense of responsibility going forward. The agony of fearing what could happen to them with the ecstacy of watching them grow and achieve. I feel pulled in both directions at each moment, and while it makes my stomach churn, I wouldn't have it any other way.

The Triviality of Now

My friend Anna (who, coincidentally, you should be using for all of your communication needs) just started blogging, and her first post was a primal scream challenging our complacent acceptance of modern techno-culture. To start, she notes:

We know too much of one another’s mundane details: where someone eats, drinks, who they eat and drink with, who they like and who they don't like to eat and drink with, where they work, how they work, how much they hate their work (I have yet to see "I love my job" post that's not facetious). It is a variable "hot sheet" of the daily grind. TMI to the umpteenth power. It is The Age of Minutia.

Perhaps you've heard this gripe expressed before: social media is all surface and no depth, about the sad little performances we put on in the digital world for our friends. But it's worth thinking about exactly what we're putting on these sites, and how it appears in the aggregate: we are incapable of thinking about or discussing anything more substantial than our last meal or the funny/shocking story we just saw.

But my favorite point Anna made was this:

Idiots are allot more fascinating to watch than someone with a brain cell. It is like recess vs. school.

Watch the coverage of politics, including (and maybe especially) the coverage of the debt ceiling 'crisis'. We hear all about the dumb things people say, and the 'gotcha' moments, but no one tries to break down the options on the table and discuss what each of them will mean for the country. Our media takes the idiots in politics and makes them the most important figures, and attempts to make our wiser leaders and reduce them to idiots. And because each side knows the easiest way to score a point is to make the other side look bad, we see this sad jockeying take the place of debate, negotiation and agreement.

The technology is a reflection of the culture, and the culture is broken. And the worst part is there are no solutions on the table that would do anything to fix it. So, pray.

***

On a personal note, I'm expecting my son to be born any day now (so pray for me and my wife, too!) I'm sure this blog will go dark for a bit when that happens. And after, I plan to change up my approach, and include shorter, more frequent posts. So stay tuned.