Parallels with 2008

I use the Magic 8Ball for making my prognostications.  (My disclaimer as a forecaster.)  Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to me that the Democrats sweep into office in November, not so much because Trump was impeached, but rather because the caronavirus still won't be contained and there will be enormous tumult as a consequence.  The global situation will be characterized by chaos.  Bringing some sensible order to that will be job one.  At this level, the situation is remarkably similar to 2008, where the burst of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial crisis created a like sense of disorder and a real fear that we'd experience a second Great Depression.

Here is a brief characterization of that history, according to my recollection.  President Obama came into office wanting to be a conciliator and thinking (incorrectly) that he was above the political fray.  TARP, a large package to stabilize the large banks, had been passed while Bush was still president, but the Obama administration had to administer it.  Perhaps it wasn't designed this way, but it served as something of a poison pill.  It was incredibly unpopular with voters, as it seemed the ones responsible for the crisis were getting bailed out while ordinary people were suffering financially.

The Stimulus Package was not a second New Deal.  One read about the absence of "shovel-ready projects" so we weren't going to spend our way out of the slump via big construction projects, at least not immediately.  In my view, it was a significant error not to keep at it till they were ready - a major infrastructure renewal plan, which did not emerge.  Instead the Stimulus Package largely was block grants to the states, who were all in fiscal trouble as their tax revenues went down substantially.  So this served to keep them with the same level of services as before the financial crises.  I can't argue with this, but in a real sense it was not new spending.  Then there were substantial tax cuts, mainly to lure the Republicans in Congress to support the bill.  Yet there was no Republican support for it in the House and only 3 Republican Senators voted for it (but this was enough to have a filibuster-proof majority).  I've written elsewhere that tax cuts are not sufficiently stimulating in a deep recession, which is still my belief now.  There was a kind of second stimulus package passed in 2010 after the November election.  Let's be thankful for Lame Ducks who understood what needed to be done and then did it.

However, the composition of the first stimulus is only one issue.  The magnitude of the stimulus was another.  Christina Romer, then chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, argued for a larger stimulus.  Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, agreed with Romer.  The package that was approved was in excess of $700 Billion.  Romer wanted a package over $1 Trillion.   The fear was that the larger package couldn't get through Congress.  Political expediency won out over the economic necessity of the moment.  

The next big thing to mention is the Affordable Care Act.  Unlike the stimulus, which was dictated by the moment, the Affordable Care Act resulted because of campaign promises.  Health Care was a big deal issue during the campaign.  Yet, to get the package through, the Public Option was dropped.  Many very enthusiastic supporters of Obama became less enamored with him, particularly young people who put in a lot of legwork getting out the vote in 2008.  At the same time there was a reaction from the Right, the Tea Party.  Democrats lost control of the House in the midterm elections of 2010.

What lessons have Democrats learned from this recent history?

Now I want to talk about private sector parallels.  I'm going to focus on economics only, as I'm sufficiently ignorant about parallels on virus prevention and treatment to comment.  If you've watched The Big Short or read books about the Financial Crisis like How Markets Fail,  you'll know that the big banks were taking risks (think of credit default swaps) that were strongly correlated across them.  In other words, when one of them failed the others would be on the verge of failure as well.  The systematic risk was too great.  We're seeing something similar now with respect to global supply chains, which all of the big-name companies rely on.  When things are going swimmingly, then the global supply chain is a way to keep costs down so that prices to consumers are low.  But when there are disruptions of a major sort, and it appears that the caronavirus will cause that or has already caused that, then there can be a negative feedback loop that brings the system to its knees.  The stock market may not be a much better predictor than I am, but I think it fair to interpret the rather steep decline in stock prices recently as a portent of system meltdown due to supply chain disruption.

To my knowledge, no Democratic candidates are making this an issue during the campaign.

If we have the caronavirus still not under control in November and the supply chain disruption then a major issue, these two factors will make for job one when the new administration takes office.   The economics of inequality issues: health care for all, a living wage, affordable child care, etc., will remain important, but won't have the immediacy created by those two other factors.

How can the Democrats avoid the cycle of enthusiasm for the new regime that propels an electoral win in November from subsequent voter disillusionment with the party in the midterm elections?

I am somewhat optimistic that party elders might address these matters  I can only imagine the behind the scenes conversations that took place to get Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop out of the race and support Biden.  If and when Democrats do sweep into office, there needs to be something similar about sticking with job one until the situation is under control.  At the same time, there needs to be strong messaging with ordinary voters that this is not a betrayal of the campaign, but an absolute necessity to put the disaster behind us.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
George Santayana

Teaching a Class Session Online in a Pinch - Some Suggestions

If the nervousness about the coronavirus continues for a while longer, it might occur to students to stay off campus and then request that their instructors hold the class sessions online, or at least provide an online alternative to the face-to-face session.  Likewise, some instructors might want to cancel their face-to-face sessions out of fears regarding their own health.  Instructors with prior experience teaching online can probably navigate this circumstance on their own without assistance, but those who lack that experience will need some help.  It is quite likely, under the circumstances, that the professional learning technologists on campus will become overwhelmed with requests of this sort from these inexperienced instructors.  Anticipating this contingency, what is needed is a virtual do-it-yourself manual, to encourage many of these first-timers to try it on their own and have a reasonably good experience in the doing.

This is a first pass at such a document.  I want to note that being retired for some time I'm no longer employed by any ed tech unit and it would be my hope that such units produce more professional materials of this sort, in which case I will happily take down this post.  In the meantime, however, something is better than nothing.  And back in spring 2011, when there was some very bad weather coming to the CU area, I cancelled class and moved the class session online, before the campus then cancelled classes for that day (so my online session was changed to being optional for the students).  Also, in that case it was clear the online session would be a one-off.  Now, instruction might move online for an indefinite period, however long it takes for the perception of the health risk to be behind us.  So an instructor might want to rethink the remainder of the semester and how the course should be conducted, if the all clear only occurs after the middle of May.

An immediate issue is whether the online substitute is conducted synchronously - the instructor and students interact in real time - or asynchronously - the instructor posts content that the students interact with after it has been posted.  If you are reading this blog post, that is an example of asynchronous delivery as I've written it and posted it before you had a chance to read it.  You can interact with me after that, by commenting on the post, sending me an email, or expressing your own views of what's said on your site, back linking to this post somewhere in your piece so I have a reasonable chance of finding it.  Synchronous interaction may more closely imitate a live face-to-face session.  For some students it will be preferred.  But there are issues with synchronous as well, particularly if done on the fly with no external tech support.  It's also possible to do some sort of hybrid.  I don't want to advocate for a particular approach here.  I want to provide some examples, most of which I've already got in the can, one or two that were made for this post.  This should give the reader some options as to how to proceed.

I want to make an important point before getting to the examples. There are technical considerations, sure.  I regard them mostly as minor.  There are psychological considerations,  if you've never before posted a recording of your own speaking online.  The psychological issues can be considerable.  That will make it seem very awkward.  I don't have a suggestion on how to avoid the discomfort, other than experience it enough, knowing the discomfort tends to vanish eventually.  But I want to try to offset that view with another.  Some of the suggestions will bring novelty into the teaching that might not have occurred except for the necessity of the moment.  And it is possible that some bits of the novelty are worth retaining even after normal instruction resumes.  So this can be thought of as an experiment in teaching method, with a possible long-term upside.  It won't make the awkwardness of hearing your own voice online go away.  But it might help you endure that awkward period, knowing it won't last forever.

* * * * *

Screen Capture Video (Micro-Lectures)

I'm going to suggest that when you first are getting started (and this happens to be my view still, even after doing this for many years) you want the production to be one and done, with little to no editing after the fact.  The goal is to produce something that is tolerably good, where it is the content rather than the production values, which determine whether the goal has been reached.    For this you need some software. I've tried a variety of products over the years.  If I were on a PC now, I would definitely use SnagIt (rather than buying the more expensive Camtasia, which has the sophisticated editing software built in).  On a Mac, there are built in tools that are reasonably functional, which can be used instead.  Screenshot is a utility for taking pictures.  Quicktime can be used for video recording, including screen capture video.

1. PowerPoint with Voice Over

This is probably the first candidate that people will come up with, especially those instructors who deliver PowerPoint Lectures in their live class sessions.

The video is itself is a screen capture video that is also a tutorial about how to make such videos.  One of the key ideas is that too much text on the screen, when in a video, needs to be managed in a way to give the viewer focus.  The video presents a certain method for doing that.  I have found it quite useful for presenting the algebra behind the math models in my economics class.  A slide full of equations will seem overwhelming to the student.  Taking it line by line is more manageable.  This is the simple PowerPoint file used for the content in the presentation.  It has only 3 slides.  And this is the PowerPoint file constructed for line by line delivery.  It's a very simple modification, but one that shows some recognition of the cognitive issues students (and other viewers) have in processing the videos.

One point to stress that is made in the video is about audio quality.  Here I mean interference with your speaking voice, either from background noise or from hiss or something else that the viewers will find distracting.  Good audio quality is a must for these videos.  For what I say next, I'm not completely current with the technology.  But I believe using a USB microphone that is closer to your mouth than the built in microphone from your computer is helpful, and I would recommend spending some bucks on getting one.  Way back when, I used to believe that you needed a microphone from your headset, so that background noise could be ruled out that way.  It may be that this particular concern is no longer, as the built in equipment is just that good.  However, I'm skeptical, so I'd still suggest a USB mic.  I use a Blue Snowball mic and have had good results with that.

2.  Voice Over in Some Technical Application other than PowerPoint

My view is that PowerPoint is okay for what it does, but if you want to present about use of some application, then it is better to arrange the presentation directly in that rather than have screen shots or screen movies delivered within PowerPoint.  This next example illustrates that.  The application is Excel.  And so as not to intimidate the audience with technical subject matter where they don't get the content, I made this when my younger son was in 5th grade, circa 2004-05, and in part he was struggling with long division then, because he didn't know to use another sheet of paper rather than cram all his calculations into a little corner on the flip side of the sheet where he started to work on the problem.  The tutorial is as much about how to organize the manipulations as it is about what the algorithm actually does.  In any event, I hope that 5th grade math is available to most parents, and thus this example won't overwhelm any instructor.   The real issue is whether manipulations within the application are sufficiently clear that the students can replicate them on their own.  If so, then this can be a superior alternative for presentation to using PowerPoint.

The video explains that the Excel file on which it is based has macros.  They need to be enabled to try the Excel for yourself.  And I do want to note that I wrote this quite a while ago.  So I'd hope it has been surpassed since then.  If not, however, it might inspire the technically inclined to produce more of this sort of thing.  This is a potential way that online content of this sort can magnify, as students who view the video find it a path for their own self-expression and a way to communicate with those who are less technically inclined.

I want to note here that PowerPoint does offer some advantages about viewing on the screen - sizing the font, for example. When you go to other applications, you lose that, so you must be mindful that what you capture is still intelligible to the students and doesn't overwhelm them with too much on the screen at one time. I believe that is is the main thing to keep in mind when making such a presentation. 

PowerPoint Video Without Screen Capture

PowerPoint files in Slide Show mode can be animated so the entire slideshow auto-plays.  The effect is to deliver a kind of video, one that is increasingly common online.  I have found this useful when done as follows.
a.  There is a longer narration.  That appears in the notes panes, not in the slides.
b.  The slides are mainly images to illustrate the concept.  Not much text is utilized there.  There is a hyperlink for each image, back to the source from where the image was selected.
c.  Rather than voice over, the slideshow presentation has musical accompaniment.  If the music is familiar to the viewer, it times the entire presentation in slideshow mode - to be as long as the musical piece.
d.  So the slideshow can be considered an overview, while the more detailed and text-only presentation is in the notes panes.

Somebody looking for a an overview only, can view the presentation in Slide Show mode.  Somebody else, who wants more detail, can read the notes panes, treating the slide as a section header, as in a research paper.

Here is an example, for my very first class session in the course I taught last fall.  (The PowerPoint file can be previewed online, but to get the video effect the file must be downloaded and then launched in Slide Show mode.)  Here is some commentary based on this example.

Many instructors use PowerPoint because it is a quick and dirty way to make a presentation.  Inserting text as bulleted content doesn't require that much effort.  In contrast, finding images online to illustrate the content and do so well can be laborious.  The main reason to do this is to help the students penetrate the ideas.  The images may have more meaning for the students than the text does.  I have had several students in the recent past tell me that if I give them a post like this to read, they will skim it.  (So one might infer that they will do likewise for the content in the notes area.) They can get a quicker sense of what's going on with a presentation of this sort.  And if something puzzles them, they can pause the slideshow with a right click, resuming when they are ready to do so.

A different reason for doing this is if students will subsequently make a presentation like this, say as their part of a class project.  Then this approach models for them the kind of thing they will produce.  When I've done this in my own teaching, I've referred to the presentation in Slide Show mode as a virtual elevator speech.  Doing a project like this should help them develop skills they will use in making other presentations at their place of work, after they graduate.  And I have them write a paper on the subject matter before making the PowerPoint.  The body of the paper appears in the notes area.  The images for the slides are selected after the paper has been written.  It is a type of communication the many students don't get to practice much at all.  I think it is a useful exercise for them - trying to get at the gist of what they say in their papers and do so visually.  Also, it should teach them that even with a short presentation, a lot of preparation must be done ahead of time to make the presentation effective.

Regarding copyright, fair use, and related issues, it is my understanding that if each image is obtained from a different source and if the back links are indeed functional, then a good fair use argument can be made for this approach.  On the music, perhaps less so, since we're using a full piece.  My idea is not to eliminate the copyright issues entirely, but rather to make them unlikely to matter.  The music in this presentation is from an album that was very popular in the 1960s, when I was a kid. The back link to the YouTube video with the song says in the description that the music was used on the TV show, The Dating Game.  If you're of my vintage you will intuitively know that.   Using that music is dating me (pun intended).   It gives my students a little tunnel into what I was like when I was a student.  My limited observations about the choice of music students make for their projects is that they are likely to opt for pieces from an earlier era (the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s).  Given that I will review their projects, that is a safer play for them, even though I've given them instructions to design their presentations for teaching other students of approximately the same age as them.  I do also tell them that they should choose instrumental pieces only, as vocals might then compete with the presentation itself for the viewer's attention.  My own actual preference for this is to use Chopin Mazurkas.  They are enigmatic pieces of comparatively brief duration.  I find them comforting to listen to.

One last comment I want to make here is that my presentations aren't slick and there are minor typos in the text that appears in the notes area.  The not being slick is actually to my liking, as it shows the emphasis should be on the content of the presentation, not the appearance.  The typos are anathema to me, as it shows either that I didn't proofread enough or that I did so too close to when I created the text so missed the errors even on re-reading the text.  But there may be a silver lining in that cloud.  If the students are to get over a bar when they make their own presentations, this shows the bar is not too high for them.  They need to feel that making the presentation is do-able.

Talking Head Video Capture

The following brief example is sufficient to explain the genre and its potential use.

I have only one suggestion in the making, which is to try to keep your eyes fixed on the center of the screen, which means you will be watching yourself as the video is recorded.  It's a little bit weird to do that, but having your eyes dart around the screen is not good.  So If you decide to do these by reading text off the screen, then you should position the text in the center of the screen so your eyes can focus there.  I prefer to wing it, but since I'm prone to senior moments now and then, I have a built in reason to keep these brief.  Also, if I do get stuck in what I was planning to say, I can ditch the video and try again.  It's no big deal to do that.

Video Chats with Colleagues

With this example, we are now entering the synchronous realm.  The colleagues who are engaged in chat are doing so live.  The chat can be recorded.  Others can then view it asynchronously.   Here is an example of a chat recorded a couple of days ago with my friend and former colleague, Steve Acker.  Steve and I met as members of the CIC Learning Technology Group.  (The CIC is now called the Big Ten Academic Alliance.)  I was the representative from Illinois.  Steve was the representative from Ohio State.  We've continued with our friendship even as memory of the LT Group fades.  One way we do this is by video chat in Zoom.  In this case, as part of a longer call, I recorded a segment near the end.  It was an experiment, as I'll describe below.

With straight lecture there is a tendency for students to treat what the instructor says as truth, with it their job is to absorb the information. Having a conversation with a colleague mixes things up.  There may be differences in style in making a point, differences in point of view on an issue, as well as differences in where to put emphasis on a matter.  The role of the student now changes and it may help them see things in a different light, perhaps to keep in mind more than one perspective on an issue.  There is the further thought that undergraduate students, in particular, may not have experienced seeing instructors in collegial interaction.  It may fascinate them, just to witness it.  Conceivably, this is the sort of thing that might continue after the crisis with the coronavirus is over.

I want to note a few other aspects of the video before discussing some technical issues.  Steve didn't realize that I was recording, at first.  Zoom actually provides an icon in the upper left of the screen to indicate that.  The colleagues all need to agree to the recording in the making, and afterward to its release.  We are very casual here, both in appearance and in tone.  That's the norm for two retired folks, but students may find it unusual if it is not the norm in the classroom.  At this point, I don't want to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down regarding appearance.  I'm not sure which way is better.  But regarding tone of interaction, I think it important to do as one would normally do in such interactions.  I'm informal as a matter of course. A more rigid style would be a misrepresentation of me.  My belief is students would like to see how the instructor actually is when interacting with other instructors, rather than with students.

The main experiment for me with this video was in regard to YouTube's automated captioning.  Though it doesn't put in punctuation (the captions can be edited later for that), I thought it did an excellent job of replicating what we said.  It probably would struggle more if we had used a lot of jargon and/or if one of us wasn't a native speaker of English.  I don't know that for sure; it is something to explore further.

Then there are a few other points to mention.  If a chat is done in the daytime, then for lighting it may be better to rely on sunlight than overhead lights, but glare can be an issue, so it is better if the outside light isn't directly behind the speaker.  There was a bit of glare in this video, though it wasn't too bad.   Regarding camera angle, many people do these chats with a laptop so they look down into the screen and consequently the camera looks up into the ceiling.  That is awkward and unappealing.  The solution is to prop up the screen, placing the laptop on a box or a pile of books, so the screen is at eye level.  In this video, Steve's camera is actually somewhat above his eye level, which is fine because it enables him to be comfortable and recline a little while he is speaking.  My iMac, even with a raised screen built in, is propped up some for my normal computer use, so what I read is at eye level.  You can be the judge whether it is set reasonably well for recording video.  My last point on this is to avoid distractors if possible.  Steve had his email program on during our recording, so you could hear the pings as new messages came in.  In some cases it may be essential for the participant to monitor email in real time, so the pings are a necessary part of video in that case.  If some real time monitoring is not necessary, however, I'd suggest turning off email during the recording.

If You Build It Will They Come?

This question, of course, also comes up in face-to-face teaching.  Here I want to point out the limited efficacy of monitoring.  Even if an instructor takes attendance in class, a student can very well be there, but not be all there.  When electronic devices are allowed, the student's head might be in that.  If there are windows in the classroom, the student might be staring outside.  When doing the analog online, clicks can be measured as can how long a video window is kept open with the video playing.  But whether the student is paying attention really can't be monitored.

Thus making the stuff interesting to the student might be more of an imperative when teaching online.  This can provide another reason for finding colleagues to do video chats.  Those colleagues might be teaching the same class on a different campus, where the same video can be used in both instances of the course, or in the same department teaching other classes, where some sort of reciprocal arrangement might be made between the instructors.

There is also the possibility of some brief assessment done of the students as a way of testing their understanding.  I'm intrigued about the possibility of having students getting a paragraph question in the LMS in a one-question quiz, offered after they have viewed the video chat.  In responding to that paragraph question, they would  pose their comments and additional questions about the video.  They'd get full credit if what they wrote is on topic and no credit if they wrote something entirely off base (or if they didn't respond at all).  These questions and comments might then inform the next video chat.

Where Should The Chats Be Posted?

There is a tendency for instructors to post their content inside a closed container (a Learning Management System), to maintain control of their own content, i.e., to avoid it being plagiarized by others, and also to protect them when they are using copyrighted content of others.   In the case of these video chats, I would encourage posting the video content publicly, where a search engine can pick up on it.  The reason is first, the content is a public good, so others who are teaching or studying the same material elsewhere can have access to it.  Then, second, if many do so it might help to create an informal network of instructors who teach the same course with regard to sharing of their content. And finally, it is conceivable that new collegial relationships can be formed this way.  Then the instructor can deliver a variety of video chats with different instructors, something like how a talk show works.  Conceivably, instruction should be moving in that direction.

Video Chats with Students

Let me say first that while some instructors might be okay with the practice of having the entire class online at one time, with students having access to the text chat but where they can't send their own video or audio content (many Webinars use this format and I did use it back in 2011 in that optional online class), I'm not a big fan of it.   If I'm speaking or chatting with a colleague, I don't want to be multiprocessing and monitoring a text chat channel at the same time.  You are welcome to try this format and see for yourself, but I won't consider it further here.

I have had reasonably good experience in a non-teaching context with group chats, where there are a handful of people on the call.  It has worked reasonably with these caveats.  Sometimes a member of the group has connection problems, because of limited bandwidth.  Other times, a group member isn't able to get their audio to connect to the chat.   On a very limited basis I've tried to have online office hours with students in Zoom.  These connection issues came up there.  If the troubleshooting can happen quickly, then it is no big deal.  But I don't want to be the tech support for my students.  So this is one hurdle that needs to be overcome before this possibility is considered seriously.

Assuming it has been managed, I can envision group chats between the instructor and four or five students, conducting an online class session in seminar mode.  The rest of the class then can view a recording of the session.  Perhaps over time the groups rotate so each student gets a chance to participate.

The single biggest issue to address with this is student privacy (FERPA).  If such chats are posted in a closed container accessed only by class members, that is consistent with FERPA.  If the instructor wants to post the chat publicly, the students in the chat need to agree to this beforehand, without any coercion from the instructor.

A second issue is getting students comfortable to open up in this setting rather than always to wait for their fellow students to chime in.  This issue can also manifest in a face-to-face class with a small number of students.   I don't have a great deal of experience with this so I'm going to speculate some about what can work.

It's conceivable that the instructor requires students to have group video chats where the instructor is not present.  The students can then view the group as making a presentation to the rest of the class.  So their discussion would concern the topic of that presentation.  If they navigate that reasonably well, it might then prepare them for a different chat where the instructor is present.   Maybe they need a few student only chats before they reach sufficient comfort to have the instructor in on the chat.  That's something to explore further. 

Wrap Up

Anxiety is running high for me now.  It seems like a triple whammy - the coronavirus, the stock market decline, and our national politics.  Individually, each of these is a source of anxiety for me.  Taken together, it can appear overwhelming.  While I can't do anything to address these directly, I am trying to cope by doing a little to help others cope as well, in this case other instructors and their students.  I truly hope it doesn't come to instructors canceling their face-to-face class sessions and doing something online instead.  But I know enough about the economics of risk that we should self-insure as best as we can in case it does come to that.

I meant this piece as a way to encourage other instructors to self-insure, by considering this contingency in advance, and then thinking through what they might do in this case.  There are options from which to choose.  Any one of them is do-able, but if you haven't tried it before it can seem a little daunting at first.  So my final suggestion before closing is to try an option before you need to use it, to feel more comfortable if and when the situation forces that on you.

Good Ideas By Acclimation Or Sausage Being Made?

In the game theory of multi-stage games, the "right" solution, referred to as subgame perfect equilibrium, is to envision the equilibrium outcome in each subgame first, then roll that back into the decision making in the first stage of the game. In this case, we get a forward looking, but realistic, outcome.

I could only stomach watching about a half hour of the last debate.  In that time, healthcare came up and the candidates were passionate about the need for all Americans to have health insurance.  This was especially true about Sanders and Warren, but also Biden and Buttigieg. (As an aside, the brief time that any candidate was allowed to speak lent itself to soundbites and slogans rather than well thought through argument.  My preference is for the latter.) Yet in what I saw, only Klobuchar made reference to getting some bill through Congress and how Purple State Legislators would vote in the process.  That too was a soundbite, but she got a nod from me for at least recognizing the issue in thinking this through as a subgame perfect equilibrium.  Warren dinged Klobuchar because her plan wasn't detailed enough.  And Warren insisted that she gets things done.  I'm still undecided now, but I do wonder whether the candidates playing non perfect equilibrium strategies realize they will get derailed along the way and if they have thought through (but not articulated publicly) what they will do when that happens.  I'm now going to walk through a simple three-stage game to illustrate the issues.

Stage one is the game for the nomination.  We can call that the Primaries season.  Stage two is the general election.  This matters not just for the Presidency, but for Congress as well.  Stage three is governing after the election.  One should note that while in the third (last) stage you simply analyze each possible subgame for its equilibrium outcome, in the second stage you must consider the likelihoods that particular subgames will occur, and ditto for the first stage.  Conversely, by looking at the strategies employed by candidates, you can make some inference about the likelihoods they perceive in the next stage of the game.

The Democrat candidates articulated first priority is beating Trump in the general election.  But one might hypothesize that their real first priority is getting the nomination for themselves.  At present, there is too much uncertainty to change that, but I want to ask this question, which might have eventual impact, when the uncertainty is reduced and it is evident that the likelihood they'll get the nomination is low, will they then care about selecting who does get the nomination from among the candidates who still have a chance?  I'm going to use this recent poll about the Nevada Caucuses to work through a hypothetical scenario.  (I must admit some confusion about Bloomberg.  He is not mentioned explicitly in this poll, but he was allowed to be in the debate while Steyer was not.  Something isn't adding up here.)

Sanders is the leader but he and Warren taken together have under 43% of the vote.  So if you cluster the candidates this way, the rest have the majority.  In my hypothetical, Buttigieg, eventually realizing he can't be king, then casts himself in the role of kingmaker.  He makes a behind the scene approach to Steyer to say we need a centrist candidate getting the nomination.  You and I should both drop out, throw our support behind one of the others, and commit our high roller funders to supporting that candidate as well.  The choices left are Biden and Klobuchar, because Bloomberg just has too many negatives.  Indeed, after they have made their choice publicly, they will have a similar conversation with Bloomberg to ask him to withdraw soon and endorse this candidate.  They understand that Bloomberg has been under attack by the media and by the other candidates, so as a matter of pride it might be difficult for him to do that, at least not immediately.  They agree to let Bloomberg choose the time of his own exit, so that can be as graceful as possible, but once it does happen Bloomberg has agreed to throw his support behind the centrist candidate who is now the leader for getting the nomination.

Between Biden and Klobuchar, I can't predict whom they will choose.  My own preference there is Klobuchar, partly for the age factor and partly because as subgame perfect equilibrium goes, I think the Obama administration got that wrong.  The Tea Party may have been inevitable no matter what.  But losing the majority in the House after only one term was not inevitable, or so it seems to me. I wrote about this in my previous post, Lamentations about our Politics.   Regardless of this, the centrist leader is better positioned to attract Republican suburban and gentrified urban voters in the general election who will make a crossover vote this time around.  These voters will understand that their taxes will go up some as the next Congress does push through healthcare reform.  But these voters aren't prepared for that tax increase to be too large.  They are the proverbial median voters in the general election.   If the centrist candidate really can get many of them, then this is the way to maximize the likelihood of beating Trump.

Let me now speculate about how a Sanders or Warren candidacy impacts the Congressional races.  Turnout among young voters will be higher.  But candidates in Purple districts probably will have to distance themselves somewhat from the Presidential candidate.  This will be evident and assist the Republican candidate they are running against.   So, it seems reasonable to consider the possibility, even the likelihood, that if either Sanders or Warren do become the Presidential candidate and do win in the general election, they will be faced either with the Republicans still holding onto the Senate or with having very slim majorities in the Senate and the House.

My inference about Sanders supporters is that they either ignore this sort of thinking or nonetheless expect overwhelming majorities in Congress.  In that scenario, of course, having a detailed plan for the legislation to be put forward is then useful, and the then President will have delivered on the various campaign promises that were made.  The supporters will be grateful for that.

But what of the slim majority scenario or Republicans maintaining control in the Senate?  Can any legislation get through this way that the President will sign?  If legislation does get through, will it have any resemblance to the policy positions that the Presidential candidate put forward during the campaign?  If not, how will supporters during the campaign feel about the outcome?

My heart is to be quite liberal on the issues.  But my head tells me that for this to actually happen, upscale voters, whether generally voting Democrat or Republican, need to embrace large tax increases for themselves into the indefinite future.  We are not there yet.  Most voters, these included, have learned to vote their pocketbook.  Voting more selflessly, for the good of the order, requires moving away from pocketbook issues among this constituency.  If this is indeed how the politics will play out, then a majority that assembles to beat Trump will dissipate thereafter.

And if we are in a sausage-being-made world when it comes to additional healthcare legislation, it is no longer obvious that it should be the top priority for what a new Congress handles. An infrastructure package might more readily garner bipartisan support.  But the new President who has written a detailed plan for healthcare during the campaign, might then feel obligated to make it the top priority.

It would truly be wonderful if social need was the driver in how our politics plays out.  Yet it would also be good if voters could think it through in this subgame perfect equilibrium kind of way.  Then candidates might be less prone toward slogans and more prone to connect the nomination to the general election and to connect that to the likely legislation that will emerge in the next Congress.

If only wishing would make it so.

Lamentations about our Politics

I find myself feeling despair a lot lately.  Some of it is me - aging and declining health for sure, but also unable to change in ways to confront current realities, instead clinging to old beliefs which may never have been valid and surely are not now, yet they remain as how I'd like the world to work.  When I was in my mid forties and feeling some despair over a work/personnel issue, a friend of the family who worked in HR advised me - be strong.  I didn't understand what that meant then and I'm still not sure I understand now, more than twenty years later.  The best I've been able to come up with is to be myself when I don't feel desperate.  I was a reasonably good analyst and could write my pieces in a thoughtful style that would provoke thought in my readers.  That's my aim here.  I will try for this with a few different snips rather than one coherent larger narrative.

Integrity versus the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma (and the Media as Propaganda Machine)

There were two Op-Eds last weekend written by insiders about what has been happening to Republican Members of Congress. One was called How Never Trumpers Fell in Line, by Steve Israel, a Democrat who served in the House from 2001-2017.  He offered up his theory of what happened, a wearing down of Representatives who knew they'd be bludgeoned in the media if they openly resisted the President.  Eventually, they came into lockstep with the Trump supporters, to assure their own political survival.  The other piece is called In Private, Republicans Admit They Acquitted Trump Out of Fear.  It's by Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who is a current member of the Senate.  The message is essentially the same as the other piece, though here it is speaking about Senators, who have a longer term in office so might be more immune from the media bludgeoning for that reason.  Apparently not, and yet it seems they care a lot about their reelection possibilities.  Why would anyone want to continue to serve in Congress when they have become a hostage?  I don't get that, but I'm not going to pursue that question here.

Instead I'm going to make a linkage that I haven't seen others make.  If you've read John Cassidy's book, How Markets Fail, you'll understand the Prisoner's Dilemma logic in a different context.  The question is this.  How could legitimate bankers, circa 2007-08, make loans they knew were bad, thereby exacerbating the financial crisis?  The story Cassidy tells is that there were other lenders in the market who were entirely unscrupulous.  They were after the quick profit.  They offered high interest rates to depositors as a way of attracting funds, enabling them to make bad loans at even higher interest rates, their profit coming from the difference between the two rates.  The idea was to make the volume as large as possible, in the near term.  If the loans were to fail eventually, they'd be gone by then, so what did they care.

Legitimate bankers had to operate in this environment.  They could stick to their lending standards, but then see their depositors lured away by the higher rates elsewhere.  Or they could raise their rates to depositors to match the competition, but then had to make the bad loans that their competitors were making, so their balance sheets would remain in the black.  Almost everyone opted for the second option.  It was a matter of principal, not of principle. (Sorry for the bad pun.  I couldn't resist.)

This gets you to wonder whether the real issue is that people with little backbone get into these positions of authority and then cave into the pressure, or if even people of high integrity would cave in (or quit) because there was no other realistic alternative.  I don't know which is the better explanation. But I do have a few subsidiary questions.  Can we identify people of high integrity in advance?  If so, how do we do that?  Does our selection process actually favor others, with less backbone, because they are willing to tell us what we want to hear?

I want to conclude this part by returning to politics and note that the Republicans have been playing the  hostage taking card for some time.  When the Tea Party came into prominence, they threatened incumbents up for reelection to either move to the right or face a primary challenge from the right.  So these sort of threats are not new.  What is new is the immediacy of the threat and the ferocity of it.  Trump writes a Tweet where he is disgruntled with x.  Fox News amplifies the complaint against x.  Trump supporters take to social media and pummel x.  My economic theory tells me that if the punishment has become more immediate and more severe then the integrity needed to withstand the onslaught has to be greater.  I fear that identifying people with the right moral fiber is a losing strategy.  Further, something of the same thing is happening with the Democrats, social media playing essentially the same role with them, even if there is no demagogue like Trump to initiate things.

The Strategy to Enact Actual Legislation versus Candidates Staking Out Policy Positions

The situation is asymmetric between the Democrats and the Republicans.  The Democrats want to enact real and substantive legislation.  That is something in common between those near the Center and those on the Left.   In contrast, while the Republicans are always happy to introduce legislation with further tax cuts, and to appoint Conservative judges, apart from that they really don't want Congress to do much.  Further, they understand the demographic changes that are happening nationally.  The trends are against them.  So their electoral strategy is to hold onto their majority (now only in the Senate), even if it requires dubious electoral practices to achieve that end.

A question that I don't see being asked is how do articulated policy positions in the campaign for President translate into actual legislation, if the person is actually elected?  And what sort of majority is envisioned, in both the House and the Senate, to get that legislation through?  Further, will that majority hold for long enough to get through the entire policy slate?  If not, which legislation is tackled first?

The best we have to go on now is what happened during the Obama administration in 2009-10.  It appears we don't have good memories about these things.  TARP, which was passed before Obama came to office, was extremely unpopular with many voters, as it seemed that the government cared more about the investment bankers who caused the financial meltdown than about ordinary citizens who had to bear the consequences of it.  Secretary of the Treasury Geitner, under a lot of pressure because the possibility of total meltdown seemed quite real, was no help on this front.  The stimulus package was the first economically important legislation after Obama took office.  While definitely a step in the right direction, as any Keynesian would tell you, a large portion of it was in the form of tax cuts, there to lure Republican support in Congress.  In my view tax cuts during a recession are not nearly as effective as direct spending, in terms of generating a multiplier effect, simply because well-off people will save their tax cut rather than spend it, while others who are heavily in debt will use it to pay off their loans. Further, the Republican support didn't materialize.  That was a disappointment, but not entirely surprising.  As a reflection on what might happen in 2021, should a Democrat be elected President in November, it seems unlikely that there will be Republican support for the next President's agenda.

Then, of course, there was Obamacare, a very heavy lift, about a year in the making, an example of the sausage-being-made aspect of getting legislation through Congress, even if it was only on the Democrat side, with the Republicans sitting out. During the campaign in 2008, health insurance was a big issue, and there was a lot of discussion of a public option.  Yet there was no public option in the actual Affordable Care Act.   I have a distinct memory of watching Gary Wills on the Charlie Rose show lamenting the lack of a public option and saying he lost faith in Obama as a result. I believe that Wills was speaking for quite a lot of Obama supporters in launching his complaint.  In the midterm elections of 2010, the House switched to the Republicans, and that ended the chance of fulfilling a full legislative agenda.  Is something similar likely this time around?

Let me make one other point here.  While the stimulus was to cover two years, a good case can be made that a massive infrastructure plan was needed to cover the longer term.  My emblem issue for this is the roads around town, many of which are full of cracks and potholes.  There is some replacement investment, but it doesn't keep up with the deteriorating infrastructure.  Given how bad the economy was doing then, I think a reasonable argument could be made that the infrastructure plan should have preceded the Affordable Care Act.  It would have had better macroeconomic consequences.  And it might have prevented the disaffection that some Obama supporters felt, so other legislative measures could have been enacted with the Democrats holding onto the House.

Of course, hindsight is 20-20 and being a Monday morning quarterback is not particularly  attractive.  The point here is not to replay this history for its own sake, but rather to inform us about the current situation.  How do we avoid making the same mistake twice?  That's the question people should be be asking.

The Democrats Are a Coalition of Disparate Interests.  What Holds the Coalition Together?

In my view, there needs to be a bargain between the party and the voters.  In a bargain, you get something and you give up something else.  If in net what you get you value more than what you give up, then you'll take the deal.  I'm afraid the politics focuses only on what you will get, and doesn't talk much at all about what you'll give up.  Further, the primary process exacerbates this.  The candidates appeal to their segment only.  This might produce a plurality during any particular primary.  But it doesn't say how the party comes together after the primaries have concluded.  It's pretty clear that in 2016, the party did not come together.

While there are many possible factors to consider that differentiate voters, here let's focus on just two of them - voter age and voter income. My sense is that younger voters are more to the left while older voters are more to the center.  Likewise, low to moderate income voters are more to the left, high income and very rich voters are more to the center.  It would be good to know how strongly voter age correlates with voter income.  My guess is that the correlation is reasonably strong.  Then, those on the left want significant Robin-Hood-like income redistribution.  Those near the center might tolerate modest income redistribution, but will be uncomfortable with anything more than that.

Historically, voter participation rates have been low for younger voters.  Yet they seem to be arguing that this time around will be different.  Turnout will be very high, so they don't need to compromise.  Conversely, if getting rid of Trump and having the Democrats retain control in Congress for a longer period than happened under Obama is very important now, the upscale voters should be willing to have their taxes raised a lot, yet that case is not being made to them, as near as I can tell.

There is then the fact that evangelical voters who support Trump are doing so, almost surely, under the assumption that eventually they can overturn Roe.  I haven't heard Democrat candidates speak about the onslaught of Conservative judges appointed since Trump was elected, nor of the shenanigans that happened after Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court.  Is there a plan to reverse this?  Or will they accept this consequence.  In other words, there are important issues that are not being talked about now among the Democrats, whether on the Left or in the Center.  Do those issues matter for holding a bargain together or possibly derailing it?

Wrap Up

One of the reasons I continue to write blog posts is that I'm vexed by some issues and when I write about one of them, I can let go of it, at least for a while.  I'm afraid that's not the case with our national politics.  It is too omnipresent for that.  Instead, all I'm trying to do here is see whether I can make arguments that frame these issues in ways other than how they are being discussed in the media.  I think there is a need for that.  I wonder whether anyone who reads this piece would agree.

What If There Were Interviews With Voters Instead Of Polls?

With the Iowa Caucuses pending, the latest polling information says that none of the Democratic candidates are close to getting 50% of the votes.  Indeed, if the leader gets upwards of 30%, that will be a surprise.  From my point of view, the process of selection is very unsatisfying, but for reasons that I haven't seen expressed in pieces I read about the election.  (Recently that's not as many as four years ago, when I was better informed.  I don't have the oomph now to do that.)  So here, I'd like to bring up a set of questions that I'd like to see answered.  Each of these are addressed to an individual potential voter.

1.  Do you have a preferred candidate?
   1a.  If you answered yes, what is it that attracts you to that candidate?
   1b.  If you answered no, are there several candidates that you'd find acceptable and other candidates you'd find unacceptable?
      1bi.  Can you explain what puts a candidate in the acceptable group and what puts a candidate in the unacceptable group?
      1bii.  If you are currently undecided on these matters, do you have a sense of when you might decide?

2.  Might you change your mind about your preferences over the candidates or is your mind made up and you are confident it will stay that way till the election?
   2a.  If you answered that you might change your mind, what sort of additional information would cause that?
   2b.  If you answered that you are confident your preferences will stay fixed, why is that?

3.  Is there a single issue that you find most compelling for determining the candidate you should vote for?
   3a.  If you answered yes, can you say what that single issue is?
   3b.  If you answered no, is there a set of issues that taken together you would deem give the compelling reason to vote for a candidate?

4.  Where do you get your information about these matters?

5.  Do your friend's views of these matters, as expressed in social media, impact your own views?

* * * * *

This list of questions could probably be made longer.  My experience with focus groups doing ed tech type questioning is that you have to give a lot of leeway for the respondent to define what's going on.  I'm afraid that the polling doesn't do this.  Further, with many candidates in the race, the information you really want to get at doesn't emerge.

If preferences really were fixed already, then you'd certainly want to elicit the full preference ordering and not just the top of the list.  In contrast, if preferences are still being shaped, it would be very helpful to know the factors that would influence how the preferences are ultimately formed. 

The Fully-Absorbed-In-An-Activity Questionnaire

Yesterday, I finally finished reading The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, a book containing many of Maslow's later essays.  (He died in 1970).  I started reading it in August and then wrote a post, Maslow and the Creative Attitude. But I soon put it down after that to get ready for the fall semester.  I read most of the rest of the book the last two or three weeks, after the semester had concluded.  There are segments of the book that are very compelling, others which are quite dull.  There is a lot of repetition on the B-Values and the D-Values, where B is short for Being (the higher level where values have an aesthetic quality) and D is short for Deficiency (a lower level - more or less, simply trying to survive).

The experiencing of the B-values happens via self-actualization - the person realizing his or her full potential - which quite often Maslow refers to as peak experiences.  I was pleased to see in Appendix A, that Maslow also talks about plateau experiences.  Peak experiences have some novelty to them.  For the older self-actualizer the sense of novelty may not be present but the desire to live by the B-Values is quite strong.  This is done via plateau experiences.  (I would have been okay if he talked about gradual down-slope experiences, which seems closer to my own reality now.)

Most college students have at least a passing knowledge of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as do most working professionals, but I believe that for the vast majority there is a very mechanical understanding of what Maslow actually says on the matter.  Anyone along the hierarchy can have a peak experience.  But if the deficiency needs are not satisfied, then it is less likely that a peak experience will occur.  Maslow also says that even if all the deficiency needs are satisfied, that is not sufficient to self-actualize.  The person has to want to do that, to live the sort of life that enables self-actualization.  Not all people have those wants.

There is an additional issue, about whether a third party (a trained psychologist or perhaps others) can tell if a deficiency need has been met, simply by observing the objective conditions in which the person operates, or if there is so much idiosyncrasy across people that whether the need has been met or not requires a deep understanding of the personality of the individual, the aspirations and the phobias, and other factors as well.

I want to illustrate the issue simply by comparing this to taking over-the-counter pain medication.  I learned this from a doctor at Carle a couple of years ago.  He said I should not rely on the recommended dosages written on the box with the medications.  I'm a big guy and those recommendations are based on an average sized person.  I needed a greater dose to have the same effect on me.   If you then replace size with some other psychological variable, you can see that it is not just the environment but also the person's disposition that determines whether the need has been met. This makes applying the hierarchy much more challenging in practice than most people are led to understand.

It is my current belief that students in college should be encouraged to have peak experiences, and the survey I will discuss in the next section is aimed at doing that.  But I also think this is true for working professionals.  My sense of things, however, is that both school and work tend to block the peak experiences from happening.  If there is no other way to envision school and work, then the peak experiences must happen outside these environments, after hours or on weekends.  If students and working professionals come to believe that they should be having peaking experiences, then we might reasonably expect redesign of school and work to make that more likely.

Let me close this section by noting that I spent time trying to find whether individual chapters of the book could be found online.  Those that were reprints of a previously published journal article certainly could be.  And some others too.  For the survey I'm borrowing from Chapter 21, Various Meanings of Transcendence, though only the first numbered item.  The online version, unfortunately, seems to have a lot of typos.  Those provide distractions, which I hope are mild only. The chapter is interesting because many of the forms of transcendence are fusion of what appear to be opposites, for example, selfishness and being publicly spirited. Maslow is very big on this type of fusion.  I believe he chose the ordering of the items deliberately, about which type of transcendence might be experienced first, and other types of transcendence that might come later.  The ones with fusion are closer to the end.

* * * * *

Being fully absorbed in an activity is something that just about everyone has experienced at one time or another.  So it is useful to survey on such prior experiences and then to get the individual to elaborate on the situation.  I mean the questionnaire below to be suggestive only.  If deployed primarily to educate the participants, the person delivering the questionnaire should feel free to modify questions, add others, and delete some of the questions given here.  Of course, if the purpose is to do social science investigation across different audiences, the questions will need to be fixed to make useful comparisons.  For now, I'm more interested in the educative value than in the social science.

1.  Can you recall the last time your were fully absorbed in an activity?  (Yes/No)

2a.  If you answered yes, please elaborate on when that happened, the approximate duration of the state of complete absorption, and what you were doing when so absorbed.




2b.  If you answered no, does this reflect a failure or your memory or do you think you never had an experience where you were completely absorbed?
(Comment: Those who report never having had such an experience should not go any further with the questionnaire.  But there is a need to prevent sandbagging.  If respondents find completing the questionnaire painful, they will need some reward for completing it.  That reward should then not be available to the person who reports never having had such an experience.  I don't want to get hung up on this issue here, but it must be resolved in an effective way to implement the questionnaire.)

3.  After the experience of complete absorption had concluded, did you reflect on it at all.  (Yes/No)

4.  After the experience of complete absorption can you describe your mood.  (Good Mood/Bad Mood/Something Else)

5. Please amplify on your answers to question 3 and 4 below.



6.  Regarding the frequency in which you experience periods of complete absorption, which best characterizes your situation?  (Very Frequent/Moderately Frequent/Not Frequent at All).

7.  Regarding what causes these experiences of complete absorption, which best characterizes your situation.  (I induce them by selecting the appropriate activity and environment.  They happen for random reasons which I don't control.  It's a little bit of both.)

8.  Please amplify on your answers to questions 6 and 7 below.




9.  Please list all factors that would block your ability to be completely absorbed in an activity.



10.  Provide annotations/explanations for why these blockages stop you from being absorbed.


11.  If the blockages were entirely absent, would you then want to be completely absorbed in an activity or not?  Please explain your answer.


12.  This is an open ended space for you to add any further thoughts on the matter.



Thank you for completing this questionnaire.

* * * * *

I now want to briefly talk about my own blockages.  Sitting in front of a computer screen for too long when I'm not writing a blog post like this one, I have found as a rather large blockage.  Part of that is multi-processing.  Another part is doing waste of time things as a form of procrastination.  I am deliberately trying to read paper books, sit away from the computer, and not have my phone with me when I'm doing that to combat this blockage.  But old habits die hard.

I was last totally absorbed, not with reading Maslow but rather reading Le Carre's latest novel, a Christmas present which I finished the day after.  I'm somewhat conscious that I read fiction quite differently than non-fiction.  With fiction I can let go and let the story take over.  With non-fiction I tend to argue with what I'm reading, even if ultimately I'm largely in agreement with what is said (though that seems to be increasingly rare with current stuff).   That last movie I saw that produced a sense of absorption, and a lot of tears, was the movie about Mr. Rogers.  I don't go to the movies that often now and I rarely find watching a movie on my computer, which I do now and then, completely absorbing, mainly because of what I wrote in the preceding paragraph, also perhaps my selections don't match my current sense of taste.

I did the above because I want to encourage readers of this post to do a similar exercise for themselves.  It then would be interesting to compare notes. 

North Is The Dummy

On occasion, I go back and read my old blog posts.  This is typically not a random occurrence but rather happens to follow up on a current thought after recalling that I said something about the issue in the blog.  A few days ago I was thinking about family, how much I knew about my parents' rhythms and how much my kids understand mine.  I've become something of a hermit, partly because of my arthritis, so I'm reluctant to go places where I'll feel physically uncomfortable, but also because I'm out of the routine of engaging in family schtick that endures more than for a moment.  And a lot of this reluctance for family banter is not getting a decent night's sleep the night before, so feeling I'll be burdened by the slightest thing.  It's kind of sad really.

With my parents these sort of issues were less, until they got very old, in large part because they had routine activities with family and friends that normalized interactions.  One of those was playing tennis.  The other was playing bridge.  I wrote about this some in a post called Devotion, which was crafted after cleaning out my parent's condo in Boca Raton, aided by their caregiver, Beverly.  The post was both a way to process my grief, which was considerable, and to offer up a tribute to Beverly.  My mother remained alive for more than 13 years after my father died, remarkable under the circumstances.  To set the stage I did talk about family life some when we were kids and then again early into their retirement, when both parents were reasonably functional.  Part of that was talking about bridge.

...... My parents (more my mother than my father) were avid if only moderately skilled players. Many of the friends whom they had over on the weekends came to play bridge. Bridge was a big part of my parents' social life. So it's not surprising that my parents taught my brother and me. (My sister, I believe, didn't learn bridge since, 5 years my senior, there wasn't a fourth person around to play with when she was junior high school age. I was too young for that.)

Bridge is a fascinating game to an economist as it bears aspects of incomplete information and communicating privately held information via both the bidding and the play of the cards. When I came to the U of I some of my colleagues (who would soon become my very good friends) had a regular game at lunchtime. I joined right in. One of our number had been a ranked player nationally and he tutored us to raise our level. For a while my game improved steadily as I came to understand the requisite thinking in better play. There is a lot of counting to determine probabilities (or at least a sense of probability) in figuring out the play of each card, using the bidding and the prior play to aid in this determination.

I didn't write this in the piece, but it turns out that bridge is a useful complement for the economic theorist in considering actual decision making.  Economic theory has as its aim to illuminate general principles that explain many seemingly different situations.  In contrast, when playing bridge each hand offers up a unique situation to analyze.  Sequencing the choice of cards to play then becomes an important aspect of the player's thinking.  The aim is to do as best as possible in the given situation.  My mother knew a lot of rules to apply, which eventually turned out to limit her play (and also to limit her in managing interactions with me when I was a teenager).  Partly out of a sense of rebellion and maybe just because it was my intellectual disposition, I wanted to figure out the situation from first principles and the facts that were already known.  Because there is considerable complexity with bridge, I wouldn't get the play right all the time.  But that's what I would try for.  I have a sense that this sort of thinking helped me in my career, as an administrator.  Sequencing the moves was important there as well.  I wonder if kids nowadays get practice at sequentially arranging choices in other activities in which they engage.

Recently, I've taken up again reading the bridge column written by Phillip Adler, which is reprinted in the local newspaper.  This was a serendipitous choice, as the paper rearranged whether the Daily Jumble appeared, and I already had the habit of doing that. Adler's column appeared adjacent to the Jumble.  On those days where I snapped off the Jumble - one, two, three, zing - I wanted some more time to noodle around with the paper.  The bridge column was perfect for that.

It's been a few weeks since I resumed with Adler's column and I want to note some differences for the reader of the columns as compared to those who actually played the hand of bridge.  First, the reader does have complete information, as the cards for each player are revealed.  But the reader is then asked by Adler to consider the situation when only looking at one hand, but also taking into account the information that bidding and the prior play revealed. Second, the hand is selected precisely because there is some subtlety in finding the winning play, whether that is for the defense or, more frequently, for the declarer.  This keeps the reader on his toes, to see if he can come up with that winning line of play.  Third, these are typically hands played in some actual duplicate bridge tournament, so the reader gets to compare his imagined choices with what actually happened in the tournament.

There are some interesting conventions employed in the writing of the column.  The first paragraph is always about some famous person or event, taking a particular lesson from that and applying it to the hand in question.  It is a stylistic choice of the writer to begin the piece that way.  It adds a certain charm to the column.  Then the players are arrayed using the convention of directions on a map.  The defense is always East and West, regardless of how the players were actually sitting during the tournament.  The declarer is South.  The open hand during the play, opposite the declarer, is North.  The open hand is called the dummy, ergo the title of my piece.

I puzzled some why this latter convention is used and if it makes reading the column easier or not.  I thought of this West Wing episode, where some cartographers argue for using the Peters projection for global maps instead of the Mercator projection.  CJ became completely freaked out by this suggestion.  What was taught in grade school we accept as absolute truth, a fact she emblemizes in this scene.  We don't like our firm beliefs to be disrupted, even if the change is socially necessary.  Armed with that memory, I wondered why the declarer couldn't match where the players actually sat in the tournament or, if not that, why in the columns the players would be identified as right and left on defense, up as the dummy and down as the declarer.  Would that really change anything?  Nevertheless, it's not done that done that way, perhaps another example of tyranny of the status quo.

* * * * *

A different tradition with my parents, one I didn't write about in that piece on Beverly, was to engage in word play.  Some of that happened spontaneously in conversation.  Making puns in context was a  prized activity, one I have passed along to my offspring.  Then, too, instead of playing scrabble we played anagrams, where you not only made your own words with the letters you had picked up, but you also could steal a word from another player by adding some letters to a word the player had already displayed on the table and then rearranging the letters to form a new word. Now word play is deeply embedded in me.  I do it compulsively, as a matter of course.

So I start to play around with the title of this post.  I wonder if anyone who reads it would do likewise.  As a preface, this quote might be helpful.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

I'm guessing that to a lot of readers it will seem now that we are going through a reenactment of the Civil War, albeit this time around it's a cold war not a hot one, and the names have changed so that now the Republicans represent the South in this war.  It seems to me we've been in this war for a very long time, at least since Reagan became president. The culture wars, with William Bennett the government official whom we most associate with the term and The Moral Majority, founded by Jerry Falwell, the non-governmental organization we most associate with the movement.  Subsequently, there was the Contract with America, the TEA Party, and more recently MAGA.  Each time the leadership made an appeal to potential members to join with them as if they were on a holy crusade.  The South understands in their bones that they are engaged in another Civil War, though the aim now is more members of Congress and more Justices who might revoke Roe.

Taken this way, the title of the post can mean that The North is stupid.  It refuses to recognize that this Civil War is going on.  It repeatedly errs by framing things as if we all love America and politics is merely the expression of differences in point of view done in a civil (not capitalized) manner.  Both pundits and politicians then err, by accusing Republicans in Congress of venality and hypocrisy, but avoiding talking about politics as war, thereby missing the main point.  During a war all is fair.

We have a long experience of fighting a cold war with the Soviet Union.  We might draw some lessons from that experience.  While there was aggression exercised on both sides then, there was also restraint, which was governed by MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).  The U.S. had already demonstrated the devastation nuclear weapons were capable of in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The arms race ensued immediately after World War II ended.  But the Dr. Strangelove scenario never played itself out in reality.  The subsequent events that the first strike would trigger were too scary to contemplate.  If we tried to apply the lessons from this experience to our domestic politics, what credible threat would The North come up with to restrain the South from its current excesses and thereby eventually retrain itself as well?  Or is that even possible?

I confess that I don't have answers to these questions.  A real answer would require understanding both game theory a la Thomas Schelling and to understand the means by which effective political conflict would occur nowadays. I'm ignorant on the latter, so rely on TV shows and the movies with political espionage and intrigue to fuel my imagination.  Suppose, for example, it has been discovered that Senator McConnell has squirreled away hundreds of millions of dollars in some off-share tax haven, and via sophisticated electronic warfare techniques those funds can by siphoned away, so he no longer has access.  With hypotheticals like this one can readily construct quite a yarn.  But doing so doesn't get us any closer to imagining what real political cold warfare would be like, with the North fully engaged.  It is, of course, also possible to imagine hot warfare, perhaps as a demonstration of the bad outcome that might ensue.  But it is much harder to consider ways where that would be contained and not escalate, indeed only to serve subsequently as a threat against grievous violations of pax politica.

So, I'm guessing this is not an easy problem to solve, even for those who do have suitable expertise to consider realistic alternatives.  But that a problem is difficult to solve shouldn't mean we shy away from considering the problem altogether, n'est-pas?  Doing so might be a different way that the North is the Dummy and a not very courageous one at that.

Direct Expenditure On Instruction Per Instructional Unit

The mantra - data driven decision making - has had a big influence on us, some in ways that are obvious to see, others perhaps far less clear.  One new thing I've become aware of is that several students in my class whom I would judge are not top notch analytically are nonetheless majoring in econometrics or double majoring in economics and statistics.  This, almost surely, is being done because the choice of major is driven by the perception of where the good jobs will be after graduation.  Knowing how to manipulate data so its truths can be revealed is an important skill.

But I keep coming back to this Koopmans piece, Measurement without Theory, as a critique of the "data will tell all" view.  As I was trained to be a theorist, I think you need to start with questions that you want the data to inform about.  Those questions then take the shape of a model, where parameters can be estimated with the data and hypotheses can be tested by the data.  Indeed, in the bits of empirical work I did as an administrator, first in the SCALE project, then more than a decade later as the CIO for the College of Business, the questions I was trying to answer drove the inquiry as well as how the data was amassed.  No fancy statistical techniques were employed, yet I knew enough about the data to be able to get at useful answers to my questions.  I'm not saying that you don't need knowledge of econometrics or statistics to understand what's going on.  I'm saying that you need theory too, which is the lesson I drew when Freakonomics was the rage.

There is yet another reason why data won't tell all.  This happens when the information needed to answer the fundamental questions is not present, but is potentially attainable with some effort in data collection. That is the issue I want to address in this piece.  In my previous post I argued that additional instructional resources needed to be put into the first-year experience.  An immediate rebuttal might be something like this - we're a public university and can't afford to teach first-year classes in a more labor intensive way.  Anyone with a traditional view of the public university - meaning geezers like me who remember back to 39 years ago - will likely embrace the rebuttal because exclusively large lecture classes in the first year seemed a staple of how things were done.  In turn, it was how the cost of instruction was kept down.

But things have changed, a lot, since 39 years ago.  For one, as I argued in this post called, The business and ethical dilemmas of undergraduate education at public R1's, tuition has been hyper-inflationary over essentially this entire time interval and now constitutes a major source of revenue for the university.  Purely on the matter of making things transparent to the "customer" (I hate to think of students as customers when they are in my class, but surely the university needs to consider them this way as they or their families pay tuition) there is a need to communicate what they are getting for what they pay.  How much of their tuition goes for direct expenditure on instruction, particularly the instruction they are getting in their classes?  What would a good number look like?  I don't know but my prior is that it should be around 50%.  Having the right data would inform that view. 

Another way that things have changed is the path students take to the degree.  It's now common for students to take the first two years elsewhere, either at a community college or at some other university, and then transfer in, mainly as juniors. Such students have already completed most of their general education requirements and are probably taking fewer large lecture classes.   If the old model had the first two years of college subsidizing the last two years of college, but the transfer students don't pay this subsidy, why should the students who do start at the university pay this subsidy?

I don't want this to be a metaphysics discussion.  I want it to be practical.  Let's begin with this question.  Can we determine a number that measures the size of the subsidy?    Here's a second question. Might some of the subsidy be going elsewhere, e.g., to doctoral education or to research or service?  This is a trickier question to answer.  I don't want to get bogged down by it here, so let me use that question to ask yet a different one.  Might there be other ways where the subsidy manifests?  For example, might some majors subsidize others or some colleges subsidize others?  This you could answer in a fairly straightforward way, with the type of information I'm arguing we need to have.

Now let me talk a bit about methodology.  Instructional units are determined by the number of students enrolled in the class times the credit hours the course offers.  The class I'm teaching now currently has 36 students registered and the course offers 3 credit hours, so the course is generating 108 IUs at present.  Yet I have two phantom students on my roster (students who stopped doing the course work quite early in the semester and who stopped coming to class). That sort of thing is probably hard to measure from one class to the next, but what is readily measurable are the number of late drops and the number of students who fail the course.  So one can get a more refined view of IUs, by excluding those students.

Likewise, enrollments typically vary over the semester.   When I did that SCALE project, the data I got from DMI (the Division of Management Information, which curates institutional data) had 10-day enrollments and final enrollments for all undergraduate sections.  Students can't add a class after day 10 without permission of the instructor, so day 10 is referred to as the add date.  The drop date is much later.  (I think it is  day 40 - 8  work weeks into the semester - but I'm doing that off the top of my head so that number should be verified.)   My preference would be to have looks at enrollments on day 1, day 10, day 40, and final enrollments.  The reasons for this are many.  Here are a few of them.

Students engage in some gaming of the course registration process.  They can't tell which classes are easy and which are hard, so they use the first 10 days as a way to sample the classes and their instructors.  Students also have strong time-of-day preferences for when to take classes, but many courses are at capacity early so they register for something else, at a less desirable time, hoping to get into a more preferred offering at a better time.  Then, students may under perform in class so consider dropping it after they learn their scores on the first midterm.  What, then, is the right time during the semester to measure IUs from a theoretical perspective?  I don't have a good answer to that question. Instead, my preference would be have several different views to consider and then see if they matter much in doing the expenditure per IU calculation.

Let me talk now about the expenditure side of things.  In my case this is remarkably easy.  I am under contract to teach the one course I am teaching this fall. So my pay in that contract is the appropriate expenditure number.  With full-time faculty, it is somewhat harder.  Teaching load matters as does the fraction of the total time devoted to instruction.  In the model we used when I first started at Illinois, the typical teaching load in the Economics Department was 4 courses per year (fall and spring, summer teaching was extra) or two courses per semester, with the typical allocation that one course was undergraduate and the other was graduate.  Also, the typical time allocation we would state is 50% research, 40% teaching, and 10% service.  If this actually were still the case you'd take the instructor's (9-month) salary, multiply by 40% to get the part of salary devoted to teaching, and then divide that number by 4 to get the part of salary on a per course basis.  

While I know there is now an official requirement for time reporting, I strongly doubt that most faculty actually track their time allocation.  Further, there is a conceptual issue with measuring cogitation.  If you're thinking of your model while driving to work or while doing the dishes (something I normally did when I was doing economics research) does that time count?  In any event, if you were able to get an an hours per week measure of the activities, it might produce quite a different number as to the salary per course number.  So the numbers one gets won't be precise, for sure.  Yet it would still be interesting to have those numbers, to get a look at salary per course.

A different issue arises in computing such expenditure for discussion sessions run by TAs.  This is whether their tuition waiver should count in their pay or not. There is some incentive for the campus to count the tuition waiver, as it will raise the expenditure per course number.  But let's face it.  The main reason for using TAs to staff these discussion sections, rather than rely on full time instructors, is because it is cheaper that way.  So I'd like to see the numbers without the tuition waiver included.  And by the philosophy I've articulated above, it really would be good to have both views.  I don't want to argue for a single number.  A vector is better than a scalar here.  We'd get a better sense of what's happening that way.

Let me close by making one more point.  One of the adjustments that students have made to the current system is to take more credit hours per semester and therefore to devote less time in any one course.  This semester I have one student who self-reported that he is taking 24 credit hours.  Several students reported taking 18 credit hours, and among them most seemed to me not that strong analytically.  This gaming, either by having a double major, or by trying to accelerate the time to graduation, is tyranny of the extensive margin and ends up crowding out deeper learning on the intensive margin, which needs students to put in more time. Some of the student stress we're seeing is a consequence of this sort of reaction, with the students themselves not perceiving they should want to find in their studies a form of self-expression.  This gives a measurable reason for wanting to see expenditure on instruction per IU.  The hope is that if we reallocated resources in a way that shows the students we understand their dilemma, we might change the living hell they are currently experiencing into a reasonably nurturing experience.  That should be our goal.

Should the U of I Consider Having Pass/Fail Grading for the Entire First-Year Experience?

Last week in the News-Gazette there was an article Demand for mental-health services surging on UI campus.  Many students appear to be under a high level of stress.  I'm seeing it in the one class I still teach.  The issue appears to be national, perhaps global.  Indirectly, you might imagine it a consequence of the rising inequality in society, fueled by the belief that those who get near the top have done so....because they earned it.

This meritocracy view puts added importance on GPA, or so it would seem.  Students then become single-minded regarding their own motivation.  In my class, where students write a weekly blog post, the last post is a review and critique, of the course and of their own performance.  This student post, particularly the second paragraph, did a nice job of describing the ethos among the students in the class.  And the comment that followed, in response to my comment, makes particular mention of the grades culture as the primary culprit.  So, one wants to know whether the surging demand for mental health services is a byproduct of the grades culture and, if so what can be done about it.

I gave a pretty thorough analysis of these issues back in 2015 in a post called, The double-edged sword we refer to as 'high expectations'.  That semester was the first time I saw the lack of intrinsic motivation manifest in a large fraction of my students.  Before that, I actually had pretty good success with the methodology I employed.  Since then, however, not so much.  And what I'm concluding is that it's pretty hopeless to try to address these issues at the course level only.   At the course level, one resorts to incentives, requiring attendance for example, that reinforces the grades culture.  A more systematic solution is needed, one that gets students to step outside their current habits with regard to school, so they can experience what intrinsic motivation feels like.

* * * * *

I was a freshman in college in fall 1972 at MIT.  At the time, MIT had the unfortunate distinction of leading the country in the suicide rate at universities.  They were ahead of the curve in regard to this issue of student stress and mental health.  So, they took some steps to address the issue head on.  The one that I remember the most was moving to pass/fail grading during the first year.  Instead of grades, students would get a written evaluation at mid-semester and again at the end of the semester.  The instructor had to produce these evaluations.

I seem to remember that the pre-meds were somewhat upset with this system, because certain courses that were taken during the first year would be important for their application to medical school, and they wanted to report the grades they received in those courses.  For example, the first semester chemistry course I took was part typical college chemistry for that time but then also part organic chemistry.  And in the second semester, you could take organic chemistry, which I did.  Organic, at that time, was the make-it-or-break-it class for getting into medical school.  So, the compromise MIT opted for was to have "hidden grades" in the evaluation document, which partly defeated the purpose, but maybe was as good as they could do at the time.  There were some other odd consequences of this policy.  I took a probability course in the spring semester.  They wouldn't let me sit for the final exam as I had already amassed enough points via the midterm and problem sets to pass the course. If testing is purely assessment of what has been learned, then this makes sense. But if some learning happens even during the exams, this seems an odd outcome.

No doubt a variety of issues would have to be worked through to change the grading system in this way.  I want to make a different, but related point.  Almost surely there would have to be concomitant changes that require devoting more resources to the first-year experience.  For one, we should take seriously the recommendations of the Boyer Commission Report.  Every first-year student should take at least one seminar class taught by a tenure-track faculty member.  Twenty years ago the university had the Discovery Program that aimed at something like this (though Discovery classes could be taught as a lecture if the instructor so desired).  Owing to various rounds of budget cuts, those classes dwindled.  It seems time to consider restoring them, in light of the mental health situation on campus.

Still, most first-year classes would be large lecture courses.  If it were the TAs who would write those evaluations, they would need to have a manageable number of students to be able to perform this task, which means either reduced section size or fewer sections per TA.  Further, they'd almost certainly need training in how to write effective evaluations of this sort.

So, I'm not holding my breath till the campus moves ahead with this.  But, seriously, if the mental health crisis with students is the canary in the coalmine, we should be asking how to address the root cause.  This seems like a reasonable first conversation to have about that.