Must Income Still Be Attached To Work?

Before getting to the topic of this post, let me make this observation.  I write these pieces to try to pique the reader's interest, so readers will reframe my questions in their own terms and then consider the questions anew from their own perspective.  I am not trying to give a definitive answer and certainly don't claim to be doing otherwise.

I hope the motivation for this particular piece is obvious.  Recently there seems to be one article after another about how artificial intelligence, either coupled with robotics or as a stand alone, will displace workers from their current jobs.  These pieces cast the situation as a tragedy waiting to happen.  Surely that would be the case if many workers who were displaced from their current jobs then lost their wage income as a consequence, and then they couldn't find other employment so they couldn't find a way to make up that income loss.  This seems to be the narrative that most people have in mind.  

But what if the income loss was minimal or not at all?  The jobs would be gone but the income wouldn't be.  Surely, that is logically possible.  Given that, two questions come to mind.  First, what is to prevent it from happening?  Much of the rest of the post will be spent on considering that question.  Second, are there plausible ways to overcome these restraints?  I'll have a little to say about that too.

The companies that are producing AI have been making massive investments in their products.  The logic for doing so is that they expect there will be quite a large return on investment.  The companies that purchase AI services from these producers likewise expect to do so profitably, either by increasing productivity or by lowering cost.  The latter implies layoffs, which heretofore have not happened when companies are performing well.  But that will no longer be the case.

It is instructive to consider those sources of income which are available at present that recipients get when not working.  One of those is unemployment insurance.  UI is intended to provide bridge income until the recipient can find another job.  In the jargon of economics, there are market frictions.  Job search takes time, to assess available alternatives and find a good fit for the worker.  In the absence of UI, the person might very well take the first available job offer, because the income need has to be satisfied.  But the first offer might not really make for a good match.  Allowing the process to play out for a while will yield better results.  The bridge income that UI provides enables a better way to manage this market friction.  And with that UI is available only to those who have worked previously and paid the UI premiums via a tax on their paychecks.  Further, UI is of limited duration only, to encourage the recipient to meaningfully engage in job search.

Another source of income available to some of those who aren't working is retirement income.  Social Security and Medicare might be the first of these to come to mind.  There are other possible sources of retirement income, private pensions or pensions provided by state government.  Eligibility for retirement typically requires reaching a certain prespecified age and having been employed for some required number of years or becoming disabled while on the job, with the disability significant enough that the individual can no longer fulfill work obligations.  As there no longer is mandatory retirement, the decision to continue to work or to retire is left up to the employee, for those who are eligible.

It is important to observe that for both UI and retirement pay, earnings while previously working matter in setting the amount of the payment, with higher earnings leading to higher non-work pay.  At least part of this is that those with higher earnings contributed more while working, so they should be entitled to receive more on that basis.  But the prior pay-in and the subsequent pay-out need not balance.  So, I'd like to introduce an ethical notion here that I believe matters a lot. It is believed that those who earned more, either through their own hard work or because they were especially talented, deserve more.  In some sense, this is a parallel idea to that good students should get higher grades.  From core beliefs, such as in the Puritan Work Ethic, we have been socialized into these views, which can be regarded as part of the more general "meritocracy" that so many subscribe to.

What should happen then if a good chunk of the workforce will get laid off in the near future with no prospect whatsoever of finding other employment?  If some sort of payment were given to these folks as a source of income, should their prior earnings matter as to the amount of the payment, or are prior earnings irrelevant in this case?  And if prior earnings are irrelevant, are they deserving of some payment nonetheless, even if they are no longer productive?  If they are deserving, then doesn't this point to an egalitarian payment system, socialism if you will?

Before I argue for an answer to that last question, I want to note that there might very well be macroeconomic reasons of the Keynesian kind for making such a payment.  In the absence of such payments there could very well be massive aggregate demand failure, plummeting the economy into a depression.  In this circumstance we'd need something other than the unemployment rate to determine whether this is happening or not, a statistic of the sort:  (Actual GDP)/(Potential GDP).  If this depression were happening, the firms producing AI might not be making large returns and those companies that moved to utilize AI in their business may find their revenues inadequate to continue operation.  This nightmare is foreseeable, so payments to non-workers might then be justified simply to boost aggregate demand sufficiently.

Yet we tend to think of macroeconomic fixes as solutions to business cycle downturns.  Eventually there will be upturns again (or at least one can hope so).   Won't the payments to non-workers halt in this case?  However, the situation where much of the workforce is displaced by modern technology may not be part of the business cycle.  Instead, it might be the new normal.  What then?

This gets me back to ethical considerations.  Should non-workers receive no payment whatsoever, because they don't deserve it?  Or does the simple fact that they are human beings mean they should be entitled to such a payment, sufficiently large to live life decently?  My point here is that it is our ethical beliefs which are apt to provide the greatest barrier toward creating a system of payments to non-workers, which might possibly become a system of payments to all, where a few do work and receive income beyond this generally provided payment.

At this point I think it is worthwhile to consider a couple of references to help lay the foundation for the argument.  One of these is Paul David's well-known paper Clio and the Economics of QWERTY.  The paper is about the economics of lock-in, where we are stuck in a solution that may have been optimal in the past but no longer is, yet we are unable to move to something better.  The QWERTY keyboard provides such a great example of this.  It was designed initially to encourage typing at a slow pace, so the keys wouldn't jam.  Eventually, with improvement in typing technology, particularly the advent of the electric typewriter, and then the personal computer, typing speed was desired.  Yet the QWERTY keyboard persisted.  The explanation comes from the numerous interdependencies that arose, which relied on the QWERTY keyboard remaining in place.  Alternatives, such as the Dvorak layout, were at a huge disadvantage, even if they allowed faster typing for those who mastered that system.  So, the question arises, are we locked into a meritocracy belief system, even if that is soon to be superfluous or already is?  

The other paper is Bertrand Russell's essay from almost a century ago, In Praise of Idleness.  It offers an eloquent argument that an alternative belief system is needed.  I encourage readers of my post to have a go at Russell's piece and see if they find his arguments persuasive.  A question I've been scratching my head about for some time is this.  If you are convinced about the necessity of an alternative belief system, how do you go about convincing others of that as well?

Now I will give a wave-of-the-hands view of our national politics.  We are a plutocracy, where many of the plutocrats have disdain for paying taxes.  It is evident that raising taxes substantially would be necessary to finance a decent-sized payment to non-workers.  Hence, the plutocrats have incentive to maintain the meritocracy belief system intact, to block such payments and hence keep the tax burden on themselves in check.  Their strategy has been to create division among the broader populace and, to date, it has been effective along these lines.  Is there a way to break out of this box that we're in?

It is evident that those future non-workers who would receive payment would vote for such a system.  But, in my view, their support of the idea is not sufficient to make it a reality.  A good chunk of the winners in the meritocracy sweepstakes must also embrace this system, and willingly accept a larger tax burden for themselves to enable it.  They would do so out of a sense of a social obligation.  I wrote about this previously in a post called, Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?  If there are enough within the professional class who do make such an embrace, then I believe it can break the logjam.

But there I didn't consider the impact of AI on jobs.  The fear of that is now front and center making the urgency in doing something significant all the greater.  

Although I'm an idealist at heart, I hope my arguments here are nonetheless perceived as sensible.  If enough others start to ask these questions then maybe something important can be done to address the issues.

Cinderella Is A Fairy-Tale

March Madness will begin the Sweet Sixteen round next Thursday.  Now that yesterday's games have been completed, three quarters of the field has been sent home.  Below is a table of those teams that remain, along with their conference affiliations, and their seeds within the region to which they were assigned when there were 16 teams per region.  

Before getting to the lessons I'd like to draw from this information, let's look at a bit of recent Tournament history.  It was just three years ago, in 2023, when Florida Atlantic University made it to the Final Four, whereupon they faced San Diego State, which won that game.  Neither of those teams made it to the Tournament this year.  I know FAU because my parent's condo in Boca Raton was near Glades Road and I would sometimes drive by the entrance to the FAU campus.  But I'm guessing that most college basketball fans wouldn't have heard of FAU prior to that appearance in the Final Four, so for me they qualified as a legit Cinderella team then.  

In this year's Tournament, High Point, another school most fans hadn't heard of (including me), would have qualified as a Cinderella team had they made it to the Sweet Sixteen.  They were competitive in their game against Arkansas, so I surely don't want to pooh-pooh them.  But from my perspective, it was close but no cigar.  Miami of Ohio, which did win its play-in game, would have qualified as a Cinderella team if they had made it to the round of 32.  But they were soundly beaten by Tennessee.

I'm having trouble getting the image of the table to post

properly.  So, as an alternative, here is a link that should work.

All the remaining teams are from power conferences.  And while there are a few teams with unimpressive seeds, Texas in particular may be of interest because it had to with in the play-in game (First Four), which implies that those making the seedings weren't sure whether they deserved to be in or not.  But they are a big school with a rich sports history (though more in football than in basketball).  So, no way are they a Cinderella Team.  Likewise, Iowa doesn't qualify as a Cinderella team even though they have fewer resources than Texas.  They are a Big Ten team.   No team from a power conference can be considered a Cinderella team.  

Now, let me get to a conjecture.  Covid disrupted college basketball.  Indeed, the Tournament was cancelled in 2020.  There were strict protocols enforced in the subsequent years to allow play.  How it influenced outcomes, I can't say, but surely it had some impact.  NIL started somewhat before Covid, but it is my belief that it really took off when the Player Portal began, which was in July 2021.  And the consequence is that most of the better players who enter the portal, particularly those who have been around for a while, will end up on a good team in a power conference.  It makes it less likely that teams from other conferences will make it to the Sweet Sixteen.  The commentators were saying during the round of 64 that Mid-Major teams were holding up their end.  But all of those teams are gone from the Tournament now.  And my guess is that over the next few years we are unlikely to see them in a Sweet Sixteen game.  

Here is something else.  I'm nauseated by all the sports betting and really wonder whether either players, coaches, or refs could fix the outcomes of games without it being immediately obvious that they were doing so.  (For example, what counts as a foul versus what is incidental contact is one of those things that clearly is more art than science.  Limiting playing time for a player who is in foul trouble is another one of those.)  A team from a non-power conference which wins its first game may then attract some fans who want to bet on it in the next-round game.  If that happens some of the players on that team, who may not be getting big bucks from NIL, may want some way to cash in on their recent success, especially if they don't see themselves as candidates for the NBA draft.  This is a disaster waiting to happen.  

Fans want to root for the underdog.  Showing my Big Ten loyalty, last night I watched Florida play Iowas and there I rooted hard for the Hawkeyes.  This is so even though when Illinois plays Iowa I'm completely for Illinois and totally against Iowa.  But Iowa was a big underdog in that game with Florida and it was compelling viewing.    Some other schools that are blue bloods in college basketball had similar experiences to Florida.  North Carolina's loss to VCU is one example.  From a seeding viewpoint, neither Kentucky's loss to Iowa State nor Kansas' loss to St. Johns can be thought of as the underdog vanquishing the favorite.  But in terms of the history of the teams performances in the Tournaments, there still was a bit of David vs. Goliath in those games.  So, I'm not yet ready to argue that NIL coupled with the Transfer Portal will tend to make the blue blood schools reliable favorites in the NCAA Tournament.  The talent pool itself seems sufficiently diffuse that other things than the school brand should matter for which become the better teams.  And I'm guessing that this year fans will be satisfied with the Tournament, even if there is no team in the Sweet Sixteen that qualifies as a Cinderella.

But if the situation doest repeat itself, fans may become unhappy with the outcome.  What then?

Pur Did

Given my post from last month, Pur Didn't, I felt obligated to write this one, with Purdue winning the Big Ten Tournament.  Congratulations to them, and with that they are now a #2 Seed in the West Regional of the NCAA Tournament.  So, this win would seem to establish Purdue as a real contender.  

But that earlier post was mainly concerned with player injury and having teams try to avoid that before the NCAA Tournament.  Indeed, as the play was very physical in the championship game between Purdue and Michigan, both Trey Kaufman-Renn of Purdue and Yaxel Lendeborg of Michigan were injured, though how severe those injuries are is anyone's guess.  

In contrast, Illinois had another overtime loss, this one in its quarterfinals matchup against Wisconsin on Friday. And in that game they surrendered a large lead, similar to what happened in the regular season game against UCLA. It's hard to know if the player miscues, and there were more than a few of those, were somehow related to player injuries, the type that aren't officially reported.  Coach Underwood has said that Keaton Wagler has been nursing an injury to his back.  Will a few extra days of taking it easy help to improve his condition?  Again, who knows?  But it surely couldn't hurt.

Illinois will be a #3 Seed in the South Regional, in spite of that Friday loss.  The advantage of being well seeded is most pronounced in the first round game, though that does put on some added pressure because everyone expects the team to win.  And because of its recent losses, Illinois may be susceptible to that.  We'll see.

As I'm wrapping this up, we are under a tornado warning here.  We will likely get a severe thunderstorm in the next few minutes.  Later tonight it is supposed to snow.  I can imagine that bad weather might interfere with travel plans that teams have.  I mention this only because it is another random factor that could influence the outcomes in some of the Tournament games, yet nobody has that factored in at the moment.  I hope it ends up not mattering.  Again, we'll see.

Optical Delusion

In my head-in-the-sand approach to our national politics, a flawed attempt to keep my temperament on an even keel, I spend a lot of my time with diversions.  The best of that is reading fiction.  Last week I finished, Simply Poe's Best Short Stories, and this reflection is based on what I learned there.  Many of the story titles were familiar to me but either I hadn't read them or I had forgotten their plots.  Yet some of the titles were entirely new to me.  My favorite was The Spectacles and it, in particular, serves as my motivation here.

I find Poe interesting to read because many of his stories inhabit the world found between the psychological and the drug-induced supernatural.  The mind plays such a key role.  And Poe taps in very well to the sources of this interaction - our deepest aspirations, our fears, our partially forgotten memories, and our physical limitations.  

Poe's writing also appeals to me because it fits into my own biography, where I have spent much of my life devoted to a kind of seeing, the one done with the mind when the eyes are closed or with them staring at the ceiling or perhaps looking at pen and paper or a computer screen, contemplating some equations or a graphic that represents the math.  I wrote about this in a post called The Professor Mind. But in that post, I wanted to go back to childhood if that were possible, to identify when that way of thinking initially manifest in me.  I didn't concern myself with going in the opposite direction in time.  I'll do a bit of that now.  

For about fifteen years as an economics professor, my research was a kind of theoretical math modeling.  The math gave the work both a rigor and a way to identify when the results actually could be identified in the theory.  But then, in the mid 1990s, I had a career switch to Ed Tech, both as an instructor who explored effective uses of online technology in teaching, and as an administrator who supported other instructors in doing likewise.  

This career switch was a happy accident.  Only in retrospect did I realize that it was a good fit for me, matching my collegial interests and where I was in the life-cycle to a field in its infancy, which of necessity entailed much in the way of open-ended exploration and, in particular, a pathway for engaging conversations with colleagues around campus.  I felt horribly under-prepared in this at first.  But I found those I met were willing to attribute expertise to me because of the title I held and I did not try to dissuade them from their views on this point.   Eventually, via a lot of background reading and sufficient job experience, I began to feel comfortable in the new role.  I dare say, however, that I was never a very good manager and supervising the staff under me was not where my interests lay.   Since I didn't "come up through the ranks" I lacked common experiences with my staff.  That made it harder for me to manage them.  I enjoyed much more the ambassadorial function, interacting with other faculty and administrators around campus, as well as support providers in different units on campus.

My administrative appointment started at 50% time, with the other half of the appointment as a faculty member in the Economics Department.  That was soon bumped up to 75% time administrator and eventually to 100% time administrator.  When that happened I stopped teaching the large intermediate microeconomics class that had been the source of my experiments with ed tech.  I did teach once in a while after that, but as an overload and then only very small classes, once a Discovery course for first-year students and then three different times for the Campus Honors Program.

Three months into my initial administrator job, I took over running SCALE, a soft-money and quite small organization. It supported faculty in what we then referred to as ALN (Asynchronous Learning Networks).  There was an all-everything staff person who managed the office and the other staff.  We would go for coffee late in the afternoon to review the goings on of the day.  For me this made managing the staff just like the ambassadorial function and I enjoyed that.  A few years later, as the SCALE renewal grant was winding down an underfunded hard-money organization was formed to succeed SCALE.  It was called CET (Center for Educational Technologies).  

Initially CET included SCALE staff, some staff who migrated over from the campus teaching organization, and a couple of new hires.  After about a month or so I was feeling overwhelmed by the managerial issues.  I needed an Assistant Director who would assume many of these burdens, but at the time there wasn't money in the budget to do a search for such a position.  So, I half-assed it, informally creating the position of office manager from among the existing staff.  It created some internal issues, but it worked well enough that I could devote much of my time doing what I wanted to do.  A couple of years later, a real search for an Assistant Director was held as the CET budget had grown after the campus got a permanent CIO.

A year after that, CET merged with the campus IT organization (CCSO) to form a new organization called CITES and CET was renamed CITES EdTech.  CITES also absorbed the classrooms technology unit, which previously had been housed in the campus teaching organization.  I became the Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies and I had both CITES EdTech and CITES ClassTech in my portfolio.    Also, the mission changed, in a not so subtle way.  Where before the focus was on effective uses of the technology for teaching, subsequently the aim became finding a way to have a scalable solution to support instructional technology.  Initially, this was concentrated on finding a suitable enterprise Learning Management System (alternatively referred to as a Course Management System) for the campus, one that eventually became known as Illinois Compass.  

Let me give one more paragraph about this history and then move on.  In the language of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, I conceived of CET primarily as connectors.  The innovators were the handful of instructors around campus who made novel and effective use of the technology in their classes.  The best way to make other instructors aware of these innovations was via workshops, with multi-day summer workshops, combined with some incentive for the attendees to implement in their own classes based on what they learned at the workshops.  This was quite effective and further established a collegial relationships between the attendees and EdTech staff.  But it didn't scale very well.  Many instructors were adopting the technology without having attended the workshops.  Further, CET was underfunded.  So the CIO suggested that the workshop funding get reallocated to the CET base budget.  Now CET funding was more solid, but it had lost its lever to engage faculty on effective uses of the technology in teaching and began its move to simply being a support organization for learning technology.  Perhaps that was inevitable, but my heart wasn't in this alternative mission.

Now let me get to what I mean by the word delusion in the title of this post.  And in doing so, I will consider only my own delusions.  It has two pieces to it.  First, it is becoming so enamored with an idea that other related matters move to the background and then may very well be ignored entirely.  Second, it is based on an assumption about scaling - if it can work for me then it will work for everyone else who is like me. I will illustrate with some posts from this blog.  

I began this blog in spring 2005, partly intrigued by blogging as a release for me, but mainly because I had many work-related issues on my mind and not enough knowledgeable yet disinterested friends to have good discussions about those issues.  So, after a bit of experimentation to see if I could generate the requisite prose, I announced the blog to a few friends.  Then, a couple of months later, I got discovered by a well-connected blogger, Scott Leslie.  Soon after that, I had regular readers for my posts.  The first set of posts to consider came a couple of months later.

They are about using undergraduate students in the role of peer-mentors, course content creators, big brothers and sisters, and any other way they might genuinely assist other students who aren't quite as far along.  Further, it is about the campus as a whole embracing this at scale.  I called the overall idea Inward Looking Service Learning (INSL).  There are 7 posts in total under this label.  They all appeared in August 2005.  I had used undergrads in my teaching the large intermediate microeconomics class, where the feature was having online office hours during the evening, and where the course design was constructed to encourage the students to make use of those office hours.  While my course design was somewhat novel, the use of undergrad peer-mentors I got from seeing the practice in some undergrad engineering classes.  I did this starting in summer 1996 and continued in the spring semester each year until spring 2001, after which I no longer taught that class.  So in making the INSL posts, I was writing about an idea that I was no longer directly involved with, but the idea was a take away that stuck with me thereafter.  Note that it only has the technology play a support role, which has been my general view right along.  

In writing these INSL posts I had the right qualifiers - pie in the sky, going over the deep end - to convey that I was making a speculative argument.  But why do that unless there is some belief that others will embrace the argument and give it a try themselves?  To my knowledge, that didn't happen.  Might that have happened if the ideas were marketed a good deal more?  The delusion rests in ignoring that question, hoping that the posts themselves would suffice, and otherwise contenting myself with providing a description of how it might work.  One probably should ask whether there is some benefit to the posts apart from encouraging the embrace of the ideas necessary in attempting implementation.  It is conceivable that others might generate their own ideas, distinct from INSL but where INSL served as a stimulus in generating these alternatives.  Would that that then justify writing the INSL posts?  If so, isn't it delusion then not to verify that some other alternatives have been generated?  It's been quite a while since those INSL posts were written, so my recollection is not perfect on this.  Yet I'm not aware of anyone letting me know of their alternative that had my INSL posts as at least part of their basis.  So, I'm guessing there weren't any alternatives of this sort.

A different thought is that these posts are simply throwing ideas against the wall to see if anything sticks.  A small probability of success means that not sticking is the likely outcome.  Does past failure mean that the next idea shouldn't even be tried?  Perhaps the answer to that question depends on how to consider the cost of writing up the post.  Is the time engaging or burdensome?  I don't have a definitive answer on that one, but I can say that in drafting this post, I seem to have gone back and forth with the answer.  If it is recognized in advance that some of the time spent will be burdensome, then there is a need to be able to get through those periods, having the procrastination come to a close and getting down to brass tacks.  Delusion seems to be the answer there.

My other example comes from a recent post, offering up my "solution" for our national politics, where members of the professional class take the lead by signaling that they are willing to pay substantially more in income taxes so as to enable higher taxes on the uber rich as well, with the proceeds going mainly to people of ordinary means. and without that having negative political consequences.  The post is entitled,  Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?  In this case I enlisted a friend from grad school who is still a practicing economist to give it a read and offer her reactions to the piece.  That took quite a while to happen and then her reaction was less than enthusiastic.  I had hoped for a more uplifting response.  There is still a fair amount of work to tighten up the argument in the piece and assemble all the relevant recent data to be included.  For the time being, this is one where the procrastination is still ongoing.  

With regard to college teaching and learning, in the mid to late 2000s, given my position on campus I could claim some expertise as to the underlying issues and possible solutions.  I also had a reasonably strong reputation at the national level among others engaged with learning technology for higher education.  So the blog posts such as the INSL series may have served a purpose about informing the profession, even if implementation of the ideas wasn't in the cards.  Regarding our national politics, however, I cannot claim any such expertise and I am well behind the times as a practicing economist.  This itself doesn't stop me from noodling about the ideas.  But then writing up my tentative conclusions, I'm really not sure as to how I will proceed in the future.  The writing activity itself is therapy for me.  Perhaps I should content myself with writing without feeling a need to espouse that I alone have the answer. Not only would that be less delusional, but would be less egotistical as well.

Pur Didn't

With Michigan beating Purdue last night and doing so pretty soundly, Illinois' chances for sharing in the Big Ten title seem slim to none.  Illinois is currently in second place, but even if it wins tonight at USC Illinois will be two games behind Michigan.  There will be a head-to-head game when Michigan visits Illinois on February 27 and before that Michigan has a game against Duke, but I suspect the motivation for Michigan in those games will be entirely how they appear in the national rankings and the seedings in the NCAA Tournament.  Currently Michigan is number 1 in the former and I suspect if they beat Duke and beat Illinois they will be number 1 in the latter, regardless of how they do in the Big Ten Tournament.

But there is another factor that comes into play that motivates teams.  Injuries become a big deal, especially when those happen to star players. Quite recently, some of the top teams have just lost players due to injury.  Illinois is in that situation with Andrej Stojaković, who has a high-ankle sprain.  If a starter can't play due to injury, the rest of the team must adjust.  There is learning in that and now, given how close we are to March Madness, there is a lot of stress in that as well.  Illinois is on the other side of that cycle with the return of Kylan Boswell.  The sort of learning that's needed will happen over the next few games, and mainly during the practices to prepare for them.

It makes you wonder whether a team can play so as to avoid player injury.  One obvious way to do this is to play fewer games.  This gets me to consider the conference post-season tournaments and whether they continue to make sense.  For the Big Ten, in particular, there are 18 teams in the conference now and each team plays 20 conference games in the regular season.  With teams on both the East Coast and the West Coast, the travel to away games is onerous.  Illinois's last game of the regular season is at Maryland, while its previous game is a home game.  This, in itself, seems absurd to me.  Then there is that the finals of the Big Ten Tournament occur on Selection Sunday, indeed with the game ending right before the selection show begins.  This means that a team that makes it to the finals may have a first round game on Thursday, with not a lot of time in between to rest and prepare.  So there are reasons to sandbag in the post-season tournament, quite apart from avoiding player injury.  

Of course, these post-season conference tournaments attract a lot of viewers.  For many fans, it gives them a chance to watch teams from rival conferences as well as to keep watching their favorite team, as long as it is still alive in the conference tournament.  And the more the fans watch, the more money is made by the teams and their conferences.  But one has to wonder whether the players suffer as a consequence.  

Getting back to Purdue, which to open the season was ranked #1 nationally, I have to wonder why.  Are they underperforming now or were they overrated early on?  And for them, might the Big Ten Tournament be yet another opportunity for them to turn it around?

We'll see.

Progressive Taxation at the Local Level - My Take

I received my mail-in ballot for the primary here in Illinois, which includes some items that are specific to Champaign County.  The County has been operating under deficits for a while and needs a way to generate more revenue and/or to reduce its level of spending.  I'm going to focus on the former here.  Raising revenue for local government is done via taxation.  There seems to be two options for that.  Either increase the sales tax or increase the property tax.  

The sales tax is generally regarded as a regressive tax.  Even people of modest means have to buy groceries and other necessities.  They pay the sales tax when doing so.  The property tax is more progressive.  Its magnitude depends on the assessed value of the home.  Wealthier people tend to have higher valued homes.  So, increasing the property tax tends to put the incidence of the tax onto wealthier people. 

Now, here is an important sidebar.  Wealthier people are more prone to itemize on their Federal income tax returns.  The property tax is one of the itemized deductions one can take.  From 2018-2024 there was a cap of $10,000 imposed on that deduction.  In 2025, the cap was raised to $40,000.  For Champaign County, I would guess that most homes would have assessed value that keeps their property taxes well under the cap.  Readers of this post can find the Federal tax brackets here.  The point is that if Champaign County raises the property tax, the actual burden on homeowners will likely be only a fraction of that, with that fraction determined by what tax bracket the homeowner is in.

Here is another sidebar.  I came of age when Reagan was President and it was commonplace then for voters to be told to vote their pocketbooks.  Were that to happen now, wealthier voters would embrace the sales tax increase, while voters of more modest means would endorse the property tax increase.  What I want to argue here is that wealthier voters need to show some leadership and get beyond voting their pocketbooks.

Taking myself as an example, in my household we are financially comfortable.  A modest increase in the property tax would not impact our quality of life one iota.  Under the current circumstances, it would be best for folks like me to embrace paying more in property taxes.  If enough did that it would show that selfishness doesn't always win at the ballot box.

I truly wish we could send that message in a credible way at the national level.  But for now, we should make a start of it by doing so in Champaign County.

Addition by Subtraction

Here is a quickie about the Illinois Men's Basketball Team.  A bit of a puzzle is that Kylan Boswell has a broken hand and has not played the last several games.  He was one of if not the best players on the team.  Certainly, he was the best defensive player.  He could really lock down the other team's best offensive player.  Yet Illinois seems to be playing better in his absence. 

One reason, little noted, is that we've gotten taller, having Jake Davis, who really is a forward, take the slot that Boswell had.  Davis is listed as 6-6 while Boswell is listed as 6-2.  Davis is not much of a ballhandler, but Mirkovic is and he is doing much more of that than he was before Boswell was hurt.  This is important because, as my prior post focus was on Keaton Wagler, while Wagler is now the team's star and media darling, the performance burden needs to be shared.  If it's all on the shoulders of one kid, he will wear down eventually. 

Another point that hasn't been noted much at all is that in the Big Ten they don't press much, except near the end of the game when the team that is behind might press to generate a turnover.  But good teams in other conferences do press and the question is whether Illinois can handle it well or not.  Illinois' big guys are reasonably good passers, with Tomislav Ivisic elite, as Brad Underwood likes to say, so maybe we can break the press by getting it into a big who can then pass the ball over the defense.  Against Nebraska in the half court, it seemed we had many very high passes over the defense from one side of the court to the other.

But if the ball goes into Wagler and he is then trapped, might that result in a turnover?  It happened against Nebraska and fortunately we got fouls called on them in that instance.  But if this was done earlier in the game, it might have gone differently.

Teams that press a lot need to be deep at guard, so they can rotate in fresh players who can keep up the intensity.  It seems to me that apart from just having a totally off night, which is surely possible, this is how Illinois might get beat.  It wouldn't be by trying to match us in rebounding.  It would be by forcing us into many more turnovers than is our norm.  

There are still 9 games left in the regular Big Ten season, with a few very tough games remaining, and then there will be the Big Ten Tournament.  At around that time Boswell should be ready to return to the lineup.  It seems reasonable to expect him to be not quite on his game at first.  At that point, might there be subtraction by addition?

A Diamond in the Rough

After an Illinois basketball game, particularly after a win, I go to YouTube and see if I can find postgame interviews with the coach and some of the players of the opposing team.  Yesterday, after the Purdue game, Braden Smith, who is/was considered the best point guard in the conference, referred to Keaton Wagler as a lottery pick.  Wagler is a true freshman, will turn 19 next month, and was not highly regarded coming out of high school, although he was Player of the Year in Kansas.  

There are perhaps many reasons for why Wagler was undervalued.  One is that at 6 feet 6 inches, he was very skinny, weighing only 160 pounds, and with that there was the issue of whether he could withstand the rough play he'd face in college.  Another is that he didn't play in one of the prestigious summer leagues, where scouts for college teams better get to evaluate talent via head to head competition.  I don't know why he missed this opportunity, but one wonders if other very talented players also might miss it, for whatever reason, and then most of the scouts lack the further reach to evaluate the player in a reasonable way.  If so, are there others like Wagler who might be discovered in the future.

Still another possibility is that even after coming to Illinois and achieving a good deal of recognition, Wagler nonetheless remained undervalued.  Basketball is a team sport and each player needs to fit in with the team.  Further, upperclassman who are starters tend to be given more responsibility than first-year players.  There is an unofficial seniority system, if you will.  But recently Wagler had taken over the ball handling responsibilities, so that Kylan Boswell (a senior) could concentrate on other aspects of his game.  And with Boswell subsequently fracturing his hand and then unable to play, Wagler's responsibilities to the team rose even more.

I confess that before yesterday's game I had assumed that Mihailo Petrović, another point guard from the Balkans, older and experienced in international play, would take up much of the slack in Boswell's absence.  Petrović had been injured during the summer and consequently missed the preseason practice.  So, he's been in catch up mode since then.  While he's gotten a few minutes of playing time in games recently, he seemed somewhat out of control, making turnovers too often.  He has looked better in the prior game or two, so my assumption seem warranted.  But it didn't happen.  Jake Davis, who really is a forward, took the slot that Boswell held.  This put even more responsibility on Wagler.

When I was a campus administrator, I came up with the expression - anyone can be a hero in a sprint, nobody can be a hero in a marathon.  We're not quite halfway through the Big Ten season yet.  Wagler played 39 (out of 40) minutes against Purdue.  The games themselves are incredibly physical, as are the practices, though we only know about the latter by what the players report.  Further, the travel can be draining.   And with the Big Ten now with teams on both the East and West Coasts, some of the travel is well beyond what it used to be, when the conference had fewer teams.  The Purdue players were asked about this in their postgame interview, having lost their previous game at UCLA.  Braden Smith, in his response, said it was unfair to the West Coast teams, as this burden is much greater for them.  Illinois has yet to make its West Coast swing.  What impact will that have when it does happen?  The question here is whether Wagler's stellar performance will continue for the remainder of the games or if he'll come back down to earth, out of fatigue, perhaps due to minor injury, or that much of the novelty has turned into a grind.  We'll see.

Ever since the book, Moneyball,  came out in 2003, it has become an object of fascination about how very good athletes might be identified, especially when the competition misses them because it is focused on other characteristics of players while recruiting.  The hero of Moneyball is Billy Beane, then the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, a small market team which means a smaller payroll than other teams.   He needed to find good players who wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.   The A's had reasonably good teams back then.  Eventually the rest of Major League Baseball caught on and changed the metrics they relied on to evaluate younger talent.  More recently, for some teams signing Free Agents became a preferred substitute to developing their own talent.  Likewise, in College Basketball there now is the Portal, and developing players as Freshmen can be risky because those players might very well enter the Portal the following year.   

But it is more than just identifying talent.  Player development matters a great deal.  In some sense, Wagler is similar to Will Riley, a star on the team last year, who though a forward liked to handle the ball and was very effective as an offensive player.  Riley is a couple of inches taller than Wagler and is even skinnier than him.  It makes you wonder whether Illinois has a comparative advantage in player development of this sort. Zvonimir Ivisic, the twin brother of Tomislav Ivisic, came to Illinois through the portal after a year at Kentucky and then a year at Arkansas.  Big Z also was skinny, when considered for playing center, and had an issue that one of his legs was much weaker than the other.  Big Z's issues have been rectified at Illinois, to some extent.  The credit goes to Adam Fletcher, the Strength and Conditioning Coach.  I don't get why Kentucky didn't have someone similar to Fletcher or why some other program with lots of money doesn't bid him away.  But given that Illinois seems to excel in this area, perhaps it has a true advantage in recruiting talented but skinny players, and maybe that offers some solace for Illini fans if Wagler does turn pro at the end of this season, as seems likely.

There is also the general issue of a college student maturing, much of which involves developing new friends beyond high school, and developing new interests that are related to those friendships.  The team has a cohort of players from the Balkans and it must be, in part, that they develop friendships with each other as a consequence.  Plus the Ivisic twins off the court seem particularly impish, which should help others on the team relax socially.  But Wagler, who is from Kansas, may have no other friends outside of the basketball team. and as stoic as he seems in postgame interviews, as well as in his on-the-court demeanor, surely he needs to be able to open up with a trusted friend about his emotions and his thinking.  If he has that at Illinois, will he feel confident that he can find it again, while playing professional basketball someplace else?  

And there is the matter of managing one's ego.  Dylan Harper, who was drafted #2 in the 2025 NBA Draft as the highest drafted guard, is averaging 20.5 minutes/game and 10.4 points/game.  He looks to be mainly coming off the bench.  When he was at Rutgers, he was the backbone of the team.  The difference between his current salary and what he was getting in NIL money has to serve as compensation.  But there is another way to think of ego, as providing a very strong motivation for getting better as a player. If Wagler anticipated that even as a lottery pick he'd be coming off the bench with whatever team drafted him, and wanted to prepare himself to be a starter two or three years hence, he'd ask where his opportunities for development would be greater as well as what aspects of his current makeup need the most improvement.  I can imagine Wagler having a call with Will Riley, maybe several such calls, where they use Riley's recent experience to forecast what will happen for Wagler and what should happen.  But can such a conversation happen?  Do freshmen who then get drafted stay in touch with their college teams after they make it to the NBA?  If not, who would facilitate this imagined conversation? 

As a selfish fan, I prefer the path where the star player stays in college another year to be the recommendation in such a conversation.  Yet because I'm evidently biased this way, I wouldn't want to make any predictions about Wagler's career beyond this year.  The game against Washington on Thursday marks the halfway point in the Big Ten season.  The game after that, a rematch with Nebraska, will be a good way to benchmark where Illinois is as a team and where Wagler is as a player.  No doubt, I'll be watching.

The Reincarnation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

I confess that I don't follow the news much these days.  I have guilt feelings about this from time to time as I was raised on it being an important function for a citizen to be well informed.  But I find that nowadays when I do return to a news or opinion piece in the New York Times, it doesn't take long for me to get irritated and then become very angry.  I really don't need more stress in my life, so more often than not I will stop the reading before I have given my own critical analysis of what I was reading, something I would do as a matter of course when I was reading the Times regularly and watching the News Hour on TV.  I have to say that to the extent I remain informed at all it is mostly from gathering tidbits of what friends in Facebook post; some of them are for more engaged with the news than I am.

So, unlike my usual blogging in the past, what I say here is much more about intuition and feel, without much analysis going into it at all.  And with that let me note that because we were taught that history tends to repeat itself, there have been many comparisons between what is going on in the America now and what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, before the start of World War II.  For a while I thought those comparisons were spot on, but now I'm wondering whether some other comparison may be more apt to describe the present circumstance.

In Social Studies class, I can't remember whether it was Junior High or High School, we were taught that the event which precipitated the start of World War I was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.  We were taught this in a somewhat disembodied way, without making connection to the full chain of events that ensued thereafter, as much of the history we learned was about dates and places in a somewhat isolated way, without the full story to connect them.  But when I was in High School I had a a very good memory.  The assassination of the Archduke is a factoid I can recall, even now.

To connect this to the present, there seem to be a large variety of situations globally that are creating great strain, where any one of them might serve as a tinderbox that produces a larger eruption.  Because I'm writing this by intuition rather than by analysis, I won't try to predict when and where the triggering event will occur.  But surely, it feels like it will be soon, and there is an absence of calming correctives that might prevent us from going over the deep end.

So, even ignorant of the news as I am, I worry quite a bit about what will happen.  I suppose the worrying is inevitable.  I very much hope that it is needless and that we will muddle through these troubling times, with this foreboding of a cataclysmic event merely a bad dream and nothing more.

Note to Readers

I've changed this blog's url as it seems that at the old url there was an invasion of hits from across the globe who were not interested in the content of my posts.  I was afraid that some nefarious plot involving my blog would soon unravel.  I hope this change will deter anything of the sort, at least for a while.  

If you'd like to make note of it, the new url is: https://lanny-on-learning.blogspot.com/

Reframing the Debate about ACA

As in my recent posts, I want to focus on members of the "professional class," which I define as being in a household with income between the 80th percentile and the 99th percentile in the income distribution. These people are comfortable income-wise but probably wouldn't consider themselves rich.  My household is in this category. 

For the purposes of illustration, I produced the graphs below.  I use TurboTax for doing our Federal tax return, and I have copies of the returns from 2010 through 2024.  TurboTax produces summary information, which I used in the graphs.  Note that there are 15 data points, but for readability those are connected with straight line segments.  

In the graph, Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) is Gross Income less Exemptions.  Early on my kids were still dependents on our tax return.  Later, they weren't.  Taxable Income is AGI less Deductions.  The two track each other reasonably closely.  Total Tax is what was paid to the Federal Government in Income Tax.  Also note that while the even numbered years are clearly indicated on the horizontal axis, I deliberately removed the income level numbers on the vertical axis, to preserve a modicum of privacy for me.  I think you'll get the idea without knowing the specific numbers.

Now, one specific qualifier about our income.  I received quite a windfall in 2010, which was sufficient to put us into a higher tax bracket.  We received another windfall, though not as large, in 2020.  After the year with the windfall our income dropped, and then rose gradually thereafter.  It would actually be easier to make the point I want to emphasize by not including 2010 in the graph, but I thought it better to plot all the data I had available.

Also, everything that is plotted is in nominal income, meaning there is no adjustment for inflation.  The dollar values are in the year that the income is being reported.

The graph below takes the information from the first graph and then plots average tax rates.  Effective tax rate is Total Tax/AGI, while Tax Rate on Taxable Income is Total Tax/Taxable Income.  Again, the two curves track each other reasonably well.

Now we can get to the point. From 2012-2017 the Effective Tax Rate was about 18% and rose somewhat in this time period so the last couple of years it actually was above 19%.  Then, from 2018 onward the Effective Tax Rate was below 17% and then from 2021-2025 it was below 15%. 

Suppose the tax experience for my household was typical of those in the Professional Class.  Then we might conclude that the Effective Tax Rate was higher in Obama's second term than it was during Trump's first term and it remained lower during Biden't term in office.  

It is said that one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.  But I'm going to do that here.  I know of know economic efficiency argument for the reduction in taxes during Trump's first term.  When Biden took office, amid the horror of Covid, one could make an argument that the economy needed fiscal stimulus, though tax cuts for members of the Professional Class, who likely have substantial savings, are probably not a very good way to stimulate the economy.  

So, from an efficiency perspective, why not return to the tax rates as they were when Obama was President?  The debacle with ACA is real enough, but there is insufficient discussion on the tax revenue side of the equation.  

If people in the Professional Class saw these graphs and took the message from them I'm trying to send, would they agree to a rise in tax rates back to the their levels a decade ago?  How can one be so cruel to people of modest means so as to preserve this gift horse?  That seems to me the question we should be asking.

Executive Summary

My previous post, Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?, reads more like a full White Paper than a blog post.  I did a word count on it and it's about 5,400 words.  Plus it is written as an overview, with many links to other posts for further detail.  So, it is a slug to get through.  Below I offer what might be considered an Executive Summary of the ideas, which should be far more readable.

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The Democrats appear stuck in identifying a unifying theme that appeals to voters. Sometimes when stuck, the best way to get unstuck is to reframe the issues. This proposal can be considered such a reframing. 

The focus is on what I call the professional class, households within the 80th-99th percentile in the income distribution. For 2024, the last year when the data is available, the 80th percentile begins at around $175,000 while median household income was around $83,730. So, households in the professional class have more than twice the income of the median household. 

Next is the surprising part. The focus is not on what these households will receive but rather on what they will contribute beyond what they are already contributing. These households will contribute by agreeing to pay more income tax. 

Nowadays, most of these households support the Democrats. By making this agreement these households will encourage the Democrats to embrace a platform which features higher income taxes on both the professional class and the rich (the 1%). Where in the past proposals to tax the rich have largely ignored the professional class, either those proposals have been unsuccessful or perhaps have worked for a while but then came undone. By making the professional class a feature of the platform, the proposal will be far more likely to succeed and far more able to stick. 

With the agreement in place, the Democrats can then focus on programs that economically benefit the lower 80% of households. Thus, the idea is to make the Democrats focus on the economic welfare of ordinary Americans, while giving them a credible way to fund the programs that they’d like to put forward. 

Members of the professional class are tired of the rampant selfishness that pervades society. They very much would like to contain that selfishness and offer a more publicly spirited alternative, social responsibility. Embracing the agreement is an act of social responsibility. Sticking with the agreement is again the socially responsible thing to do. 

However, members of the professional class recognize that acting individually they are powerless to achieve a change in the ethos. What is required, instead, is for members of the professional class to act in concert, with this unitary action highly visible to all members of society. Were that to happen it would encourage other members of the professional class to embrace the idea, and it would also encourage members of households in the lower 80% of the income distribution who are of voting age to vote for Democrats. 

There remains to consider how members of the professional class can make their embrace of the agreement in both a credible and highly visible manner. To do this, imagine there is a demonstration project that benefits foodbanks, homeless shelters, school organizations, and other charities at various locations around the country. The project would be funded by donations from members of the professional class, who would contribute the difference between what they would have paid in income tax were the tax rates as in 1995, inflation adjusted, versus what they actually paid in the past year. These donations would signal a willingness to be taxed at the higher rates. 

 

For this to work, word of the demonstration project must spread widely and the demonstration project must grow precipitously. Were that to happen, the overall goal would be obtainable.

Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?

This post has two different sources that served as stimuli.  One of those is the Opinion piece in the New York Times from a few days ago, How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do.  This is other than how things have been historically and it serves as a contributing factor in the Democrats struggle to find an identity.  The other source I reached a bit more indirectly.  I was watching Season 3 of the Diplomat on Netflix.  (The show itself is a bit too absurd for my taste, but it does fill the time till I find something else that appeals to me more.). In the casting Allison Janney is the President of the U.S. and Bradley Whitford plays the First Gentleman.  

Almost immediately, my thoughts turned to The West Wing and it occurred to me that many members of the Professional Class likely were fans of The West Wing, so that if arguments were put forward in language familiar to viewers of that show, those arguments would apt to be persuasive.  I thought of one particular episode where President Bartlet plays simultaneous chess with both Sam and Toby, who are in different rooms.  And the chess games really just serve as a cover for more serious discussion.  With Sam, in particular, the President urges, "See the whole board."  (This is from Season 3, Episode 14, Hartsfield's Landing.)

I thought that seeing the whole board was a good metaphor and that member's of the professional class, most of whom are highly educated, would like to hear arguments about their own political identify that helped them to see the whole board.  Also, as part of the character's background President Bartlet had been a  Nobel Prize winning economist.  This might make members of the professional class more receptive in receiving economic arguments concerning their political identity, though from my years of teaching economics I know there is a real risk that too much drill down will put the audience to sleep. So, in the ideal, a high level overview would be presented and the drill down would be made available to those who want it but not be included in that overview. 

As it turns out, many of the points I want to put forward, I've actually made many years earlier, first as a reaction to the TEA Party, where I was appalled by their narrow-minded selfishness, and then up and through the Presidential election of 2016, where Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote but Donald Trump won the Electoral College and thus became President.  Plus, by making these points prior to the present context, I'm credible on at least one point - I've been thinking about these issues for some time, so the ideas haven't been hastily constructed to fit the current circumstance.  The earliest of these, posted in April 2011, was meant as a bit of humor, Raise My Taxes --- PLEASE!  But the subsequent post, The Lanny Tax Plan - Sort of, was intended to be serious.  Item (F) in the plan is closest in spirit to what I want to write about here and is a good way to introduce the ideas, giving substantive meaning to the word "embrace" in the title of this post.

(F) Raise marginal tax rates gradually for all households starting at the 80th percentile, $100,000 a year, in such a manner that reaching the 98th percentile you have the Obama proposal to eliminate the Bush cuts. That is the burden of tax increases should be much more broad than is being proposed at present. The message needs to be shared burden, not punitive on the rich.

Now let's get to the tasks at hand needed to "see the whole board." They are:

• Characterize the current situation so it is amenable for analysis.
• Consider the relevant history on how we got here.
• Propose an immediate solution that would ameliorate the situation, i.e., perform a Machiavellian analysis rather than engage in wishful thinking.
• Consider why the participants would persist with this solution in the long term, i.e., ask about the ethical considerations and, in particular, focus on social responsibility as a prime motivation.
• Ask what actions might the participants take that would convince others that their commitments are genuine. This is necessary to get others to join in.
• Anticipate pushback from those who stand to lose if this solution takes effect.  Consider what measures might effectively counter this pushback.
• Likewise, take Murphy's Law seriously and then consider in advance how to prevent things going wrong, also taking seriously that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  In other words, do a SWOT analysis on the proposed solution.

Let's proceed to the analysis.

Framing

Beginning with the obvious, so we can move past it, members of the professional class who are Democrats clearly are anti-Trump and anti-Trumpism.  They would like to see that defeated soundly, in a way where successors don't emerge and instead there is some return to "normalcy." That said, I want to take a longer term view, so will frame things somewhat differently that I hope is nonetheless sensible to the reader.  

America is a plutocracy de facto while it is a democracy de jure.  The plutocrats control Congress mainly via their control of the Republican party.  Economically, the plutocrats are the main beneficiary that results from this control, so it comes as no surprise that whenever the Republicans are in power tax cuts that favor the rich are a big part of the agenda.  

But, because we remain a de jure democracy, these Republicans still need to get elected and there are far too few plutocrats to get that done on their own.  They must rely on rank and file voters for this.  At this level of abstraction, one might wonder why these rank and file voters don't demand a slice of the economic pie for themselves.  In fact, they have been distracted from doing so by a massive amount of propaganda aimed to stoke their anger and keep them in an ongoing state of agitation.  When I was a kid, we learned in school about Yellow Journalism, which was prominent during the Spanish-American war. More modern media has greatly intensified the effectiveness of the approach.  The movie Network, which came out in 1976, was prescient in this regard. Social networking online has only magnified the effect further.  Contentious social issues of one sort or another are the red meat that the plutocrats throw to their rank and file dogs, who chew them up.  The rank and file are emotionally addicted to this role of propaganda to stoke their fires.  From the viewpoint of an outsider looking in, the rank and file are being played by the plutocrats in this way, so as not to ask for pecuniary reward. 

Professional class members are far from blameless, however.  In a recent post entitled, Crass Warfare, I wrote a bit about my own financial situation.  After voicing concern about the possibility that I will need quite expensive long-term care, as I went through the experience where my mother required it, I wrote:

But apart from that, modest changes in either income or expenditure have no impact on family well being and mostly money matters are not on my mind, even while I'm the one who files the tax return annually.

If that's even within the ballpark of how many members of the professional class think about their own financial situation, then it at least partly explains why social issues seem to have become a prominent concern.  Yet the Democrats are often perceived as hypocritical this way and sometimes the criticism comes from other than the Republicans.  For example, consider this piece by Richard V. Reeves, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich, which takes on zoning restrictions in housing as one evident point of such vulnerability. Yet it doesn't take on the source of the pretending itself, that they literally might not realize how well off they are, for as Daniel Kahneman explains in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, people have difficulty imagining beyond their own immediate experience.  And again taking myself as representative, I grew up in a middle class household in the 1960s.  Even if my material well being is much more advantaged now than it was then, I still feel myself middle class in outlook. Kahneman refers to this as WYSIATI (What you see is all there is). 

But in a quite different vein, organized labor is far weaker than it was 50 years ago and thus doesn't have as much voice within the party.  There are multiple voices, which together may seem like noise rather than a coherent message.  And now the Democrats largely appear in disarray, with only a handful of exceptions to suggest otherwise.  This is not the path toward electoral control by getting working class people to switch parties.

When I started my first real job as an assistant professor at Illinois, 45 years ago, I soon learned about voting your pocketbook, as I would occasionally argue state and national political issues with colleagues who were Republicans.  (At the time that meant they were anti-regulation.)  The idea that voters will express selfish preferences is at the heart of economic models of politics and I became quite familiar with the approach.  But there is an older idea, noblesse oblige, that says privilege conveys social obligation.  As a kid, I learned this idea from JFK's Inaugural Address:

Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.

An embrace of democratic socialism by members of the professional class would then be a kind of noblesse oblige, in the spirit of JFK.  Perhaps it should be termed "profess oblige" to make it sound distinctive, so that it will engage both members of the professional class and other voters as well.  For in order that this be truly effective it must convince other members of the professional class to behave likewise, and that must happen en masse in a way that's visible to all.  

This is far from a trivial matter, as with every issue regarding voting and social participation there is a need to overcome the free-rider problem.  In other words, if my social class as a whole is collectively making significant contributions and my individual contribution is negligible relative to the total because I'm only one of many in my social class, then the collective contribution should still be effective even if I don't make mine. So, acting selfishly, I have incentive to hold onto my money and not make a contribution.  The free-rider problem can be overcome by social conscience, if enough people possess it and act on it.  Among those who haven't acted on it yet, one might imagine that a sense of urgency could cause one to act or that peer pressure could also do so.  But something else would be needed to make it persist, habit the likely explanation or some other reenforcing mechanism.

Let's make one more point here and then move onto the next section.  This will take a lot of time, both to happen initially and then to persist.  We have a tendency to want solutions that work readily at the snap of one's fingers.  That can't happen here.  This is the long game and members of the professional class need to understand that in order to play it well.  

History

Readers need to learn about the history of income distribution in the U.S. and the history of tax rates, so they have a foundation for the ideas expressed here.  They should also learn some of the history about electoral politics.  One thought on that score is to consider voter participation, which from my eyeball look at the data has been pretty abysmal.  Might non-voters be attracted to vote if the Democratic party as a whole embraced Democratic Socialism?  Another thing to look at are the episodes where Democrats had control of both the White House and Congress.  Those experiences have been fleeting.  As surely the full agenda of Democratic Socialism can't be accomplished within just two years, what can be done to make full control of this sort more enduring? 

With an anecdotal approach to our history, one might get much of the message across.  For instance, we are now enduring this insanely long shutdown of the Federal government where Food Stamp benefits will likely be cut.  Consider the contrast to the present in the situation near the end of World War II, where the G.I. Bill was passed, showing that our government then was willing to invest in ordinary Americans.  Yet as compelling as the anecdotal approach may be, it can be seen as cherrypicking the anecdotes.

So, one might prefer to look at actual data, which for the variables I suggested above are numerical.  Below I will provide a suggestive look at such information.  Eventually, one will need a more exhaustive and carefully done look, yet constructed in a style where readers can make good meaning of what is being presented.  Let's begin.

I originally constructed the following in a post entitled, Socialism Reconsidered - Part 2.  The table was constructed with data about household income.  I got these data from Wikipedia, which got them from the Census.  The data are divided into quintile bands, with the amounts showing the upper limit of each band.  I computed the numbers in blue, which show the differences in the upper limits of consecutive bands.  Notice that they rise over time  and themselves look like an income distribution, reflecting that the higher income households are getting further away from the median income household during this time interval. 

The time period that is shown gives the years when the economy was recovering from the burst in the housing bubble, which is what precipitated the global financial crisis.  While the financial system was saved, many who had been living in houses with underwater mortgages were dispossessed.  They were obviously upset by that - the rich get their debts forgiven but ordinary folks do not.  Obama was President at the time and it may be that there was little he could do other than what was actually done, given that he had so little support from Republicans in Congress. The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, after a considerable period of debate within Congress and ultimately without a "public option." Only one Republican member of the House voted for it.  No Republicans in the Senate supported it.  One wonders now how many Trump supporters are on Obamacare and if they are aware of this history.

I have it on my to do list to update this table with more recent years of data as well as years earlier.  Yet I've been vexed by the thought that if the table has many more rows, then simply eyeballing it will not be possible and the message from the data may be entirely lost.  So I reflected about some way to get out of this difficulty.  Eventually I came up with this post, A Simple Statistic for Measuring Income Inequality.  The household income distribution is skewed.  While at lower incomes it looks like a bell curve, there is a very long upper tail reflecting that higher incomes are increasingly spread out. 

My statistic is the ratio of Median/Mean household income.  With a bell curve, this ratio is 100%.  With a skewed distribution as I've described it, the ratio is less than 100%.  This spreadsheet shows annual results for the statistic from 1953 through 2022.  Note that it says family income rather than household income.  Apparently the Fed divides households into two groups, family and non-family. As the data for the former were available, that's what I went with.  So, a good chunk of the population is missing in these results.  Nonetheless, I think because they can be readily eyeballed the results are interesting.  The decline in the statistic starts in the 1970s, where the decline is modest.  It is precipitated in the 1980s and continues thereafter. In my mind the decline in the statistic is a ready way to see the hollowing out of the middle class numerically.

Yet the reader should be cautioned.  I've shown this post to some economist friends who were not impressed by it at all.  Focusing only on variables of the center, median and mean, implies missing all the other information inherent in the full distribution.  So, perhaps I'm oversimplifying with this presentation.  But as I wrote in my post about the statistic, I think the Gini Coefficient is too complex for the general population and consequently too many readers would be lost if that is what was presented.  So, I will leave it there and move on to consider tax rates.

The Federal Income Tax is a complex beast and comparing changes with it over time is a non-trivial matter.  Nonetheless, we can make some headway by breaking it up into deductions, on the one hand, and tax brackets and tax rates, on the other.  Here I'm only going to focus on the latter, though if at some later point in time one wants to contemplate the more egregious of the former, then do note that the Carried Interest Deduction is probably at the top of the list. The table below is from a post entitled, Ask What You Can Do For Your Country.  For the category, Married Filing Jointly, it gives focal incomes in $50,000 increments, inflation adjusted, (there is an error in the labelling, where it should say Taxable Income rather than AGI) and then gives the amount owed to the IRS, first reported in 1980 and then in 5-year intervals after that.

Note that in 1980 Jimmy Carter was still President.  The reader should be able to fill in who was President for all the subsequent years.  Eyeballing of the table reveals there has been a general decline in average tax rates over time, more so at high incomes.  The reader should note that with the initial tax cut under Reagan, efficiency arguments were advanced to justify the action - the economy would grow faster and thereby have the tax cut pay for itself.  This argument was given by the Laffer Curve, though I believe many economists didn't buy that argument.  Subsequent tax cuts after 1980, I believe, didn't receive such justification.  They were simply part and parcel of the Republican dogma. 

The table clearly needs updating so we can better talk about the current situation.  Yet even with only those years that do appear the table is intended to get the reader to ask, is there a socially desirable set of average tax rates?  With that, note that under Clinton average tax rates rose at higher incomes, which was one reason why the government achieved a budget surplus in the tail end of his tenure.  (There was also the boom generated from the dot.com bubble, an additional important factor.)   We tend to think of tax policy changes as based on where rates are at present and then consider increments or decrements based on the political feasibility in changing rates. But doing it this way makes it seem there is no set of rates that is fundamental.  Might voters feel otherwise?  My own opinion is that the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001 were pure give away and of no efficiency benefit whatsoever.  Others, of course, are entitled to their own opinion about it.

Let's wrap up this section with a bit of history on voting.  A table on voter participation rates during years with Presidential elections is given in the table in this post, Socialism Reconsidered - Part 3.  It hovers in the mid 50% range.  And we should note that participation rates during the primaries and out year elections tend to be lower.  For more than a decade I've participated in early voting and for the last couple of years that's been via vote by mail.  Of course, I'm a retiree.  Would non-retirees be more likely to participate if these options were generally available?  Thinking of this differently, is there mileage to be gotten by playing the participation rate card?  Or is that a political loser?  We know that members of the professional class participate at a much higher rate than does the general population.  So they are over-represented while the poor are under-represented.  Maybe the question should be framed still differently.  Would the Democrats effectively raising the participation rate help to favor them in elections?  Conversely, what about efforts in this direction that were largely ineffective?  

Finally, look at the table presented here on Party divisions of Congress.  When Jimmy Carter was President, for one term only 1977-1981, the Democrats were the majority in both houses.  In contrast, when Bill Clinton was President, the Democrats were the majority in both houses only for the first two years.  Thereafter the Republicans were the majority in both houses.  Under Obama, again the Democrats were the majority in both houses the first two years, then for the next four years it was split with the Democrats the majority in the Senate and the Republicans the majority in the House, while for the last two years the Republicans were the majority in both houses.  Under Biden, the House was majority Democrat the first to years and majority Republican the last two years.  The Senate was closer to being evenly divided, as a few independents played the role of swing voters.

The lesson I'd like to draw from this is that if there is a political agenda that will take multiple terms of Congress to accomplish, there is a need to get voters aware of the importance of this agenda and perhaps to not be so upset if the entire agenda hasn't been completed all at once, so they continue to vote in support of the agenda.  This will require quite a change from the historical norm and thus should be thought of as an enormous challenge to rise to.

Initial Proposal

Let's imagine that members of the professional class send a public message, a draft of which is below.  The message is meant as an encouragement for the leadership among the Democrats to embrace Democratic Socialism and for all voters who would benefit from such a move economically to vote for the Democrats in future elections.  The message needs to be credible.  As they say, talk is cheap, so mere talk won't cut the mustard.  There must be actions taken that are sufficiently costly as to signal that these members are serious in their intent.  Let's call the taking of such a costly action an embrace.

We now want to consider the embrace of Democratic Socialism as an innovation and consider how innovations diffuse a la Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.  In particular, I'd like to ask who will play the role of Connectors and Mavens.  The former can't be very well known Democratic Socialists, at least not at first, as the embrace by others would be too self-serving for them.  It must be various experts from within the professional class - top journalists, lawyers, doctors, university professors, etc.  What would it take for there to be early adopters within this group, if the proposal became known to them?  I don't have a good answer to that question, which is a current weak point in the argument. But if some are identified I'd imagine they'd make brief individual videos intended for an audience within a given field and then a group discussion to highlight the commonalities in their views, say recorded in Zoom and reproduced for all to see, with the hope that these would gather a large viewing and that some fraction of the viewers would then themselves embrace.

The embrace itself would be a payment of money toward a Demonstration Project.  The Demonstration Project would benefit foodbanks, homeless shelters, school organizations, and other charities at various locations around the country.  It would aim to do this in a balanced manner, regardless of whether the locale was Red, Blue, or Purple.  Ultimately, the aggregate of what is given to these various organizations must line up with the amount contributed to the Demonstration Project.

To make matters concrete, the amount of the donation would be the difference in the income tax owed if the rates tax were those of 1995, inflation adjusted, compared to the actual tax paid during the past year.  There would need to be a tax calculator that readily produced those amounts and have this information bundled with the receipt for the donation.  There would also need to be the highest level of information security so that the individual's identity is certified as legitimate, on the one hand, but is not publicly revealed, on the other, to avoid harassment of the individual after the fact.  Then the full pool of donations, absent the names of the donors, can be made public to show what part of the professional class has made the embrace.  Independent auditors need to certify the entire process.

I haven't said this yet, but the project would certainly accept donations from very rich donors, who indicate support for the underlying ideas even if they are not members of the professional class. It might or might not accept modest donations from others in the population, depending on whether that can be done in an inexpensive manner.  Surely it would be good for others to show their support for the project, but that will likely have little impact on Democrat leaders to adopt Democratic Socialism as the core of the party platform and it likely won't persuade too many Trump supporters to switch party allegiance.  

With that as background, below is a draft of the message that members of the professional class will implicitly sign when they make donations to the Demonstration Project.

I, who am relatively well off financially, want to convey to the Democratic Party leadership that I willingly embrace a substantial tax increase on my household in order to help restore America to a middle-class society.  Toward that end I urge the party leadership to embrace Democratic Socialism as the core of the party platform.  I also want to urge voters who would benefit economically from this embrace to vote for Democrat candidates.  They need to understand that many of the very rich in the country will be against this, but if we secure solid majorities in Congress and the Presidency as well, then we can pass laws that promote Democratic Socialism, which will very well include substantial taxation on the rich, even though many of them will perceive it as punitive.  So be it.  We are a democracy where it is the will of the majority of the people that should speak, not the will of the majority of the dollars.

Let me close this section by noting that I didn't mean to pooh-pooh the role played by prominent Democratic Socialists, inside and outside of government.  And my hope is that political infighting would be minimal in determining how a leadership coalition would work, should the embrace move forward.  But I also want to say that I think a youth movement among the leadership would be welcome.  I am soon to turn 71 and consider myself a geezer.  I know that I don't have the needed vigor to be part of such leadership, even if I can write a sketch of the plan, as in this post.  If the post does persuade others, then it will be time for a baton pass to those who are more vigorous in order to move the project along.

Confronting Murphy's Law

As I referred to The West Wing early in this post, let me do so again to say that sometimes we are our own worst enemy.  After finishing up one bit of business, President Bartlet would often ask others in the Oval Office, what's next?  We're all used to having a broad agenda and going from one item to the next on it, even if those items are apparently unrelated.  In particular, if there is some early success with the embrace of Democratic Socialism, the longtime Democrats who are angry and tired from Trump's attacks on various social justice programs will feel impelled to undo some of that and address others with new initiatives.  But those who switch over from supporting Trump very likely didn't do that to address social justice issues.  If there is only a little of that maybe it's okay and the coalition can remain intact.  I don't know.  But why risk it, especially early on?  At present Democratic Socialism will be the New New Thing for the party.  But even as it becomes the Same Old, Same Old, this a word of caution that sticking with it might be the right play and doing anything else will be seen as being too greedy.  I'm not a political insider on this, but I will say that polling about it may not be enough, especially if people's attitudes on this score change significantly over the business cycle - in particular, a recently laid off person is likely to be resentful about a variety of things.  It's not that writing this paragraph will eliminate the problem entirely.  But it is good to be aware of it ahead of time.  

The Smack of the Republican Attack Dog

How much did the propaganda around Benghazi and Hilary Clinton's email determine the outcome of the Presidential election in 2016?  That was a rhetorical question to get the reader to realize there likely will be some sort of propaganda response to the ideas presented in this post, if there is any sign of an initial uptake of them.  What that propaganda response will be is beyond me, but as with the previous section, it seems to me better to appreciate the likelihood of it happening than to ignore it in the planning.  The obvious question then is this.  Are there forms of self-protection that might be taken to minimize the impact of such attacks so that current Trump supporters who would benefit from a move to Democratic Socialism are not swayed by those attacks?   The only thing that occurs to me now is that much of the Demonstration Project leadership should come from outside national politics.  Trying to impeach private citizens for expressing themselves is fraught with difficulty.  Arguing that elected officials have violated their oath of office is a different matter.   Maybe the rules have changed on this since Trump has returned to the White House.  But at least early on, I would play it as if the rules are not different.

Wrap Up

My stated goal with this post was to provide a see-the-whole-board presentation of what members of the professional class embracing Democratic Socialism would look like and then what it might achieve.  My hidden agenda was to get these ideas off my chest, as I've been sitting on these thoughts for a while now.

My difficulty in writing this piece was in determining whether I'm giving too much detail or not nearly enough.  Perhaps the answer varies from reader to reader.  

I know of one immediate criticism - there is too much wishful thinking in the piece.  No doubt, there is some.  I hope to get some early feedback from some friends and then perhaps make some modifications in the writing based on that.  

I always wonder with pieces of mine like this one, if it isn't entirely wishful thinking why hasn't somebody else come up with it already?  The only answer I have is that it seems most people are caught up in current events.  I think it is necessary to step away from current events to consider the ideas presented here as a real possibility.  It is why I've referred to many of my earlier posts, all of which were written before 2020, with the exception of the post on the simple statistic about income inequality.  

Here is one last point.  Being willing to to pay more in income tax to embrace Democratic Socialism is one thing.  Taking a leadership role in the Demonstration Project is quite another.  The people who would qualify for it based on their reputations are likely incredibly busy already.  This project will demand intense attention. Making that sort of commitment is huge.  I do hope there are people who will step up to it.  And I hope that happens soon.