A Selective History from Reagan to Trump

I'm responding to this opinion piece from Peter Wehner entitled What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me.  There is no doubt that those Reagan Republicans still alive today are haunted by all that Trump stands for.  Nevertheless, I found the essay unsatisfying, mainly for what it left out.  

There was no mention of the Tea Party and the havoc it wrecked.  A particular example I have in mind is Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who was noted for his foreign policy expertise, losing in the 2012 primary to a Tea Party candidate, which was followed by the general election where the Democratic candidate won.  This was a form of destructive cannibalization (from the Republican viewpoint) that repeated many times. 

There was also no mention of Newt Gingrich and the Contract for America, where in the previous decade that imposed constraints on the Clinton Presidency, and hence the fiscal policy mistakes that were made, evident in retrospect if not in prospect.  During Clinton's second term the economy was in high growth mode mainly due to the dot.com bubble and the Federal budget ran a surplus the last two years, where deficits had been the norm beforehand and which returned soon after Bush II took office.  Those surpluses could have been used to fund massive public investment projects.  At the time, the economy had been changing from one that had centered on manufacturing to one focused on the provision of services.  Working class people, especially men, took a hit economically as a consequence.  Many didn't have the right skill set for the service economy.  Further, they resented that the service work was for lower pay.  Increasing the supply of blue collar jobs outside of manufacturing would have been a sensible accommodation, but it was not to be.  And when Bush II did take office the budget surplus was squandered on a tax cut for the rich.

Then there were two big events of note, each of which created a major imprint on the present.  The first of these was the war in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein.  So much has been written about the immorality of that war that I don't need to expand upon it here.  But much less has been written, to my knowledge, about those who served in the military then and their connection to MAGA now.  One did read about a large number of suicides committed by veterans of that war.  Evidently, they felt morally betrayed.  What about those who didn't commit suicide?  And what about their friends and relatives who had a more indirect connection to the war.  Did they too feel that their country had betrayed them by creating false expectations about what would happen?

The other event is about the "rescue" put in place after the burst of the housing bubble and the start of the financial crisis that then ensued.  The plan bailed out many of the big banks, which were then able to rebound.  The financial system as a whole was saved.  But individuals in underwater mortgages didn't fare as well.  Many lost their homes.  The reality is that many shouldn't have qualified for mortgages to begin with.  The only collateral they had was in the market value of their homes increasing steadily.  So they had their expectations raised and then brutally lowered.  Yet there were funds appropriated to help them out, but those funds remained unspent.  If the big guys could get bailed out, why couldn't they be bailed out as well?  That didn't happen.

Let me identify two other factors that have clearly mattered.  One is the Citizens United v. FEC decision by the Supreme Court, which happened in January 2010.  It enabled a huge amount of "dark money" to enter the political arena.  If the various Republican incarnations are cast in the language of innovation, this dark money can be conceived of as a kind of venture capital.  Of course, the main goal of such funding was to produce tax cuts which would give substantial return on investment.  The secondary goal was to create a structure that would generate enough voters who support it where the primary goal could then be achieved.  

The other factor is about our media, particularly the environment in which voters get their information about the news.  When Reagan was President, Cable TV had become the norm, but the innovation in news programming was CNN.  Other channels that provided news programming: ABC, CBS, and NBC did so with evening shows on workdays (a half hour each of national and local news) and then Sunday morning programming for commentary. PBS offered yet one more alternative.  There was no station favored by one party only.  There was a lot of criticism from Conservatives about Liberal bias in the news.  But voters were getting their information from the same sources, more or less.  Near the end of Reagan's second term Rush Limbaugh's radio show began, and the politics of grievance started anew.  That show developed a large audience, but at the time it did not have a television counterpart.  It would be more than a decade later until Fox News came on the scene, as did MSNBC, though the latter was slow out of the gate.  By the early to middle 2000s, much of the audience was getting their news and/or commentary from one of these networks, each of which featured stoking their audience, as that was a way to hold viewer interest.  It meant that Republican and Democratic voters were getting different narratives about the news and as a result wouldn't see eye to eye on most matters of politics.

In case this isn't obvious, none of these developments encouraged moderation.  One might ask, what can be done now to undo the most pernicious of these factors/events?  Alternatively, one might ask what other innovations might get the country back to having a shared vision and then be on a more sensible path thereafter?   If one compares the election now to the election of 2008, there is the similarity in that it feels as if we are in crisis - then because of the Great Recession, now because Trump might be reelected.  Many want simply to get past the crisis and not consider other items that would complicate things.   I fear, however, that without asking these questions now, they might never be asked at all.  That would be very unfortunate.

A Brief Note in Response to Aaron Sorkin's Opinion Piece

I am reacting to this essay, which appeared in yesterday's New York Times.  Let me say first what I liked about it.  There is no doubt that now the Democrats need to make an appeal to lifelong Republicans who have been Never Trump as well as to those who are now No Longer Trump supporters.  They need to vote for the Democratic candidate in the coming election rather than sit this one out.  Sorkin's suggestion of making Mitt Romney the Democratic candidate would likely achieve this end.

But there are two things I didn't like about this essay.  First, Sorkin doesn't address at all whether the whole thing is really a zero-sum game in that attracting lifelong Republicans to vote for the Democratic candidate will repel lifelong Democrats, who then won't vote at all.  Is it possible to make this a positive-sum game, getting both groups of voters to participate in the upcoming election?  If so, what would do that?  I will discuss a possible answer to that question below.

Second, Sorkin seems to believe that a singular act, nominating Mitt Romney, will be like flipping a switch and then achieve the desired result.  However, what if each voter, instead, hems and haws about whether to vote in the coming election, because they are unsure of whether they can rank in a lexicographical manner beating Trump over all other issues and are more comfortable having a candidate who on the other issues has views that parallel their own?  In this election it would be desirable for voters to have this lexicographical ranking, but wishing doesn't make it so.  What might be done to achieve the desired end?

My view is that we should treat voters as learners and truly educate them (I don't mean indoctrinate them) on these matters.  Learning of this sort needs to accommodate the learner's prior disposition.  Further, negotiation through to a newly held point of view can only happen with an instructor whom the learner trusts.  This sort of learning will be labor intensive and time consuming.  I have articulated these ideas in my recent novelette, Adventures of the Minute Women, though the story there is applied to related matters rather than to the Presidential election. 

If begun immediately could such an educational program produce results at scale by election day?  I don't know, but that is what I wish that Sorkin had argued in his essay.

Is Seven Days in May, a book and then a movie from the 1960s, relevant for now?

The book was published in 1962. I was 7 at the time.  The movie came out in 1964.  I don't think I ever saw it in the theater, but I watched it on TV several times, perhaps before I read the book, which I believe I did in Junior High School, though my memory is very imprecise on these details. The book is about a plot by the military to overthrow the government.  It was very much steeped in the politics of then, as the Wikipedia entry details.

I thought of Seven Days in May by considering some questions about January 6 that to my knowledge haven't been asked, the enormous coverage of that event notwithstanding. As Trump was Commander in Chief at the time, why didn't the January 6 plot come from within the government, either some element of the military or a different element from the intelligence services?  I will leave it to the reader to puzzle over this one and come up with answers of the reader's own choosing.  Now, take the hypothetical where a plot of this sort actually was possible.  If you compare it to the plot that actually happened, does it make it seem that the execution of that plan was quite amateurish, in spite of the terror and violence it did produce?  Here I will weigh in with my own view.  That's how it seemed to me.

Now I want to get at how the events of January 6 impacted the views of those higher up in the military as well as those in the then Republican establishment who are now on the outs with Trump; Mike Pence comes to mind here.  But to do that let's take a step back to earlier and what the views in the military were then.  

It has been quite a while since I stopped watching the News Hour on PBS.  Judy Woodruff was the host then and the Tea Party was very much in the vernacular.  I became overly frustrated with interviews which had one Democrat and one Republican.  The latter invariably stonewalled and the questioner, out of an attempt at fairness, didn't hold the person's feet to the fire.  I didn't need the aggravation.  But before I quit watching, I recall seeing on many occasions a high ranking military official on the show. Invariably the person would say that in their official capacity they are non-partisan and would not take sides in any political debate.  Does that remain true today or did the events of January 6 change that in a particular way?

As a total outsider to all of this, I can only speculate as to the answer.  But I think it likely that insiders have, at the least, posed similar questions for themselves.  It seems prudent, one would think, to see if the normal processes would prevent Trump getting reelected. In that case no Seven-Days-in-May-like plot would be needed, so none should be attempted.  But recent events suggest that the normal processes have played themselves out.  So what now?

Let me speculate a little more, albeit in the form of a question.  Suppose that there is some group of insiders who have hatched such a plot, President Biden is aware of this, and these insiders have arranged to give the President deniability.  Would that be a reason to stay in the race for reelection, the very poor debate performance and low polling numbers notwithstanding?  

In the Seven Days in May story, the good guy is President Jordan Lyman and the bad guy is the egotistical general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Mattoon Scott.  Do we have a similar situation today, but with the good guy and bad guy roles reversed?

A Simple Statistic for Measuring Income Inequality

The traditional macroeconomic measures of economy-wide  performance are the unemployment rate and the inflation rate.  When both are low the economy is thought to be performing well.  When one or both are high, there are economy-wide problems of some sort.  But even when both of these measures are low, might it be that a significant fraction of the population is not benefiting from that overall good performance and, indeed, could it be that many are struggling?  While most can readily admit to that possibility, out of sight is out of mind, or if you prefer Daniel Kahneman's acronym from Thinking, Fast and Slow, there is WYSIATI.  In other words, unless there is a third statistic to go along with the unemployment rate and inflation rate, one for measuring income inequality, the income distribution issues become a tertiary matter only in thinking about economy-wide performance, so we don't really discuss those who are hurting economically in spite of the strong indicators. 

But the statistic that economists are likely to want to play this role, the Gini coefficient, hasn't caught on in popular discussions of income inequality.  It is my view that the Gini coefficient is too complex for most people to understand and thus a simple-to-understand statistic is needed to play this role. Admittedly, such a statistic will have its limitations.  I don't want to deny this.  But as politicians discuss the issue, the usual focus is on the middle class.  For that reason I think the statistic I suggest is compelling.  It is the ratio of median income to mean income.  (On the Fred Blog, the reciprocal ratio is graphed, though their data only goes through 2013.  They draw a similar conclusion to what I concluded below about this as an indicator that income inequality has been increasing, though they don't hazard an explanation for these results.)  I will illustrate this measure with a simple Excel workbook I put together from readily available data. Below is a brief discussion of how this workbook was constructed. 

I did a Google search on - mean household income U.S. - and soon found what I wanted.  The first hit was the U.S. Census; but that didn't have what I needed. At the second hit I found this page from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.  Note that the graph says family income rather than household income.  With the aide of a friend, I found this definition of household at the Census.gov Website. From there, households are divided into two categories, family or nonfamily.  From what I know about the income data, family households must, on average, have higher income than nonfamily households.  Further, from elsewhere on the Website there is an issue of non-reporting.  I suspect the issue is more serious with nonfamily households.  Taken together, this may explain why the St. Louis Fed seemed to prefer family income to household income.  

I really liked the page I found because if you scroll down from the graph it provides links to a host of other graphs for related searches, median income distribution for example. And with a bit of further exploration I learned that each graph gives you the ability to download the data that generates the graph.  Initially I downloaded two worksheets, one for real median family income, the other for real mean family income.  They cover the same years, from 1953 to 2022.  I copied and pasted the data into a blank Excel workbook on the same worksheet.  So, the first four columns of my Excel (columns A and B and then columns D and E) are simply reposts of the St. Louis Fed data.  My contribution, meager though it is, can be found in column G, where the entry in column B is divided by the entry in the same row that's in column E, with the result expressed in percentage terms.  I don't believe the ratio of median to mean income to be very compelling on strictly theoretical grounds.  But I found the downward trend extremely interesting, something worthy of further discussion. 

To make sure I was on terra firma, I repeated the exercise, this time with nominal data.  There is a series of median family income that is not inflation adjusted and another series of mean family income not inflation adjusted.  The latter actually has two different series, either Vintage 2022-09-13 or Vintage 2023-09-12.  I chose the latter as it had data for 2022.  The former only goes as far as 2021.   I then did essentially the same thing as before in computing the ratios.   I compared the real and nominal results side by side (that is not shown in the Excel) and learned that while the results are not identical, they are quite close, within a few hundredths of a per cent in each case.  And the downward trend is still there.

Some Mechanics of Income Distribution and of the Trend in Question

I mean this essay to be available to non-economists and non-statisticians.  Anyone who has an interest in economics as it speaks to our national politics should find this essay accessible.  So here I'd like to explain a little about what's going on behind the scene to drive the results.  For those readers who don't need this type of hand holding, you can skip this section, puzzle for a bit over what explains the downward trend, and then resume reading the next section. 

If the income distribution were a bell curve, the median and the mean would coincide, so their ratio would equal 1 or 100%.  If you held all incomes below the median constant but added a fixed amount to each income above the median, then the median itself would remain unchanged but the mean would go up by half the fixed amount (as half the population received that income increase).  More generally, symmetric distributions, such as one that yields a bell curve, will produce an equal median and mean, while distributions that are skewed to the right will have the median less than the mean.  The greater the skewness the more the disparity between median and mean.  The U.S. income distribution is skewed in this way.  Evidently, the distribution was closer to a bell curve in 1953 than it was in 2022.  

Income in the U.S. has mainly been growing; both median and mean family income have been growing, the data say as much.  If median income grows at the same rate as mean income, then their ratio will remain unchanged.  For this ratio to fall requires mean income to grow faster than median income.  The reader should interpret this as incomes higher in the income distribution growing faster than incomes lower in the distribution.  That this has been the pattern for some time suggests that those who are lower in the distribution may have distinctly different views of the overall economy than those who are higher in the distribution. 

What Caused the Downward Trend?  Will the Trend Continue?

Here is some speculation on my part, which might be thought of as the start of an argument on these questions.  Post World War II, the U.S. economy really embodied the notions we associate with a "middle class society."  The GI Bill, in particular, repaid, in part, those who served in the military by helping them start on a middle class lifestyle, which I will note was far more modest than its equivalent today.  For example, the square footage of the family house or apartment was comparatively small and there might have been a single vehicle for the family car.  So, part of this is about attainment level.  Another part of this is about institutions that supported this attainment.  Unions were much stronger then and many more people were union members.  Unions helped their members lead a middle class lifestyle.

Now let's make a little conjecture that I deem likely - voting participation correlates with income.  The downward trend in the median to mean income ratio can be thought of as the system rewarding those with higher incomes, who in turn tend to vote their pocketbook.  In this view the surprise might be that the trend wasn't steeper earlier.  I do want to note that in my eyeballing of the data the trend happened under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, though it was somewhat steeper when Reagan was President.  

It can be argued that high marginal tax rates at upper incomes, which existed through the Carter administration, and have kept coming down for the most part since, inhibited the taking of very high income.  That inhibition lessened as the tax code changed.  The rich could then be more greedy and without shame.

Still a different way of looking at this, economic theory explains that a factor of production must be paid at least its opportunity cost (what that factor could earn at its next best opportunity) in order to elicit the factor's participation.  Payment in excess of the opportunity cost is called an economic rent.  Economic rents tend to exist where the factor is supplying something scarce.  And when there is excess demand for the product produced, those economic rents can skyrocket.  Earnings for those people will grow much faster than for those who merely earn their opportunity cost.  Parallel to this, certain sectors of the economy have experienced hyperinflation - health care and higher education are two such areas.  I believe that accounting and finance are also in this category.  These are just examples and are not meant to be an exhaustive list. The areas experiencing hyperinflation are likely the same areas where earnings have grown much faster than median income.

Is this slowing down now?  I'm not seeing it.

Naming the Median/Mean Income Ratio

Coming up with an idea is one thing.  Marketing it is quite another.  I'm including this cutesy section because I think the marketing calls for a compelling name, yet I couldn't come up with any that weren't too convoluted.  So I encourage those readers who want to make a go of if to suggest a name and then either do so in a comment or send me an email with it.  I'll post those and see if readers can identify a favorite.  

The Frequency in Updating the Measure

I believe that both the CPI and the unemployment rate are updated monthly.  Further, seasonal adjustments in CPI measures allow them to reconsider the earlier numbers in light of new information, going back at most 5 years to make such adjustments.  (Beyond 5 years the numbers are fixed.)  The data I used for computing the Median/Mean Family Income Ratio were annual.  Can a measure that only changes annually compete for importance with these other traditional measures of the macro economy?  Alternatively, might it be possible to get more frequent income measures so the numbers would be more timely?

I don't know the answers to these questions.  My thought is that if this remains just an idle curiosity then we're stuck with annual measures, which might then reinforce why the measure isn't taken more seriously.  Alternatively, if interest in the measure spiked, then perhaps there would be data forthcoming to support a more frequent adjustment of the numbers.  But that's just speculation on my part.  

Wrap Up

In the previous decade I wrote a fair amount about income redistribution, as a policy matter.   This post is probably the last one I wrote of that sort.  It was written while Trump was President and before Covid had manifest.  

I view the current post as several steps back from policy.  It's about how people perceive the economy.  It is not an unusual proposition to say that people will see the same thing differently depending on where they are standing at the time they make the observation.  Yet somehow when we talk about the macro economy, we lose this thought except for saying that Democrats will see it differently than Republicans.  I do think where people are in the income distribution matters for this perception.  It matters a lot.  Indeed, it matters much more now than it did in 1953, when the U.S. really was a middle class society.  We need a way to talk about that and I hope that the simple statistic I suggest in this post offers a vehicle for doing so. 

And, to be clear, I view income inequality itself as a proxy for wealth inequality.  Those who have a large debt burden relative to their income and "live paycheck to paycheck" have to endure every bump that the economy dishes out whereas those with enough savings and access to credit have buffers to allow them to be comfortable in spite of the economy's vicissitudes.  But getting direct measures on wealth and access to credit is much harder.  So proxy measures will have to do.  And the one I suggest is both readily available and easy to understand.

Eating as Consolation, Overeating as Habit

This piece is meant as something of a refutation to, A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong, an opinion piece in the NY Times from 10 days ago.  While my critique can readily be framed in theoretical terms, and I will do so next, after that I will be autobiographic in order to give some support to my claims.  I'm not trying to be a role model with this.  I only hope that my story can give readers enough fodder for them to work through their own personal examples.  There is one way that I'm unique in writing about this, as a former academic economist.  I can give a behavioral economics spin on the coping process.  I hope that part is helpful.

Johann Hari, the author of the linked essay, squarely puts the blame on the food companies, who design their products in a way that customers find them addicting.  (In this there is a remarkable parallel with the cigarette companies, as depicted for example by The Insider.)  Hari reports that he was born in 1979.  I'm more than a generation older, about 9 months younger than Jerry Seinfeld.  I surely don't want to get the food companies off the hook.  While the recent movie, Unfrosted, has been called a comedy, it easily could be considered a mockumentary about the big cereal companies.  I guess that most viewers would agree.  There is a lot of nostalgia in watching that movie, but also a feeling of entrapment from all the bad choices we made.

Nevertheless, I think it a poor approach to consider what the big food companies do as the the sole cause of obesity, leaving all the psychological issues as effect.  I much prefer to have a multi-causal approach, as I hope to explain below.  Here, let me get to just a few of those issues.  In adults, is overeating related to excess with alcohol or drugs?  Or should each of these only be considered separately?  It seems evident to me that in children it may be one thing, but in adults quite another.  Even if drugs like Ozempic are effective, are there reasons for good health and greater self-esteem from both getting the overeating under control and increasing physical activity?  That too seems evident, with an obvious answer of yes.  Further, while it is well known that there is a mental health crisis among young adults today, I will impute here that the primary cause is a lack of a sense of agency among these people.  To confer agency on someone, that person must try to address his or her own issues, perhaps failing frequently, but with the occasional success, and then learning how to do it better the next time based on the prior experience.  Generating a sense of agency about one's eating seems to me a key factor.  To do that one needs a multi-causal approach of obesity. 

I've struggled with my weight for much of my life and I still am struggling with it now.  So I don't want to maintain that I have some miracle cure for obesity.  I only want to argue that the struggle is necessary.

While I will mainly focus on psychological/motivational causes, I want to acknowledge the possibility of genetic/cultural causes for obesity.  I can remember that as a very young kid my mom would call me a fresser. (She was one as well.)  And in my high school yearbook, where friends would write something next to their photographs, one friend wrote that I was the hungriest kid he knew.  Saying that was a bit unusual, but it goes to show an unfortunate part of the reputation I had at the time.  I do want to note that for me it is impossible to parse the genetic causes from the psychological ones.

Now let me get to the title of the post.  Leading off with eating as consolation was intended to get the reader to ask - consolation for what?  The answer will depend on the reader.  In my case, the issues for which I needed consolation changed over my lifetime.  I will sketch some of them below.  Others who have struggled with obesity might do likewise in coming up with their own issues.

As a very young kid, the issue for me was poor self-image based on physical limitations.  For example, the schoolyards would have jungle gyms.  I was afraid of climbing them, though other kids were not.  In general, I was a klutz.  I was a very big kid and my coordination wasn't as good as the other kids.  Further, I was grouped from nursery school onward with kids who were somewhat older than I was.  (Being the biggest and the youngest is an odd combination.)  This was compounded by two other factors.  I had difficulty with fine motor activities, threading a needle for example, handwriting for another example.  My dad made a thing about the latter, which didn't help my self-esteem at all.  Then too, when we started to play ball sports, (see my post from a decade ago called Slapball) it was evident that I was worse at catching the ball than the other kids.  Right around the time that President Kennedy was assassinated, I was 8 then, I got my first pair of glasses.  Until then, I had a visual disadvantage compared to the other kids in following the flight of the ball.  All these physical issues were eventually overcome (except the handwriting, which has been abysmal for my entire life) but the psychological scars that formed remained.  

It can be argued that all young kids have some difficulties of this sort; angst in adulthood likely has its roots in early childhood.  But not all kids resort to eating as consolation for those difficulties.  Do these kids find other ways to cope at an early age?  I don't know.  I do believe the genetic explanation may matter here.   But it is also possible that parental intervention serves as a different sort of buffer for the kid.  I had less of that as my mother often wasn't home or when she was she was busy tutoring a student in a foreign language.  I often cite this piece by Hanna Rosin, The Overprotected Kid, which argues that parenting has gone too far in the other direction since I was a kid.  The kid needs to take some knocks, no doubt.  Where the right sort of balance can be found I will leave to others.  The only point to take here is that kids will look both for self-protection and for consolation when the self-protection is inadequate.  Some will find the latter in eating.

Let's move on.  I briefly want to turn to the boy-girl thing.  It terrified me in junior high school and thereafter for two reasons, one that should be already apparent.  Although I was a very good student, that did not offset the poor self-image I had and I was still the largest kid in the class, by far.  So, that I didn't think I was attractive to girls shouldn't be a surprise.  But the other reason might be more unusual and specific to me.  I often would not understand how I felt about something and would note that sometimes in the future I would change my mind about things.  If I told a girl I really liked her now, would I be implicitly leading her on that I wouldn't change my mind about her later?  I couldn't imagine being able to talk my way out of a situation like that.  This served as a big inhibition in getting started.  

There must be a huge amount written on eating as consolation, especially for teens, given a forlorn love life. I haven't tried to find references on this as the point seems so obvious.  And, quite clearly, I fell into this category.  

Now a bit about the second part of my title, on the overeating as habit. Any activity done repeatedly that is not done through the coercion of others has the potential for turning into habit. The point here is that a vicious cycle can readily form.  The overeating causes the person to put on weight, making the person less attractive to others, and thereby confirm the need for eating as consolation.

In 10th grade I went into a depression; there were a variety of causes for that.  One of them was putting on weight and feeling out of control in doing so.  I did see a shrink at the time, who helped me some, particularly with my limitation in making eye contact with authority figures.  And I saw the family doctor as well, who prescribed some medicine (I believe it was an amphetamine of some sort) to control my appetite.  I recall losing about 20 or 25 pounds that spring.  But I was unable to keep the weight off after the prescription expired.  It is an issue with any drug treatment for obesity.  What will happen after the treatment concludes?  Or will the drug be taken for the person's entire lifetime thereafter?

I put on a few more pounds in college and after I graduated (in January) I wanted to change things, so I went on a crash diet where I lost about 45 pounds.  It was one meal a day, dinner, with no seconds.  I did this without any drugs for around 2 months.  I have a vague memory of hanging around in my bedroom at home either watching TV or reading - not interacting with people much at all.  I seem to recall a belief that I could handle the intermittent fasting if I didn't have social interactions that would test my mettle.  It's why nowadays I would suspect that people can't both lose a lot of weight and work at a stressful job.  It's one or the other, but not both.  Let me return to that issue in a bit.

When I went to grad school there was nobody at Northwestern who knew me from how I was earlier.  I looked more or less normal (maybe a bit husky) but I still had the mindset of an obese person.  That presented it's own challenges.  

I will fast forward now 14 years, till when I got married.  The weight remained more or less stable.  I found a reasonable balance between eating, drinking, and physical activity, and for 2 more years after that, when our first child was born.  Parenting, with its chronic lack of sleep, brought about the first chink in the armor.  Fatigue lessens one's powers of self-restraint.  Then I changed careers in the mid 1990s, from being an academic economist to being an administrator for educational technology.  There was job stress in the latter position that I wasn't ready for.  My saving grace, weight-wise, was jogging, which helped relieve the stress and kept the weight somewhat under control.  While the weight did trickle up, the routine I had worked more or less until 9/11.  Right around then my knees gave out and I could no longer jog.  Perhaps 7 or 8 years later I took up walking, which is not a perfect substitute for jogging but it is definitely better than nothing.  Until then I was quite sedentary.  We did buy a stationary bike, but I don't think it was sufficient exercise for me.

I also experienced a work change in summer/early fall of 2002.  Where before I was running a small Center for Educational Technologies, which was much to my liking, the work stress notwithstanding, thereafter my center merged with the big campus IT organization and I became the Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies.  Nominally, it was a promotion for me.  In actuality, I ended up being involved in big IT matters much more than I cared for and was not nearly as happy with the work I was doing.  The reader should be seeing a big need I had for consolation at this time.

The major difference between then and my teens is that at Illinois alcohol had become an alternative way to console myself, often drinking with friends but also quite a lot on my own. And here's the thing to make that relevant to this piece.  Alcohol doesn't just lower one's inhibitions in social situations.  It also lessens (perhaps eliminates) one's sense of self-control with regard to eating.   When the work stress got particularly bad in fall 2004 and all of 2005, my weight ballooned upward.  Things came to a head in September 2006 when I had a very bad fall in my bother's house in Ann Arbor, severing all the tendons between the knee and the thigh in my left leg.  Reform happened very slowly after that and in different stages.  

I'm going to fast forward to now.  I'm about 100 pounds lighter than I was when I had that fall and within 10 pounds of the weight when I got married.  The motivation for losing weight during this entire time has been to promote better health.  Back in 2015 I was experiencing hip pain and found that I was a candidate for a hip replacement procedure.  But a few years earlier, I had a rotator cuff repair after which my shoulder got infected and I spent 5 days in the hospital for them to clean out the infection.  The memory of that lingered and I wanted to prevent a repeat experience.  I reasoned that if I lost about 30 pounds or so the chances to avoid infection would be much greater.  Lo and behold, while it took quite a while to lose that weight, what I found while walking is that the pain in the hip was largely gone and I could walk further without difficulty.  Other health issues motivate me now.  I will spare the reader from detailing those, but reducing drinking and eating less are part of the solution to each of those issues.

Recently, my diet has changed remarkably towards the fruits and vegetables end of the spectrum and I am much more conscious of getting some exercise, even if it is not aerobic exercise.  On the former, I think it worth noting that I'm quite comfortable financially, so a change in diet puts essentially no pressure on the family's savings.  For people of more modest means, high starch diets are likely less expensive.  Getting to a more healthful diet when on a tight budget is surely a challenge.  It seems to me that some form of government intervention, such as a tax on the food companies to fund subsidies on fruits and vegetables available to people of modest means, would make good sense here.  But the devil is in the details and I don't want to get sidetracked by those here.  So let's get to the last point.

I'm not big on willpower.  When applied to learning, I'm a strong advocate for intrinsic motivation and self-actualization.  I very much dislike the term - deferred gratification.  (See, for example, my post on Maslow's essay, The Creative Attitude.)  It is far better to be totally absorbed in now.  But that does not mean there shouldn't be any forward thinking, far from it.  In behavioral economics there is the notion of a nudge.  Simply put, a nudge is something you do in advance that either raises the cost of doing the bad thing or lowers the cost of doing the virtuous thing, thereby increasing the likelihood that you won't go astray in that moment of weakness.  

When I was a single assistant professor, well before I had heard of a nudge, I would nonetheless employ the concept by never buying ice cream to keep in my apartment.  The assistant professors would often walk to Green Street in the afternoon and get ice cream at Baskin Robbins.  That was okay and I indulged in the activity along with the others.  But by not having ice cream in my apartment, I would avoid the scenario where later in the evening I was alone and perhaps with something bothering me about work.  Had there been ice cream in the apartment, I might have eaten all that was left in the box.  But it was just too much effort to go to the grocery story to buy a box.  So, this particular nudge was effective that way.  

Once you're married, you lose some control of what is in the refrigerator and freezer as well as what's in the liquor cabinet.  If there is to be an effective nudge, it needs to be found elsewhere.  For me, I've got two things I need to control.  First, it has to be about limiting both food and liquor consumption.  I'm prone to overdo on both and if I drink too much I will then eat too much (and then stuff I shouldn't eat at all).  Second, the impulse to be a bad boy this way definitely depends on time of day.  It is much stronger in the evening then it is in the morning.  To control the evening weakness, I try to go to bed early - about 8 PM during daylight savings time, even earlier during standard time.  This is anti-social in many ways.  But it is far less anti-social as a senior citizen than it would have been as an assistant professor.  I'm disciplined enough that once I've gone upstairs to bed, I won't come back downstairs till the morning, when it's coffee that I want and which I won't deny myself.  

However, I'm not perfect with this and after a week or so of following the regime I will typically break down and have a few drinks, eating too much as a consequence.  I do need some break from the regimen.  The issue is whether I can get right back on the horse after that or if instead I have a period of indulgence that follows.  For me these days, a big determining factor of which happens is the extent of physical pain I'm feeling.  I'm not good about toughing it out.  If things hurt a lot, I will drink.  Moderate arthritis pain I can tolerate, as I've now come to accept it.  Sometimes I over exercise or have some minor accident and then the pain is more intense.  This is where returning to the regimen becomes very difficult.

So, I'm not advocating for this specific form of nudge, because everyone has a different life situation. But I would strongly encourage readers to experiment with their own approaches and see if they can find something that works for them. 

If you try this for a while, but nothing seems to work, have a Pop-Tart.  A sense of humor about the situation helps too.

The Old Dog Is Working On A New Trick

Trying extra hard to restrain
Impulse control is a drain
Yet it is what's needed
For aging to be impeded
The message could not be more plain.
#HopingToKeepTheOldDemonsAtBay

Inadvertent Anti-Learning

For the past couple of weeks I've watched a lot of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament.  Even with Illinois' decisive loss to UConn, certainly very disappointing for Illini fans, I continued to watch other games.  The commercials for these games remained remarkably constant, with the usual suspects being fast food commercials, insurance commercials, and car/truck commercials.  There was one commercial that didn't fit this mold and I wondered why it was there.  This one was from Grammarly Business and was about using AI to resolve an office scheduling problem.  Twenty years earlier, when I was a campus administrator, that sort of problem would have been solved by the secretaries working together.  Now there is an automated alternative, la-de-da.  But the commercial implied the solution was beyond human capacity.  It's that thought which triggered the ideas in the rest of this post.  

Let's move on and talk about learning.  A few years ago I featured the following graphic in a post called A Simple Model of How Adults Learn.   (In turn, that post was part of a Website I called the Non-Course, which I developed during Covid in an attempt to encourage college students to learn on their own and develop the reading habit.  Alas, it was just me blowing off steam and had no other impact.)

There is nothing original in this graphic.  You can find the ideas previously expressed in a paper by Kenneth Bruffee called Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind."  Evidently, a way to externalize one's thinking is to engage in conversation with another person who wants to do likewise.  Yet writing, a different form of externalization, can also be considered as conversation, in this case with an imagined reader.  And if ingest happens via reading, then the reader can be thought of as being in conversation with the author.  Ditto for reflection, which is internalized conversation. 

Personally, I have found this conversation metaphor extremely useful in considering how we learn.  And it has helped me in affirming a belief I've had for some time.  The meta skill we want to see develop in the learner is the ability to produce a coherent narrative, one that takes account of the relevant points, sequences them in a way where others can understand the ordering which in turn makes the narrative comprehensible, and in total offers an explanation for the topic of discussion. 

How does one develop this meta skill in the learner?  That too is no mystery; it takes a lot of practice of the right sort.  I have seen it called "effortful study" but I believe most now refer to it as deliberate practice.  This conveys the idea that the practice must be challenging to the learner, but the learner must view the goal of the practice not so far out of reach as to be impossible to attain.  The deliberate part is comparatively new to our understanding, but that practice is needed in learning is hardly a new idea.  The following quote dates back to the 17th or 18th century.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Sir Richard Steele

To make these ideas more concrete, much of the deliberate practice the learner should engage in must require transfer - which means using the new idea in a novel context. A successful adult learner has developed the habit to practice transfer whenever exposed to a new idea.  This is a way that the learner can test whether the idea is really understood.

My sense is that many college students don't get it about transfer.  Instead, they cave into the extrinsic motivation provided by the goal of getting good grades in their classes.  This then serves as a justification for much of their study time to be devoted to rote.  Further, it does so in a way where the time devoted to study is manageable.  As I like to tell students, real learning takes as long as it takes.  The deliberate practice with transfer I mentioned in the previous paragraph likely would be rejected by many students as too time consuming.  I wrote about this more than a decade ago in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams?  Though I don't have any current data on this and my own teaching experience ending after the fall 2019 semester, my guess is that, if anything, the situation is even worse now.  

With college schooling so considered, I want to turn attention to informal learning outside of courses and to formal education at the K-12 level,  or perhaps only the K-5 level, where extrinsic incentives may be weaker or entirely absent (at least one can hope that to be the case).  Is it poor pedagogy that's the problem?  Or does technology detract from the deliberate practice that nascent learners need?  When I was a kid there was both Why Johnny Can't Read? and a view that watching television was making kids illiterate.  So, at this level of abstraction, these questions have been with us for a very long time.  

More recently, technologists and social scientists have gotten together to consider this and related questions.  It's not quite a quarter century ago when John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid published The Social Life of Information.  (An updated version came out in 2017.)  I read the original version a few years after its release, when I was doing campus edtech, and found it a godsend in that it put the emphasis where I thought it should be, on the social practice that the technology induces.  (A few years later in a post called Learning Technology and the "Vision Thing" I referred to this as the Umpire Theory of Technology.  I still subscribe to that today.)  The sociologist Sherry Turkle was more explicit about how the technology blocks the requisite deliberate practice in a New York Times Op-Ed called, Stop Googling. Let's Talk.  

Now I want to get at the word inadvertent in the title of my post.  The discussion above suggests a new technology may have a differential impact on people depending on how far along they are on their own personal learning curve.  Mature learners may react differently than nascent learners.  Do the designers of the technology anticipate this?  If not, this differential reaction is what I mean by inadvertent.  The last time I taught, fall 2019, students who were in the classroom before class started either had their phones out or their laptops out, with the former far more popular.  (There was one iconoclastic student who would have a paper book out.) None of the students tried to engage me in friendly conversation before class.  I have no difficulty asserting that mobile technology has severely limited the deliberate practice that students need at Externalization (the lower left box in the diagram) and it probably has also limited the deliberate practice at Ingest.  

But I'm behind the times.  What about AI in this regard?  I can only guess at its impact.  To date most of what I've read about it is on student cheating and its possible detection on written assignments.  I don't have a good sense how students will use the technology in other contexts.  And I, for one, don't want to banish the technology in favor of pure thought. But I do want to hope that students are getting some important deliberate practice with Reflection, though I fear that even prior to AI many students were not engaged in this way.  

It is hard to know what is going on in someone else's mind.  The best we can do is to engage them in conversation and inquire about that.  The technologists have had their day, and then some.  It's time for the sociologists and the evaluators to take center stage and take their best stab at what's going on.  Maybe some of it will support the cheer-leading for the technology.  But, and this I think is the critical point, the cheerleaders should acknowledge the need for such an effort and accept the results, regardless of what they turn out to be.

Sports Forecasting

Predicting the future based on the past
Hoping the pattern will continue to last
But for something truly new, what can you say?
Which is why we watch all the games they play.
#LearningFromMistakesIsItselfAnInnovation

Pod System for the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

Illinois is in the East Regional but is playing in Omaha Nebraska. While on Thursday it played the second game that finished in the afternoon, today's game starts in the evening.  It is the second to last game of the day.  I puzzled about this some and then went to the ESPN Website for today's schedule of games.   For the purpose of this post, which might be more interesting to an economist than a basketball fan, the interesting columns are Location and Time (all those times are Central, as I have it set to my own preferences in case I want to watch the game).  There isn't a column for region, but that information is provided in smaller font under the match-up. 

There are four sites for the games today.  (Note there are NIT games listed as well.  I'm not including them in the discussion here.)  Those sites are Charlotte NC, Pittsburgh PA, Omaha NE, and Salt Lake City Utah.  From the perspective of time zones, the first two are in the East, the third is in the Midwest, and the fourth is in the Mountain zone.  There is no location in the Pacific zone.  This must somehow be related to why some of the conferences are realigning to include a few west coast teams.  But I definitely don't have the full story on that

A naive view would have the Locations and Times correlate, but it seems that today the correlation is negative as the first two games are in Salt Lake City.  I will give my conjecture on why that is below.

Another issue is whether any of the sites really offers a home court advantage for the favorite team.  North Carolina is playing Michigan State in Charlotte.  Here is a Google Maps view of the drive between Chapel Hill and Charlotte.   There and back seems do-able in the same day, with watching the game in between.  It might require the designated driver to not imbibe at all, but it is still do-able.  Also, I don't know this for sure but I'd speculate that UNC fans are distributed all around the state (except in Durham) and one might make a similar quick study for other locations that have a significant number of fans.

Here is a similar Google Map for the drive between Ames and Omaha.    It's a bit longer than the other though not by too much and if the weather cooperates it is definitely do-able.  (One point of geography I learned from this is that Ames is further north than Omaha.)

Now to the conjecture.  I'm not sure how the tickets get distributed to the schools but I assume that each school gets its own allotment, which in turn get allocated mainly to season ticket holders.  And then there are some tickets held for sale to the general public.  Some locals may want to go to the game.  Within the first group, tickets to the first two rounds are issued and those fans get hotel accommodations or something equivalent, hoping their team will make it to the second round.  

But, of course, half the teams lose in the first round.  That's the nature of the beast.  What happens to the tickets that fans of losing teams have for the second round?  Intuitively, they will resell them to fans of the winning teams.  That might very well happen face-to-face right after the first round game concludes, or there are scalpers who serve as middleman to get the market to work.  The NCAA would like as many seats filled as possible for the second round games.  That must mean there are many fans at those games who weren't present at the first-round games.

Salt Lake City is in the middle of nowhere.  For the sake of this argument, I would say that very few will drive there just to see a second round game.  The vast majority will fly and given the vicissitudes of air travel these days, they will fly in the day before.  Making the games early there might allow these fans to fly out day of the game.  

For the games that are later today, those who aren't driving will fly out tomorrow.  That includes Illinois fans who have gone to Omaha, whether driving or flying.   

I don't know how big the Iowa State fandom is, but it will be interesting to watch and see whether they fill up the arena for their game.  If they do win this game, those who aren't driving back tonight might stick around to watch Illinois play Duquesne and get a sense of the Sweet Sixteen match-up.  

I do suspect that the Michigan State vs North Carolina game will be pretty much like a home game for North Carolina.  There will be some Michigan State fans in the stands, but they will evidently be a minority.   

And if this analysis is making some sense, I would expect the Pittsburgh arena to be less than full of fans.  It's drive-able for Oakland fans but not really for the other three schools, definitely not for Oregon.  And with three double-digit seeds in this region, you have to wonder about how intense the fandom is about seeing the game. 

The NCAA in coming up with this system has to balance fairness to the teams with filling the seats for the games.  Because the driving distances are greater in the West, the later requirement creates a bias against west coast teams.  

Tomorrow Purdue gets the home court advantage with a game in Indianapolis.  So I don't want to say that the bias is for certain conferences.  But I think there is too much advantage to teams that get number one seeds.  

Yesterday, in the Northwestern vs. FAU game, I thought the refereeing was terrible, and that was a game without the locational bias, as the game was in Brooklyn.  Since I still remember Illinois playing Kentucky in the Elite Eight back in 1984, with that game played at Rupp Arena, I really don't want fan pressure to be one of the important variables that impacts the refs.  But given that filling the seats is a need, I'm afraid that sometimes we're stuck with that.

The Writer Does The Work So The Reader Doesn't Have To

Once having chose
To avoid brief prose
With rhyme on the nose
Then eschew adipose.
#IfYouInsistOnOnlyTheGistRhymeOffersATwist

Faux Spring

The trees in the park with their dry brown leaves tinking
What is it possibly that Mother Nature is thinking?

Go outside for a walk and find something odd
Then decide whether it's already time to turn the sod.
#ItAllDependsOnTheDirectionOfTheWind

Should we call it an upset?

Along the plateau of reasonably good teams
None wants to be number one
That honored station a burden or so it seems
Taking away all of the fun.

So now we must wait till the Tournament plays out
In order to learn who is boss
At which point the critics surely will pout
They just squeaked by without a loss.
#WhoNeedsRankingsAnyway

https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/39566531/creighton-knocks-uconn-ending-huskies-14-game-win-streak

It's Time For Some Indoor R&R

Here's a snow burn
From winter's return
Weather forecasting we learn
Is something to spurn.
#TheMeltIsSaidToStartSunday

A Belated Response To: College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.

A Facebook friend posted a link to this NY Times Magazine piece by Professor Stephen L. Carter along with some kudos about how the piece captured the poster's views of what college should be about.  In days of yore I would have read much of the Times Magazine already, but recently I find I read much less of the paper, doing word games instead, reading fiction (most recently a Raymond Chandler novel), or simply goofing off.  Some of this is that recently I often feel I'm not learning from what I'm reading.  Another part is that the reading seems a source of stress that I would be better off to avoid.  In this case I started to read the piece, found I disagreed with the author on fundamental points, and then stopped reading.  But I wanted to share my contrary views.  They have appeared in this blog over the years and in other than the present context.  It's not just a knee-jerk reaction now.  So, yesterday morning I finished reading the piece and after that I began writing this response to illustrate my thinking on these matters.  In doing so, I will make heavy use of earlier posts I've made.  If the reader is so inclined, those can be read as well, and in this way I can keep the current post to modest length. 

Here are the criticisms in a nutshell:

The piece is far too idealistic in its conception.  It needs a more realistic sense of the student/learner and about the source of learning blockages.

No doubt, Professor Carter was a precocious learner as a student.  I believe I was a precocious learner as well.  Such learners will have a well-honed curiosity before they enter college.  They likely will have an intellectual social life, fed by extensive non-school reading and other activities that challenge them.  I've written about this in a post called PLAs Please (a play on words explained in the piece).  Nowadays, long-form reading is on the downs as is face-to-face conversation, a consequence of the "progress" brought to us by online technology. College for precocious learners is giving these students what they already want.  But by no means are these students the majority of those in college.  What about educating the others?

There is another dimension to this issue often described as students lacking a sense of agency.  Hanna Rosin's piece in the Atlantic, The Overprotected Kid, gives a good first pass as to the primary cause.  Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz, explains how this lack of agency manifests in college.  The last semester I taught, fall 2019, the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed were filled with stories about student mental health problems.  But then the focus was on the lack of mental health professionals on campus, not on how learning is structured.  The problem persisted through Covid and may have gotten even worse then.  Are students who lack agency nevertheless able to express their curiosity?  

Professor Carter doesn't talk at all about fear and how fear can inhibit learning.  Here I want to focus only on one sort of fear, the fear of looking stupid in public, in front of an authority figure such as the instructor or in front of one's classmates.

Even if questions and comments are welcomed by the instructor and that is evident to the students, it is quite likely that most students (I'm using the classes I've taught since retirement as my sample) won't ever raise their hands to participate.  For those who attend class regularly, how does one explain this?  I want to note that in the mid to late 1990s when I was leading the SCALE project on campus that introduced some online learning into the face-to-face classroom, many of the instructors we interviewed at the time told us that they were trying out online to help address the "shy student problem."  The issue has been with us for some time. Free speech de jure does not mean free speech de facto.  

This issue about the learner's fears inhibiting learning surely means that the idealistic approach misses the boat on the gains from hearing diverse opinions on a matter.  I wrote about this in a post called, On learning to argue with people where we disagree - what's possible and what isn't.  The safety needs that the learner has must be accounted for properly as a precondition.  This point is very much like what Maslow argues, that the Being Needs and Self-Actualization are in dialectic with each other.  In contrast, the idealistic approach of Professor Carter focuses solely on Self-Actualization and ignores the Being Needs entirely.  Now, I would claim that the fear of looking stupid is universal, while the fear a black student has in a classroom of predominantly white students is not.  Perhaps the non-universal fears have commanded too much attention.  But ignoring the universal fears is not the right answer.

There is then what might seem a pedantic point, but since such a big deal is being made of Free Speech,  the classroom isn't the place for it.  Office hours might be, but so few students nowadays attend office hours.

I wrote about this in a post called, There really isn't freedom of speech in a well functioning classroom.  The classroom presents an asymmetric situation where the instructor has authority. Hence, the instructor regulates student speech. Students expect this.  This isn't a big deal, until somebody tries to politicize the fact.

Provincialism (or closed-mindedness if you prefer that expression) persists, on campus and throughout society.  Given that, how should an effective classroom manage the situation?

I wrote about this in a post called Provincialism and Freedom of Speech in the Classroom.  I want to link this idea to something else I learned from the book What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain.  Once the learner has a well-established world view, if the learner then confronts evidence that challenges this view, the learner is apt to reject the evidence rather than to adjust the world view to account for the evidence.  This itself might be a kind of self-protection.  You might call it anti-curiosity.  My understanding is that it can be overcome only very slowly and needs a lot of patience with the learner.  

This might give one reason why so many students seem to want to get through their courses (with high grades, of course) without being fundamentally changed in their intellectual outlook from taking those courses.  Further, it is my belief that the approach feeds the mindset of students where they are less sensitive than they otherwise might be to the needs of their fellow students.  Such sensitivity, were it the norm, might obviate the need for regulation from on high in this dimension.

I would add that this feeds the apparent mercenary tendencies of so many students, which Professor Carter briefly rails about, but then moves on.  I'm afraid there are real economic forces at play - largely the income inequality in society at large and the high tuition at elite universities that mean those mercenary tendencies will persist for later generations of college students unless these fundamentals are reversed.  

* * * * *

I could raise other related points, but let me close here.  I think I've made enough of a case for my main bone of contention.  The purely idealistic view of college, it's purpose and how it should go about achieving that purpose, does a disservice by abstracting from some real needs that have to be addressed for any reform to be successful.  As a former professor, I know that I would often cast myself as the typical learner in my classroom. In retrospect, that was an error on my part.  We know our own experiences and thus seemingly can base our teaching approach on those experiences.  But the vast majority of our students won't go on to become professors.    It behooves us to better understand the experiences of our students to frame our teaching so as to account for their experiences.  How can we really reach them so they learn and not just in a surface way?

No Unbeaten Teams Left

No team wants to be ranked number one
Each then tanks on the road.
The burden makes basketball less than fun.
Emotional circuits on overload.
#PurdueAndHoustonBothLostYesterday

Fodder for a Loren Tate Column

Recently, Loren has been giving readers a stroll down memory lane (and for most of us he's also going into history before we were around) about Illinois sports, trying to tie past to the present where possible.  Here is an example that might prove especially relevant, should Illinois beat Purdue in basketball tomorrow night or, even if not, should be it be a tight game in the closing minutes.  

The example comes from the Lou Henson team of 1983-84 that made it to the Elite Eight and lost to Kentucky (some say they were robbed by the ref's bad non-call near the end of the game).  The point of interest, however, happened before the season began.  Forward Anthony Welch was lost for the year due to injury.  Lou needed to replace him, but his available personnel didn't have another small forward to step in.  So, instead, Lou moved Doug Altenberger to small forward from shooting guard and had Quinn Richardson take over for Altenberger.  In effect, the team played with three guards, later to become the norm, but it wasn't then.  It is unlikely that Lou would have come up with these changes on his own had Welch not been injured.  Yet this team performed extremely well, tying for the Big Ten title with Purdue. 

Now I'm not saying that losing Welch back then is the same thing as losing Terrence Shannon now. But might the Illini without Shannon actually be better than they were before, perhaps because the pieces fit better and/or because the players better understand their roles?  That question might be asked after tomorrow's game.  For that Lou Henson team, losing Welch made them better.

* * * * *

Now I want to make a different comment, also based on Illinois history, this time reacting to something that Brad Underwood said regarding caring about the point spread in a game, even when it's not close, because it matters for the NCAA's NET rankings. Screw that. Every time that the Illini have gotten far into the NCAA Tournament, the games Illinois played at Rupp Arena in 1984 were an example, a key player was injured and that hampered team performance.  Brad Underwood should focus on minimizing the impact of injury on Illinois Basketball players from here on out.  

I'm not a medical doctor, but it's evident that playing increased minutes raises the risk of injury and/or increases the risk of exacerbating a prior injury.  Both Coleman Hawkins and Quincy Guerrier have prior injuries that are still relevant.  Consequently, to me its obvious then that Dain Danja should get more minutes, subbing for one of them while he's in the game.  I understand that this changes the nature of how the Illini play, because style-wise Dainja is quite different from the other two.  But the team needs to figure out how to be effective with Dainja in the game and figure it out now.  It shouldn't wait till one of the others gets seriously injured again. 

* * * * *

Here is one last point.  Where the current team has looked bad it's been against full court pressure.  Northwestern didn't try that at all.  If Illinois doesn't see it much more in Big Ten play, how does it prepare for that in the NCAA tournament?  

My own view on this is that Domask, as good as he's been with booty ball, is not that great bringing the ball up because he has a tendency to turn his back to the defense while he's dribbling, which gives the double team an advantage of surprise.  Indeed it seems to me that none of the starting guards are very strong in this area.  The guards coming off the bench may be better in this dimension.  

Maybe this says something about the playing time they get.  But maybe it says more about how practice goes.  How much of it is preparing for the next opponent and how much of it is preparing for the NCAA Tournament, without knowing who that opponent will be?  I don't think it is too early to be asking that question.

Maslow 101

If you run a regression
On creative expression
Regarding where you look
You'll find you were mistook.

For the workings inside one's head
Can neither be measured nor read
And while idea fragments internally seduce
Their expression typically ends as refuse.

It's within each of us
To be a creator
And do so without a fuss
First as emulator.

Then learn to immerse
In the task at hand.
Goodbye creative curse
And the feeling is grand.
#PracticeIsNecessaryButDoesNotMakePerfect

The Inevitable Decline

Noblesse oblige
Was under siege
That battle is done
And it's greed that has won.

Once the uber rich's predation
Would have caused a sensation
But now it is the norm
So, the rest of us must conform.

Our former Commander in Chief
Clearly is a thief
As many have suspected
And yet he might get reelected.

Bureaucracy
Hypocrisy
Kleptocracy
Then autocracy.

The tune you're humming
When you know it's coming
While the future isn't here
Surely it is near.
#TheIncredibleDreadInTurningAllRed

References

What Happens When the Super Rich Are This Selfish? (It Isn’t Pretty.)
This Is Why Google Paid Billions for Apple to Change a Single Setting

 

The Blight Of Being Convinced You're Right

Society seemingly has wrought
Citizenry purity of thought

Yet with so much to befuddle
Better would be intellectual muddle.
#Might-ImNotSure-ActuallyBeACure

It's The Same Story In Many Different Contexts

Zero sum
Is terribly glum.

It's winning the game
Without feeling shame.

So many can relate
To a future of hate.

A higher ideal
Is now incredibly unreal.
#WhileTheSoCalledLeadershipMilksItForAllItsWorth