The Other End of the Tunnel

Not quite six months ago I wrote a post called Trying to Flatten My Personal Downslope from Aging that was intended to motivate me to stick with a regime of not drinking alcohol, this to reverse the situation with my liver, which was diagnosed with stage 2 of Fibrosis.  This Friday I have a blood test and the following Monday I have a Fibroscan, which together should give a good picture of how my liver is doing now.  I am writing this post before knowing the results from those tests, but with the knowledge that I stuck to the regime and, in addition, for the last several months I also stopped taking Tylenol, the pain medicine I had been taking regularly to deal with my arthritis.  Apparently, it too can cause liver damage.  I want to give a recap of the experience, but also some reflection on how it compared to my behavior in adolescence as well as some forecast for how it will impact my behavior from here on out. 

I've had issues with impulsive behavior for as long as I can remember.  When I was a kid my mother, who grew up in Germany, called me a fresser. It was an apt description as I ate a lot and ate very quickly, including indulging in many snacks that I should have avoided.  Much later, when in mid-career and campus learning technology was getting the better of me, where I had no other way to relieve the stress, I drank too much.  There is a relationship between drinking alcohol and overeating and during this period my weight ballooned.  This happened after I stopped jogging, because my knees went out, and I didn't find an alternative form of exercise to balance me both physically and emotionally.  Nowadays I go for long walks and that really helps.  But it didn't occur to me then that walking might be the answer.

As I am rather thoughtful about many other matters, it may at first seem puzzling that I have this issue with impulsivity.  I have subsequently reconciled myself to this duality with the following observation.  When my creativity can find a focus for its expression I get absorbed in that and find the experience enjoyable.  However, when I am angry and/or frustrated, the thoughtful part of me is stymied and it is then that I get impulsive, with the eating and drinking serving as some kind of compensation, unhealthful though they are, for those negative feelings.  It is why nowadays I try to avoid situations that predictably would upset me.  So, for example, I spend much less time reading the newspaper than I used to do, though I haven't eliminated the habit entirely. 

I believe there to be a genetic component to all of this.  When my younger son was four or five, the folks at daycare recommended that he be tested by a psychologist, who found he was mildly autistic, along the lines of Asperger's Syndrome.  When I did a Google search on that and read about it I said to myself - this is my mother.  Indeed, I've come to realize that I have some of the symptoms, while others didn't manifest, and still others I learned to suppress as a teenager.  Further, my mother had the disposition herself to be a fresser and my sister has that as well.  Plus, my dad was a type-1 diabetic and I believe there is some correlation between diabetes in the parent and obesity in the child.  Here I want to say that the genetic explanations produce inclinations only.  Impulses can be controlled.  Alas, I didn't learn to do so when I was a teenager.  I went on a diet near the end of 10th grade, which was facilitated by some medication, perhaps an amphetamine of some sort though I can't recall that now.  While the diet worked, when the medication stopped I put the weight back on.  It was only much later, after graduating from college, where I was able to lose weight without the aid of medication and keep it off, more or less, for about 20 years, when I was just getting started with learning technology on the administration end.

The tail end of my earlier post can be thought of us a plan for impulse control, based on finding non-alcoholic alternatives that I could persist with also on going to sleep earlier than I had been doing as a "nudge" toward impulse control.  Regarding the latter, I stuck with that assiduously.  As to the former,  while I did utilize a variety of substitutes for alcoholic beverages, what I ended up doing changed over time.  First, let me report that non-alcoholic bourbon is dreadful and while holding a drink in your favorite glass has its merits, this is no way to wean yourself off of the good stuff.  Next, I had previously given up drinking sparkling water, reasoning that since I seem to have excess gas in my gut I didn't need to consume sparkling water as well.  But I was having non-alcoholic beer, Coors Edge in my case.  It was okay but not really a substitute for the dark beer I used to favor.  (Recently I wrote this rhyme, to emphasize the point.) And it started to seem like needless calories, which is why my wife won't drink it.  So I went back to buying La Croix, although my favorite flavor in the past, Mixed Berry, no longer seems to be available.  I also started to have, on occasion, diet tonic water, a different taste and another reason to use a good glass for drinking.  I can report that the Schweppes version is much better than the store brand, but when the name brand is not available you go with what is.  

There is another aspect to impulse control that I hadn't considered in my earlier post and it goes as much toward eating as it does toward drinking.  This is about planning what will be consumed.  In the language of the decision making I learned in graduated school, this is a rolling plan, on a meal by meal basis, a snack by snack basis, and a drink by drink basis.  And it is made somewhat in advance an hour or two before the event, not written down but done in my head.  I am compulsive in planning this way, especially since as a retired person I am time abundant, so don't need to have my attention elsewhere.  And the planning itself isn't very time consuming, as the choices to be made come from within a limited set of alternatives.  The point is to reduce spontaneity from the consumption process.  It does that although it's not perfect.  Sometimes I will tell myself - I'm still hungry or I want a treat now.  For the latter I try to restrict myself to sensible alternatives, IQBars or Go Macro Bars, though I will have a sweet treat that my wife buys now and then.  Yet even with this deviation, there is far more control in my food and drink consumption than there used to be. 

Let me turn to how I think about these matters moving forward.  First, there will be a bit of celebration Monday evening and maybe Tuesday evening as well, regardless of how the test results turn out.  There will be a bit of deferred Halloween candy, I'm thinking of a small package of M&Ms with peanuts, after which there will be some dark beer and then maybe some good whiskey.  This is to celebrate that I stuck with the regime for the full six months and learned that it was within me to do so.  After that, however, I  expect to go back to the straight and narrow, with perhaps one or two nights a month as celebration, but not more than that.  Here is why.

Two weeks ago I had rather severe pain in my right hip.  I suffer from lumbar radiculitis and sacroiliitis and it was acting up.  But last week the pain went away and it has stayed away since then.  I don't know why this happened but I conjecture the following.  I have also have been diagnosed with a tortuous colon, which makes me prone toward constipation.   I have verified that there is a correlation between the pain from sacroilliitis and constipation, so if I can do things to control the latter I end up helping myself out with the former.  Not drinking alcohol lessens the chance of constipation, as does keeping my weight under control.  Since I'm into rhyme, I really wish it were - no gain, no pain.  But I'll content myself merely with making this more likely and then dealing with it at the time, when the pain does return.  I will try not to drink for pain relief.  I've been able to do that these last six months, so I know it's possible.

There is one way this cuts against the grain.  I get up frequently during the night to go to the bathroom.  Recently, it's about once every two hours.  Alcohol dehydrates you, so should lessen the frequency.  The getting up part itself is not so bad.  The issue is whether I can go back to sleep after I'm done.  Recently I've been finding that's getting more difficult to do, especially after the third or fourth time.  (I usually go to sleep by 8 PM.)  I do take Melatonin, which I've been doing for a while.  Maybe it's time to stop with that.  But would I get to sleep at all without it?  I'm going to wait a while before I experiment with that.

Let me make one other point and then close.  While doing the pre-writing for this post I was wondering about the impact of something cataclysmic happening on my decision making, whether that were to my own health or the situation in the community where I reside.  I didn't get very far with this.  I suppose the underlying issue is whether I felt a sense of agency in addressing the situation.  But as to what would bring about that sense of agency, I'm not sure.  On the flip side, I'm making more mental errors these days than I used to.  Yet most if not all of them have been uncovered immediately and so far none have caused irredeemable damage.  I'm hoping the decline that way is very gradual.  When that ceases to be the case, all bets are off. 

Puzzling

Nowadays, I'm so frightened about what is going on in the (sur)real world that I want to vanish into my own head, to hide from it all.  One way I do that is by writing these blog posts.  Sometimes I find that gathering my thoughts and then composing the piece is absorbing, at least for a while.  On occasion in doing so I will try to tie into my thinking from from an earlier time, when I was still working and reflecting on teaching and learning with technology as well as on teaching and learning without the technology modification.  There were many ways in which we were coming up short as to what I thought should be the norm, so I wondered quite a bit and would give air to my musings in writing. The post today is of that sort.  But first, here are a couple of things I need to confess.

When I was teaching undergraduate economics, I found a great gap between how the students seemingly went about things and how I go about my own learning.  While I could readily identify factors that explain this disparity - generational, locational, parental, etc. - and drill down on each of these, thereby developing an abstract argument to explain what I was observing, in my gut that abstract argument never held sway.  Over time you get quite accustomed to your own patterns of thought, which are then a kind of habit.  Those patterns seem normal to me and my gut tells me they should be a commonplace with everyone else as well.  That it is not so, I will admit.  But why it is not so remains a puzzle to me, one I haven't solved.  This post is a kind of wishing that it were otherwise.

The other confession is that I'm completely out of it, having retired in summer of 2010, teaching one course a year after that for the most part through fall 2019, with Covid putting an end to that.  I stopped teaching before AI entered the vernacular and have no experience with it on which to base my arguments.  For many readers, that will disqualify what I have to say, giving them a legitimate reason to stop reading right here.

But it does make it easier for me to maintain that the elements of thinking, problem solving in a situation which has not previously been resolved, where some creativity is expressed in finding a solution, my belief is that these things are within us and don't change much at all over time, even if the technological environment changes enormously.  In my ideal, this should provide the focus for teaching and learning, from grade school through college and thereafter as well.

Near to when I retired I started to write a book based on the idea that there must be joy associated with creative problem solving, with that joy emerging from a spark of intuition, the prelude to the Aha moment. Yet that intuition itself couldn't provide the right answer for certain.  Indeed, it might lead one astray.  At best it was a guess as to to right answer.  I called the book Guessing Games.  I thought the first several chapters went reasonably well, but then my inclination to lecture took over.  The argument became overly pedantic and I got frustrated with the writing.  That's why I stopped.  But there is enough there that might pique the interest of others.

I recently reread a chapter I had long since ignored called Assessment.  The first half has perhaps too much recounting of the economics we were taught during my first year of graduate school at Northwestern.  But the second half makes a rather compelling argument in the support of embedded assessment which happens mainly via an ongoing conversation with the student, where each particular item to be assessed is done in a low-stakes environment.  We have inadvertently made school anti-democratic with our emphasis on high-stakes testing.  The very good students become the elite, receiving a variety of privileges from that, including that we professors teach as if they are the norm.  The rest become the riffraff and develop the emotional scars associated with that determination.

I began to wonder whether one could teach a full course with only embedded assessment and how that might be done.  I should note that during the teaching I did in retirement,  I had students write weekly blog posts, which I would comment on.  And I relied on portfolio grading - individual posts didn't receive a grade.  Instead, I gave one grade for the posts during the first half of the course and another grade for the posts during the remainder of the course.  But the economics department still wanted me to give exams, so I complied with that, though I did so unenthusiastically.  

I suspect that AI would obliterate the benefits from the blogging approach I used.  Plus, reading each post and commenting on it is time consuming.  That was no problem for me, as a retiree, but it might otherwise make the approach unattractive to other instructors.  And even so, it really would only work in small classes, the type you see in upper-level courses.  Something else would be needed  for larger classes.  For now, I'll leave that something else to still be determined.  Here, I only want to propose a framework, nothing more.

And with that, let me report that nowadays I spend an inordinate amount of time on puzzles, mainly word puzzles from the NY Times, also a lot of Sudoku.  For Wordle, those without a subscription can access the puzzle.  For Spelling Bee, those without a subscription can solve a few words in the puzzle before access to the rest is denied.  But my favorite puzzle is Letter Boxed, which can only be accessed with a subscription, so I will illustrate with a screen shot from today's puzzle.  I believe that the process of solving this puzzle is very much in the spirt of the problem solving that one does in an open-ended situation.  The steps that one goes through can then be generalized, which I will do at the conclusion of the post.

The puzzle has 12 distinct letters arrayed around the box, with 3 letters on each side of the box.  To make a word the next letter in the word must be on a different side of the box from the previous letter.  This rules out words with double letters and it rules out a lot of letter combinations as well that might occur to you while trying to solve the puzzle, for example "er."  You hit the Enter button when you want to enter a word.  The next word then starts with the last letter of the previous word.  Letters can be used as many times as you need to solve the puzzle.  The goal is to use up all the letters and do so in as few words as possible.

Some years back I surprised myself when for the first time I solved the puzzle in only two words.  I then wondered whether there always was a two-word solution and to convince myself of that I started to record my solutions at this site.  I subsequently found another site that generates such solutions and later that the NY Times has a site with their solution. So now, each day I try for a two-word solution.  I don't always find one, but I will spend quite a while looking before I give up.  It's what one goes through in that search which I consider below. 

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with what's there. 

This seems so obvious, on the one hand, yet I believe that students often expect to find an answer to a problem on their homework or to an exam question before getting sufficiently familiar with what is being asked.  In this case, I first look at the vowels, there is no "a" in this puzzle, as well as what vowels are on the same side of the box, so can't be used in combination.  Then I look for the "hard letters," which in this case I take as "q" and "v."  I'll want to find words which have at least one of these, unless I've found another words that already uses both.  Regarding the latter, you might initially try "quiver" but then note that the "er" combination is not allowed.  If you give up on finding a word with both of the hard letters, a different approach is needed.

Step 2: Frame the problem to admit a solvable subproblem.

In this case, it means finding a first word that doesn't end in a hard letter but contains one of them and that uses at least 8 letters of the puzzle, so the second word isn't too hard to find.

Step 3:  Guess at a solution to the subproblem.

Now I will admit that I use an online dictionary to help me solve the puzzle.  One feature of these dictionaries is that you can search using a non-word and it will return possible alternative words that seem similar, so have many of the same letters.  I prefer to try first without the dictionary, but I don't wait too long before I start to use it.  In this case my original word, which I think is pretty immediate, is "question."  If that is my first word, can I find a second that starts with "n" and also has "c," "d," "r," and "v?"  It occurs to me to try "noncurved" and I check that in the dictionary, but it's not a word.  So, anticipating the next step, we're not done yet.

Step 4: Are we done yet?  If not, is there another subproblem to solve?

If we're done, great.  If not and there is another subproblem to solve, return to Step 3.  If you're not done but you can't find a suitable subproblem to solve, you're stuck.  Then go back either to Step 1 or Step 2 to get unstuck, but try something else this time around.

* * * * *

Whether puzzles of this sort could be constructed for a variety of different subject matter, I leave as food for thought, as I really don't know whether that's possible or not.  But if it were possible and if students developed the yen for solving such puzzles, it would address the mystery of intrinsic motivation and these students would really learn.  Wouldn't that be nice?

The Dickens You Say

We have beds that incline, both at the back and at the feet.  Lying on the bed and adjusting the tilt appropriately, I find is one of the very few ways that I can relieve the pain from lumbar radiculopathy and sacroiliitis, which persists in spite of a recent steroid injection I had in the region of my right hip and also performing some exercises I learned in physical therapy, the last time I did that.  So, already disposed toward sloth, I have yet another reasons to stay in bed for prolonged periods, even when I'm not sleeping or napping.  It has now become the place where I do my long form reading, most of which I do during the daytime, and gets me away from sitting at the computer, still a habit for drinking the morning coffee, doing way too many word puzzles, and every once in a while writing one of these godawful blog posts.

This one is about my recent reading.  Yesterday I finished David Copperfield, quite a long book, after previously reading A Tale of Two Cities.  Some years back, I had read Bleak House and liked it very much.  Yet, unlike when I was a kid and then got on a binge to read a series of books by the same author, my more recent trajectory of choosing what to read has been somewhat whimsical, and while I might read consecutively two books from the same writer, I will then bounce around to something else that has caught my attention for whatever reason, though apart from finding the novels that form the basis of TV series I've recently watched, I try to avoid contemporary fiction.  For the most part now, given that I've been retired for quite a while, I no longer need page-turner fiction as a release from the daily grind.  I want more than that from my reading, to be elevated in some way, either educationally or emotionally.  About the former, one way to learn from the reading is to note parallels between the historical context and the current time in America.  History repeats, or so they say.  As to the latter, I will get to that in a bit.

Let me make one note here as a guide to potential readers, in case this post encourages someone else to give Dickens or other authors of his ilk a try.  The reader of such works has an implicit obligation, to adjust oneself to the rhythms and timbres of how the author writes, which might take some doing as both the style and word usage may be somewhat unfamiliar.  There is reward in showing patience as the story opens up that way.  With that, let me make a confession.  I read with my Kindle Fire disconnected from the Internet.  I do this primarily to save battery life, but also to keep me from straying and Web surfing while I'm reading.  For the same reason, I only rarely use the Kindle application on my Mac.  But this means I don't have access to an online dictionary while I read.  I need to get meaning from context, or miss it entirely, which does happen once in a while.  Then, later, perhaps I will remember a word that stumped me and look it up when I return to the computer.  (I recall finding the words gaol and gaoler when reading a Tale of Two Cities.)  With that, there is more than just skill to the meaning making, as it entails developing a sense of taste as to whether sufficient grasp of the story has been obtained.  I will add to this that I have imperfect recall of the characters who were part of the story earlier but then faded into the background for a while.  I hope that the author will help to refresh my memory when it is appropriate to do so.

With David Copperfield, I identified a good deal with the title character, finding several similarities between him and me, in spite of the big differences in time and setting.  The biggest of these, surely, is a penchant to be absorbed with producing narrative in one's head, finding it a natural occupation.  I was able reconcile that eventually with having a good job by becoming an academic with a focus on economic theory.  Yet the story itself made me reflect back on an earlier time, when I was in school, graduate school in particular, but before that as well.  I developed a reputation as a very good student among my classmates and in some cases I became aware of something similar among my professors.  

That serves as backdrop to the story.  One way where my story is quite different from that of David Copperfield is that many of the main characters he confronted early in life remained important parts of his extended family later in life.  In contrast, as I changed settings, particularly when I started out at Northwestern for grad school, I knew neither my classmates nor my professors ahead of time and indeed, having grown up in New York wondered whether the Midwest personality was different in some  fundamental ways.  Yet that hadn't been the only change for me.

I was overweight in high school, more so in college.  I was also terribly shy regarding the boy-girl thing.  It's hard for me to separate cause from effect this way.  I deliberately lost a good deal of weight between college and grad school, as a way to have a clean slate on this score and improve my chances thereafter.  And weight-wise, I was able to maintain the new level for about 20 years or so, well into getting married and having a couple of kids.  What I want to note here is that my personality didn't change with these alterations in my outer appearance.  I still felt physically unattractive and didn't know how to initiate with a girl, blowing a few opportunities at Northwestern as a consequence.

This is unlike David Copperfield, how had a few girls in his life where he had both much contact with them and where he fell in love with each one at the time.  One was in childhood with Emily, where they played together extensively.  Memories of her fueled his imagination thereafter.  It is this fueling of the imagination where I found similarities with the Dickens character.

The next girl chronologically is Agnes, who was a dear friend and confidant while David was in school.  He lived with her and her father, who managed his aunt's finances.  It was Copperfield's aunt who paid both for the this boarding and for the school tuition.  Agnes remains a steady friend through the rest of the story.  Eventually he marries her and the have a very nice family.  But that is getting ahead of the story.

Before that is Dora, the daughter of Copperfield's first work boss.  He immediately falls in love with her, because of her beauty.  While I find that quite natural, as I will explain momentarily, Dora is also depicted as a silly little girl, playing with her dog Jip and looking for affection from David, but not otherwise engaging in serious matters.  It is a wonder how someone like Copperfield, so caught up in the life of the mind, can nonetheless feel that love for a woman is entirely visual and tactile, without any intellectual component whatsoever.  

Yet for most young men, that is probably how it is.  My second year in grad school I was a TA, the first quarter, fall 1977, for introductory microeconomics taught by Assaf Razin.  I held my office hours in the Library lounge.  At one of these a girl in my class with blonde hair came to sit down at the table where I was sitting. Overtly, nothing unusual happened.  In my head, however, I fell in love with her immediately and have long since regretted not pursuing the matter further.  

In spite of Dora's shortcomings, evident to the reader if not to David, she calls him Doady, a cutesy idiosyncrasy, the two marry and seem quite happy.  But her health is not good and after a while she passes a way.  While Copperfield does experience grief at this time, it doesn't appear overwhelming and he recovers from it.  Eventually he finds his shared friendship with Agnes, which for him really has gone beyond that, is actually a shared loved on her part as well.  They then get married and there is seemingly more balance in their relationship than the prior one with Dora.

Something similar happened to me although it took quite a while to rebound from the Northwestern experience.  While on sabbatical at UBC in spring 1989 I met Leslie.  By this point I had tenure at Illinois and Leslie was an assistant professor at UBC. We feel in love and had a whirlwind romance, but we also had some more maturity then, being in our 30s.  It was wonderful.   Yet I still can't help wondering if I could do it over again whether I could have made my early 20s more fulfilling on an emotional level.

There are other parallels I've had with David Copperfield.  The book has many stories of cruelty, overt misrepresentation, and evil.  I experienced some of this happened while I was at Northwestern, partly from the Economics program and partly by my fellow students.  Much of this was about funding for support of our learning.  I was on fellowship my first year and not being a stickler for details I thought that fellowship was guaranteed for 3 more years thereafter, provided my academic performance was satisfactory.  It turned out that no such guarantee existed and indeed that funding in the second year was scarcer than they originally had expected.  So, my class became even more competitive in seeking fellowship support.  Further, and this one is just absurd in hindsight, at the time being a TA was a requirement for the PhD and not a paid job, apparently as a way to gyp the IRS.  Yet during my second year the program had raised the requirement from 4 quarter courses (2 courses for 2 quarters) to 6 quarter courses (2 courses of 3 quarters) without any adjustment in compensation for the TA.  That was chutzpah.  

Then, during the first year, one or two of my classmates got it into their heads that they could get a leg up on the rest of us by reshelving the bound journal that contained our required reading in the wrong place in the Library, so those who hadn't read the piece already never would.  Also, in 1 or 2 cases they actually ripped out the article from the bound journal, so finding the bound journal was insufficient to get at the reading.  In case it isn't obvious, this form of competition is quite demoralizing to the other students.  Many of my classmates that first year got a Masters degree and then dropped out of the program.  I'm guessing that the cheaters were among them, though I'll never know that for sure.  

I hadn't thought about those episodes for quite a while.  It's not obvious that reading Dickens would trigger those memories.  But it does show that not all mental connections are linear and that sometimes in searching for a parallel we come up with what might seem quite other experiences.

Let me close with one other point.  We are used to fiction delivering us with happy endings.  Dickens doesn't disappoint on that score.  It makes one wonder, even as we are living in a seeming dystopia at present, whether we can produce a happy ending to our own lives.  I hope that is still possible.

Non Proximate Causes and Singular Events

It is said there is no use crying over spilled milk.  But what if via some mysterious technique, the milk can get put back into the bottle.  Then the crying would be the least we might do.  The reader should keep that thought in mind as the rest of this post progresses.

I have in mind large events that impacted our national politics and national ethos. Further, in each case there is a large gap in time between the initial act and the subsequent consequence.  Let me illustrate then with President Gerald Ford's pardon of former President Richard Nixon.  I wrote about that quite a while ago in a post called The "L" Word.

Gerald Ford was a Republican in the Eisenhower tradition.  Reagan tried to run for President in 1976.  But Ford was the sitting President and he won the nomination.  There is no way to know this, but I think it a likelihood that Ford would have won the election had it not been for the Pardon.  After Watergate, most everyone hated Nixon, certainly Democrats and then many Republicans too.  Ford explained that the Pardon was necessary for the country to heal.  Maybe so.  I’m not so sure.  The Pardon was a huge assist to the Carter candidacy.  Consider Ford as President from 1977- 1980, but imagine Ford facing the same Stagflation that Carter had to deal with and imagine the Shah falling and the hostage crisis in Iran happening anyway.  Now when Reagan runs in 1980 it’s no slam dunk and quite possibly a Democrat wins that election as a reaction to the previous regime.  But the Pardon set in motion the timing that we did observe.  It’s not in Krugman’s book at all.  It doesn’t help his case.  But it clearly did set in motion a chain of events that contributed to Reagan winning in 1980.

This next one I haven't written about before.  While there has been a huge focus on the events of 9/11, there has been much less reflection, in my view, on America's reaction to those events.  The second war in Iraq, in particular, should be noted as 9/11 seemed only a pretense for starting that war.  Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the events of 9/11.  But since the earlier war in Iraq left him in place, as regime change in Iraq was not part of the agenda at the time, there were some higher ups within the George W. Bush administration who viewed that as a mistake and wanted it rectified.  They held sway and eventually we did declare war on Iraq, again. 

We operated under a cloud of delusion.  Recall that is was said that the American liberators would be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqis.  After that initial mirage we ended up losing our soul, most notably by the horrific events at Abu Ghraib.  In some sense, this utter disregard for humanity ended up being matched at home by the widespread speculation in real estate, ultimately leading to the burst of the housing bubble and the Great Recession, a kind of penance or so it seemed.

In neither of these first two examples can we get the milk back in the bottle.  I'm hoping that with the next one we still can.

Before getting to it, let me levy a criticism against the news which I don't see others making.  We seem to be so caught up in the immediate transgressions that we lose track of the prominent events of the recent past.  We can't keep all that information present in our thinking.  So, intentional or otherwise, the news serves us as a distraction from focusing on some of the particulars in our memory.  In that way, alas, it rewards the propagandists, who want to encourage such distraction.  The remedy is either to find a way to keep these prominent events newsworthy or to find some other outlet than the news in which these prominent events remain in view.

The event I want to focus on here is President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.  This happened on March 16, 2016. The nomination was never put forward for the Senate to consider in its Advice and Consent process, a violation of their Constitutional responsibility.  At the time it was said that there shouldn't be Supreme Court nominations in the same year that there was a Presidential election.  Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, avowed that view.  Yet 4 years later he oversaw the nomination and subsequent confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.  Further, this nomination happened on September 20, 2020, more than 6 months further into the year than the Garland nomination.  It clearly put the lie to the earlier claim about no Supreme Court nominations during the year of a Presidential election.  

I believe that this event should remain front and center in our political view rather than being swept under the carpet like so much of the rest of our history. Indeed, I was so impassioned about this that in the late summer and fall of 2022 I wrote a novella (at the time I referred to it as a novelette) called The Adventures Of The Minute Women that was largely motivated by this event, though admittedly it was triggered by the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Chapter 3 of my book, entitled Merrick and Mitch, is devoted to reconsideration of President Obama's nomination.  

The events mentioned a couple of paragraphs above are not in dispute.  What might be argued is why McConnell and the Republicans didn't take up the nomination.  Most likely, in my view, they regarded Garland as too qualified not to be approved.  So they hoped that with an open seat on the Supreme Court a Republican President would be elected and a more Conservative nomination would then be put forward.  Alternatively, even if they felt they could block the confirmation of Garland in the normal Advice and Consent process, doing so might very well diminish the chances of the Republican Presidential candidate.  One of those must be the right explanation. This sort of reasoning should be evident to all voters, regardless of their political affiliation.

The guilty party in this case is the Republican Senate, not Donald Trump.  Then, those Supreme Court appointments that happened during Trump's first term - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett are all tainted as a consequence.  Evangelical Republicans are surely willing to live with that, as it produced many of the results they were after.  Yet other Republicans, viewing the country on a downhill slide during Trump's second term, might wish for reestablishing faith in the Constitution as primary.  Achieving that would require undoing these ill-gotten gains.  My book makes the argument that this can only happen via the electoral process, voting out those still in the Senate who won't renounce what happened to the Garland nomination in 2016, and voting in other candidates, regardless of party, who are willing to vote for impeachment of those Justices nominated by Trump, as a necessary step toward reuniting the country.  This would happen, of course, with the full cooperation of Democratic voters.  But, as should be evident, it can't happen with only Democratic voters.

This is on nobody's radar now and maybe it is too far-fetched to even be considered a possibility.  Yet I don't think that can be known until this event becomes prominent in the public eye once again.  I hold out the hope that is possible.  After that, who know knows what might happen?  

Debunking The MythMaker

It's an interesting matter how one chooses the next book to read.  For me, with my eyesight what it is, it will invariably be an ebook on my Kindle Fire, so I can provide ample line space and a large enough font that it's no strain that way.  I also have a mild preference for sans serif font, even though once in a while the letters seem to get jammed together and then the word is hard to discern.  As of late, my rule of thumb has been to intermix reading fiction after first watching the TV shows.  This includes Endeavour, a prequel to the books by Colin Dexter about Inspector Morse, Poldark, a show based on the series of books by Winston Graham, and more recently Outlander, and the books by Diana Gabaldon as well as the first season of Dept. Q and the first book in the series by Jussi Adler-Olsen.  With this I've also tried, on occasion, to choose books for my edification, so recently I've read a couple of novels by Toni Morrison and a few by Kurt Vonnegut. And not too long ago I've gotten through some books that I'm under the impression should be read if a person is to consider themselves educated, even if the reading itself I found less than enlightening because the books have significant segments that were over my head and opaque to me. This includes two books I've tried to get through multiple times in the past - James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.  I was able to get through them in this last go round, so I could check them off the list.  But otherwise, there was little if any personal growth from the experience.

In the past, when I was still able to read paper books comfortably, I would sometimes go on a jag where I'd read non-fiction, with that often tied to my interest in how people learn.  My favorites there, at least the ones that I remember now, are Abraham Maslow, both Toward a Psychology of Being and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, and Marion Milner's On Not Being Able to Paint.  Both authors write about creativity, among other things.  Milner's perspective may be more directly related to what I have to say below.  I wrote about some of what Milner says in this post called Interweaving.  (The part about Milner is in the middle of the post.) 

Now I want to get to the most recent book I've read, The Gilded Edge by Catherine Prendergast.  I probably wouldn't have read this book if I had come across it on my own.  I learned of it, instead, while having a coffee with Norma Scagnoli.  Norma and I were colleagues while we did ed tech in the College of Business and we had been friends before that.  We remain friends now and have a coffee now and then to catch up.  Norma more than mentioned Cathy's book.  (Maybe there is a deal with Netflix about the book, of that I'm not sure.)  And I knew Cathy from when I was doing campus ed tech.  We served together on the oversight committee for the Center of Writing Studies when Gail Hawisher ran the show.  We interacted a little either before, after, or during committee meetings; I no longer remember which.  And I checked my email archive recently.  Cathy and I have had a couple of exchanges in the past.  I have never read a book before where I knew the author first hand.  This made me eager to read The Gilded Edge.

The book is an archival analysis of the key players in the artist colony located in Carmel, California, from when that colony was formed around the turn of the 20th century.  The artist colony has a glamorous reputation today.  The debunking is to show that this reputation is mainly the work of George Sterling, the mythmaker, and his cronies.  Sterling had an odd combination of jobs.  He sold real estate.  He did other financial business as well.  Those two may not be so odd in combination.  But then he was a poet, the work he'd have rather done full time, if only the pecuniary rewards were sufficient from that.

But Sterling was also a lecher and a drunk and engaged in all his sordid activity while married to his wife Carrie.  He strung her along and that made her miserable, but it took seemingly forever before she divorced him.  George Sterling was well connected, for example, to Jack London and to Ambrose Bierce. Those connections afforded certain advantages and it seemed that Carried implicitly calculated that those advantages outweighed the misery her husband's despicable behavior was making for her, until they no longer did.  It probably wasn't as rationally thought out as that, as Carrie came from a poor background and had a great fear of living in poverty again.

The book is quite depressing to read as it describes multiple suicides, disjoint in time but by the same method, cyanide poisoning.  And these suicides seem to be linked to each other.  The first of these is by Nora May French, the poetess, as close to a heroine of the story as there is.  She was seemingly a free spirit, but suffered through multiple abortions and was with child when she killed herself.  At the time she had been living with George and Carrie Sterling and it may very well have been that George was the  father of the child.  It seems that George loved Nora and no longer loved Carrie.  Even if you're not a prude, reading about much of this is sickening, especially as Nora's spirit, embodied in her writing, remains present through the rest of the story, which goes on for a while.

I understand that Cathy had to invent some narrative when describing the female characters of the story, as the archival evidence about them is sparse, and even with the male characters there must have been some narrative invention as well.  Given that, I'm going to speculate a little on something I would have liked to see considered but didn't. 

In the literature on learning there is much discussion about intrinsic motivation - primarily curiosity in the subject matter - versus extrinsic motivation - coming mainly from trying to get a good grade on the coursework.  The former is purer and promotes learning far better than the latter.  Too much focus on the latter can block learning entirely.  In a parallel way, the writers who are the subject of the Gilded Edge must have had both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation in producing their works, with the former simply the need for self-expression while the latter was from getting their piece placed in a well-regarded outlet and making good money from the publication.  The thirst for these extrinsic rewards, however, might then serve as a blockage for future creative endeavors.  The debauchery might then be escapism from this sort of writer's block.  I have no way of knowing whether there is any truth to this suggestion, but I'd like to have seen the idea examined.

Another idea was put forward.  These people lived on the razor's edge income-wise and that was an enormous source of stress.  I know from my own career as a campus administrator that one is apt to over-indulge in a situation of ongoing stress, simply as a kind of relief from it all.  Now, where I am 17 weeks into not drinking in an attempt to rehabilitate my liver fibrosis, I very much regret the over-indulgence in alcohol from 20 years ago, the overeating too.  I can be more disciplined now, but I've removed so much of the stress from my day-to-day existence.  George repeatedly promised Carrie that he'd give up drinking, then not live up to his promise.  He was either too immature or too irresponsible to find a more direct way to deal with the situation.  As such, he is the villain of the story, even as he does eventually commit suicide himself.

Let me wrap up with this bit from a post I wrote 20 years ago called Jen Dah.  It comes right at the end of the post.

I’d like to close with a point I’ve made before. It’s hard to be a nerd during childhood; there is a lot of social stigma attached to it. For boys, however, it is easier than for girls. My experience when I was a kid and at least for my older son he seems to have replicated that, it is possible to find a cohort of like minded kids and so one doesn’t have to bleach out all the idiosyncrasies. For girls who are inclined to be intellectual in a geeky way, however, I believe they are less likely to find a cohort that is unobtrusively nerdy. I’m of the mind that these kids will feel impelled to suppress a good part of their personas just to achieve some form of social acceptance. I’ve really not seen this issue discussed as much as I think it deserves.

While I may have been vaguely aware of nerdy girls in junior high, it became far more evident in high school.  I graduated from high school in 1972.  The Gilded Edge considers a time not quite 70 years earlier.  If anything, things must have been much harder for a nerdy girl then.  Yet for most of her life Nora May French did not suppress her personality.  It was only near the end of her life that she behaved differently, at which time she was living with George and Carrie Sterling.  Maybe sticking with our own personality can be a disaster socially, while still being a source of self-protection.  Alas, I'm clutching at straws here.  I really don't know.  It is said that hindsight is 20-20.  In this case, however, I'm not sure it is.

Humanizing The True Believer

I first read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer over 50 years ago, as an undergrad in a political science class.  I can't say that I remembered much of what Hoffer said there.  But something of what I read must have stuck with me because near to the time when I retired I started to read other things written by Eric Hoffer and I found that compelling reading. (Also see a post from a couple of years later called Interweaving.)  By then I had read a compilation of Hoffer's works contained within a single volume titled Between the Devil and the Dragon. The True Believer is one of the works contained therein.  But as I had read it before, I skipped over it in this reading.  I read it again quite recently, drawn to it by a peculiar consideration.  I was watching a TV series on Netflix called The Following.   Season 1 is about a cult that follows a messianic leader who also is a mass murderer, and cult members were well aware of this.  That awareness did not dilute their devotion to the leader.  I had no feel for what motivated cult members and I wanted to better connect with them to get more out out of the show. 

I thought the story would be more interesting to me if I had even just a bit of intuition as to their inclinations as cult members.  I told myself I might find that in a re-read of The True Believer, even though that book is about mass movements rather than cults.  Apart from the sheer number of members, I'm not really sure about the difference between the two.  Others may have a firmer grasp about what separates the two notions.  Perhaps one of them can elaborate on that in their own writing.  Here, I will just push on with my narrative.

Hoffer is very strong on identifying the core motivation of the true believer.  It emerges from utter self-contempt.  The person has completely lost faith in himself and feels that he can't be redeemed.  So he needs to find an outer focus that he can devote all his attention to and totally submerge his individuality to that.  Hoffer takes that self-contempt as a given and does not explore its source.  In The Following there are bits about the family background of cult members and that they very well might have had abusive parents.  I want to note this possible explanation and observe it is likely highly idiosyncratic.  Below, I will suggest another possible explanation, one with a socioeconomic basis, that gives a more systematic view of who the true believers are.  Once this alternative explanation is admitted, one can then consider whether a systematic undoing of this cause is possible and, if so, whether a restoration of the individuality and humanity of each (now former) true believer can be achieved.  

* * * * *

Another TV miniseries I've watched recently is Abraham Lincoln, also on Netflix, which is partly a documentary with the commentary of many different historians and partly a dramatization of various scenes that were critical in Lincoln's lifetime.  The last of the three episodes is devoted to the ending of the Civil War, Lincoln's attitude about restoring the peace, expressed in the brief time he had left until his assassination, and then the calamitous event itself.  Although Lee surrendered at Appomattox, unlike many in his Cabinet Lincoln didn't feel a need to extract additional punishment from the South, the war itself being enough punishment as it was.  For example, Lincoln wanted Southern soldiers to be able to keep their horses, so they could return to their farms and start with the planting.  Lincoln regarded them as Americans, first and foremost, and they needed to return to life of ordinary citizens.  Hoffer actually talks about Lincoln as cast in the same mold as Gandhi, unusual in their gentleness and prescient in being able to see the full picture of the consequences.  Alas, Lincoln wasn't there to lead the efforts of Reconstruction.

It occurred to me that our current national politics has the feel of being engaged in another Civil War.  In the event that the Democrats sweep at the national level elections in 2028, that may very well seem like they have won this version of the Civil War.  It might make sense then to try to emulate Lincoln and ask what can be done to pursue the peace.  

Others might argue that this is putting the cart before the horse and we shouldn't get too far ahead of ourselves.  The focus should remain on the 2026 elections.  Let's make the best out of that.  

From the viewpoint of current politics, that other perspective might very well be right.  But my own perspective is different.  Back when I was doing research on theoretical models of industrial organization, the model would often be in the form of a two-stage game.  Game theory being what it is, the right theoretical approach is to first solve for the equilibrium in the stage-two subgame.  This subgame equilibrium can have different outcomes depending on how stage one plays out.  Understanding this, one can than determine the equilibrium of the overall game, which is termed 'subgame perfect.'  That means the players of the game in the first stage correctly anticipate how the game will subsequently unfold and that predictions based on the model don't need to rely on the players having unrealistic expectations about the future.  So, my thought is that modeling this future in a way that it can be unfolded back to now might be helpful in better understanding what will happen in the present (and in the near future).

* * * * * 

It is fairly straightforward to cast MAGA-type Republicans who follow Trump as true believers a la Eric Hoffer.  They would be the ultimate losers in the current Civil War should the Democrats sweep in 2028.  (The plutocrats would also be big losers, but the plutocrats are not the focus in this piece, so for now we'll cast them aside.)  If Hoffer is right and they indeed feel nothing but self-contempt at present, might they somehow be redeemed to have a modicum of self-respect and with that tolerance for others who are unlike them?  Would achieving this be a necessary component of a program that aimed to eliminate racism in our country?  That is my Lincolnesque noodling for now.  

Let's drill down as to the source of their self-contempt.  The vast majority of these people will have been steeped in a patriarchal mindset and with that they have the presumed role as breadwinner within the family. Disruption in the labor market, which makes them lose their jobs and for which other employment isn't readily available, can then serve as a first cause among a series of causes.  And that first cause really should be taken as exogenous, totally outside the control of the individuals.  This first cause in itself leads to substantial frustration, especially if there hasn't been adequate savings made ahead of time to guard against the situation, and even if there are such savings once the situation seems to be permanent, those initial savings will run out.  That frustration may then be taken out on other family members, who react accordingly.  And the frustration may cause excessive drinking, alcohol abuse, and other anti-social behavior that can both lead to family breakdown and make the person unemployable in the future, even if the labor market were to rebound.  Initially, the person may feel the entire process is reversible.  Eventually, however, it will seem permanent and fully explain the self-contempt. (While I'm speculating here as to causation, I really don't think the story I've told is very far-fetched.)

So, the question arises, can the process really be reversed, given sufficient commitment of resources, time and patience, as well as an understanding of the emotional needs the person will have as he re-establishes his identity? It would do well to have some small-scale social experiments done ahead of time, both to test the feasibility of a program of this sort and to learn how to implement such a program so it is more likely to succeed. 

On the other hand, there may be a sizable number of blue-collar types who are not MAGA adherents.  I don't have the data on this, so am just making a wild guess here.  But, to push a metaphor perhaps too far, just as the Southern soldiers were returning to their farms after the Civil War, many of the Northern soldiers were returning to their farms as well.  An overall program to benefit soldiers returning from the War could target both groups.  

Then, one might imagine a Federal government program to rebuild the middle class, allowing working Americans to enter it, with a focus on massive construction projects.  It is well understood now that there are enormous needs for new sources of clean energy and affordable housing.  There is also something we don't talk about much at all - that a good chunk of the population resides in drought areas.  Massive desalination projects and building water pipelines to bring the clean water to where the people are makes sense.  The work to be done on such projects would need to pay a decent wage and provide reasonably good benefits. And, such work must endure, probably for decades to come.

This, however, is not enough. Those who have been emotionally damaged won't be able to seek out such work, at least not at first.  They will require treatment of some sort and a means of support until they are able to return.  That too must be provided.  The overall program might then be called Rebuilding America and Rebuilding Americans, though I admit my skills at marketing are second-rate and somebody else who is better at it should come up with with a more convincing promotion.  

* * * * *

I hope that what I have provided here is sufficient to pique the interest of the reader and give them some intuition as to what is needed, even if they find my ideas more than a little off base.  They then might very well want to try their hand at noodling with a Lincolnesque solution of their own.  I encourage them to that.  We need an approach that will capture the interest of many.  Even if it isn't in the official party platform, it could well influence voting behavior in the 2028 election.  My hope is that it would help bring the country closer together.

In addition, there may need to be some blunt talk before then, because it is clear that the plutocrats who have engaged in extensive efforts to reduce their own tax burdens will resist these efforts.  It is my view that the MAGA types have been the unwitting stooges of the plutocrats in this regard.  Pointing that out may not be a way to win many converts.  But while it may not be evident in prospect, it should become obvious in retrospect.  Should that happen, it will seal the deal. 

Ideating on Social Responsibility

If only real life were a Frank Capra movie.  Then warm-hearted generosity might very well triumph over greed, selfishness, and disdain for others.  Then this victory in the war of competing ethos would happen because people have become quite fatigued with the alternative, yet they maintain a hopeful idealism that society can be restored to something that reflects their ethos, simply by having enough other people take up the same point of view, without the need to launch a painful and destructive counterrevolution to achieve this end.  That is the punchline for where I'd like to end up with this post.

But it is a long path to follow before reaching that conclusion.  I want to take up first why during junior high and the first couple of years of high school (fall 1966 - spring 1970) schmaltzy movies were so important to me in shaping my views on social responsibility, and it's not just It's a Wonderful Life that comes to mind. This is true even though I started to read the newspaper then (first the Herald Tribune, then after it folded the New York Times), some serious fiction for pleasure (the first of which was The Grapes of Wrath which I read in summer camp after 7th grade), and by 9th grade and perhaps earlier I was subscribing to The New Republic and reading that from cover to cover.  Yet all this reading was about the world out there.  I should know about that, sure.  But it didn't really help to answer what bits of it I should bring into my own little world and incorporate within my personal makeup.  The schmaltzy movies were better for me that way.

Let me give an example. For a while, I was quite taken with the Gregory Peck character in To Kill a Mockingbird. I have a distinct memory of wanting my next pair of eyeglasses to have tortoiseshell frames, in imitation of that character.  That we first learn to be ourselves by imitating others strikes me as offering a good insight into my development as an adolescent, particularly regarding ethical matters.  The character that Gregory Peck played, Atticus Finch, is associated with the line about walking round in somebody else's shoes. How, exactly, does one do that?  I have one particular example of how that played out in my case, which I wrote about in a post called Retards.  The first part of that post talks about my last year at summer camp, where several of my bunkmates regularly picked on a kid named Gary, and more or less by default I became something of Gary's defender, not something I sought out but it needed doing and there was nobody else who would take it on.

Alas, as I got older the world out there seemed to intrude more and more on my little world, and even though I matured and became more knowledgeable in areas of interest to me, I was often less efficacious in achieving the ends that I would have liked to see.  This is particularly true in the teaching I did in retirement - one course a year, an upper level undergraduate class on the economics of organizations.  I put in a substantial amount of time in the teaching, much more so than I would had I been working full time.  And I used a nonstandard methodology (in re teaching economics) where I had the students write weekly blog posts as part of their homework and where I would give extensive comments on their posts. This effort notwithstanding, I would seemingly reach only a few students in the class.  The vast majority remained unchanged by the experience, with no evidence at all that they were making personal connections to the subject matter.  

And as a true introvert, once this teaching came to an end, Covid wasn't the cause but it cemented that there would be no return to teaching, I no longer went to campus and spent less and less time in face-to-face conversations with others, instead mainly living in my head without being part of a community to share responsibility.  My wife is a far better neighbor than I am, spending a good chunk of her time in her garden, then chatting with others as the situations arise, and being helpful if need be.  I do that only rarely.  I do donate to a couple of local charities, but it is a passive form of contribution.  So, as to social responsibility, particularly of the informal kind, I am definitely not a role model.

This gets me to the normal functions we associate with good citizenship, voting and paying taxes.  And here I want to focus on these functions at the national level.  As to the voting, that is in both primaries and actual elections in even numbered years, and it is for Congressional office as well as the Presidency.  As to taxes, this is filing the income tax return with the IRS, which I do for our household, and arranging in advance for the amounts withheld from our pensions, so the tax is paid, more or less, on a rolling basis.  While as someone who usually follows the rules I do these things, I will note that I'm powerless in determining which candidates appear on the ballot I see, what the major issues are for these candidates, and how they will act if and when they assume office.  Likewise, I have no say as to the level of income taxes I should pay or my fellow citizens should pay.  As one among tens of thousands of voters in my Congressional District and one among millions of voters in the State of Illinois, I'm only a drop in a very large bucket.  It is only when a large mass of voters speak with a common voice, where their message will be heard.  If I were part of such a large mass who are trying their best to act in a socially responsible way, what then is the message we should want to send? I will try to give an answer to that question below.

Before doing that, let me note that it is far easier this way for the plutocrats.  As they say, money talks, and they have plenty of money.  Too many of them, it seems to me, are willing to be self-centered and quite socially irresponsible.  So, it is natural for others to want to pushback at that.  That may be necessary for tactical reasons, given our politics, but I think it is unnecessary as far as articulating what needs to be done from a socially responsible perspective.  So, I hope not to get hung up on this in what follows.

I've recently read Kurt Vonnegut's debut novel, Player Piano.  The copyright is 1952, a few years before I was born.  It's about a dystopia, where machines have fully replaced humans in production, with only a small elite group of engineers and managers to oversee the productive activity, and where this elite group receives a disproportionate share of the economic rewards.  Sounds familiar, doesn't it?  Given how long ago that it was written and that Vonnegut readily admitted he borrowed freely from other dystopian novels, notably Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, I don't want to claim that Player Piano provides interesting commentary on the situation today, particularly on a society that may soon be dominated by AI.  Instead, I want to focus on only one aspect of the story, but I think it is key.  The material needs of the bulk of population are provided for, although not in a generous way.  But their mental health suffers greatly nonetheless because they feel they aren't making a social contribution, and their sense of self-worth is caught up in that.  Further, the protagonist of the story and one of his friends, both of whom are from the elite group, indeed they are the elite of the elite, nonetheless feel that their work is artificial and without real purpose.  So they too are experiencing a decline in their mental health.  It is this linkage between one's mental health and the feeling that one's work needs to be making a real contribution to societal well being which we should take from Vonnegut's book.

Of course, in actuality some may work simply to put food on the table and a roof overhead, drawing their sustenance elsewhere, perhaps from friends and family, maybe in pursuit of some hobby which provides the venue for self-expression yet is not a source of income.  Those who do this well probably are not depressed, because there is some joy in their lives.  But it seems nowadays that many struggle to make ends meet and this inadequacy of income can then make them quite depressed, especially if they feel this situation is likely to be permanent.  No doubt inadequate income can be a source of mental health issues.  Further, apart from income, if they were asked about it many of these people would report that the work itself is alienating.  So, even if their income were adequate, they might report that work itself was a source of mental health issues, which would happen when these outside-of-work factors failed in providing sustenance.  Thus, even with Vonnegut's novel to serve as a guide, there is some complexity to confront in considering this issue of mental health.

To compound matters further, one should be aware of the relevant economic history, as this has had considerable impact on current attitudes and mores.  This would include consideration of the decline in manufacturing, the decline in private sector unions, the expropriation of worker pension funds via hostile takeovers in the 1980s, the dramatic increase in income inequality in the overall economy since 1980, and other factors as well.  I think it fair to say there has been a broad scale emasculation of woking class men, who were ill equipped to adjust to changes in the labor market, particularly to finding jobs in the service sector.  This was likely compounded by how veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were treated after returning home, with an alarmingly high suicide rate among this population.  Evidently, people directly impacted by these events became frustrated and angry.  They needed to blame someone other than themselves for their misfortunes. A good chunk of our national politics might be explained by this observation.

Depression can be caused by highly idiosyncratic and personal issues, in which case simply being there for the person might be the right answer.  For me, the schmaltzy movie that comes to mind to illustrate is The Apartment, with the Shirley MacLaine character jilted to the point of desperation and the Jack Lemon character playing the role of the unlikely hero.  Nowadays when you hear about depression, seemingly quite often, the issue arises whether there is therapy readily available.  That last semester I taught, fall 2019, about 1/3 of my students admitted to feeling depressed and since it seemed to be an issue all over campus, the big concern was whether there were a sufficient number of mental health professionals to handle the load.  Items from Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education confirmed that this was a serious problem around the country.  

That then suggests the underlying issues were likely systemic (and quite possibly may still be with us).  Hence, one wants to know whether the system itself can be modified or changed outright to produce improved mental health outcomes for the vast majority of students.  Similarly, one wants to know whether our economic system can be modified sufficiently to produce improved mental health outcomes for the vast majority of citizens.  A socially responsible person, in my view, would take up this issue quite seriously.  If and when an affirmative answer were identified, the person would then devote considerable energy and personal resources toward making that change a reality, hoping to identify enough other like-minded individuals that this wasn't merely a tilting-at-windmills exercise but a reasonable expectation to pursue.

Now let me pause rather than provide a solution here.  What I have offered above is one possible framing of the societal problem, one that is largely based on economic matters.  I have noodled with solutions elsewhere, most recently in this post, but based on some preliminary discussions with a few friends, it is far from perfect.  Likewise, the framing I've offered above is only one possible framing.  I will briefly try another one, below.  But even restricted to frames with an economic basis, mine might very well be flawed for a variety of reasons, in which case an improvement or an outright replacement is desirable.  It is my hope that the entire process - frame development, frame embrace, effort to achieve an effective solution, and finally delivering a good result - can be viewed metaphorically as a very long relay race.  This post, if it were successful, might get the race started.  But then the baton is passed to others, who advance it further.  Ultimately, this process must emerge from a collaborative effort that then becomes popularized.

Actual discussions about national politics seem mostly to focus on specific policy alternatives.  Framing is at best implicit in these discussions.  You are either for or against the policy.  Modifications are off the table, except for backroom negotiations that occur when a bill needs to be passed. This lack of explicit framing is something which bothers me and was one of the main reasons for writing this post.  Are others likewise bothered by this?  I was an academic economist who would construct theoretical math models in consideration of some economics issue I wanted to analyze.  That background may predispose me to want the framing to be overt in national politics, but others may not be so predisposed.  They might prefer anecdotes, adult versions of Aesop Fables, if you will.  I will try to illustrate.

My household is in the top 10% of the income distribution, but is not close in income to those in the top 1% of the distribution.  As a group, we are largely ignored in the discussion about national politics.  That too has bothered me.  I conjecture that we're ignored because we are already financially comfortable, so don't need a handout from Uncle Sam, yet we are not part of the uber rich, so for that reason alone are regarded by political insiders as folks who should not be a target for additional taxation.  Yet I believe we have an important role to play, especially if the majority of our group are willing to take socially responsible positions.  The most important of these, in my opinion, is for group members to be willing to accept a higher tax burden on their own households and do so of our own accord.  Doing that would, in aggregate, raise substantial tax revenue.  It would also provide cover for raising the taxes on the top 1%.  How would I convince fellow households in my income category to be willing to accept this higher tax burden?  Consider the story of the Major League Baseball player, Ron Hunt.  For 7 years in a row he lead the National League in a category that is not frequently considered - being hit by a pitch.  It's got to hurt a lot to be hit by a pitch thrown in the major leagues and recognizing that gives a nice visualization for the expression - taking one for the team.  If we citizens in the U.S are each the teammates of fellow citizens, then accepting a higher tax burden for our own household is taking one for the team.  And if it is only those at the high end of the income distribution who would be experiencing that, why would anyone have a problem with it?

I didn't say this in the previous paragraph, but I believe that many people choose to go along with the crowd when making their own choices rather than always reason through the choice from first principles.  If so, then the group embrace of a novel social decision might very well look like how innovation diffuses as described, for example, in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. Pursuing that thought in depth could itself be its own post.  Here I only want to observe that it is connected to the relay-race metaphor I mentioned above and that there is some interconnection between the framing and the diffusion, which needs to be worked out in full to have a workable plan.

Let me proceed to a different framing, something I promised above, while attempting to keep it brief so as not to try the reader's patience more than I already have.  The basis is enmity about race, religion, or national origin.  (Additional identifiers could be included here, but this suffices to make the points I'd like to include.)  This form of prejudice has been weaponized politically.  In my view, the plutocrats have used this to distract the MAGA types from focusing on economic issues, thereby making it possible to legislate still more tax cuts for the uber rich.  Given that the socially responsible goals on the economics front aim to defeat the plutocrats in achieving their end and to raise the standard of living for the masses, if this is successful will this enmity fade away of its own accord or does it need to be addressed directly?  Further, even if it will fade away of its own accord eventually, should it be addressed earlier because the wait itself will be intolerable?  I wish I knew the answer to these questions.  My point here is that thoughtful answers need to be developed, which can then serve as guide for socially responsible people.  Now a couple of other points.

I may have sandbagged above by calling To Kill a Mockingbird a schmaltzy movie.  Others might not agree with that designation.  I did so because I wanted to articulate the line about walking around in somebody else's shoes.  To me, it is an essential part of being a socially responsible person.  Yet I rarely see it happen.  In particular, on the racial/religious front, while I quite frequently read about a within-group person making a group defense, I rarely if ever read about an out-of-group person making a like defense.   Perhaps what I do see amounts to a bonding activity for within-group people.  Maybe that is necessary.  But, if so, it is quite unlikely to persuade those who are not part of the group.  I have one possible example that might work otherwise and I wanted to relate it here.

About a dozen years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates had a piece in The Atlantic called The Case for Reparations.  As it turns out, my mother, who was a Holocaust survivor and passed away a couple of years before Coates' essay appeared, had received what amounts to reparation payments, both from Germany and from Austria.  If I recall correctly, this was compensation for denial of education.  My mother was born in 1920 and would have been of junior high/high school age when the Nazis came to power.  I had started to manage my parents' finances in 1998 (my dad passed away a year later).  So I was the one who facilitated the German payments being deposited into my parents' checking account.  (I can't remember now whether that was monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually.)  The money from Austria accrued there, only to be claimed after some todo a year after my mother passed.  My siblings and I were the beneficiaries, but I was the one to manage the money flow.  All of this background contributed to my being positively disposed to Coates' ideas.  So I wondered if family members of other Holocaust survivors who had likewise received such payments were to read Coates' essay, how would they react to the arguments made in the piece?  It seems an interesting social experiment to try, if it can be implemented.

Now, a different point, one more tactical.  LBJ was President during my junior high years and the first half of 9th grade as well.  During that period, a lot of powerful legislation was passed under LBJ's mantle, the Great Society. Both of the frames I've considered were represented in this legislation.  Yet we hardly mention the Great Society today.  Instead, news of the time was dominated by the War in Vietnam, which ended up fracturing American society.  The imprint of the Great Society was lessened as a consequence and from the point of view of social progress much of it was negated after Ronald Reagan became President.  

That bit of history should inform how the socially responsible coalition positions itself.  One implicit goal is to enable the coalition to endure and not cause such strong counter reaction that it undermines all that has been achieved until then.  Another implicit goal is to make real progress from the get go.  Regarding the latter, no doubt that if a Democrat takes control of the White House in 2029, much attention will have to be given to either restoring Federal government function that had been disabled by Trump, or starting from scratch at building alternative function that aims to improve on what existed before Trump became President.  Some of this might overlap with the agenda I've described, but how much of an overlap I really can't say, and to the extent that the two are disjoint, they will compete for our attention and might fracture the overall support.  This can be anticipated in advance.  

Nowadays, even a moderate sports fan like me is well aware of the prevalence of sports betting.  It makes me wonder how I would bet now that a successful socially responsible coalition will develop.  In spite of my great desire to see it happen, at present I would bet against.  

What might be done to improve the odds enough so I can bet the other way and get likeminded people to do so as well?

Some Reflection on Instructor Self-Protection Against the Campus LMS Failing

Given the recent hacking of Canvas and the dislocation that occurred as a result on campuses across the country, many must be asking themselves - was this a Black Swan or a portent?  If instructors assign a non-zero probability to the latter, they then will want to know what they can do in advance to mitigate the consequences of the next event.  This post is motivated by those concerns.

Now it's time for the disclaimer, my usual one and another that is specific to the content of this post.  I write these posts primarily to provoke the reader's thinking on the matters of concern.  My proffered solutions may very well be off base.  I want to admit that up front.  Nonetheless the post can be useful in getting the reader to consider other possibilities that would be better.  That value of the post, then, is in getting readers to reflect on the issues in a serious manner, rather than to just have them worried but with no strategy on how to self-protect.  I also need to note here that I am a has-been.  I last taught in fall 2019, so have no experience as to the consequences of AI on instruction.  Further, I retired back in 2010 from doing ed tech work, first for the Campus at Illinois, then for the College of Business.  At the time, I might have been considered to be an informed insider.  This commentary which initially appeared in then Educause Quarterly, Dis-Integrating the LMS, reflects my mindset from back then, and which continued into the time when I was teaching the one course a year on the Economics of Organizations that I did in retirement.  The rest of the post leverages those experiences, even if they are now out of date.

There is an obvious form of self-protection an instructors might take - use an alternative host (or set of hosts) other than the campus LMS, hosts that are less likely to experience an outage at a critical juncture in the course, perhaps because those hosts are used mainly for functions other than teaching and learning.  But I can't leave well enough alone, so I am going to take a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone approach.  Once alternative hosts are on the table, might that readily enable an improvement in pedagogy as well?  Some of my suggestions below will be along those lines.

Make Much of the Course Website Publicly Available

This is first and foremost to reflect an ideal from 20+ years ago - Information wants to be free.  I will try to illustrate some of the learning benefits from doing so in what follows, but let me start with this one.  As this use of an alternative host is done by instructor opt-in and not as a requirement by the instructor's academic department or the campus, it is a way for the instructor to demonstrate some pride in how the instructor goes about teaching.  Further, once having made such a commitment, it places an implicit obligation on the instructor in sustaining the quality of the online content that is posted on the course Website.

For the sake of illustration, here is my course site from a decade ago. This is the penultimate page on the site, as I made a few posts there after the course concluded that are less relevant for illustration purposes.  The page that is displayed shows the end-of-semester posts.  Let me also distinguish the course site itself from course content that I created.  As to the latter, go to the tabbed page called Useful Links.  The first of these was to Moodle, which the College of LAS supported as an alternative to the Campus LMS.  I used it sparingly, but I did use it.  The next link is to my PowerPoint files (and some PDFs as well) that are in my Box.com account.  These files are publicly available, but are probably not discoverable without the Useful Links page.  Because I subsequently required my students to make "Virtual Elevator Speeches" as part of their course projects (and because some students would only add the course during the second week of the semester), the file First Class Session.pptx is done in that style.  I encourage the interested reader to download it and have a look.  The slides themselves have images to illustrate the ideas and only a limited amount of text.  There is discussion in the Notes pane.  The presentation autoplays in slideshow mode, and then has musical accompaniment.  This is both to convey a sense of motion and to time the entire presentation to coincide with the duration of the musical selection.

The reader might like the effect created, but balk at the idea of creating similar such presentations, as it is quite time consuming to do so.  Let me get back to that issue later in the post.  Likewise, the next link to my Excel files also requires some explanation, which I want to defer till later as well.

I want to note that there is also some video content of my own creation, which was produced to illustrate the economics in the Excel files.  Each of those videos is embedded in a post on the class site.  Here is an illustration of that.  I also embed a variety of content that I've found on the open Internet and that is relevant for course purposes.  This gets me to the next point.

A significant sticking point with having an open class site is the use of copyrighted material, where the instructor does not have permission to use the content in an open manner.  This will happen, for example, if the instructor utilizes content supplied by the textbook publisher.  The reader will note that in my class, while I had a textbook, it was more or less a reference book for the students and I didn't teach to it at all.  I'm on record that we need to be moving away from textbooks in college instruction and toward inquiry based methods.  If wishing would make it so.  My hope is that self-protecting against the campus LMS failing might encourage a step in that direction.

Let's push on. Anyone looking at my course page will notice the Student Blogs in the left sidebar.  I want to give a bit of background on this and how I used student blogs in this course.  I first taught with student blogs back in fall 2009, in a course for students in the Campus Honors Program called Designing for Effective Change, so it wasn't an economics course. My experience there informed my later use of student blogs in my economics course as I will describe below.  I wrote about that initial experience in a piece for Inside Higher Ed called Teaching With Blogs.  

The first lesson, one I hadn't figured out in advance, is that the student blogging constitutes formative thinking on their part.  They are okay doing that, provided the environment is safe.  Here, safety refers to whether a potential future employer can see the student posts.  They were afraid that might happen.  Having students blog under an alias addresses this concern.  So, in the economics course I assigned each student an alias, the name of a famous economist concatenated with the course rubric and the semester the course was being offered.  This way, the aliases remained unique, even as I reused the names of the famous economists from one year to the next.  

The next lesson is about the prompts I gave to the students on which they based their blog posts.  (They were also free to blog on a topic of their own choosing that was relevant to the class, but that happened only rarely.) I wanted them to build connections between the various economics ideas we were studying and their own experiences, as I thought they would better learn the economics that way.  This bringing in their own experiences also served to differentiate their posts somewhat.  As I read each post and commented on it, I needed to maintain a freshness of perspective.  I tried to have my comments situated in what the student wrote rather than comment about the intended lessons from the underlying economics.  This gave some novelty to the comments and made commenting more enjoyable and less drudge work for me.  Also, I required each student to respond to my comment with their own comment, to acknowledge what I had said.  Sometimes other students would comment as well.  This student blog provides a good example along these lines. 

And while it is not possible to observe this, the expectation is that students would have done considerable pre-writing before making their posts.  I referred to the pre-writing as mental puttering and wrote this piece to explain that it is tied with making connections among the ideas but that forming such connections doesn't happen in such a straightforward manner.  As such, it is time consuming, which brings to mind the question, can this sort of approach survive now that AI is so prevalent?  My guess is that it can't for the following reason.  Many students view coursework as a series of obstacles, which they try to get past as quickly as possible.  The thought of mental puttering is alien to such students and they would use AI to produce a tolerably good post in as short a time as possible.  That there are aspects of the post that pertain to their own experience might slow them down a bit.  But would that be sufficient?  I doubt it.  Before considering what might work let me make the following observation.

As I believe that most students are way too grade conscious, I did not assign grades to individual blog posts.  This is in accord with the view I articulated here.  Instead, I borrowed an idea from the Art and Design folks and embraced portfolio grading.  While students would get a small credit for each post they submitted, halfway through the course I'd give one grade on all the posts till then.  At the course conclusion I would give a grade for the remaining posts.  The reality is that even for the earnest student it would take a while to get comfortable with the blogging, so one would expect to see some improvement in performance simply based on that.  Then one might hope thereafter that the posts would become a bit more nuanced.  For the better students that actually happened.

And I'd like to note a learning benefit from having the student blogs made public.  Students who are finding it difficult to write posts or who have received commentary from me that they view as somewhat harsh can read the posts of other students and my comments on those. They might then emulate in approach the posts they found that were well received.  This is a way of learning to write, by reading what other writers have done and then basing one's own style on the reading that was most enjoyable.  Further, they might come to understand that my comments, even if critical, are intended to improve their writing.  The comments, then, are a form of coaching.  Even if it is awkward at first to receive such coaching, I would hope that eventually the students would want that, as they can see it is helpful for their own learning.  

Can the approach be modified sufficiently that it remains effective even in the presence of AI yet produces similar outcomes to what I was able to achieve 10 years ago?  I've been mentally toying with various tweaks that might be tried to achieve this end.  One of those is to have students, either in pairs or groups of three, have online video chats that are recorded.  During these chats part of what the students would say is similar to what they would have posted in their blog in the past, including their personal experience that is relevant to the economics under consideration.  But, as listeners, they'd also then react to what the other student says, asking clarifying or follow up questions, so the chat very much becomes a conversation. The instructor would get to see the video itself, but to preserve a sense of anonymity for the students, only the transcript of the video would be made public. If these chats were viewed as giving a performance to be seen by the instructor, then students might feel it necessary to prepare in advance for them.  Such preparation would be akin to the pre-writing I mentioned above, even if AI were utilized as part of the preparation.  Perhaps this can work.  I'd like to encourage others to try it to see if it can.

Have students complete weekly assignments where the students bring in their relevant personal experiences that that are published on the course Website under a student alias.  The instructor should comment on these submissions, but only grade submissions in batches, once or twice a semester.

There may be subject matter that is too disembodied for prior student experience to matter.  In my class the pure economic theory students were to learn fits in this category.  The standard way to present this theory is via mathematical modeling.  Yet undergraduate students who are neither math nor engineering majors, most econ majors are in this category, may be uncomfortable with abstract presentation of the math modeling.  Is there a way for these students to visualize the economic theory without them finding the presentation off-putting?  The Excel homework I designed for the course was aimed at addressing this question.  Those workbooks are examples of what I had earlier referred to as Dialogic Learning Objects. 

To get a sense of this, go back to the Useful Links tab on the Course Website and this time choose the Excel Files link.  Select the Excel Tutorial file and download it.  This is a tutorial about how Excel was to be used in my course.  Enter some short textual content in the NetID box and then choose an alias from the pulldown menu.  You need to include that information for the completed tutorial to generate a "key" which can then be submitted to get credit for completing the tutorial.  Like the individual blog posts, the tutorials are credit - no credit.  All the questions must be answered correctly to get credit.  But what is submitted is only the key.  

You should be able to complete the rest of the tutorial without difficulty and can submit your key if you'd like via the form link that is provided.  I used Google Forms for that function.  I included a comment box on the form and, surprisingly, a fair number of students used it to make an impromptu comment about the homework.  That was a pleasant surprise.

If you are ambitious, you can try some of the real homework.  The first of these in the course, one that doesn't require too much prior knowledge of microeconomics, is the one on Efficiency and Equity Concepts.  The one on Math of Risk and Risk Preference is interesting in that each time a question is answered correctly part of the graph is drawn, so this really should help the students visualize what is going on.

The feedback that is given is generated by the IF function, along with conditional formatting.  And many of the questions are parameterized in a way that students will see different numbers for the same question, with their alias determining what does show up.  This is one step in the direction of preventing the students from cheating on the homework.  Of course, a real math nerd could figure out the underlying parameterization and give the answers to other students that way.  Fortunately for me, I never had that happen.

One might want to know whether other types of dialogic learning objects might be made that don't rely on Excel but do require AI in their construction.  Posing this question is easy.  Answering it, however, is beyond my expertise.  If it is possible, might the instructor make a few as means of illustration and then have students make others, as their course projects?  It is said that you really learn the subject matter deeply when you teach it.  Might that also be true in designing learning objects to illustrate the subject matter?

I have been fascinated with this idea for some time.  And then these learning objects that were course projects one semester might become learning tools for other students in future semesters.  (As there is a copyright issue here, the students who made the objects as their course projects would need to give their permission for the reuse of these objects.) Alternatively, if a similar course were being taught at some other campus, might the courses share such learning objects?

All of this is meant as background for discussing the issue of instructor time devoted to instruction and how that time should be best spent.  In my case, I was retired when I taught the Economics of Organizations Course and only taught that one course in the fall each year.  I was still working when I taught that CHP class, but it was comparatively small with only 18 students.   The Econ of Organizations class typically had fewer than 30 students, so providing the comments on the student blogs wasn't too much of a time commitment.  And the design of learning objects, whether Excel files, or PowerPoints, or videos would typically be done before the course started.  What about other instructors, who have larger classes, a full class load, and other obligations that make them far from time abundant?  Let me offer a first pass at answering this question.

If you go to the url for the course Website and change the year, say from 2016 to 2015, you will find another course Website similar to but not identical to the one that we've considered.  Indeed, you can do this back to 2012 as well as forward to 2017 and 2019 (I didn't teach in 2018).  The point is that there were changes in the course from one year to the next, as I liked to experiment to address issues that arose in the teaching, but a large part of the course was done according to a template that was fixed by the second time I offered the class.  So, with that, I suggest the following.

Instructors should develop a rolling plan about how to teach their course with a Website that is out in the open, one that balances their idealistic goals for instruction with the realistic limitations placed by the time they actually can devote to the course, recognizing that they will teach the course again, make further changes then, and develop a better overall approach.  

Let me wrap up. I think I got carried away in writing this, giving a full spiel about pedagogy even while that wasn't what the title of the post seems to be about.  Maybe the post will serve to generate posts by other authors who stick more to the topic.  Or maybe some will be inspired to also write about pedagogy out in the open, but come up with many other different ways to proceed.  I would be delighted to read such pieces, should they come to light.