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.

Trying to Flatten My Personal Downslope from Aging

For machines, parts wear out and then are either repaired or replaced.  And if not that, the entire machine is replaced.  While that last one is definitely true for capital equipment, I'm going to try to steer away from it as a metaphor in this post.  I'll keep the first two in mind in what I write below.

Let me begin with my eyes.  I first got glasses when I was 8, around the time when JFK was assassinated.  I have a distinct memory of the drive back home from the place where we got the glasses.  It was nighttime.  The streetlights seemed so much brighter; everything appeared much clearer.  Alas, that sensation didn't last.  And for much of adult life my vision has been somewhat off, even with the correction provided by the glasses.  For the past 20 years or so I've had bifocals - the continuous kind. While I was quick to adjust to those, I'm never really sure whether I'm looking at something through the right part of the lens.  Since then I've been diagnosed with the triple whammy - macular degeneration, glaucoma, and cataracts.  I've got friends my age who have had surgery to remove their cataracts, but they didn't have the other issues.  My optometrist, instead, has me on a regime of eye drops, 3 times a day with dorzolomide and once a day with latanoprost.  In addition, I take an eye vitamin pill twice a day, currently PreserVision.  I then go for checks at the doctor's office on a regular basis, some of which is just to monitor pressure in the eyes while the rest is to check field of vision.  My right eye has already declined some in that regard.  The left eye is better.  But there is no expectation that the deterioration will reverse course and begin to show improvement.  The goal now is to slow down the decline.  

I've made various accommodations to deal with the situation.  One of those is relying on my Kindle Fire when I read books, where the font is large and there is substantial line spacing that I've inserted.  I now much prefer that to reading paper books.  My main computer is an iMac and I keep the screen resolution quite low, so items look large.  That works for me.  And then, as to driving, I try to avoid doing it at night, particularly in areas where there aren't streetlights.   With this I function reasonably well.  If my vision were to deteriorate much beyond where it is now, I'm not sure whether I could find a suitable alternative approach, so I'm hoping I don't have to anytime soon.

Let me move on to my other health concerns.  For more than 20 years, there have been three foci of those concerns.  One of those is my weight, which was close to normal when I got married in 1990, but after 9/11 it ballooned upwards as my knees gave out so I could no longer go jogging for exercise.  And, foolishly, I didn't find an immediate substitute exercise activity.  I was extremely busy at work, so I let that absorb this other time.  In retrospect, it was a big mistake.  I want to note here something I've only come to realize recently.  While a singular event that causes me stress can be dealt with in an undo way, I need a healthful response to repeated sources of stress or it will be debilitating for me.  In my case it wasn't just the overeating and lack of exercise.  It was drinking too much as well.  And all of that becomes habitual.  Bad habits are hard to break.  When the subject matter is not my own person, I can be objective, logical, and sometimes insightful.  It makes you wonder how I could be so stupid when it came to my own health.  But, no doubt, I was.

Another focus was my blood pressure, which also was quite high.  I received medication for that to keep it under control.  Initially, that was lisinopril/hydrochlorothiazide, which I took twice daily.  After several years of that, I began to show improvement (from lifestyle changes) so the dosage was reduced to once per day.  Eventually, even that seemed like too much medication, so I went to straight lisinopril.  But that was less than effective so I went back to hydrochorothiazide, as a separate pill.  It worked to lower the blood pressure but it has a negative side effect on my feet.  So now I take it every other day, while taking the lisinopril every day.  

The third focus was physical pain, mainly due to arthritis, to which I'm genetically disposed.  The issue is how to contain it or avoid it entirely.  Over the years, I've had physical therapy sessions with multiple therapists, to address different loci of pain.  And while I'm told to do exercises that are taught in those sessions, the reality is that I stick with those as long as the therapy sessions are ongoing and then for a while longer, after which the pain seemingly goes away, and then I stop doing the exercises.  I think the psychology of this is understandable as the exercises are something of a nuisance, but that is not a real excuse for making this mistake.  

Now let me make an aside, which is relevant for what follows.  In 2018 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, for which I ultimately received radiation treatment.  The cancer is now in remission, tracked by an annual PSA blood test.  Here is the real point I want to make.  As prostate cancer is eminently treatable, and as I later learned most men will get it eventually if they live long enough, in itself it wasn't that big a concern.  But the oncologist made it clear that there was a risk the cancer could spread to nearby bones or other tissue.  That thought truly frightened me, as it was the first time that I really contemplated my own mortality.  More than one scan was done to see if the cancer had indeed spread.  Those scans turned up several false positives.  I learned that the scans themselves don't distinguish well between cancer and arthritis spots, one needs additional diagnostics to identify which it is, and that arthritis actually riddles my entire body, even while at many of those sites there is no pain.  My fear of dying in the not too distant future disappeared, but fear that I will face a lifelong struggle with pain thereafter intensified.

Later that same year I was experiencing a lot of pain in my right hip and my lower back.  I saw an orthopedist, who said I was a candidate for a hip replacement.  My mom had many of those and each time the hip would get infected, so the prothesis had to be removed.  Armed with this knowledge, I was concerned that I would have a similar experience if I had this procedure.  So I opted to delay and in the meantime try to lose a good chunk of weight, thereby increasing the likelihood that the procedure would not create undo complications.  I now had incentive to lose weight for other than vanity reasons.  (As I sometimes fret about the gray hairs in my eyebrows, I certainly don't want to claim that I'm not vain, yet that has never given me sufficient reason to diet seriously.)  And then I learned from experience that the weight loss itself might very well lessen the pain in the hip and the back.  Had I understood that ahead of time, I might have done more about weight loss earlier.

Let me fast forward to the present.  I still haven't had a hip replacement even though I've lost 100 pounds since 2018.  In 2025, the orthopedist said that there are so many other things going on in the area of the hip that I'd still have substantial pain even with a hip replacement and I'd be better off having the pain doctor address my situation.  He had me get physical therapy, for itself and partly as a necessary preparation to be eligible for a steroid injection in my back, which I subsequently got.  At the time I started physical therapy I couldn't walk 1/4 of a mile. Now I can go for long walks.  Earlier this afternoon, I was able to do about 5 miles at an estimated 20 minutes/mile.  That's been my recent experience when I walk outside.  (Champaign is comparatively flat with the few hills we have quite modest.) On the treadmill I don't walk for as long but I do go faster.  I much prefer to be outside, if it is warm enough for that. But when I'm inside I do a bit of other exercise that maybe I should be doing once in a while in any event.  I try to do some exercise at least 5 days a week unless I'm really hurting.  Playing through pain is for young people, but not for me.

Here is one other episode to round out the picture.  In early 2023 I was having abdominal pain and felt very gassy.  I was diagnosed with SIBO (Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth).   Subsequently I had a colonoscopy which found I had a tortuous colon, a partial explanation for the SIBO as well as why I'd likely experience constipation with some frequency.  For the SIBO, they also tested for intolerance to certain foods; lactose is the one I remember; I didn't have lactose intolerance.  And maybe they did gluten too.  An antibiotic was prescribed and I was put on a Low FODMAP Diet. That was a 6 weeks regime.  It's the lessons I took from that experience that really matter for now.  Berries and other fruits became a staple of my diet, as did green vegetables.  Now I restrict my carbohydrate intake quite a bit, almost never having pasta or white potatoes, bread (whole wheat) only in limited quantities, also modest amounts of protein mainly chicken, lean pork, salmon, cod, and tuna from a can.  (I gave up beef in 2018 when my urologist said that doing so was a way to keep the prostate cancer from coming back.)   And I seem to have stopped eating ice cream, something I would never have predicted in advance.  My weakness is the occasional sweet roll at breakfast time.  I'm particularly vulnerable to those extra large chocolate chip cookies which seem in vogue now.  So as to the diet it isn't an absolute thing, but I don't stray too far from where I want to be.  And then, once in a while, I will skip a meal or two, either because I simply don't feel hungry or because I was a bad boy the day before and want to make up for that.  

I wish the story would end there, because that's the picture I'd like to paint.  But my experience is that aging seems to move the goalposts with regard to health.  The first sign of this for me was when my blood tests started to show a high Creatinine number, an indicator of some issue with the kidney.  While my Creatinine number is now in the normal range, they started to measure the GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) and while mine has bounced around some it has been consistently below 90 (the cutoff for normal) with the most recent reading being 68.  Based on that evidence I've been diagnosed with Stage 3A of Chronic Kidney Disease.  Apart from the other steps to promote good health that I've mentioned above, I need to stay hydrated (nighttime is a challenge for this because I go to the bathroom frequently and I don't want to increase the frequency by drinking water then) and to avoid salt as much as I can.  While I never salt my food, I do wonder how much salt I take in with processed food, such as tunafish or canned chick peas.  If it comes down to that, I will need to get somebody else to do my food preparation, a person who can take explicit steps to reduce the salt in the food.

Then, a couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with a fatty liver, based on what the blood tests showed.  The AST was a bit high in November 2024, though it has come down since.  The ALT has been normal throughout the time that it has been measured.  Based on this I had a FibroScan in April 2025.  The CAP score was high then while the Liver Stiffness score was normal.  I was told to lose weight, which I've done.  The FibroScan was repeated just 9 days ago.  The CAP score had come down into the normal range.  Hurray for that.  But the Liver Stiffness score jumped up and now I'm in Stage 2 of a Fibrosis diagnosis.  (Stage 4 is consistent with cirrhosis of the liver.)  I've been told to give up drinking alcohol.  You'll pardon the pun, but that's a tough pill to swallow.  However, mainly out of fear I've been on the straight and narrow for the last 8 days.  Sticking to this regime is another matter.  Writing this post is one way I'm trying to come to grips with that.

I have learned a few facts about Fibrosis.  The good news is that it is reversible, provided the liver damage isn't too bad.  So I can hope that if I do stick to a regimen of not drinking alcohol that eventually I will go back to Stage 0 and Fibrosis won't be a concern.  Then my brother, who is a doc, told me that there is something called a FIB-4 score, which makes a probabilistic Fibrosis forecast based on the results from a blood test.  (It would be nice if the FibroScan and the blood test painted a similar picture.)  My current FIB-4 score is 2.3, a middling number that I suppose corresponds reasonably well to a Stage 2 diagnosis.  The last thing I learned is that it can take months and months of abstinence for the results to show up, though 6 months should be sufficient to detect any changes.  Alas, the way health insurance works these days, my next blood test and FibroScan will be a year from now.

This makes the not drinking quite different from the dieting, where I can weigh myself on a daily basis, and the monitoring of my blood pressure, which I can also check at my whim.   I won't get feedback on the not drinking for quite a while.  I need to take it on faith that progress is being made.  There is a well-known paper (to economists) by Koopmans called Measurement without Theory.  This is theory without measurement.  I find it somewhat unsettling.

But I do know a couple of things from my own casual empiricism in regard to my own drinking.  If I have more than one drink, it tends to raise my blood pressure and dehydrate me.  Further, my self-control is diminished so with regard to eating those bad things - chips, candy, leftovers that should be saved for tomorrow - I'm much more prone to do so after a couple of drinks.  These reasons provide some evident motivation for abstinence.

I've also learned a few ways to cope.  Recently I've taken to drink decaf on the rocks, in a tumbler which I have previously used to have some alcoholic drink on the rocks.  The feel in my hand is the same.  The taste is obviously different and I'm prone to drink the decaf quickly where I would try to slowly sip the alcohol.  It is not a perfect substitute, for sure, but it is something.  And I've taken to having non-alcoholic beer  on occasion, with my favorite being Coors Edge.  This is closer in taste to the Real McCoy, but without the kick.  Let me get back to that because it gets to the motivation for drinking alcohol.

And I've taken a page from the book Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler, on how to discourage the drinking up front.  Again, my casual empiricism suggests, that my wanting to have an alcoholic drink is dependent on time of day.  It is nil in the morning and early afternoon.  Then it begins (it must be 5 PM somewhere - the time when Happy Hour starts) and probably continues for several hours thereafter.  If I go to sleep early, which is my own personal nudge, I don't need to be disciplined that long and then can go the entire evening without drinking.  When the Illinois Basketball game starts late and I feel that fan loyalty means I should watch it live rather than view a recording the next morning, that presents a challenge and I'm more prone to drink then.

Now let me briefly discuss motivation for drinking and then try to bring this post to a close.  As a habit, it can be a form of celebration.  It can be enjoyed for the taste as it is consumed rather than for the after effects.  When I drink alcoholic beer and I'm the one who buys it, how it tastes matters a great deal.  Both of these I would term drinking for pleasure.  Sometimes, however, when the arthritis pain seems especially intense, and the Tylenol I take doesn't seem to be that effective in reducing the pain, then the drinking is done as a way to feel numb to it all, an alternative to taking a narcotic.  The numbing also seems needed when I'm feeling heavily under stress and want some relief from that.  It would be healthier if I could reduce or eliminate the source of the stress in advance.  This is one real reason why I have greatly reduced reading the news.  Absent that source reduction, however, the stress becomes very much like a physical pain and then one drinks to numb that.  Taken together, these reasons can make drinking habitual, which it has been for me.

But, I hope what I've written above indicates that I've taken real effort to break that habit.  However, I have not gotten anywhere close to complete abstinence.  And I'm scratching my head now as to what else I need to do to achieve that.  Further, if the reality is abstinence much of the time but still the occasional stumble, how do I limit the damage of those episodes and then get right back on the horse?  I don't have an answer to that question as of yet.  For now it seems to me that if I do try to answer it I might encourage the initial stumble.  

I have an appointment with the nutritionist who ordered the FibroScan.  That appointment is 20 days from now, not quite a month after the scan was done.  It seems a good time to take a reckoning on these matters.  In the meantime, I've thought it through about as much as I can for now and I aim to take it one day at a time till then.

Must Income Still Be Attached To Work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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