A Precise Moment of Political Polarization

by James Wallace Harris, Thursday, April 27, 2017

Last night on the PBS Newshour Judy Woodruff interviewed Mick Mulvaney, Donald Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. When Woodruff pointed out that Reagan’s tax cuts didn’t lead to big economic growth Mulvaney looks at Woodruff and pauses. In that moment we see why we’re politically divided. Mulvaney stares at Woodruff as if she had just said the world was flat. Then Mulvaney says she was wrong and quotes figures about GDP growth. Woodruff doesn’t press the point and goes on to other questions.

Who is right? Both views can’t be right. Did Reagan’s tax cuts help the economy or not? Is it a matter of seeing two sides of a coin? Didn’t Reagan’s tax cuts have countless impacts and each side is now using figures from specific impacts to support their political beliefs? Can any one indicator predict future complexity?

Our reality is infinitely complex. The economy is not that complex, but the number of variables is so great that it’s hard to grasp. Liberals are focused on social equality, conservatives are focused on the freedom to get ahead. They each use evidence to support their beliefs assuming reality works the way they want to see it.

For us to ever solve our political polarization problem will require both sides studying the evidence in new ways. Think of understanding the economy like a science experiment. Any scientific journal that ran studies by current liberals and conservatives would be deemed biased. You can’t go into an experiment looking for an outcome. You can’t cherry pick the results to meet your hypothesis. But that’s what polarized politics does all the time.

If you watch the video closely, you can see that Mulvaney’s conviction that the tax cuts will work is equal to any pope’s conviction that God exists. He’s also confident that GDP growth will pay for the tax cuts in the same way liberals are convinced they will only grow the budget deficit.

Basically, conservatives will embrace what Mulvaney says, while liberals will question it. Is there any evidence to support or deny his claims? This is where it gets hard. One of Mulvaney’s basic assertion is we want a 3% GDP growth rate, and under Obama that never happened. Here’s an article from CBS News that supports his claim. That article included this graph:

10_straight_years-gdp_growth-chart

And if you look at GDP growth rate after 1982 when Reagan’s tax cuts took effect, GDP growth rates did eventually grow above the 3% rate. The Reagan-Bush era ran from 1/81 through 1/93, and before it was over growth rates had fallen below 3%. We had 3% plus growth rates under Clinton, and briefly under the second Bush administration. Isn’t this evidence that growth rates aren’t tied to taxes?

But can you explain the economy with such simple numbers? I’m not trying to explain economics here, I’m trying to explain belief systems. We all suffer the Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to economics, even economists with PhDs. The above chart might have been all Mick Mulvaney needed to support his faith in tax cuts. But it’s not enough.

Look at these charts that break down GDP in various ways. Instead of looking at one number, overall growth rates, we’re looking at several numbers. And this approach is still incredibly simple. To really understand the problem we need to be an economist working with several supercomputers analyzing trillions of numbers.

contributions_to_percent_change_in_real_gdp_28the_us_1991-29

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File_talk:Contributions_to_Percent_Change_in_Real_GDP_(the_US_1991-).png

us_quarterly_gdp_contributions

Source: http://www.thoughtofferings.com/2010/08/real-gdp-growth-in-us-and-japan-closer.html

Here’s a comparison to world GDP, which shows GDP growth is related to world GDP growth. In other words, there are many outside factors we have to consider.

20150613_inc576

Source: http://www.economist.com/news/economic-and-financial-indicators/21654018-world-gdp

This is enough charts to make my point that the issue is more complex than one number. Mulvaney has an undergraduate degree in international economics, but his graduate degree is in law. Then he became a politician. I don’t think he can know what the tax cuts will do. But then, neither will liberal politicians. We’re literally gambling.

I would have trusted Mulvaney more if he had presented 20 factors and charts to make his case. But how many citizens want to sit through such a presentation?

If the average citizen tried to understand the economic evidence they would be quickly overwhelmed. When Mulvaney replies “That’s not true,”  when Judy Woodruff tells him the Reagan tax cuts didn’t work I believe he believes that. But I don’t think he knows. I’m not sure anyone knows.

Watch the above video closely. Is it ever about facts and evidence? Isn’t it about one ideology versus another? We tweak the economy every new administration, but how much does that really do? Isn’t the economy really a pinball machine with a quadrillion balls and bumpers? Aren’t major changes dangerous?

I’m tired of meaningless evidence. We need AI minds and armies of supercomputers to analyze the economy. I might trust them, but I don’t think I can trust humans anymore. I can’t even trust my own beliefs. I don’t think humans are smart enough. I’m quite confident that conservatives are wrong, but I can’t prove it. And I’m tired of people with absolute faith in their superiority running the country. Such vain egotism is scary.

What divides us politically is how we react to what we think we know, even though we don’t.

JWH

Comparing Where-To-Retire Strategies

by James Wallace Harris, Monday, April 24, 2017

My wife Susan and I have been talking about possible places to retire. Right now we each have completely different thoughts on the subject. It would help if I laid out the possibilities. Making this decision feels like climbing a mountain. Quite often I want to turn around and go back down.

mountain-and-reflection

The Least-Effort Lazy Plan

Our house will soon be paid off. We could just stay here. We’ve recently bought a 30-year roof. Since the Social Security Life Expectancy calculator predicts we’ll live another twenty years, we’re covered so-to-speak. Twenty years seems like a long-time and not-too-long time. To give perspective, the film Titanic came out twenty years ago.

Retiring in place has many advantages. We know the city. We have our friends. We have our routines. We know all our doctors, dentists, plumbers, and such.

The main disadvantage is it’s the same old place and we could be living somewhere much more exciting — or secure.

The Secure Low-Maintenance Plan

Maintaining a house, especially while getting older, is a pain-in-the-ass. My idea for the perfect low-stress retirement is to move to a 55+ community and rent a nice apartment. It would need to be well-built and soundproof. I don’t want to hear neighbors or they hear us. But the idea of having no yard is overwhelmingly seductive. I’d also love to live somewhere where we didn’t need a car. I imagine moving to a retirement community near a small city would be a safer place for aging. The bustle of a big city is probably scary while aging.

Living in a 55+ community would also offer lots of social outlets and activities. Plus all the support services would be geared to people our age. Such a lifestyle would maximize free time by reducing chores to a minimum.

The Atomic Ranch Plan

I love old 1950s ranch style houses, like those profiled in Atomic Ranch magazine. If we wanted to keep a house and car, it would be cool to move to small Florida retirement community, find a corner lot with a ranch house, buy a vintage 1950s car, and then recreate a beautiful recreation of our childhood. I could collect 1950s science fiction books, pulp magazines, and old vinyl records. I could put in a 21st-century large screen TV to show old movies and television shows. If I wanted to get really weird, I could drop off the net, and cut the cord to cable.

This retro-retirement-recreation appeals to me, but I don’t think it does for Susan.

atomic ranch

The Cool City Plan

If we’re not quite ready to mosey off to the elephant graveyard to wait to die, we could pick a trendy city to live in and attempt to stay young for another decade. This would appeal to Susan more than me. I already consider myself old. She still loves going to parties, eating out, rock concerts and baseball games. If we chose this path I’d like to find a very liberal city, but on the small side, maybe a college town. I like living in flat cities but wouldn’t mind being near mountains or oceans.

The Not Likely Adventurous Plan

If I had the guts to be adventurous I’d love to live in several interesting cities before I died. I feel bad about not trying to see more of the country or even the world than I have. I traveled around a lot when I was young, but have been in the same city for the last 46 years.

It would be far-out to get a 1-year lease in a new city every year for ten years, and then settle down in a 55+ plus community. Such a plan would require pairing down our possessions to a minimum. We’d have to learn to make new friends quickly, and how to find new doctors and dentists wherever we went.

The Least Likely Political Activist Plan

It bothers me that conservatives have taken over the nation. Conservatives have worked for decades at the grassroots political level to achieve their goals. If liberals want to regain power they need to duplicate those efforts. It would help the cause if liberals living in urban areas would move to red counties, districts, and states. It would help even more if they got involve with local politics and social activities.

The Most Rewarding and Scariest Plan

I have a friend who plans to move to Mexico. I’ve been watching films about expat life with her and reading newsletters and books about living abroad. I’ve never traveled outside the U.S. If I really wanted to enrich my life before I die, living abroad would be the way to do it. It could involve living in a city, an expat community, or even an overseas retirement community.

guanajuato

JWH

Are You An Auto-Brainwasher?

by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, April 22, 2017

There is an extreme condition known as the Anton-Babinski syndrome where blind people believe they can see. It’s a visual variation of Anosognosia, where a person with a disability is unaware of their disability. Anosognosia covers a range of delusions dealing with the body, senses, memory, and language. There is a cognitive related syndrome called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where low-ability individuals suffer from superiority illusions. (I can’t help think of Donald Trump when reading that article.) Quoting Wikipedia, here are the essential qualities of the D-K effect:

  • fail to recognize their own lack of skill
  • fail to recognize the extent of their inadequacy
  • fail to accurately gauge skill in others
  • recognize and acknowledge their own lack of skill only after they are exposed to training for that skill

I believe we all fool ourselves. But how far do we go? Are some people auto-brainwashers? Anyone who has read books by Oliver Sacks knows how powerful a brain is at fooling its own mind. I highly recommend you read the articles linked to above, and then ask yourself: Am I fooling myself?

brainwashing

This has very powerful implications. What if you think another person is in love with you and they are not? What if you think you are great at your job and you are not? What if you believe you’re writing the world’s greatest novel and you’re not? What if you think you are brilliant, sexy, funny, and compassionate and you are not? Many people are crushed by self-doubts, but maybe just as many people are brainwashed by over-confidence and delusions.

Take climate change deniers. They believe they know the truth, even though they oppose armies of scientists with PhDs, using trillions of dollars worth of supercomputers, space satellites, rockets, airplanes, drones, ships, submarines, monitoring stations, balloons, and other scientific resources. Are they any less deluded than blind people claiming they can see?

Any individual who thinks they can solve any of the world’s major problems is absolutely deluded. Our reality is intensely complicated. To assume we understand anything clearly is delusional. A reasonable amount of self-doubt is healthy. Too much can be crippling, yet we need enough for humility.

The trouble with being human is we make up stories to explain a limited set of facts. This is called the narrative fallacy. I can’t find a single article that explains it, but the book, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is where I first heard the concept. If a noise wakes you in the middle of a night you can’t stop yourself from imagining scenarios for what caused that noise. From burglars, falling tree limbs, to raccoons, you have to think of something to explain the noise, even if the explanation is wrong. And generally, it is.

This is how we brainwash ourselves. Narrative fallacies lead to the Dunning-Kruger effect if you don’t do a lot of fact-checking. The reason why fake news is so successful is it often fits into people’s narrative fallacy storylines.

Science is our cognitive tool where we statistically study reality to look for consistency. We can only trust evidence when it’s overwhelming. We can only trust evidence when a majority of other people collaborate that evidence with further scientific research. But we are easily fooled by masses who have fooled themselves with auto-brainwashing. Their claims appear to be consistent evidence – but consistent opinions do not equal consistent evidence.

One of the purposes of Zen Buddhism is to deprogram our auto-brainwashing. If you can get your inner observer to back away from its attachments to thoughts it is possible to see how we auto-brainwash ourselves.

My old friend Connell and I have been talking about auto-brainwashing lately. Terms like Dunning-Kruger aren’t very effective, or memorable, so I’ve started using the phrase auto-brainwashing. Once we accept that a concept exists and have a good label for it, it’s possible to see it in action. With the idea of auto-brainwashing in mind, study yourself and your friends.

What do we see that’s not there. What’s there that we don’t see?

JWH

Confessing My Anxieties

by James Wallace Harris, Friday, April 14, 2017

There’s nothing that sets off my anxiety more than having an event in the future to worry about. Next week I’m scheduled for jury duty and I’m worried I’ll be sequestered. I have no idea how many people are like me. We never know how other people think, do we? So I thought I’d just tell you about my quirky anxieties and figured you might tell me about yours.

the future 

The tendency is to believe everyone thinks in the same way, but I don’t know if that’s true. First, we can divide the world up into the anxious and the anxiety free. Of the people I know who confess their anxieties, it appears our symptoms come in all varieties, with many variations of physical and mental properties.

I have no idea how common my type of anxieties are among other people. If I studied psychology I could analyze the data and statistics, but I think I’ll take different path. I’m just going to confess my anxieties and ask my friends to confess theirs. Confession is great for the soul, or so they say.

I’m not sure how honest I should be. I don’t want to come across as psychically naked. But on the other hand, this experiment is based on revealing what’s behind my barriers. The act of writing down my problems is therapeutic. That implies a certain degree of honesty is required for effective results.

My main source of anxiety comes from thinking about the future. That can be planning my grocery shopping trip or worrying about climate change in the year 2100. I’ve always thought this was a particularly good trait for someone who wants to writes science fiction – an ambition I’ve had since age 12. Unfortunately, even though I imagine hundreds of scenarios every day, I’ve yet to learn how to dramatize them into fiction.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve discovered this trait is a handicap. It has a number of downsides. It’s especially paralyzing for social activities. Future worry has led me to create a very comfortable now. I am my own siren. On the other hand, any disruption to my routine causes anxiety. Most of the time, it is very minor anxiety. I am happiest when I have nothing scheduled. I have friends that schedule their lives weeks in advance – what a nightmare.

My second anxiety, and I believe it’s caused by the first anxiety, is I hate to leave home. When I was young I always wondered why older folks were so homebound. Now I know. Home is security. Controlling my future is easiest done from home. Leaving the house increases the variables involved in imagining the future. When I was young I could go out and play all day, ranging over neighborhoods, countryside, and woods. It never even occurred to me to plan my future. After I retired I had nearly complete control over my time. It was only when I have to be somewhere else do I lose that control.

My agoraphobia is not extreme, but it is growing. I have not always been this way. Even after I grew up and out on my own, I could leave home with abandon, worry free. Before I got married, the longest I had lived in any one house was eighteen months. I’ve lived in my present house about ten years, and I think that long comfortable stay has affected me.

However, I believe my agoraphobia started when I developed a heart arrhythmia in my forties. My fear of having an episode in public made me want to always stay home. Even after I had surgery to fix my heart a bit of that anxiety remained. I began going out again, but never like before. Because this event was concurrent with getting older and living longer in the same house, I’m not sure which was the primary cause.

Then in my early sixties I had to have a stent put in my heart because of clogged arteries. Around the same time I developed spinal stenosis which has caused a number of physical limitations. I have a Catch-22 situation. If I exercise more to help my heart, my legs go numb, and I have back problems. If I exercise less the numbness decreases and the pain goes away, and my heart feels worse. I have to walk a razor’s edge to stay feeling reasonably well. I’ve also worked out a rather severe diet that helps both conditions. Eating out makes it very difficult to follow that diet. All of this conditions me like Palov’s dog to stay close to home.

Many of my retired friends are trying to do more outside the house, especially travel. Travel scares the crap out of me. First, I’d have to leave home. Second, I’d have to give up most control. Third, I’d have to eat at restaurants. Fourth, I wouldn’t have my custom exercise equipment. Fifth, I might have to sleep in a bed, which freezes up my back. (I’ve been sleeping in a recliner for years.)

Are my anxieties just in my head? Or has my body dictated them? If I worked hard I might discover how to eat healthy on the go, how to exercise anywhere with no equipment or portable elastic bands, how to sleep comfortably by improvising back friendly nests with available furniture at hand. Theoretically, all that’s possible, but it’s hard to imagine. To get a good night sleep I need a certain kind of recliner adapted with four kinds of pillows.

Now I know why old crotchety folks I met in my youth were so set in their ways. Aging means adapting to your bodily demands. If I eat just right, exercise just right, and sleep just right, I can avoid pain. Have my anxieties evolved through pain avoidance? Or am I just being a pussy? Should I just get over them?

My wife thinks I give in too easily. She might be right. She loves to be on the go, to travel, to be active. She has aches and pains – but just ignores them. I know a number of people our age who eat whatever they want, never exercise, and lead happy active lives. Then I know other people who are adapting their life to deal with ailments, conditions, pains, disease, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.

Is anxiety mental or physical? Like I said, there many kinds of anxieties. I think some are mostly mental. I think mine are related to the physical, but I could be fooling myself. If I changed a mental condition with drugs or conditioning, is it really mental?

Most people associate anxiety with depression. As long as I can pursue my hobbies at home I’m extremely happy. I don’t feel crippled by anxiety. I guess I would if I wanted to travel. Maybe I’m happy because I accept my limitations. If I wanted more, I might be unhappy. Even this might be age related. If I was young and felt this way, I’d feel resentful, even imprisoned.

Does getting old allow us to accept what we can’t change? Or does getting old mean we stop trying to change.

Is everything I’ve written here a rationalization that allows me to avoid living life to the fullest? I have a feeling going to jury next week will teach me a lot. I’m not to try to get out of the duty, but it provokes all the fears I mention above. I’m having far more anxiety than before my heart procedures. I’ll write an update to this piece and confess what I learned after I’ve faced those fears.

JWH

We Don’t Even Give Half-a-F*** Anymore

by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, April 8, 2017

Many of my retired friends have expressed the same sentiment to me lately. It’s a variation of “I can’t believe how lazy I’ve become.” I feel that too. Although I don’t think I’d diagnose our conditions as laziness.

For some reason, we all just don’t give half-the-f*** that we used to give.

SAMSUNG

At first, I thought this malaise was brought about by the lack of discipline from not going to work every day. But I’ve also heard from friends nearing retirement about their struggles to care about their jobs. Before I quit work, I remember how little I cared for each new project. A rigid schedule didn’t make me care more.

This makes me wonder if our condition is age related. It’s as if vitality is slowly leaking from our souls. That would be quite disturbing if we still gave a full-f***. Does aging mean dwindling drive? How sucky that would be! Ironically not giving a full-f*** makes it easier to take.

I feel like Henry Bemis in that old Twilight Zone episode about a guy who gets all the time in the world to read but then breaks his glasses. Retirement meant I had all the time in the world to pursue by ambitions but my goddamn fuel for giving-a-f*** is running out! Instead of hoarding minutes to get something done, I hoard gives-a-f*** energy.

It scared me recently when I read people over 65 watch the most TV. There’s a fine line between loving TV, TV addiction, and TV mindlessness. And so many of my friends have become political news junkies. Could obsessive worry about Donald Trump be zapping our ability to give-a-f***?

I really want to find a cause that’s not aging. If I’ve got ten or twenty more years, I want to use them, not waste them daydreaming in my recliner.

Not only do we care less, but we’re moving slower. If you’re over 65, have you noticed that? Do people tell you that you’re slow? Did you see the interview with Ted Koppel and Sean Hannity? Wasn’t it so visible that Hannity was impatient with Koppel because was so slow? Is thinking half-as-fast related to only giving half-a-f***?

The weird thing about not giving half-the-f*** I used to give is it doesn’t hurt. It’s as if I hear the Sirens and don’t care about being seduced. I don’t know if this essay can help us rally.

Does noticing you care less make you care more?

JWH