My Analysis, Which Is Not Worth Very Much

I only read bits and pieces about Ukraine, Putin, economic sanctions and the rest so I confess to being more ill informed than most.  Yet I'm surprised that the Pandemic has not come up much if at all in this context.  I think it should.  Beforehand, the impression we were given is that the Pandemic is entirely out of control in Russia.  

Do dictators of Putin's ilk still have to care about their popularity with the public?  My thought is that if the economic and social environment is more or less static then no, they don't need to care about public opinion.  But if the social situation is deteriorating, and surely the Pandemic being out of control would do that, then the dictator's power is threatened. At this point, some serious misdirection can be be helpful to the dictator.  Fighting a war in Ukraine is for Putin the analog of the-election-was-stolen for Trump.  

And here is the thing, which it seems is out of reach for those reasonable policy maker types who impute rationality to the the other side of the conflict.  Once a major political misdirection is taken, there is no backing down from it.  Premised on a falsehood, or a series of falsehoods, it is in effect a move to go all in with the play.  

With that, if the NATO+ side is to win in this situation, eventually it will have to do so on the battlefield, something it has already shown a distaste for by relying on economic sanctions.  All else equal, and assuming for the moment that even Putin wouldn't resort to nukes, I think the other side probably can win on the battlefield, with drones and other modern hardware.  But then there is this not so secret weapon that Putin has.  

The reactionary right in many of the NATO+ countries is aligned with Putin in ways that are at once repellent to us and yet obvious.  Jingoism has been on the rise.  Strongmen become champions to the jingoists.

There has been talk about civil war in the U.S. for quite some time now, completely divorced from any discussion of Putin and Ukraine.  That an actual civil war with fighting commences, somehow triggered by Putin's aggression (though for now the full connection is hard to spell out) means the other side in the fighting will have to deal with internal conflict that might very well escalate.  And that could create sufficient diversion that Russia prevails in Ukraine.

Let me close with a general observation about game theory a la using a strategic analysis to game out likely outcomes in a conflict.  Even events that are deemed zero probability can impact what will actually happen.  So rather than ignore them entirely, we're better off assuming their highly unlikely but still possible.  This will get us to a more robust solution.

The reader can take all of the above as simply me being paranoid, which I'm prone to do on occasion.  So, let's conclude with Joseph Heller's famous line:

Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

The Second Cup Is Decaf

In the be-careful-what-you-wish-for category here's a little story from some years ago.  I'm doing an appointment with my regular optometrist (who has since retired) and there's something wrong with my eyes, part of a general deterioration due to acute myopia.  So I tell him, my goal is for all my parts to wear out pretty much at the same time.  That got a good chuckle out of him.  I wish the joke were still fresh with me. 

I'm going to do a brief inventory of what ails me at present coupled with an equally brief status report.  For some of these, change in diet might be helpful.  The post is really about producing such a change via a nudge, a term from behavioral economics which means taking some action in advance to influence a subsequent choice.  It's my particular nudges that I want to elucidate.

Starting with my eyes, this has been a lifelong issue, but I notice the consequence only once in a while.  This happens when reading and the font is small - my current example of that is the bridge column in the local paper (in print) where I can't distinguish the symbol for clubs from the symbol for spades. (I do figure out that information from the context.) Much of the rest of my reading is done on the computer screen, where the font is large, and it becomes a non-issue for me.  The other issue is driving at night, where I struggle when the lighting is dim.  Since these days I'm driving exclusively near to home and am already familiar with the area, it's not that big a deal.  But I would be wary of nighttime driving if in an unfamiliar location, even when armed with that delightful voice from Google Maps. 

As to treatment, I take prescription eye drops twice a day, and likewise an eye vitamin twice a day.  It's hard to tell cause and effect with treatment like this, but my general sense is that it slows down eye deterioration greatly, particularly if I'm a good boy with regards to the rest of my health.  (In particular, that means keeping my blood pressure in check.)  

Let's turn to the next ailment, chronic osteoarthritis, particularly in my lower back but also in my neck and in my feet.  This was originally diagnosed in 2009, when I first found walking painful.  At the time the doctor recommended exercise as the treatment.  Until about 9/11, I relied on jogging as a form of exercise.  I would do about 4 or 5 miles at between 9 and 10 minutes per mile.  It was a good workout for me and helped to keep my weight in check.  Plus, it was a good stress relief.  (Until the kids were born, I also played golf fairly regularly.  If you walk the course and carry your own bag, that is something of a workout, though it is not aerobic exercise.)  But then my knees started to bother me while jogging.  One of the bigger mistakes I made in life was not to take up an alternative form of exercise then and there, which most likely would have been walking.  Instead, I became very sedentary and my weight ballooned. I did take up walking after that arthritis doc made the recommendation.  For a while it was reasonably good for me and a pleasant diversion.  But then the lower back pain became more acute.

Eventually, I discovered two things.  First, I was a candidate for having my right hip replaced.  After consulting with the doctor, I opted to defer doing this.  I feared that an infection would develop after the operation.  Back in 2012 I developed such an infection after a rotator cuff repair (itself an outpatient procedure) and spent 5 days in the hospital after the infection was discovered, which was incredibly gruesome, plus perhaps 6 weeks of further infection treatment after I was released.  I really don't want to go through that again if I can avoid it.  The doctor and I agreed that my weight was a significant factor to consider in whether the operation would be safe.  I needed to take off quite a few pounds to make it a good bet.  (More about my weight below.)  Second, I learned that if I supported some of my weight with my hands, for example by wheeling a shopping cart around in the grocery store, then that took pressure off my lower back, and I could tolerate walking for a much longer period of time. So now I do my exercise on the treadmill, where by holding onto the guardrails I give myself such support. 

The third ailment is perhaps mislabeled with the term ailment.  I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in winter/spring 2018 and received radiation treatment thereafter.  Prostate cancer doesn't show much in the way of symptoms.  In my mind there are two.  The first is excessive fatigue.  In fall 2017, I taught one class and would come home exhausted, needing a nap immediately.  That hadn't happened before with my teaching.  After the fact it made sense.  The second is an excessive need to go number 1.  This includes during the night and hence interrupts sleep.  But maybe this second issue happens to men as they age whether they have prostate cancer or not, of that I'm not sure.  (And maybe all men will get prostate cancer, if they live long enough.)  I want to note that post treatment the first issue is largely gone.  I do like to take naps during the day now, but I attribute this to sleeping in fits and bursts rather than sleeping through the night.  The second issue remains. C'est la vie.

During the time post radiation treatment, there is a monitoring stage to see if the cancer has been held at bay or if it returns.  This monitoring is ongoing.  A relatively modest blood test, checking the PSA level, gives the indicator of how things are going.  On this front, while my scores have not been perfect, they are reasonably good and for the time being appear stable.  Let me turn to why that might be the case.  Early on after treatment concluded I had an appointment with the urologist.  He suggested certain dietary changes: giving up eating beef, having a soy bar from Revival Soy on a daily basis, and eating/drinking some processed tomato product every other day.  I did this pretty religiously for the first year or two.  I found that a turkey burger or a veggie burger is a reasonable substitute for a hamburger.  Indeed, the beef restriction wasn't as big a deal for me as I thought it would be.  I found the soy bars on Amazon, so ordering them wasn't a big deal.  The company has since stopped producing the type of bar I favored, but what is still available is okay.  And now I order directly from the company, as Amazon seems to be out of the soy bars most of the time.  I'm more erratic about the tomato thing now.  Part of this is the oncologist telling me there is no proven benefit from the regimen.  The other part is an inability to consistently find good real estate in the refrigerator for the bottle of tomato juice, while not having the inclination to cook up some dish with tomato sauce sufficiently frequently.  (I do make a tomato-based turkey chili once in a while.)

The fourth ailment is kidney disease.  I have had mild indications of this for quite a while and got to learn new words from the blood test results, in particular, Creatinine and BUN. With the recent blood test, I had in preparation for my annual physical, it seems I've regressed to the next lower level, though it is possible that my kidneys are performing about as well as before and I was dehydrated when taking the test, which can make the results seem more severe.  So, I hope I can repeat the test in the near future to make sure of the conclusion.  In the meantime, I've done a little reading online about diet and kidney disease.  There are certain foods that the kidneys find difficult to process.  Eliminating them from the diet helps the kidneys function better.  I was pleased to note that red meat was one of those foods.  But there is quite a list of such foods, including caffeine.

With this as backdrop, let me describe my goal from here on out.  I take as my role model, Buzz Lightyear, after he has learned that he couldn't fly. The goal then becomes falling with grace.  That is my goal, as well.  This includes reducing my weight enough so I can have the hip replacement with minimal risk of infection, keeping my blood pressure down as a consequence of the weight reduction, perhaps to the point where I no longer need to take blood pressure medicine, eliminate or at least dramatically reduce the various foods in my diet that make the kidneys strain to function, and doing all of this while keeping my mental outlook on a relatively even keel. 

* * * * * 

I've had lifelong issues keeping my weight in check.  My mother called me a fresser, a German word, someone who is always thinking about eating and often acting on those thoughts.  It wasn't only my mother with this view. One of my math team classmates wrote in my high school yearbook that I was the hungriest kid he knew.  Not too many people get an entry like that.   In college, I eventually became more overweight than I was in high school, and it definitely impacted my social life.  For that reason, I went on an extreme diet, one meal a day only, it was dinner with no seconds, which I did for about 8 weeks.  I lost nearly 50 pounds in that time and got down to 210 pounds, which I view to be my normal weight.  I don't recall exactly what I did during the day and how I dealt with the feelings of hunger and the consequences of low blood sugar, but I think mainly I just stayed in my bedroom at home and watched TV.  In retrospect, it is somewhat amazing that I did this, as I've tried for brief times to do this more recently, and I could soon feel myself falling into depression.  So, I know it is not the answer for me now.  But maybe some partial step in that direction would be sustainable as a weight loss approach. 

I started graduate school in fall 1976 at that normal weight and more or less maintained that weight for the next 16 years or so, after which my older son was born. During those 16 years, the weight would drift up in the winter to about 220 pounds, mainly because I exercised less then, and it would come back down in the spring.   The year I met my wife, 1989, I briefly got under 200 pounds as I was jogging quite a lot then and keeping reasonably fit.  But I returned to my normal weight for when we got married, a year later.

Thereafter, the weight began to drift up.  I would attribute this to lack of sleep, at first.  With a newborn baby there is a world of joy but also a reality of responsibility.  Lack of sleep was part of the latter.  I coped by reducing the set of activities I used to do regularly.  But I also compensated for the lack of sleep by eating more starchy food than I previously had been eating.  And I learned that it was very difficult to do economic theory research when sleep deprived, which was one of the main reasons why I had a career change in the mid 1990s, into online learning, soon becoming the main ed tech guy for the university.  This produced its own stresses, some of it quite severe.  Both my eating and drinking got out of hand as a consequence.  And, as I mentioned above, I stopped jogging a little after 9/11, which until that time served as something of a countermeasure.  The results were not good for my health.   

There is no reason to belabor the full history of my weight here.  I will only mention a few general lessons.  First, there have been dramatic increases in weight, with a high of about 315 pounds in September 2006, and significant periods of weight loss as well.  When I was 58 or so, I got down to about 242 pounds and even at my 60th birthday I weighed 250 pounds, quite reasonable given the recent history.  But the weight ballooned upward after that.  I'm now in another of those significant weight loss periods.  This morning I weighed 238 pounds.  I need to lose about 30 more pounds to get to that normal weight ideal and then I need a strategy for keeping my weight relatively level thereafter.  

Second, the nudges I would do if I were single to manage my weight, for example not keeping ice cream in the house, are simply not feasible now.  My wife is entitled to have the food and drink she wants in the household.  Maybe we can agree on a few items to refrain from, but largely it is my responsibility not to indulge in unnecessary starch eating of stuff that is laying around the house.  This makes it especially difficult from about Thanksgiving through Christmas.  If I'm conscious of the issue, I can limit my indulgence, if not avoid it entirely. 

Third, and this one may be unique to me or at least a less common issue, I can't lose weight unless I stop drinking entirely. My self-control regarding food consumption vanishes when I drink.  Further, the notion of fresser applies to my drinking as well.  If one drink is good, then another drink is better.  There is the related issue of whether one drinks purely for the taste or for the buzz.  Regarding the latter, since I am a big guy, it takes more drink to get me to feel its consequences. So, between food and drink there is the possibility of a self-enforcing downward spiral, which in itself can explain those upward drifts in weight that I've experience as an adult. 

Fourth, and this is related to the previous one, there are time of day effects regarding my self-control.  I'm best in the morning - after breakfast and at least one cup of coffee.  I'm worst in the evening.  The desire to have a drink is present then.  It's not present earlier in the day (even when we tailgate). 

The nudges I've come up with are based on the recognition of these lessons learned.  Plus, I'm retired and am somewhat time abundant. Somebody else struggling to manage their own eating and drinking might come up with quite a different approach, because their situation is different.

Then there are ideas I've taken from behavioral economics.  It is much better to focus on establishing routines (or making new habits) than to leave choices about food and drink to decision making in the moment.  I have consciously done this for other aspect of my life.  I post a quote of the day in Facebook available to my friends.  With it, there is a quip from me, so I make a little contribution each day.  This is done early in the morning, while I'm on that first cup of coffee.  Following that I write a rhyme each morning and post to Twitter (so it is less than 280 characters in length).  I repost that rhyme to Facebook.  I've developed this little motto - a rhyme a day keeps the Alzheimer's away. The rhymes seem to get a positive reaction from a few friends, which helps to keep the process going.  In any event, I'm looking for something similar with most of my nudges for regulating eating and drinking. Here are a few of these.

• Go to bed very early, around 7 PM. 
  
  The pandemic makes this easier.  That plus my wife and I like to watch different things on TV or do other individualized activities much of the time means there is little social consequence from doing it.  The goal here, of course, is to avoid the treacherous time of day when I'm most likely to stray from the plan.  If I could get to sleep almost immediately and sleep straight through till morning, this would be perfect. Neither of those happen.  But for some reason, I don't go back for something to eat or drink (other than a glass of water) after I've gone to bed.  I'm not sure what prevents me from doing that but so far this has been an effective nudge for me that way.
  
  
• Keep my favorite beers out of the house.
  
  This is the one nudge I would also do if I were single.  I'm rather partial to imperial stout from craft breweries and Dragon's Milk from New Holland brewery.  My wife won't drink the imperial stout even when it's in the outside fridge.  She might drink a bottle of Dragon's Milk, but won't complain if it isn't there.  I would break down and drink it if it was there, so this one is a must.
  
  
• Start the day's exercise in midafternoon, around 3 PM and work out for somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes. 
  
  Since I break up the walking on the treadmill with some light weightlifting and there is some transition time between the two, with the occasional bio break also part of the routine, the time here is just meant to be enough for me to work up a sweat.  The real key is that with the need for a shower afterwards and then a need to re-hydrate some, there is only a very limited time for the happy hour and dinner period. 
  
  
• Find a non-alcoholic drink, I use decaf coffee for this purpose, to segue between re-hydrating and the dinner/happy hour period.
  
  I want to note here that decaf coffee for me is tolerable but definitely not a treat. I don't need a treat here.  I just need to do it regularly.  This helps to lessen the time where temptation is present.
  
  

It would be nice if the nudges were sufficient to always keep me on the straight and narrow. Let me focus on a few factors that cut in the other direction.  One is that the exercise, especially if I do it intensively, tends to increase the pain in my hip and lower back.  I take extra strength Tylenol as part of my regular regimen to deal with the arthritis pain.  But at times it is not enough.  When the pain is severe I either grin and bear it or I have a drink, which serves as a more effective pain reliever in the moment.  Another factor is that between the pandemic and our national politics, sometimes I get extremely angry for an extended period of time.  I need something to blow off some steam.  I could do the Howard Beal thing and yell out of my window - I'm madder than hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.  Having a drink seems a safer alternative to that. The third factor is that we have a regularly scheduled happy hour in Zoom on Fridays with some good friends.  When everyone else is having a drink, having one yourself seems like the social thing to do.  Sometimes I have a V8 instead and nobody says a word about that.  But I have guilty feelings when doing so.  This points to a possible conclusion - the ideal is not perfect never drinking but mainly non-drinking and once in a while straying from that, but not for very long. 

Let me also note that the first two factors pertain equally as well with binge eating, though then the goal is some form of compensation for the unfortunate stimulus rather than something that negates its effect. 

I now want to talk about experimenting with potential nudges and the need to do that, if for no other reason than that we don't live in a static world and there is a need to made adjustments.  This first one I've only tried a few times and the jury is still out. 

• Have plenty of romaine lettuce around (or your preferred alternative green leaf) and eat it on demand the way others eat popcorn or peanuts.
  
  The idea here is that there may be a need to munch, which should be fulfilled rather than thwarted, but do that in a way the doesn't consume a lot of calories.  Indeed, use this to ward off other "cheats" at going to the refrigerator.  (And to be clear, this is just the lettuce, no salad dressing, or other ingredients.)
  
  

Now a couple of nudges I've been trying recently to ward off specific food consumption.  This is in preparation of making diet changes if my kidney disease has indeed gotten worse.  One of the recommendations is to stop eating dairy products.  For me, that's a big deal, especially around breakfast.  A mainstay for me is blueberries or strawberries on bran buds, then topped off with yogurt or cottage cheese.  I prefer the non-fat varieties if I can get them.  This is reasonably healthful and also filling enough that it can be a breakfast in itself. 

• Experiment with soy, almond, or other alternatives to dairy products, to see if they can be a reasonable replacement for your prior dairy usage.  You may have several different criteria for making a comparison, e.g., taste, consistency, and calories. 
  
  I've only just started on this with two versions of soy yogurt from Silk.  On the taste they were okay, though sweeter than I'd prefer.  They were also more soupy than I'd like. I have not yet checked whether they are high in sugar or using some artificial sweetener.  Also, these containers were rather small.  I'd rather purchase in quart containers, if those are available. The first experiment sets the height of the bar.  The next experiment can be made in reference to that, and the choice of that experiment is informed by the prior choice.  (In this case, my wife bought those as a favor to me when she went to the store to buy something else.  I need to do this shopping by myself to learn what is available.)
  
  

Some might not consider the above a nudge, but in my view there is a rather constant need to experiment to make adequate adjustments to the current needs and something is required to become willing to engage in such experimentation rather than to become frustrated at the outset.  Put this way, the diet restrictions that the need to preserve good health may place on us are an invitation to try new things to eat.  Some of that experimentation can be enjoyable for its own sake.  This has been my attitude about teaching since I embraced online learning back in the 1990s.  The same idea applies here. 

This last nudge is based on the need for me to reduce my caffeine consumption.  Caffeine is another thing that the kidneys struggle to process.  My typical pre-nudge coffee consumption was 3 cups of regular coffee before noon and then that one cup of decaf later in the afternoon after exercise.  Here the idea is not to go cold turkey on regular coffee, which I would find extremely difficult to do now, but rather to reduce the regular coffee consumption on an ongoing basis in a way that is sustainable for me. In case you were wondering, the title of the post refers to this nudge.  But the title only gives a partial picture of the nudge, because the nudge is also an attempt for me to stay hydrated during the day. 

• With each cup of coffee, drink a glass of water of equal volume. Then alternate the coffee cups between regular and decaf, starting with regular, and expecting to drink two cups of regular per day, preferably having the second cup before noon.
  
  I like to sip coffee.  It's a preference developed over a very long time.  I tried the water thing recently, but didn't follow through on it, because while I don't mind drinking the water, if I'm not thirsty I have no craving to do so.  I also like the oomph that coffee gives me, especially when I'm writing, which I try to do in the morning. The oomph aids in the thinking, or at least seems to do that. But recently my being dehydrated has been brought to my attention, so I've been doing the above for about a week.  This is not a controlled experiment.  I haven't been drinking during that time and on more than one night I had only a light dinner, so may have had low blood sugar when starting out in the morning.
  
  I don't like the feeling of low blood sugar and I'm expecting the coffee to counteract it - the oomph I referred to above.  But it may be that the coffee actually exacerbates the situation.  Perhaps I should have some citrus fruit and other breakfast in this case before the first cup of coffee. But that would really upset the routine I've developed.  I take the morning pills and other medications with the water that accompanies the first cup of coffee. And I do that while I'm working on the quote of the day and the daily rhyme.  Adjusting the timing of coffee and breakfast would be a large trick to learn for this old dog.  Alternatively, I could eat a larger dinner the night before to avoid the low blood sugar in the morning.  But then, confronting the scale in the morning, I'd have made even less progress on the dieting than I had been making the other way.  As you can see, my own impatience with wanting success on the dieting front interferes in coming up with a sensible solution.
  
  

Let's wrap this up.  I've tried with this post to show how I plan to address my current health issues, much of that revolves around getting my eating and (alcoholic) drinking under control.  In elaborating on this in such detail, it may be evident that I'm fixated on these matters.  I can't be fixated for an extended period of time and still be mentally balanced.  So, the hope is that the fixation leads to new routines that can be sustained without fixation, after which I can turn my attention to other things.  The other hope is that I learn to forgive myself when I stumble, which I surely will, and then get back to these routines soon thereafter.  Achieving normalcy and then maintaining it is the ultimate goal.  It was far easier to do that when I was 21, no doubt.  I hope it isn't impossible to do now, at 67.

Is Everything Really Broken? If So, How Do We Cope, Let Alone How Do We Fix It All?

This post is something of a follow up to my previous post as well as a reaction to Everything Is Broken by Alana Newhouse, published in Tablet Magazine almost a year ago.  I found this essay from The Sidney Awards, that David Brooks publishes annually in the New York times.  I wasn't aware of Newhouse or of Tablet Magazine before that.  Via a simple Google search I learned that Newhouse is editor-in-chief of Tablet magazine.  After reading her essay, I wondered if that mattered because I found the piece wanting in several ways, as I will elaborate below.  I also wondered about Brooks selection of the piece.  Perhaps to him the theme as conveyed by the title is more important than the analysis, or maybe he reads essays like this in quite a different way than I do.  In any event, after the fact I was somewhat disappointed.  This post is my way of expressing what I would have liked to see.  Perhaps a sequel can be written to deliver on just that.  

Ahead of time, I was positively disposed to the hypothesis in the title of Newhouse's article.  Of course, it was written well into the pandemic, but before the introduction of vaccines.  Things seemed rather hopeless then.  With first Delta and then Omicron, that feeling has persisted.  But, in addition, even before the pandemic we were suffering from a variety of big-deal evils: global warming, a dysfunctional and highly irritating national politics, severe income inequality and the societal ills that engenders are among the more obvious of these.  Then there are those background things that matter a lot as well: people have their heads in their phones much of the time and have lost the art of face-to-face conversation; long form reading is on the outs; and there is a seeming brittleness of younger generations with at least one cause of that being over protection by their parents as they were growing up. In addition, right around when Newhouse's article appeared, I began to post my ideas about the Non-Course, which argued that undergraduate education was broken and proposed a certain type of program driven by the students themselves to rectify matters.  (I want to note here that to date the Non-Course is a concept only.  No student has tried it, as far as I know.)

Let me turn to my criticisms of Newhouse's piece.  I'm going to go somewhat out of order in terms of how they are presented in her article.  I hope that will actually clarify a few of the issues. 

• Newhouse doesn't consider some of the important historical antecedents that have destabilized the economy and our national politics.  Prior to that it seemed the system was more robust and could rebound from substantial external shocks.  That became less so because of these factors. 
  
  The two main factors I have in mind were the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 and the Vietnam War.  Both factors drove White blue-collar types, hardhats if you will, from the Democratic party to the Republican party.  This happened when these folks were still strong union guys.   Likewise, the Civil Rights Act, in particular, drove Dixiecrats into the Republican party.  Where before there were moderates in both parties, with considerable overlap in governing philosophy, afterward there was hardly any of that.  Further, many Americans of all stripes lost their faith in government.  (Watergate, a third factor, contributed to that as well.)  The system was less robust as a consequence.
  
  
• Newhouse looks for one big cause to explain the dysfunction.  For her that is Flatness.  If the economy is compromised winners and losers, flatness focuses on the losers.  I think it is useful to consider the winners as well.  There is an economic theory of dual labor markets.  In higher education, faculty with tenure or those who are on the tenure track are the winners.  Adjunct faculty are the losers.  Likewise, in product markets there may be second degree price discrimination.  When I used to teach that I'd use airline ticket pricing as the example, contrasting first class and coach pricing.  Here the theory enlightens in that it explains why coach quality is crappy.  If it were halfway decent, some of those who now fly first class would opt for coach instead.  This sort of phenomenon is happening big time with regard to housing in urban areas, to the extent that one can't find housing for moderate income people in the inner city.  This is buttressed by zoning restrictions, so it becomes government regulation rather than market provision that creates the price discrimination.
  
  
• Newhouse also ignores the possibility of sector specific causes of the dysfunction.  But if one is going to find solutions to these issues, good answers might very well depend on those specific causes. 
  
  To illustrate and as Newhouse began her piece with a medical issue that arose when her baby was born, let me likewise illustrate a specific issue with my own medical story.  Back in 2018, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  Initially, the system worked reasonably well.  I went to my primary care doctor for my annual physical.  They do blood tests before the visit.  He asked if they should do a PSA test as part of the blood work.  Since I hadn't had one in a while, I said yes.  The result showed a high number for my PSA.  The next step was to repeat the blood test, to make sure the result was accurate and not an anomaly.  The re-test result came back essentially the same.  This triggered a referral to the urologist.  I vaguely knew him from a kidney stone I had more than a decade earlier.  We discussed the different methods of diagnosis.  I wanted the one that was most informative, so we ended up doing an MRI.  It showed two tumors in my prostate.  So far, the system worked as it should.
  
  But the MRI also took pictures of the surrounding areas and some active spots showed up outside the prostate; possibly they were in a bone.  This is where the trouble began.  I'm a rational guy most of the time and my brother is an MD-PhD, so I have a family member to consult with who can give me an informed medical opinion.  The radiologist who interpreted the MRI couldn't determine whether those other spots were comparatively benign or also cancer, but cautioned that they should be monitored further.  My brother urged me to follow up on this.  Also, I knew then that prostate cancer itself is eminently treatable, especially if it is caught fairly early.  But cancer in the bone is a different matter. It can be gruesome and possibly fatal.  At this point my head started to play tricks on me.  For the first time in my life I contemplated my own mortality.  I really wanted an answer as to what those spots in the MRI were.  In the absence of knowing I took a Murphy's Law approach to my own health.
  
  The urologist and I needed to chart a path for further diagnosis of the MRI results, as well as to identify treatment for the tumors that had shown in the first MRI.  For the latter, I was referred to an oncologist and we agreed on radiation treatment.  For the former, some other diagnostics were ordered, but my insurance company disallowed the tests.  The urologist appeared frustrated by this and I began to feel frustrated by the entire process.  I subsequently learned that many doctors at Carle, my healthcare provider, are intimidated by the insurance companies, who seemingly have more control over diagnosis and treatment than they do.  During the same time period I had a stress fracture in my foot (unrelated to the prostate issues) and saw a podiatrist for it.  He said essentially the same thing about the insurance companies.
  
  And here's the thing.  The relationship between patient and doctor should be a trust relationship, especially if it is ongoing.  The patient should be forthcoming about the health issues when talking with the doctor; the doctor may make a set of recommendations knowing the patient and the patient's history; and together they should agree on how to proceed.  If things have worked reasonably well in the past, trust builds over time.  There really can't be a trust relationship of this sort between the patient and the insurance company.  The interactions are not personal in this way.  Yet the insurance company has the power, presumably justified by cost-containment reasons.  There is something quite wrong with this, yet it is not an issue that gets discussed in news outlets when considering healthcare.
  
  Now let me briefly switch to journalism, to identify a sector specific factor of importance there, though now I'm discussing an issue which has gotten ample attention.  Revenues for news organizations are roughly proportional the number of their readers/viewers/listeners. If those numbers can be boosted substantially at little incremental cost, that is more profit.  We know that the bulk of the audience are repeat customers, so the issue for the provider becomes how to increase the frequency with which they come back and the duration when they are connected.  One might think that the answer is to offer high quality content.  Yet a different answer is to offer highly addictive content.  The market might sustain both answers with different providers concentrating on one or the other.
  
  I want to note that the addictive content answer has a long history.  I learned about Yellow Journalism in regard to the Spanish-American War while I was in grade school, where an additional goal the content provider was to move public opinion in a certain direction.  What is different between now and then is the 7 x 24 news cycle and the increased competition for eyeballs, not just with other news providers but with other forms of entertainment.  This has clearly shifted the balance toward the addictive form of content.  I also want to note that what counts as additive depends on audience demographics.  That said, I would argue that MSNBC produces addictive content, though of a different form, than Fox News. 
  
  I believe a credible argument can be made that this addictive content is dividing us as a nation and therefore should be contained if not eliminated outright.  In my opinion, most of the news should be boring and presented in an even handed but unexciting way.  The question is how to get that as the outcome.  It's not possible under the current funding model.
  
  
• If things are broken, individuals will get beaten up emotionally by dealing with the consequences.  Before the pandemic, there was piece after piece in both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed about student mental health issues and the scarcity of mental health professionals on campus.  No doubt, those same issues exist for many working people as well.  They could use tips about coping from more experienced people and perhaps help with their own self-reflection on these issues.  I wrote such a post several months after experiencing many of my students openly admitting to their own depression.  I would like to see others who are experienced in their own fields do likewise.  Newhouse might very well have done some of this in her essay or made reference to some other piece that does this.  I felt that something like this should be there.  Even if everything that is broken can be fixed, it won't happen overnight. We should care about those who suffer in the interim.
  
  
• Newhouse wants to have it both ways. Towards the end of her essay she writes:
  
  

  I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

  
  A bit earlier in the piece she writes:
  
  

  So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

  
  
  Yet on a topic she views as very important, regarding the biological differences between the sexes, she holds that inviolate and hence she can't stomach Trans people asserting that this leaves no room for them in society.  Might it be that claiming it bigoted to assert gender is binary is itself part of that messy process which will inevitably generate errors.  I wondered why Newhouse doesn't see it that way. 
  
  If I might give a different example here that is not in Newhouse's essay, consider Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the National Anthem before an NFL game.  This went ignored for a couple of weeks before it drew substantial attention.  Then much of the reaction was negative, with many fans viewing it as unpatriotic, something akin to flag burning.  However, not quite 4 years later, the video of the George Floyd murder somehow connected with people, and the taking a knee protest was seen in a different light. Might something like that happen with the rights of Trans people as well?
  
  

Let me wrap this up with one further thought.  Newhouse wants to champion individual creativity as one way to fix the problems.  I'm all in favor of that.  But then among her various exhortations is this one: "Go back to a house of worship—every week." This is offered without explanation.  I don't know where Newhouse stands on abortion or a host of other social issues, but I for one can't accept this particular exhortation without an extended argument to support it.  Further, in my view no such argument can be given for worship that breed rigidity in viewpoint and intolerance of others.  So instead, I will offer up my own exhortation.  Read Maslow.  If Towards a Psychology of Being is too daunting at first, read Maslow's essay on The Creative Attitude, a link to which can be found in this post.

Noun and Pronoun, Subject and Object, Face and Body

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who is trying to make sense of things - so many instances where we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot socially, economically, and politically - yet given my background I may come at this with a different approach than what others are trying.  So, let me begin with the following paragraph, which is from a post I wrote almost a decade ago called Is reasoning taking a beating?

In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view.  Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence.  The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it.  The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under.  With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position.  It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed.  Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter.  When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view.  A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural.  There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective.  There is leadership in helping students make the transition.

Just to be clear on the little physics experiment in that paragraph, the instructor holds a string with a weighted object at the end.  Then the instructor tells the students, I will swing this over my head to get the object to travel in a circle.  Then I will let go of the string. The instructor then asks the students what the path of the object will be after the instructor lets go of the string.  The Aristotelian view is that the object will continue traveling in a circle.  The Newtonian view is that the object will travel in a straight line that is tangent to the circle at the time the instructor lets go of the string.  As near as I can tell, which view of this experiment the student has doesn't correlate with the student's political preference or preference about other societal issues.  We should recognize that people hold contrary perspectives, even in socially benign situations.  But in the rest of this piece I will concentrate on situations of social consequence.

So, the question I want to use to frame this post is whether learning where the evidence contradicts the prior held world view can happen in outside-the-classroom settings.  Might it be that a significant purpose of a college education is to encourage the graduate to learn in such situations?  Alas, I fear that is wishful thinking. Instead, might it be that leaders on social issues help citizen/learners work through those issues so they can gain a new perspective?  One might hope so.  Before getting to that with a concrete example, I want to give a few of my own parallel experiences.

Recently, I was required to change my NetID password for the University of Illinois.  They insist that it be changed annually (really more like every 11.5 months).  They are the only provider that does this.  Many other providers do two-factor authentication and with that the password stays fixed over time.  This includes the various financial institutions I use.  The requirement for password change predates the use of two-factor authentication and I believe it persists for that reason.  In any event, I now dread the time immediately after a password change, fearful that something will break as a consequence.  As it turns out, for my home computer there was no problem at all.  Everything worked fine.  But now on my iPhone, the mail program doesn't seem to remember the password for the Exchange server, which is the new NetID password.  It's not the end of the world to type in the password, but it is a bit of a pain.  I really wish that I didn't have to change this password in the first place.  There is some irony in this, since I was a technology guy for the second half of my academic career and in that capacity enjoyed experimenting with new toys (software applications).  But now I'm a geezer, grumpier in general than I was earlier in life, and somewhat resistant to change. I think I'm typical this way, at least for folks my age, even when the change is not of social consequence.

The next two experiences come from my teaching.   Neither of them is uplifting.  But I think they are illuminating regarding the constraints in place that block real learning. The first one happened in fall 2017, the penultimate time I taught.  This was in an upper-level undergraduate course called, The Economics of Organizations. I take a dual approach in teach this course, part storytelling and part math modelling. The former is better able for me to integrate my experience as an administrator.  The latter allows me to teach economics the way I learned it in graduate school, albeit with simpler math, mainly high school algebra and analytic geometry.  The reality, unfortunately, is that even though there is a calculus prerequisite for the econ major and all the students in my class have met the prerequisite, many of them are nonetheless not competent in the high school math I mentioned, and the math modeling becomes a struggle for some of them. So, there is real issue whether the dual approach continues to make sense.  Indeed, I'm aware of quite a few econ instructors who have dumbed down the math (for example, not teaching indifference curves in intermediate microeconomics) because the students are not up to it and doing so would simply be an exercise in frustration.  I understand that completely.  Yet I can be incredibly stubborn.  And the reality is that before I made the switch to ed tech as an administrator, I was a math model guy with the economic theory.  If the students are to get from me some of what made the Economics Department higher me in the first place, the math modeling needs to remain as part of the course. 

Mainly I've handled the instruction for math modeling via videos of animated graphs in Excel, along with homework designed in Excel that feature both auto grading and a blend of presentations of the economics ideas and assessment of student understanding, which I believe is the natural way to do homework.  Yet on one topic during the course, the students seemed even more befuddled than usual.  So, I opted to do in class what I used to do full time, but had long since abandoned almost entirely.  I gave a chalkboard lecture on the subject for about 15 or 20 minutes, at the tail end of one class session. After it was over, one student walked up to me and said, don't ever do that again.  I gather that he got nothing out of the math lecture and felt it an imposition for me to spend class time that way as a consequence. But that he felt empowered to speak for his classmates as well as himself, indicated something more than that. 

He projected his own experience onto his classmates and then felt empowered to let me know about it.  I don't believe I had yet to hear about trigger warnings then.  And even now, a trigger warning about a math lecture in an econ class sounds a bit preposterous.  Yet given the student's reaction it makes one ask the following.  How is one to distinguish a situation that is overblown in the student's psyche from another situation that truly deserves a trigger warning?  A half dozen years ago I wrote a post, Boundaries Are Always Harder to Define, where I was reacting to a then campus report on Racial Microaggressions.  I will only observe here that the student reaction itself is not sufficient to determine whether a trigger warning is warranted or not. Perhaps many students reacting in the same way is sufficient, although the requirement probably still needs to be sterner than that.

The other experience happened a couple of years later, the last time I taught.  (I did not teach in fall 2018.)  A feature of the class is that students do weekly blogging according to a prompt I provide.  This is quite unusual for an economics class.  Perhaps it is unusual for any class outside of those that have a principal aim of teaching writing.  In this case the dual goals are (a) for students to try to tie their prior experiences at work, at school, or elsewhere to the concepts we discuss in the course and then (b) for me to give some individual coaching of the student thinking via my comments on their posts.  The students are uncomfortable with this at the start of the semester.  It takes about a month for them to get used to it.  By the end of the semester, many report that it is the best feature of the class. 

The particular incident happened as we began our study of Transaction Costs, a matter of critical importance for the economics of organizations.  A significant cause of transaction costs is that some parties to the transaction may behave opportunistically.  Doing so would make the transaction ineffective or worse for other parties involved in the transaction.  So, the transaction cost in this case entails whatever is necessary to do to prevent the opportunistic behavior. The prompt for that week used the word opportunistic and asked students to recall prior experiences where they either behaved opportunistically or had the chance to do so yet refrained from such behavior.  I should note that I've used the prompt in previous offerings of the class and never had a problem with it.  But this time around, several students wrote posts that ignored the ethical dimension of opportunistic behavior and instead simply considered situations where opportunities presented themselves and then taking advantage of them.   In so doing, they entirely missed the point of the exercise. 

I became angry with this outcome rather than take it as a sign of the times in undergraduate economics education at Illinois.  I spent a good deal of the next class session in scolding the students, not usually thought of as effective pedagogy.  As part of that, I did a show and tell with a look up of opportunism at Dictionary.com.  Then I followed up with what seemed to me as simple and sensible advice.  If the student isn't sure of the meaning of a word in the prompt, one that itself isn't economics jargon, then the right thing to do is look it up online. One of the students responded that instead I should provide the definition along with the prompt. Several other students agreed with that. I don't recall what I did to indicate my displeasure with that response.  But I can report that while on the syllabus attendance was strongly encouraged, it was not required, and that attendance fell precipitously after that class session and remained low for the rest of the semester. 

There is some irony in that it was the same person, me, who authored that paragraph quoted near the top of this piece, yet who became extremely irritated with students who seemingly put in such little effort doing the work for my class.  The leadership described in that early paragraph may not be present for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that ahead of time it wasn't obvious that any leadership was needed.  But one thing that did become apparent that semester is that many students in the class were struggling emotionally, with anxiety and depression, and some of them told me about it.  The blogging probably enabled them to feel more open in communicating about their situation, in email or in a response to one of my comments.  Then it came to light for me that this was a national problem, from reading the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.  And this was pre-pandemic.  Things have almost surely gotten worse since on that score.

I took a hiatus in the writing here, perhaps for three weeks or so.  It's hard for me to tell because I did think about the piece away from the keyboard, but I wasn't able to resolve my main concerns, which focused on two points.  Are the incidents that I claim are parallel really parallel?  I'll let the reader be the judge of that.  Then, I wondered if I was being tone deaf in coming up with this approach, ignoring sensitive and emotional issues that need to be accounted for, and hence being offensive in the recommendations I have to offer.   Ultimately, I decided to get the ideas out as best as I could and hope that, as with the other posts I write, this one provokes some reflection by the reader.  That would be the best possible outcome. 

I've been asking myself as of late whether in regard to identity issues, racism for example, am I like the student whose worldview still clings to an Aristotelian view of circular motion, or am I one of the choir, so when I read Charles Blow's columns, as I do with a fair amount of regularity, it is that like preaching to the choir for me.  Or might there be some gray area in between that is worth discussing?  Let me assume there is without discussing it, but then think of Charles Blow as a teacher for us regular readers of NY Times Opinion pieces.  What does the teacher want his students to be learning?  Are we students learning anything close to those objectives?  Might the learning objectives be better facilitated by a different approach in the writing or by having a different writer make the arguments?  

I likewise have asked myself with regard to sexism whether I did a lot of mansplaining when I was working or if I was able to treat colleagues on an equal level regardless of gender.  And here I want to make an additional distinction as to whether the relationship is horizontal or vertical. Here, horizontal means the other person works in a different unit on campus or at a different university, while vertical means we are in the same organization and one of us reports to the other, directly or indirectly.  The professor-student relationship also has a vertical element.  Of course, mansplaining may only be the tip of the iceberg regarding sexual harassment, where an array of other behaviors should be considered to give the complete picture. 

I won't do that here, but instead will note my experiences with identity issues as an adult that have been painful to me have been more indirect.  In the classroom, face to face or virtual, a student commits an evident microaggression.  In my role as instructor, what responsibility do I have in to remedy the situation?  This one has happened on a few occasions.  Likewise, when I was an ed tech administrator, I had one experience where a female direct report had been the victim of sexual harassment by her previous boss.  After learning about this, I found myself stupefied and treated it as if the past should be dead and buried, then ignored.  But this was avoidance by me only, not active decision making.  

The identity issues, which are intense and justified to be brought to our attention, are almost always brought forward from the victims' perspective.  The framing of the issues and the suggested cures that result from this approach are considered by the victims themselves as to whether they would demonstrate sensitivity by others and restore fairness, should the cures be implemented in full. It may be self-evident to the victims that this is the right approach to take, for those very reasons.  Yet if my parallels are indeed on the mark, it might be that this approach does not facilitate learning by others.  Indeed, it may create pushback only, nothing more.  Let me illustrate with particular parallels for the experiences I've described.

On resisting change that is suggested/mandated institutionally, consider the pushback about defunding the police.  There is a logic to the recommendation as video capture of police violence against Blacks that is shared via social media makes evident that there is and has been a huge problem this way.  So, doing something to fix the problem makes a lot of sense.  But violence is on the rise more broadly and many people who don't feel safe as a consequence think that the police provide needed protection. So, there is a reason to resist the suggested change.  And it seems to be having political consequences, with voters moving from the Democratic to the Republican party.   Could this have been anticipated in advance?  If so, would defunding the police have emerged as the answer nonetheless? 

On my delivering/not delivering mini-lectures in my economics class, I thought of that episode while reading this column by John McWhorter, with leftist fictions the parallel of using math models in undergraduate economics. Here I have to say I'm personally conflicted, on the teaching part of the parallel.  The math models are ingrained in me and what I feel gives the essence of the economics. Of course, this means not just understanding the math, but also applying the right model in context and thereby getting some insight into what is going on.  Maybe it's too much to expect typical undergraduate students to be able to learn that so I end up teaching an elite few and not teaching the vast majority.  That's been the pattern.  Yet I've not been able to let go of teaching that way.  Perhaps the leftist fictions emerge similarly, with the ideals ingrained so much so as to make light of the practical realities.

Then, on the misunderstanding of a word or expression and leveraging that misunderstanding for political gain, there now seems to be a cottage industry for that, with Critical Race Theory the most recent prominent case.  In my living memory, there have always been soundbites in politics.  But over time there has been a change from spin, to propaganda, to brainwashing.  The deliberate misuse of language for political purposes seems to me a huge problem.  It blocks learning instead of encouraging it. Instead, it reinforces stereotypes and makes people very angry in the process.  

Is there some alternative approach that would actually educate ordinary people, so they eventually change their worldview to embrace tolerance and fairness for all?

* * * * * 

Partly because I don't feel on terra firma when considering the above question as applied to identity issues and partly because I've written a fair amount about this before, I want to focus on income inequality and consider an education approach in that context.  Of course, the identity issues are wrapped up in the economic issues, so there is something artificial about looking only at the one and not the others. Yet I think I can make more headway this way, so I will proceed accordingly. My focus will be on income inequality and on educating those in the top ten percent to voluntarily participate in income redistribution that reduces their own income for the benefit of society as a whole. 

Let me begin with this recent opinion piece by Zeynep Tufekci, which is mainly a postmortem on America's poor handling of the pandemic.  Our dysfunctional healthcare system gets a good chunk of the blame and with that income inequality is taken to task.  Near the end of the piece she writes:

After the horrors of World Wars I and II and the Great Depression between them, there was rebuilding of democracies, including constructing a public sphere geared toward preventing the rise of fascism, an expanded safety net and great reductions in income inequality. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t what you’d guess would come next, looking at the smoldering ruins of 1945.

That is followed a couple of paragraphs later with:

Fixing all this requires an interconnected effort that unleashes a virtuous cycle. Rebuilding the public health infrastructure and creating a sane, sensible health care system in which we don’t keep spending more than any other developed nation for poorer results will help restore trust and improve our lives. Fair taxation policies would reduce income inequality and generate resources to execute these measures. We can investigate what went wrong, with an eye to actually fixing it instead of simply finding scapegoats. Regulation and oversight can better align the incentives of social media platforms with that of a healthier public sphere. We’ve done that before with transformative technologies.

In other words, we should fix the economy now the way we did after World War II.  We know we can do it now because we did it before.  There is no recognition here that maybe the parallels are not perfect and our political divisions now make this much harder to accomplish.  

Next, do a Google search on - raise my taxes, please. The hits you get show there are wealthy people who understand the need to contribute more in taxes for the good of the order.  Yet it is not a mainstream idea at this time among the wealthy.  One might wonder why.  

Some other pieces explain that, with particular focus on those in the income distribution from the 90th to the 99th percentile.  For starters, consider this piece by Richard Reeves, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich.  According to Reeves:

So imagine my horror at discovering that the United States is more calcified by class than Britain, especially toward the top. The big difference is that most of the people on the highest rung in America are in denial about their privilege. The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system. At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.

If this is right, there is a good deal of denial going on coupled with intense gaming of the system among this sub-population. Both of those factors might block a willingness to have one's own taxes raised for the good of the order.  In a more recent piece, an interview with the philosopher Matthew Stewart author of the recent book, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture.  According to Stewart, the underlying cause for the behavior is fear.  (Presumably this is fear that they themselves or their offspring will fall precipitously in the income distribution.)  This results in behaviors that are harmful to others and to themselves.  One might reasonably hypothesize that the mental health crisis among college students, which still exists but preceded the pandemic, is an indirect consequence of these harmful behaviors by the new aristocracy.   I do want to note here that in identifying the underlying cause, the author's discipline might matter a lot.  Instead of fear, behavioral economists might focus on confirmation bias as why the new aristocracy clings to the belief in meritocracy, while also noting that these people are largely shielded from significant interactions with others who are of more modest means.

In my own way of thinking I find it helpful to envision that these people are stuck in their own peculiar Prisoner's Dilemma.  They are aware of what is to be decent and humane to fellow citizens.  But that is a dominated strategy. The gaming of the system helps to ensure high income for the offspring, even if it is a form of selling one's soul to the devil. Having gone fairly far down this path, it is very unlikely for them to retrace their steps and start all over again with a different approach. Yet an effective education program to embrace fairness in the income distribution would seem to require the participants to do just that.

Now I want to get to my own writing.  There are a series of 6 posts written under the tag, Socialism Reconsidered. The first four were written in early 2017, before the Reeves piece appeared. The most recent of these was written in early 2019, so there was quite a time gap before it was written, meaning my thinking had to evolve enough to consider the ideas in that post.  It is the most relevant for what is being considered here, as it conjectures about what would be needed for an education program of the type we're considering here to be effective.  However, it was written well before anyone had heard of Covid, so it doesn't contemplate what accommodations to the ideas would need to be made to still be functional in the pandemic world in which we now live. 

I will give a brief recap of that 6th post and then encourage interested readers to read it in full, along with the earlier pieces in the series.  In a nutshell, I considered this learning as diffusion of an innovation.  I cut my teeth as a promoter and administrator for educational technology in the early days where the Internet was used in teaching.  The idea was to imagine pilot projects run by early adopters and study those intensively, so that other could learn from those experiences.  It is also important to do extensive evaluation of how things are before the pilot projects occur, so there are clear benchmarks about where things are.  And then there needs to be a way to make these results highly visible, so they become part of the vernacular.   

For this to be even modestly effective, the evaluation must expose some of the myths that the new aristocracy cling to.  But, I would argue this must be done in a non-punitive way or it won't work.  How might it be possible to do that? 

Note that above we've talked about percentiles in the income distribution but not about the levels of income to which those percentiles associate.  People who are at median income or below in the distribution surely do care about their income level as they struggle to make ends meet.  But above a certain point that concern vanishes and instead where they stand in the distribution becomes the more important factor. This, in essence, is the idea behind the Relative Income Hypothesis of James Duesenberry.  Flattening the upper tail of the income distribution can still preserve the notion of merit without it requiring obscene income levels to reward that merit. 

So the question I'll close with is this. Can we find an education program where a good chunk of those in the upper decile of the income distribution willingly embrace higher levels of taxation as long it their position in the income distribution is preserved?  I'm sure it will be quite a heavy lift to get a yes answer to that question.  But I'm hopeful that it is still possible.

Dinosaur_U an Introduction

From Video Description:

Dinosaur_U as a concept is a sequel to ideas in this blog post:
https://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2021/06/becoming-fossil.html 

The video is captioned. Apart from making the video accessible to those who are hard of hearing, the captioning serves quite a different purpose. It may seem that I'm winging it in the video. I do generally prefer to talk without notes. A viewer might not be able to tell how much forethought went into making this video and if the estimate is not much at all, then discount the value of the video accordingly. But captioning is labor intensive. That there are well edited captions gives evidence of some effort in post video production. The creator has paid a "time price" in making the video. The viewer can readily observe the captioning. In this way it functions like a performance bond posted by the video creator. 

Audio only version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I97Qj9ReeMDmYgoRWYp_BOfxZMIMlskt/view?usp=sharing

Transcript of Video:

Welcome to Dinosaur_U an Introduction. I am Lanny Arvan, your host, and I will explain the title Dinosaur_U and what this is about.

This video and this concept are actually a sequel to a blog post I wrote, not too long ago, called Becoming a Fossil. And it was about ageism in society, specifically in academia, and also whether senior citizens who are retired currently might somehow re-enter the labor market in some way, because of chronic labor shortages because of the aging of society.

So, this is not the immediate short run labor shortages we're seeing under the pandemic. This is a longer-term issue of labor shortage because our society is getting older and fewer people are of working age.

And so, the question is, can we do anything about it? So, one of the ideas in that piece was that retired people who are of reasonable means might enter the labor market as volunteers. And they're likely to have substantial human capital that is still of some value, even if they've been retired for a while. And that human capital can be put to good use, if deployed in an interesting way.

So, Dinosaur_U is doing that in academia. I'm a dinosaur. I've been retired for quite a while. I’m a former faculty member in economics and administrator in online learning/educational technology. And maybe some things that I possess skill-wise and knowledge-wise could be put to use as a volunteer.

So, the idea of Dinosaur_U is to collect others like me who would volunteer because it's socially beneficial to do so. Hopefully we do something that's useful and create a little marketplace where those people who might want the volunteer service, and I'm going to try to illustrate that in the rest of this video, will come and look at these little bio videos to see: Do I want to hire this guy as a volunteer? Do I want to match this person into teaching my class? Or, if in an administrative capacity, do I want a mentor of this sort? Etc.

The thought is we've learned we can do lots of work online. So, Dinosaur_U will be an online service only not a face-to-face. Coincidentally, the people who hire might be in the same geographic area as the ones who are offering their services. But that's not really necessary.

So, I now want to explain why I use the word Dinosaur for U rather than some other maybe more somber term that's equally descriptive. And I'm trying to be a little tongue-in-cheek, a little self-deprecation, and a sense of humor. Because even though ageism is a rather serious issue, making a market that works is - seems to me like a long-shot possibility and we should have a sense of humor uh at the outset.

We should know that people like me, maybe especially me, but people want to have a nap once or twice a day when other people think work should be done. and may have other priorities because of health reasons or whatnot. And the people who are hiring, who are likely to be much junior to them, may feel well this is a little bit awkward because of the age difference. So, how do we get past that?

And I’m going to make a little bit of a setup that I hope creates a general set of rules for getting past it. And then I’ll try to illustrate in my particular case.

So, there are basically two rules. We seniors or we retirees who are the dinosaurs will always be the supporting actor in any relationship. The people who are hiring will be the leading actors. So, the relationship is we’re the support; they're the lead. They, and you can also think of them as the director, they get to set the way things will go, what the usage is, etc. We might offer suggestions, but they're the ones who are making the ultimate decisions. We understand that already. We're doing it under those terms.

Why does that work for me? It works for me because I had my career already. I don't need to have a career to define, in retirement, a career in retirement to define who I am. I’ve done that already. So, I could be support and let the people who are hiring be the ones who figure out how that support might work.

So, I'm going to talk about this in the teaching context and then maybe in future videos perhaps explore other contexts.

But in the teaching context, I teach microeconomics. I have been teaching advanced courses since I’ve retired. But I used to teach intermediate micro quite regularly. I have a website, ProfArvan, which has videos for intermediate micro.

So, an instructor at another university who may be beset by having too many students, or not enough respect because they're a grad student teaching, or they're an adjunct teaching and nobody gives them resources to do the job decently, is looking for some help and they happen to be doing it in microeconomics. They watch this video, and they say, hey maybe partnering with Arvan wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

So, I’m going to list a variety of different things that might happen during the partnership.

We might have video chats, if you will dialogue, conversation about topics which normally would be presented by lecture. But online, you know if you do listen to podcasts, podcasts are almost all conversation. Nobody listens to lecture online unless it's for courses. And so, maybe if the topic is very technical lecture is better. But in a lot of cases if there are issues to extract or there are different points of view that might inform of the subject, then conversation is the better approach. So maybe we would do conversation, record that like I’m recording this, and give that to the students outside of class. And then inside the class in the live class session they can do active learning activities based on that video.

Another possibility is the instructor wants to vent. Life is tough. Nobody is being friendly to them. So, vent. Vent to somebody not on your own campus and to somebody who's okay hearing that. You can call that being a mentor. But venting is a good thing and if you want somebody for that purpose that's fine.

If you want to talk about particular teaching techniques or trying little experiments in the classroom, that can be coaching about that sort of thing. Whatever the instructor, the direction where the instructor wants to go, that would be fine.

I want to say one thing that won't be done. The arrangement has to be willing on both sides. I like teaching, but I hate grading. I will not volunteer to have anything to do with grading. Furthermore, student privacy dictates somebody who's not actually officially in the course doesn't get to see student grades. So grading is out.

However, offering office hours to students before they've turned in the work, that might be a possibility. Or helping students on a group project, that might be a possibility as well. So, there's just lots of different things that might come out of this.

Now let me say one other idea I’ve had. If a few different instructors at different campuses want to hire me and they're teaching the same course, and I get to be friendly with them, and we're comfortable with each other, after a while I might introduce them. And they might partner with each other in the future. And I can be out of the picture, so maybe help somebody else.

So, another possibility, down the road, is bringing instructors together at different campuses who are teaching the same stuff, where a collaboration between them might be useful.

So, there are just a handful of ideas off the top of my head that can be explored and tried. And Dinosaur_U will have each dinosaur, each potential instructor helper, present their own ideas about how this might help and also their own background.

I’m going to stop now so this video doesn't get keep going forever and let's perhaps resume in a sequel.

Learning Objects and Micro-Lectures Revisited - Introducing Peer Review by Students into Redesign

About two to three weeks ago I completed what might prove to be my last professional obligation.  I refereed a paper for the Online Learning Journal. I have some history with this journal, which was previously known as the Journal of ALN (Asynchronous Learning Networks).  Indeed, I have the lead article in the very first volume of the journal.  Having published in a journal, there is an obligation to referee for them.  I'd like to begin by talking a bit about refereeing and about the obligation to do so.  

I cut my teeth on refereeing not with online learning but rather with economic theory, what I studied in graduate school.  There I learned to get into the depths of a paper, to really understand what the author was driving at, but also to look for flaws in the development of the model.  Working papers precede papers published in journals and those are what most practicing economists read.  If there are flaws in the former but they are not fatal and can be remedied, then part of the refereeing process is to indicate the path whereby this can be done. Not all PhDs in economics have this skill to read a paper in such depth.  I recall my early years as an assistant professor, one colleague in particular wanted me to read his working papers papers and give him feedback, even though I had the annoying habit (to him) that having identified the flaw I wouldn't read further into the paper, until another version was produced that corrected the error. 

Writing a referee report is something more than giving feedback to a colleague.  I learned how to do it over time, by receiving referee reports on my own work, some of which I regarded highly while others I thought superficial.  And as I struggled early to get my work published, getting a handle on this form of negotiation with the referee and the journal editor became crucial for my academic survival.  It was a trial by fire, quite stressful but also very educative.  My own style in writing referee reports, after I had tenure, was borne out of that assistant professor experience.  At the time the typical process was single-blind reviewing, meaning the referee's name was hidden from the author, but not vice versa.  Most of the papers I ended up reviewing were written by assistant professors at other universities.  Once or twice, I got a paper from a well known economist to review.  My recollection of the latter is that the paper was not carefully written, which created its own set of issues.  And there were usually two different referees, a way to ensure that more than one perspective about the paper would be considered.  The editor might then be thought of as a third referee in combination with a different role, as arbitrator, to determine how the paper should be disposed.  I want to note for those who haven't ever done this that the referee typically sends a cover letter to the editor, along with the referee report, in which some recommendation for how the paper should be disposed is given. 

Refereeing at the journals where I participated was not compensated.  A reward for doing a good job in refereeing was to earn the respect of the editor by doing so.  In contrast, if a referee did what was evidently only a superficial job, the editor might then develop enmity for the referee, unless it was evident that some life event interfered in doing the refereeing well, in which case it would be appropriate for the referee to decline reviewing the paper.  Concocting faux life events to get out of refereeing is another way to earn the editor's enmity.  One might then ask whether there is sufficient incentive in the process for most referees to be earnest in their reviews.  Thinking this way, in my opinion, leads down the road to perdition.  It is a sense of obligation to the profession that makes a scholar do a good job in refereeing.  That sense of obligation is a necessary component to make the system function well overall. 

But, I think most undergraduates I've taught in the previous decade don't understand this sense of obligation, except perhaps in volunteer work they do.  In their understanding, the main type of work they hope to have upon graduation is all about incentives, embedded mainly in how they will be paid.  And I'm afraid that is how they go about their studies, with such a heavy focus on grades, which reinforces this considering incentives only.  I've had a few students where either I mentored them after the class ended or I've had an extended email thread with them during the course that continued afterwards, where they couldn't understand why I would do this since I'm retired. Why not simply "enjoy life" instead?  Since I'm retired, why take an interest in how the student develops that goes beyond what other instructors apparently do and extends beyond the semester where I've been paid to teach the class? They don't see the sense of obligation I have for doing this, which is much the same as the sense of obligation in refereeing. 

But being retired does insert an added wrinkle.  For how long does the sense of obligation extend?  Does it end at retirement, last as long as the person is physically and mentally up to fulfilling it whether working or retired, or perhaps is it something else - competence in the subject matter and whether it might have eroded over time - that determines the extent of the obligation. In my particular case, I am time abundant and can readily afford a departure from "enjoying life" to referee a paper.  Yet for the OLJ review I was afraid in advance that I was not competent, as the paper would invariably be about some experience with online learning during the pandemic, while I had no such experience myself, having last taught in fall 2019.  I asked the editors about this.  They left it up to me.  After the fact, I felt okay reviewing the particular paper, although the general issue remains and I asked out of them sending me papers in the future.  On a different matter, OLJ now does double blind reviews. (The referee is not told the name of the author(s) though might get clues as to that from the references and other mentions in the paper.)  Would an author want the referee to know who they are?  I couldn't figure that one out.  

But I also did wonder whether the sense of obligation can be taught - to undergraduates - and, if so, how might that be done?  In what follows, that question should be kept in mind. 

* * * * * 

Let's now turn to learning objects and micro-lectures.  I made a slew of these back in spring 2011, the first semester I taught after retiring.  These were for intermediate microeconomics.  Most, if not all, of the learning objects were Excelets made to illustrate the economics.  I then made screen capture videos where each video reviews one worksheet, demonstrating how to manipulate the controls and to understand what is being graphed.  These videos were then captioned.  The voice over, done in my usual style, was made without referring to notes.  The presentation is more casual than you would find in a textbook, but nonetheless comprehensive on the topic under consideration. At the time of teaching this course I was aware of a possibility that I might teach it again in the future in blended format (where some online substitutes for face-to-face lecture).  That didn't happen, as we got a new department head in Economics soon thereafter and he had other ideas about how intermediate microeconomics should be taught. But this explains why I went to the trouble of producing the Excelets and the micro-lectures, which took considerable effort in the making.

The students in the class didn't like the micro-lectures, but then they didn't like the class as a whole.  I gather that this was mainly because they found the exams difficult and the videos didn't seem to prepare them for the exams as they expected.  I found this disappointing, though it brought back memories from the early 1980s when I first taught intermediate micro and had similar struggles.  The story would end right here except that a funny thing happened after the course was over.  The videos continued to get hits and the occasional comment that thanked me for making the video. 

For a while it was a mystery as to who was watching these videos.  Though I don't have absolute confirmation on this, I gathered that most of the viewers were students who were taking intermediate micro or some other microeconomics class, with the vast majority taking the class at some other university, quite possibly not in the U.S.  Either their instructor or their textbook was difficult to follow on a particular topic, so they went to YouTube looking for a video from some other instructor that might be easier to understand or more thorough in the explanation provided. If that was indeed happening then the micro-lecture presentation content, which I made, was decoupled from any assessment content that the students might experience, which would be provided by their own instructor. So these students should have a different perspective from the students who took my class, as the micro-lectures could be considered simply by whether they felt that they understood what was going on immediately after watching them. 

Now we have reached the point where I can explain why I've focused only on my own learning objects and micro-lectures. YouTube provides analytic information to video creators about viewer access to videos.  I only have such data for my own creations.  It would be extremely interesting to have the analogous data from a wide variety of instructors.  But lacking that, I will maintain this more narrow focus. Below is information for the top 5 videos from the past month, 4 of which were created during that spring 2011 semester.  (Note that the average duration times are in minutes:seconds format.)

 

Each video is only a few minutes in its entirety.   Students go out of their way to start viewing the videos, as there is no requirement for them to do so.  Yet most stop well before the video is complete.  Why does this happen?  It is something of a mystery.  

Originally, before I looked further at the analytics data, I hypothesized that a small number of dedicated students watched the videos through to their conclusion, while the rest would watch only briefly and then stop.  In fact, its more a continuous falling off in the distribution as illustrated below.  This is for the Isoquants video, the top one listed above. but now it is for the past year rather than just the past month.  I switched to yearly data so there would be enough information to plot, though the monthly graph looks quite similar. 

Now let's consider a hypothetical where an evaluator gets to interview a student viewer of this video soon after they finished watching it.  If the student watched to completion, did the student feel the material in the video was well explained and easily understood?  If the student stopped before the end of the video, and maybe this should be segmented into stopping early, stopping about halfway, and stopping later but still before the end, was the student satisfied or disappointed with the experience?  Why did the student stop viewing?  Beforehand, what was the student hoping to get out of the viewing?  Could the video have been done in a different way that would have produced a more satisfying experience for the student?

Of course, it is quite possible for factors unrelated to video quality to explain the student stopping time in viewing.  For example, if the student is multi-processing, then it can be the lure of something else online that is the key factor.  Alternatively, if the student has network connectivity issues, that might end viewing the video involuntarily.

There is a way that these two different sorts of explanation overlap.  The analytics reveal that well over half of those who access the video do so via search in YouTube.  But once one finds a hit to that search and goes to it, one will be confronted with videos on the same topic that are showcased in the right sidebar.  Does the student plan to watch all of these or only one?  Which video on the subject matter gets top ranking by the search engine?  If one reason to stop watching a video is to watch another on the same topic, how does the stopping time get determined in that case?  And is the stopping time impacted if the viewer has already watched part of a video on the same topic?

Crowd sourcing video quality may be sensible for certain types of content.  I don't want to dispute that. But for academic content, which surely will not go viral, it may not be the best way.  Wouldn't it be better for a student to watch a reasonably well done video in its entirety than to flit between various videos on the same subject done by different instructors?  It may matter less which instructor to watch than to get the complete lesson.  Extrapolating based on the data I have, that seems to occur infrequently. 

To sum up, the reason why most students don't watch the video to completion can be categorized as some flaw with the video (there are needless sticking points during the presentation), or some flaw with the student (the student lacks the necessary background or gets lost too easily in the argument), or extraneous factors (mainly multiprocessing and living life online).  In what follows I will abstract from the third category as I have nothing to say about how to manage those extraneous factors.  If it proves to be the main cause, what I do say should be discounted accordingly.   I find it amusing that what remains is remarkably similar to the situation in the early to mid 1990s, when I taught intermediate micro and that motivated me to take up online learning at the time.  Then, a small fraction of the students really liked my course and got a lot out of it.  But the vast majority did not.  I wanted to know if the cause was them or me.  Was there a better way to teach the class the would engage more students and improve their learning?  That was the question then.  It's still the question now. 

I want to make one more point before getting into the redesign part of the post.  About 20 years ago I became aware of the Merlot Project, through the CIC Learning Technology Group and specifically from Carl Berger, then of the University of Michigan. Merlot was a referatory, which contained the metadata (descriptions) for learning objects, and links to those objects that resided elsewhere on the open Internet.  The idea was to encourage the diffusion of use of a learning object developed by one instructor so that other instructors teaching similar courses at other universities would bring that learning object into their own courses.  At the time Merlot provided quality assurance of the learning object via peer review.  So, in this sense, learning objects were treated like working papers submitted for review at some journal.  However, there were/are differences, particularly in how the reviewer was selected and the criteria the reviewer would use to accept a learning object in Merlot.  Would a potential instructor adopter of the learning object buy into the criteria and thereby trust the review?  Or would this instructor feel the need to perform their own review, possibly a quite cumbersome activity? 

But what if students adopted learning objects directly, not mediated by instructors?  Part of the discussion in this section is to show that is happening some now, though at present it is mainly under the radar in talking about online learning.  Would some sort of peer review process help to drive student adoption?  What might that look like?  In the next section I speculate on this some. 

* * * * * 

If there are sticking points in a video micro-lecture they are surely not there by design as the instructor/creator of the video aims for clarity.  So, in identifying sticking points, students are more expert than the instructor is. Therefore, some process is needed whereby students can identify sticking points. However, in any particular identification, it may be a deficiency in the student that gives a "false positive" rather than a true sticking point. The solution is to trust strength in numbers.  If many different students independently identify the same sticking point, then there is reason to believe there is a problem with the video that is there in spite of the instructor/creator's best efforts to avoid such problems.  

As a rule, students who don't understand some course content are reluctant to admit that to their instructor.  A process needs to be identified where students are comfortable opening up on these matters.  The previous paragraph assumes such a process has been identified.  Some years ago I wrote a post called Rethinking Office Hours, which I believe has the elements of a good process.  If you couple that with having most if not all presentation content coming via online micro-lectures, quite possibly created by other instructors, along with homework/assessments that entail both identifying sticking points in those micro-lectures and the students writing up summaries of the videos in their own words, then in total you have the makings of such a process.  This same process might have to be done on multiple campuses and entail the same video micro-lectures, to pool the results where students have identified sticking points. That would entail a good deal of coordination across campuses that currently does not exist.  Here, I will simply assume it is possible to do and move on.

Having identified the sticking points in the video, let's consider two different possibilities to address them.  If the sticking point is caused by students not having the background that the creator assumed they would have, then a possible solution is to link to other content, text or another video, that provides the requisite background.  This potential solution will make viewing all the necessary content a longer experience than is indicated by the duration of the original video. So a full solution here requires encouraging students to take on this additional burden.  And part of that may mean not simply linking to other content that already exists, but instead producing a condensed version that is sufficient to make sense of the original video yet is not too time consuming to view or read.

The other possibility is that the instructor was needlessly obtuse in providing an explanation or in offering a discussion of a result.  In this case the video content should be replaced by something that is more straightforward, as if one student was explaining the content to another.  But in this desire for greater simplicity, one must be sure not to omit critical bits of content.  So, here we note that the instructor who made the original video is an expert in the subject matter, while a student who explains the material to another student may understand the content, but is not an expert.  The ultimate arbiter of whether the content omission was critical or not should be the instructor or other instructors who teach the same subject.   

There is a copyright issue to contend with as well.  Either the modifications of content meet the requirements of what counts as Fair Use or the creator of the original video must give permission to allow changes to be made to it or the creator must be the one who makes the changes.  If my situation is any indicator of how this issue might play out, 10 years after creating those micro-lectures for intermediate microeconomics, I lack the energy to modify the videos in a substantial way.  Putting small changes in the description (perhaps with links to other content) would be okay.  Beyond that, somebody else would have to do the work.  My only concern then is that the new versions don't end up tarnishing my reputation, because the new work ends up being of much lower quality than the original. 

Let us note a larger lifelong learning issue here.  Eventually, students need to learn to get themselves unstuck, either by researching the appropriate background information that they didn't have at hand at the outset or by working through a seemingly complex explanation so they can make good sense of it by themselves.  If this education in identifying sticking points in micro-lecture is to advance the student as a lifelong learner, then the student should also be involved in creating the revised video, at least some of the time, as that will close the circle on this lifelong learning issue.

Further, if the student can see how the effort in identifying sticking points produces a benefit to other students, who get to view an improved revised video, then the student gets first hand experience at acting responsibly.  A sense of obligation may then develop out of a sufficient number of such experiences.  How long that would take is anyone's guess.  But I suspect one course done as sketched above would not be sufficient, not even close.  So one should envision a series of courses, perhaps taken in a prescribed order, that would be necessary for the student to take to produce the desired result. 

In the review process of papers submitted for publication at a journal, it is possible for there to be outright rejection and it is also possible for the paper to go through a second round of revise and resubmit.  We should envision the analogous things are possible for our micro-lecture videos that undergo review by students.  Those videos that survive the process should be without sticking points and should be reasonably intelligible to student viewers.  If there is a consortium of universities that have parallel classes which do this type of video reviewing, then the consortium has the ability to give a virtual stamp to those videos that have made it through the process.  This is the analog of getting a research paper published in a journal. 

Now envision that the consortium stamp is readily viewable by potential student viewers of the videos who are at universities that are outside the consortium.  Will those students be attracted to these videos when there are other videos available that don't have the stamp and/or are made by instructors from universities outside the consortium?  Likewise, if students are attracted to videos with the consortium stamp, will they be more likely to watch those videos to completion?   The hope is that the answer to both of these questions is yes.

* * * * *

The devil is in the details.  The previous section, which gives a high level overview of the ideas only and no implementation plan whatsoever, may make it seem plausible when in actuality it is not.  Let me mention one bit to consider here.  The methodology part of intermediate microeconomics is pretty time invariant - more or less the same things would have been taught when I started back in 1980 as would be taught now.  That method might then be applied to current events - Econ in the News.  It's the videos about the methodology that should be the focus here.  A video about a current event is surely possible, but its durability will be less as it becomes less timely. Here the focus is on methodology videos that are apt to have substantial durability as long as they are perceived to be of high quality.

Even with that qualification, the overview may be entirely implausible.  Yet I find such speculation an attractive exercise.  It points to where we are stuck in our current approach and perhaps some things to try that might improve matters.  I wonder if a reader of this post would agree.