Two Reasons Why I'm Scared of Using AI

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
--- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

The line seems so apropos to me now.  I have an old hit tracker for my blog called StatCounter.  I no longer get a lot of hits on my blog, according to StatCounter, and the majority of the hits I do get are from bots of one kind or another.  Blogger gives it own stats regarding number of hits and typically reports an order of magnitude more of such hits.  It does give a geographic distribution for those hits, but it doesn't provide the info that StatCounter provides, which matches the reader's online address either to the particular post or otherwise to the blog in general.  Indeed, I know essentially nothing about those hits which Blogger reports but StatCounter doesn't register.  Are those from human beings or from bots?  I don't know.  Note that this is for activity of mine I do try to track, however feebly.  With the rest of my computer usage, however, I'm not trying to track anything.  The paranoia comes from the feeling that all those providers out there, as well as the nefarious players who operate behind the scenes, are trying to track me, either to sell me something that I really don't want, or to entrap me in a way that would create some personal damage, and inadvertently I give them information so they can do that.

That said, I do continue to write blog posts on occasion, post fairly frequently in Facebook, and write the occasional rhyme that is posted in BlueSky.  So, in spite of my paranoia, I am putting fodder out there and I should acknowledge that might be making things worse.   But I do exercise control in making that content.  Generally, I have my guard up then.  (There is a life lesson, don't write a post when you're very angry, which I've learned the hard way.)  It's those interactions where my guard is down that is of more concern.  I'd really prefer not being observed then.

However, I'm not a purist about it, for sure.  I use many of Google's services, including their search engine, which now features AI.  The convenience benefit from doing so lured me in and now the use is largely habitual.  Plus I've recently had chats with AI when that is providing online help for some service I use.  One instance was with my bank about an online banking issue I was having; another was with my coffee vendor about a delivery that hadn't yet been scheduled.  With the former, it didn't seem there was an alternative to talk with a human being and I needed the transaction to go through.  With the latter, I was hoping it would be quicker than my human communication had been in the past.  (It wasn't.)  I suspect that increasingly, paranoids like me will find that they can't be purists about this.  Nevertheless, they can significantly reduce their interactions with AI as compared with those who are fully engaged with it.  Does that matter?  I hope so, though I really don't know.

* * * * * 

Let me get to the other reason.  Over my lifetime, I've spent a significant amount of my thinking in producing a narrative of one sort or another.  Maybe it started even earlier, but I'm sure it happened in college, lying in bed at night, thinking about the meaning of life questions.  Then, I hardly wrote anything that wasn't a paper for some course.  Whatever externalizing I did was in conversation with friends.  Professional writing of research papers increased after I became an Assistant Professor, but while my set of friends changed completely (they were other Assistant Professors in Economics), I mainly didn't write papers with them, though I did have many conversations with them.  That all started in 1980.  I eventually did write papers with a few others, but that was work.  Conversation with my friends was my social life.

When I switched careers to Educational Technology, which started in the spring of 1996, I began having conversations with faculty around campus about online learning.  I really enjoyed those conversations.  It was the best part of the work.  In some sense, my blogging, which began 9 years later,  was my internalizing these conversations, but then producing some output from those internalizations that others could have a go at.  The writing happened because I didn't have friends I could share my thoughts with over coffee.  My peers then had similar positions as I had but were located at other universities.  This was before Skype was popularized and, since everyone was so busy, even if we had the technology available a one-on-one online meeting during working hours seemed a luxury we couldn't afford.  (After I retired, for a while I hosted ooVoo chats with a group of friends.  We called ourselves Grumpy Old Men of Ed Tech.)

In order to process a narrative, such as the one for this post, I will use external tools.  These include an online dictionary, if there is mention of a movie or two then I will often take IMDB.com as a source, and for more general information I used to access Wikipedia quite a bit.  Using these tools notwithstanding, I exercised full control of the narrative.  It reflected my thinking.  If, in contrast, I thought of AI not as such a tool but rather as a coauthor, would I want that, to surrender some control so as to get to ideas I wouldn't have come up with myself?  Is it egotistical on my part to say I prefer full control, even if I'm then limited by my own prior experience and reading?  

I must say that with this a good part is about worrying where to find the slippery slope, after which ceding control has gone too far.  Further, I'm someone who has had a variety of bad habits over my lifetime.  If ceding control over the narrative is initially challenging, but then continuing to cede control starts to become easy, might that turn into another bad habit for me, regarding less and less practice with reflective thought?  

I can imagine that my own diminished mental function would encourage a different answer than I gave above.  So, perhaps five or ten years out, I will be unabashed about using AI as a writing partner.  But I'm not there yet.  And, truthfully, I'd like to forestall that time for as long as possible.   

Artificial Dumbness*

*The term Artificial Stupidity has already been claimed by Computer Science.

With my title I mean to make reference to the massive amount of illiteracy that characterizes our society today and, in particular, to make a follow up post to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Is This the End of Reading?  In the main I thought the piece well done, quite comprehensive on the issue, making the argument that what we are observing now about the non-reading of many college students is the consequence of a long-term trend.  Covid amplified the effects of that trend but it surely didn't start them.  The article also brings in the lack of face-to-face social interaction that many students now seem to expect, the consequence being that many of them feel lonely, something the article does point out, and also not getting sufficient practice in conversation, a point not made in the article.  

When it comes to remedies, the article considers what a few concerned college instructors have been doing to counteract the situation.  While those efforts may inspire some other instructors, collectively they don't scale up well.  Further, because the piece does appear in the Chronicle, the focus is on what might be done within higher education to address the issue.  From a societal viewpoint however, that would seem too late in a student's academic career to seriously get started with literacy.  The efforts really should begin in elementary school, or even earlier.  

Next let me touch on some earlier efforts on the literacy question, some of which get to how reading is taught.  The book, Why Johnny Can't Read, was published in 1955, the year I was born.  So, it seems, the issue of broad-based literacy has been with us my entire lifetime.  I wrote about my own experience with learning to read in a post called PLAs Please, which was mainly about outside-of-school learning.   This is the most relevant paragraph for reading instruction in elementary school.

Reading was different. Pretty early on, perhaps fourth grade, we had SRA. This history by Don Parker is a fascinating read, if a little melodramatic. We also had individualized reading. (Those who preach a learner centric approach likely will be intrigued at how early this piece is and yet that its critique is not about “teacher centric” so much as it is about “grouping,” where all students read the same book.) And now I must confess that my memory fails, or that I’m not able in looking backward to attribute cause to school or elsewhere or in some combination.

The reader should be aware of my own confirmation bias.  Intuitively, I would like to replicate my experience in elementary school for current students.  But would that work?  Those who go on to become a college professor typically were quite good students themselves and may not be aware of issues that other students face who are more typical.  There are also generational effects that should be considered.  For example, we had several local public libraries within easy driving distance and my dad would take us on Saturday so we had a new book to read each week.  He bought a bunch of Time-Life books for me to read as well.  Further, I had very good teachers, I lived in a nice middle class community in Bayside, and I graduated from P.S. 203 in 1966.  Aside from playing outside, which I did with my friends, television was the main competitor for my time that might have been spent on reading.  I actually did a lot of both.  Homework, for me, was not very time consuming. 

Now let's fast forward to consider later reforms, yet well before the present time.  I wrote about this in a post called Are We Ketman? written right before I retired.  I was reading Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the American School System, after I had read a review of her book by E.D. Hirsch.  I found the history that Ravitch wrote about fascinating, since I lived through the Reagan years and was vaguely aware of the report, A Nation at Risk, which came out in 1983, but I was an assistant professor of economics then and somewhat heads down with a focus on my own research (although I did read the New York Times).  I was somewhat more aware of No Child Left Behind, which became law in 2002, as by then I was a campus Ed Tech administrator and got to know several people in the College of Education, some of whom were quite wary of NCLB.  At the time, I don't believe I had a strong opinion on the matter, but by a decade later I had become quite disappointed with the accountability movement as it impacted college-level instruction, which I wrote about in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students prepare for exams?  This post details how illiteracy and non-learning are tied at the hip.  By enabling instruction like this, higher education is a major culprit in the larger drama.

My belief is that literacy is necessary for sense making and making sense of things is a primary reason for education.  This is true whether you regard education primarily as a passport to a good job, which I take is how the majority of the people view the purpose of education today, or if instead you regard education as a way to make good citizens, a necessity in a democratic nation, with John Dewey and his book Democracy and Education the primer, and Harry Boyte a latter day apostle.  (I saw Boyte give a talk on undergraduate education back in 2016 and wrote a long post about it then.)  But as my previous paragraph should make clear, you can talk about a noble purpose of education, on the one hand, while the actual functioning of instruction betrays that purpose.  Further, to the extent that the passport view of education holds, college faculty seem like gatekeepers and resentment can build when the education itself is non-nurturing, so the gatekeeper function appears that's all there is to it.  This is true not just for those who haven't attained a college degree, but for many newly minted graduates as well.

With all of this as background, we should then ask, who benefits from this massive amount of illiteracy?  I will answer with a few examples from my recent experience before generalizing from that.  Tuesday morning I received the following text message:

Illinois State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Final Notice: Enforcement Penalties Begin on May 29.  Our records show that as of today, you still have an outstanding traffic ticket. In accordance with Illinois State Administrative Code 15C-16.003, if you do not complete payment by May 28, 2025, we will take the following actions:

1. Report to the DMV violation database
2. Suspend your vehicle registration starting May 28
3. Suspend driving privileges for 30 days
4. Transfer to a toll booth and charge a 35% service fee
5. You may be prosecuted and your credit score will be affected
Pay Now:

https://idot-illinois.gov-qnfr.icu/portal

Please pay immediately before enforcement to avoid license suspension and further legal disputes.
(Reply Y and re-open this message to click the link, or copy it to your browser.)

I subsequently found this Illinois Department of Transportation page, warning about text and email scams like the one above.  Who falls for these?  Does lack of literacy correlate with falling for a scam like this?  My guess is that it does.  Also in the last couple of days, I've gotten phone calls from numbers I don't recognize in California and Arizona.  I don't pick up and they don't leave voicemail.  I'm going to assume those were scam calls as well.  Who does pick up on calls like those?  So, it seems to me that scammers benefit from massive illiteracy.

My generalization is to consider scams in the world of politics.  And it's not just Fake News!  Trump is a master of misdirection.  I contend that he has doubled down on attacking DEI because he wants to divert our attention from other things his administration is doing.  In particular, he mainly doesn't want ordinary voters to focus on economic issues (even while it is their primary concern).  The "Big, Beautiful Bill" is a prime example.  In the main it's about tax cuts for the rich.  Why should ordinary voters want that?  And why should they tolerate it when it raises the deficit and necessitates cuts in programs like Medicaid?  But if the voters have their attention elsewhere, they won't be asking these sort of questions.  I am still amazed at how many younger voters, including those who are college educated, voted for Trump because their job prospects are mediocre at best and they are challenged to find a clear path for entering the middle class.  Their economic travails are real enough.  But their lack of literacy is on display, as is their poor memory for failing to reconsider how Trump screwed up during the first year of Covid, which is probably what cost him reelection in 2020.  How could they think he'd be better to improve their own economic situation this time around?  

* * * * *

The word artificial in my title suggests that we can remedy the situation if we set our minds to it.  Is that only wishful thinking on my part or could we truly improve literacy in this country and with that improve sense making and reading between the lines as well?  I will content myself with making a few points on this question rather than detail a full program to achieve the goal.  I may do the latter in a subsequent post.

• The massive income and wealth inequality in our country has fueled the passport view of education.  Reducing the importance of the latter will require doing something of substance about the former.  A friend recently told me that I have socialist tendencies.  Indeed I do.  Many others do not.  Yet how an overwhelming majority of Americans don't share in my views completely baffles me.
  
  
•  In particular, how we fund K-12 public education now leads to de facto separate and not equal schools, as Jonathan Kozol has repeatedly reminded us.  But the lack of literacy is not just among lower income students.  So, while we try to better fund school systems, we will need other ways to improve literacy.
  
  
• I have this image in my head about when my kids were little and I would read to them at night, either with them already in bed or sitting on my lap and then getting ready for bed.  In other words, the act of reading was associated with snuggling, in this case with a parent.  Could the snuggling happen with other adults, at a school or a library or some other place that kids might congregate?  And could those adults be volunteers who help teachers or librarians, because that sort of thing, while important, probably breaks down if there are too many kids per adult so the teachers and librarians can't do it all themselves.
  
  
• I think the first book I read was The Cat in the Hat Came Back by Dr. Suess.  I read many of the Dr. Suess books as a kid and the rhyming was definitely an attraction.  (I write a lot of my own rhymes now.) When my kids were little, we read aloud Sandra Boynton - A hog and a frog cavort in the bog.  Does rhyming help kids learn to read at first?  I know there is some sensitivity that kids from different social settings might need different things to read to identify with.  But perhaps there are certain universal ways to make early readings easily understandable and that should be more of a concern.  Context will definitely become important at some point, but perhaps it is less so initially.  Is rhyming one of those universals?
  
  
• Some years ago I learned about service learning - college courses where students rendered community service and the course instructors and community service providers worked in tandem to make the entire thing functional.  At present, one might imagine those adult volunteers from a few bullets back to be registered in a service learning course.  Right now, that could happen within the College of Education, which would rule out most college students.  But what if the University as a whole embraced the idea regardless of the student's major and with the University providing transportation and other facilitating services so that the college students could spend one day a week in reading to these primary school students?  Would that become something attractive to do for the college students and in that way reinforce the good citizen approach to education.
  
  
• In addition, might such a service activity by college students encourage them to improve their own literacy by reading on their own more?  And, if it did this, could it also impact how these students go about the courses they are taking?

Let me wrap up with a note of caution.  Sometimes I can become very idealistic and hopeful, in spite of the current evidence.  Also, my experience as an Ed Tech administrator, at first in the mid 1990s when it actually was a lot of fun, then later in the mid 2000s, when we tried to scale the approach to the entire campus, which was far less enjoyable, is that early adopters can accomplish remarkable things and then make you quite hopeful.  Majority adopters, in contrast, tend to do things in a boring way and can make you cynical about things.  Being aware of this in advance, perhaps there might emerge a way for the early adopter results to maintain and spread more broadly.  I certainly hope so.

Rubbing SALT into the Wound

I'm commenting on this piece from today's NY Times, which is about how the cap on the deduction for state and local property taxes is causing problems for Republicans in the House in passing that big, beautiful, tax bill.  Here I just want to make a couple of quick observations, but a personal point first.  

Yesterday, I paid the initial installment of the Champaign County property tax.  Even though we get the senior citizen exemption, it only lowers our tax bill a trifle.  The amount of our property tax well exceeds the $10,000 federal cap.  That's mostly not a big deal for me except on specific days - when I use TurboTax to file our federal return and when I pay the property taxes. Otherwise, it is out of sight, out of mind.  But Champaign housing costs are modest and we have comfortable retirement income.

The underlying issue considered in the article is for those who live in the megalopolis in and around New York City.  This includes those who live in Nassau County, Suffolk County, Westchester County, Eastern New Jersey, and New York City itself, all of which are mentioned in the article, and perhaps those with an even longer commute to the city, such as in southern Connecticut.  The issue is about housing costs, which are sky high, and how working families even with two earners struggle to afford the expense.   For them it's very challenging, no doubt.  With that, the $10,000 cap on the deduction for state and local property taxes, which first came into effect in 2018, added insult to injury.  

So, Republican lawmakers in the area are looking for some way to remedy the situation, perhaps by raising the cap, or getting rid of it altogether.  But, this needs to be done in a revenue neutral way, where the tax revenue lost from raising the property tax cap gets offset by some revenue enhancement elsewhere in the system.  To this now retired economist, a cap on total deductions makes sense whether those deductions are for mortgage interest, property taxes, charitable contributions, healthcare costs, or other categories of expense that are eligible for tax deduction.  

But, here's the thing.  An overall cap on deductions would impact the highest income taxpayers most.  No doubt charities would be upset by such a change in the law, as they'd lose some of the largesse that high-roller contributors had been making.  But the real ones complaining might be those Republican lawmakers, who lose out on gifts from these same high rollers, just because they made the actual tax law more progressive.  

In my opinion, that's how the tax system should be.   It's quite ironic that the cap on this single tax deduction has become such an issue in the New York megalopolis that it might expose the regressive nature of this big, beautiful, tax bill.  If I didn't find some dark humor in that, surely I'd be crying about it.

Al Truism

Earlier today my Facebook feed was filled with items about Bill Gates, stemming from this piece in the NY Times Magazine, about the plan to zero-out the Gates Foundation endowment in the next 20 years rather than to try and have the Gates Foundation operate in perpetuity. Most of the piece is an interview by David-Wallace Wells with Gates, to try and shed some light on Gates' perspective as to what the Foundation should be funding and why. 

Gates is very into problems of pubic health, particularly as they manifest in developing countries.  He talked a lot about Africa, mortality rates of children and their mothers while giving birth, and disease that should be imminently eradicated, certainly before the Gates Foundation goes out of business.  He also talked a lot about future technology, both for pharmaceuticals yet to be developed fully and for artificial intelligence, which might very well deliver medical care as well as serve as teachers of children, especially when the human alternative is in short supply.  I would call all of this forward looking.

(These days I prefer to read a sans-serif font, as it offers less clutter for my eyes.  But looking at the title of my post, one flaw with a sans-serif font is that the symbol for a lower case "L" is the same symbol as that for an upper case "I" and in some contexts, one might not be able to tell which was intended.  While I was going for a pun with my title, I wasn't looking for this ambiguity.  I meant the lower case "L" though the reader is free to make his or her own interpretation.)

But I wondered whether the interview missed on some points, particularly this one.  Given the U.S. government has cut its public health services internationally, for example PEPFAR and especially USAID funding of healthcare, should the Gates Foundation step in to partially fill the void?  It seemed implicitly as if the answer to that question is no, but the reason why that's the answer wasn't provided.  I would have liked to see this spelled out.  

A second question I have, one related to the first one, is whether some coordination across foundations is needed for filling the void.  With each foundation acting independently, and the others with smaller endowments than the Gates Foundation, they too can say no because the hole to fill is just too big for them.  Would that no longer be true if they acted in concert?  

Let me close on this note.  I'm comfortable financially but not wealthy.  I find similar dilemmas in my own charitable giving.  The bulk goes to the volunteer work I'm engaged in with Universal Love Alliance, but I also give locally to the public schools and the food bank.  Each has needs.  The approach I take to balancing them is completely ad hoc.  Can one do better than that?  I wish I knew.

Getting Started

When I was a kid, before I took piano lessons, which I started when I was 8, I learned two songs. One was Chopsticks, which was a very easy piece. You can see why it became an introduction to playing the piano. The other was Heart and Soul. That was played as a duet. One person, sitting on the right side of the piano bench, played the melody. The other person, sitting on the left side, played the accompaniment. Now I'm wondering how Heart and Soul found its place to be in this role and did the composer, Hoagy Carmichael, have any idea when he was writing this tune that it would eventually come to play this role.

Maybe those of us who care about teaching and learning should spend more time considering gateway activities, do-able and compelling at the same time. Identifying those poses a challenge, certainly. But the payoff from having found one seems quite large indeed.

I Am Not A Psychiatrist, But Really...

 ... how can the ADHD research be so inane?

I am reacting to this piece from the NY Times Sunday Magazine.   At first, I thought it an interesting read but as I got further into it I became increasingly frustrated with the maintained assumptions.  Let me explain my concerns.

Here is the setup in many of the experiments described in the essay.  Students known to have ADHD are divided into two groups.  Both are tasked with doing something cognitively challenging.  The first group gets some treatment (Ritalin, Adderall, or something else in that family of drugs) while the second group gets the placebo.  Then they are scored on engagement in the doing the task and in the success on working out the problem.  On the engagement front, the first group well outperforms the second.  In identifying a solution, however, both groups are equally bad.  Though engaged, the first group doesn't come up with a good strategy for addressing the problem posed. 

Now, let's take a step back from ADHD and instead focus on learning.  Then we'll return to ADHD and its consequences for non-learning.  It seems appropriate to posit that learning is cumulative.  That goes for reasoning skills, background knowledge needed to make sense of the current situation, and a sense of confidence that when working a problem one can get to a reasonable solution.  For those students who don't have learning disabilities, whether ADHD or something else, we'd fully expect the junior high school student to be more proficient than the first grader in these dimensions and we'd expect the high school student to be even further along.  But for a student with ADHD or some other learning disorder, is that true?  If the lack of prior growth inhibits the learner at a later stage, why should we think that engagement will address the issue, unless engagement goes back to square one and allows the growth to occur so as to catch up, albeit at a later time in life than is usual?  But that's not what the experiments reported about in the essay did.  Apparently they assumed the students had age-appropriate reasoning skills, only to find that their experiments revealed otherwise.

Now I'm aware that students are scored on their reading by grade level.  I wish students were likewise-wise scored on their reasoning by grade level, but to my knowledge they are not.  What, however, would happen if reading grade level were taken as a proxy for reasoning grade level?  Could the experimenters have obtained the students' reading grade level before administering their treatment?  If they had done that, would the experimental results have been so surprising?

Later in the piece there is a discussion about stimulants and their impact on engagement of the people who are taking the stimulants.  After reading a bit in this part, I did a Google search to ask, is coffee a stimulant?  Indeed it is.  If the author of the piece acknowledged that up front, and also acknowledged that most readers of the piece were doing so while drinking coffee, then the idea of stimulant or not seems unrealistic.  The vast majority of us are on stimulants.  Comparing Adderall to coffee might then be useful to establish level of intensity as an important matter.  But stimulants or not as an issue should never have been brought to our attention.  

Finally, I believe that engagement itself is not a sufficient test, though it is evidently necessary.  The issue is engagement in something that promotes personal growth versus engagement that is mainly dissipative.   And on this matter, one needs to ask whether others can task the student and merely by doing so assert that is important.  Were the student to task himself or herself and do so in a responsible way, would he or she concur or do otherwise?  We can only speculate about our historical giants.  Were Einstein and Freud, for example, hampered by learning disabilities, ADHD or otherwise?  We can all agree that Vincent van Gogh was so hampered.  But he clearly was engaged.  Is that the answer then?

Charity, Government, or Joint Provision of Social Services: When Is One Better than Either of the Other Two?

For the past few years I have been making a monthly contribution to the local food bank, part of my usual charitable giving.  A couple of weeks ago I learned that USDA had been giving grants to food banks around the country, but those were cut by DOGE recently.  I wondered how I should respond to this news.  Should I increase the amount of my monthly contribution?  As one person operating in isolation, that would just be a drop in the bucket.  Would it be possible for enough like-minded people to contribute more so as to enable the food banks to continue their operation, even if it weren't a perfect match for the DOGE cuts?  And how would the needed coordination come about to make this outcome possible?  It is these questions which provide the fuel for this post.

The post is also fueled by the little bit of news and opinion pieces I have been reading as of late, which have the Democrats searching for a coherent direction in which to respond to the Trump offensive.  I will offer an idealistic pie-in-the-sky approach that might at least be considered some before dismissing it as too impractical.  Let me begin.

The good about charity is that it addresses a felt need and that those who make donations to the charitable organization do so voluntarily.  Under these circumstances, the need always seems to exceed what the charitable organization can deliver.  In other words, the donations and the need don't line up perfectly and the charitable organization is constrained to limit its services within what's made available via donations.  Government provision of service, in contrast, can scale up well beyond that, but then services are funded by taxes (or deficit spending) and taxes are often cast as coercive rather than as social obligation needed to maintain the public weal.  With this simple (and perhaps simplistic) casting of the circumstances, the scale of the need then determines the better way of doing things.  At low scale, charity is better.  At very high scale, government provision is better, so food stamps rather than food banks.  Joint provision makes the most sense when the scale is somewhere in the middle.   This story could be readily complicated to make it more realistic.  I will refrain from doing so here, because I want to move onto other matters.

I receive lots of solicitations from non-profit organizations, some of which are charities, but some of which are not, such as for a Democratic Party organization or a Democratic candidate. I find there is a very large number of such solicitations.  And I also get commercial solicitations, a remarkable number for life insurance that I don't need, and others for a new credit card or a new bank account.  In total I find the solicitations overwhelming and for the most part I entirely ignore them, which renders them ineffective.  I wonder how many others are in the same boat as me on this score. Would it be possible to reduce the volume of the solicitations, perhaps by consolidating many of them, and thereby get the few that do still come through to capture my attention in a way where I might respond positively to one of them?

On a different point, one needs to concede that the Republicans are far better at propaganda than the Democrats.  In large part, this is because negative messaging is usually more effective.  In the past, some of that negative messaging has gone into demonizing the people who receive government assistance, casting them as immoral cheaters.  For example, back in the 1970s  in response to AFDC, we heard about Welfare Queens who were ripping off the taxpayer.  While personally I find such messaging offensive, there is no doubt that it was effective with many other voters, by appealing to their prior prejudices. The Democrats have a harder job here, in trying to deliver an uplifting message about government being helpful to its citizens, one that voters take sincerely rather than regard with deep cynicism.  How might such a message get through?

And still a different thought, which I think should be given some consideration.  In a well functioning society every citizen plays a role.  But in the rhetoric of politics, there is a tendency to focus on some sub-population only and ignore the rest of the voters.  It is necessary to have inclusivity across economic classes in the political rhetoric, if at all possible.  The Democrats now want to embrace economic populism, which to me is quite okay, but then it seems that voters like me are largely ignored, a mistake in my view.  We have an important role to play, though mainly out of social obligation rather than as recipients of government largesse.  Widespread need and social obligation are two sides of the same coin.  The political rhetoric should reflect that.

Having set the table, I'm ready to deliver my proposal to address these issues.  The Democrats should form a charitable foundation, for now call it the Democratic Party Foundation (DPF).  (I tried to come up with an alternative foundation name that was a riff on The Invisible Hand, but everything I attempted was already taken.  Somebody more adept at marketing can come up with a better name.)  The purpose of the DPF is first to make grants to charitable organizations, such as the food bank.  Second, when there is evident need but there is no charitable organization operating to address the need, the DPF will be empowered to create such a charitable organization to fill the gap. Third, as long as the Democrats maintain minority status in Congress all Democratic organizations, such as the DCCC, will suspend their own fundraising activity and instead redirect potential contributors to the DPF.  Likewise, Democratic candidates for office will redirect their campaign contributions to the DPF.  The hope is that this will refocus attention on the need the DPF attempts to address and away from current political issues, which are quite nasty.  Fourth, partly just to educate Americans about their fellow citizens and partly to encourage additional donations, the DPF will shine a light on people in need, under various circumstances.  And last, up front the DPF will announce that if and when the Democrats become the majority party in Congress, and take over the White House as well, some of what the DPF supports might very well move to government provided programs instead, because the need is much greater than the contributions the DPF can bring in to address the need.  

Some evident challenges that the DPF will face are about how to maintain fairness in selecting those charities the DPF does support and what level of support the DPF does provide, how not to become overly bureaucratic so that the bulk of the donations to the DPF end up as grants to other charities, and how to avoid even an appearance of impropriety.  I don't have solutions for these challenges that I can present here, but it is evident that such solutions need to be contemplated in advance of the formation of the DPF.  Further, as one can anticipate that many of those in need won't receive any help from the DPF, one wonders whether they will remain bitter about the Democrats or if they might as least come to agree that the DPF is doing as best as it can to address the issues.  What would it take to make the latter more likely?

In case it is not evident yet, going all in with the DPF is meant to be an extraordinarily drastic solution, which one might hope should become evident soon after the DPF begins to operate.  For the sake of argument, let's say the DPF has some early success, the consequence being that the narrative in the media becomes more about the overwhelming need many citizens are feeling and much less about what Trump and Musk are doing to upset the apple cart.  Further, suppose this new narrative begins to have appeal to some very wealthy Americans, both Democrat and Republican.  Might they then make significant donations to the DPF?   And might they also speak out about the absurdity of tax cuts on their own behalf?  Were that to happen, we'd almost be home.

When I was a child my dad would read to me and my siblings at night before we went to bed.  Sometimes it would be Aesop Fables.  My little sketch of a solution to our current dilemma is very much in the spirit of The North Wind and the Sun.  In the story, the Sun wins out.  Wouldn't it be delightful if that were to happen here, pipe dream though it may be.

The Sequel Where Clarence's Older Cousin Turns Mr. Potter Into Another George Bailey

I have a soft spot for schmaltzy movies and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of my favorites.  I must have seen it a zillion times, but in case you haven't, it's available on Amazon Prime, among other places.  

The hero of the story is George Bailey, a genuinely decent person who has lost his way, after his uncle Billy has misplaced a large deposit that their Building and Loan needs to continue to operate.  George takes responsibility for Billy's error but then despairs as there seems no way out of this thicket unless this money is found.  Clarence is George's Guardian Angel.   He helps George work through the various dilemmas, initially by almost drowning so that George has to save him.  Ultimately, it is George's wife Mary who does the heavy lifting, calling all of George's friends to ask them to chip in and help George out.  They do and then some.  George then has his faith restored and Clarence "earns his wings" for helping out this good soul to get on the right path again. 

In this story, Mr. Potter is the bad guy, the richest man in town, but totally uncaring for the others who live in Bedford Falls.  He is stingy and manipulative, a complete contrast to George.  The story I vaguely have in mind would take that at as a starting point, but then via the various happenings that the story depicts, Potter goes through a transformation.  He is unmarried and has no children.  What should he be caring about when he enters the afterlife?  The selfishness might be best understood if he expects to live a considerable while longer and the power he wields gives him personal satisfaction.  In the story as told, he doesn't have to confront that question.  How would his personality change if circumstances forced him to realize the end of his natural life was imminent?  Some alter ego would be needed to help Mr. Potter work through the moral dilemmas and reconcile himself both with his future in the afterlife and his earlier natural life.  Clarence's older cousin, also a Guardian Angel, is in position to do this.  

* * * * *

I have no skill as a screenwriter, so beyond this very brief sketch I am not going to attempt to write this sequel.  I welcome any and all to give it a try and consider what you come up with as an original work of your own, not a derivative of this post.  I want to encourage your creativity, not stifle it.  While we always need interesting new ideas, we especially need them now.

Instead, I want to make two brief points and then close.  One is that this idea of a highly significant life event fundamentally altering one's perspective is not novel.  Indeed, over the past two days I watched the mini-series, Prime Target (it's on AppleTV+) where the protagonist goes through such a transformation in the ultimate episode after a horrific experience in the penultimate episode.  (For the sake of those who might watch this, I don't want my post to be a spoiler.  I will say I thought the series was okay but not great.) I wonder how many other mini-series or movies feature a similar personal transformation in the lead character.

The other point, in case it is not obvious, is that Mr. Potter can be taken as a placeholder for some current day plutocrat.  We might then ask whether such a personal transformation might happen with one of them and what would that take?  Could it be orchestrated by others?  If so, how?  In my previous post, I briefly mentioned coercive means whereby a host of plutocrats change their perspective and thereby enable a credible impeachment of Trump.  But such coercion amounts to a kind of warfare.  Not feeling that necessary as of yet, one wonders whether there is a more benign alternative that might achieve such results.   

I don't want to try to answer that here.  I simply want to encourage others to be asking similar questions.

Should There Be A Remake Of Seven Days In May?

For those who are my age (and those even older) you may very well have read the book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.  I'm sure I read it, maybe in junior high school, or perhaps in 9th or 10th grade. I seem to recall it was quite a compelling read.  More will recall the movie, which starred Burt Lancaster as General James Mattoon Scott, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Kirk Douglas as Jiggs Casey, General Scott's adjutant, Frederic March as the President of the United States, Jordan Lyman; and Ava Gardner as General Scott's jilted lover, Eleanor Holbrook.  

The story is about a coup attempt in the U.S., a plot schemed by higher ups in the military, in which the plan is for General Scott himself to assume the Presidency once the coup succeeds.  General Scott is far more hawkish against the Russians than is President Lyman and with that General Scott has far greater popularity among the public.  A recent treaty with Russia, signed by the President, is viewed as a demonstration of his weakness.  The public is fearful that the Russians won't keep to their end of the bargain.  Jiggs Casey is not one of the conspirators in the plot attempt.  He learns about it by decoding the messaging that he receives on behalf of General Scott.  He then brings this information to the White House, so the President knows about the conspiracy.  The bulk of the story is about how the plot is then thwarted.

It is worthwhile to cast this story within the real events of the time.  The book was first published right around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The movie came out a couple of years later.   The JFK assassination happened the year in between.  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution happened earlier in the same year as when the movie came out.  I started junior high school a couple of years after that, when the Vietnam War was beginning to ramp up.  It took a while before I became aware of anti-war sentiment and the distrust of the military leadership that sentiment engendered.  So, it may be that how you read this book depended on when you read it.  But for me it was clear - Jordan Lyman the duly elected President, his advisers and Jiggs Casey as well were the good guys in the story.  General Scott, who exceeded his authority in plotting the coup, along with his fellow co-conspirators were the bad guys.  

If there were a remake of the story, it would need to be cast in the current moment.  And, at least from where I'm sitting, that means the story would have to be reversed in a critical way.  The coup plotters would be the good guys.  For the good guys to win in the story, the interesting part would then be how to construct a plausible coup attempt that has a chance of succeeding under the current circumstances.

* * * * * 

The above is the view from 64,000 feet.  I know from my teaching days that for learners such a view is not sufficient.  They need another view closer to the ground, an example that illustrates the more general proposition.  For that reason I'm speculating about a possibility, I dare not call it a likelihood, where the coup plotters come from entirely outside the Federal government and then exert their pressure indirectly on those within.

Here is the idea in a nutshell.  While a bunch of assassinations of key players would have visceral appeal to many readers (including me) pulling this off seems incredibly unlikely.  So a different path is needed.  Let's instead consider Impeachment.  Both of the previous Trump Impeachment Trials in the Senate were a mockery.  If there were to be a third such trial (as well as near simultaneous Impeachment Trials for others in the current Executive Branch) how might it be that guilty verdicts are obtained then?  My answer is that ahead of time a sufficient number of Senators would need to be blackmailed in a certain way - namely that donations to their campaigns as well as other largess they have been receiving would be entirely cut off if they voted the wrong way on Impeachment.  Who could make credible such blackmail threats?  The plutocrats (multi-billionaires) who operate behind the scenes could do this.  But why would they do this?  They, in turn, must be blackmailed or themselves kidnapped and forced into it.  They obviously wouldn't do it willingly, at least not at first.  

How do you turn blackmailers and kidnappers into the good guys?  Well, part of this should be considered a latter day Robin Hood story.  Criminal activity that robs from the rich and gives to the poor casts the criminals as heroes.  (Implicitly, there is a backstory of the rich becoming that way on the backs of the poor and then being quite stingy about it.  Robin Hood and his Merry Men are undoing this injustice.)  So, who gets to play this latter day band of Merry Men?

My candidate is some subset of major research universities.  They have the needed expertise in computer science (for hacking into bank accounts), in finance (for knowing how to manipulate funds without arousing attention from the authorities), in providing muscle (via ROTC and possibly other law enforcement preparation programs), and they have the connections with the high rollers who are on their governing boards and comprise their largest donors.  

Now a few preliminary questions need to be asked and answered before this candidate can be considered plausible.  

• Are these research universities in a good position to cast themselves as Robin Hood? At present, the answer is no, as I argued quite extensively in this post: Repricing - in Higher Education and in the Economy as a Whole.  But, apparently higher education is getting clobbered money-wise by the current White House.  If it wants to save itself in the eyes of the public it needs to recast itself in a credible way as a critical instrument toward rebuilding a middle-class society.  And it needs to recast itself to insiders at the university as well, particularly students and faculty.  Toward that end, I suggest a large group reading of Democracy and Education by John Dewey.
  
  
• Do the circumstances justify "biting the hand that feeds you" in having these universities turn on their large donors in the way sketched above?  I'd respond to this question in two different ways.  While the donations are large from the point of the universities' coffers, are they large when considered as a share of the donor's wealth?  If not, what else might be done to put that private wealth toward the public good?  And can donors be convinced of doing that purely by reasoned argument or is that a pipe dream?
  
  
•  Universities are supposed to be havens for free speech and open communication.  In such an environment, how does one keep word of the conspiracy from leaking out so as not to be thwarted by the current regime?  I don't have a good answer for this one.  I only know that the question needs a good answer.
  
  
• If the conspiracy were otherwise effective, would most liberals nonetheless object to it because the ends don't justify the means?
  
  

* * * * *

In this closing section, I want to get at some of my reasons for writing this post.   As with many of my posts, the main goal is to get the reader to think through the issues rather than to provide a blueprint for resolution of these issues.  Further, elsewhere I largely am not writing/commenting/publicly reacting to the current political news, this as a way to keep my emotions somewhat in check.  But I can't keep myself from doing a "what if" exercise of the type that I'm not getting from the little I do read in the news or from posts by my friends.  I spent all these years as an theoretical economist and then an ed tech administrator doing such what if exercises.  It's part of my persona.

From seeing posts in Facebook, evidently there is a lot of frustration with the current White House and a lot of the posts are protests of some sort.  I do understand the need to vent.  I yell at the TV when watching a basketball game and I think the ref made a bad call.  But do I really think my yelling at the TV will impact the game situation at all? 

So there is a reason to ask what coordinated fighting back looks like rather than individual venting.  In between might be coordinated protest, which is legal and ethical.  But is it effective, and if so, how long does it take to be?  Do we have the time available to allow it to work?  It seems to me that under the current circumstances it is reasonable to ask whether there are more expeditious means. 

Then, too, I don't think we can rely on the a purely political solution now.  The Democrats are too weak and in disarray as to how to address the present crisis.  So, shouldn't non-political solutions be contemplated even if they seem improbable at first?

One last point is that I apparently have a bug for Seven Days in May.  About a dozen years ago I wrote a post called ECOMCON, after having watched the movie again.  The underlying issue at the time was the treaty with Iran about them not developing nukes.  So, for me Seven Days in May serves as a good reference point for making argument.  But what about for later generations.  Would they want to watch the movie?  If so, would it entertain them?  I wish I knew the answer to those questions.

Putting Two And Two Together About The Current Trade War

I've read some pieces recently about Trump's misdirection and his taking actions to confound things so that others, the media and the press mainly but also some Republicans, don't understand the real intent.  Using that, I'm going to posit a simple idea that might explain things.

The idea is this.  Certain domestic industries are clamoring for protection.  The one that comes to mind is microchip production.  In the past, Silicon Valley companies have imported their microchips, possibly from a vertical integration arrangement where this critical input was produced abroad as part of a global supply chain.  Suppose that, as of late, the decision was made to bring that supply chain entirely within the U.S.  You may very well recall that this was a goal both for Biden and for Harris.

Now, the efficient thing to do in this case, assuming the government supported this goal, would be to place sector-specific tariffs to make the import of these inputs more expensive and thereby enable domestic production of the inputs to be more viable.  But that would be showing one's cards.  Trump does not play Indian Poker.  

So, instead, we have the current tariff morass, where the bulk of it simply offers cover for the desired protectionist policy.  Further, to make things more explicit, we really only want to apply tariffs to inputs that come from China, though one might imagine that China would itself use intermediaries to avoid the tariffs, if possible.  We don't have any desire to place tariffs on goods from Mexico or Canada that are not themselves imports from China.  

I want to note that this is all conjecture on my part.  I have no direct evidence about what I'm saying here.  But it does make sense to me.

Maslow Encore Une Fois

This is a connect-the-dots post.  One form of connection is from the past to the present.  My blog started back in 2005 and some of the references that I linked to in posts during the first year were from pieces written earlier than that. So I will take snippets from several of these early posts to make the case that what was happening then in higher education offered a reasonably good foreshadowing of what is happening now.  A different but related connection is that issues within higher education seem to mirror issues within society as a whole. Then, a third connection is about the search for resolutions of these issues.  I've tried a variety of these, each of which has failed (mainly because I offered them up as a theoretical possibility but had no way to implement them).   It does seem that to date societal imposed solutions have made matters worse.  Is it possible for there to be effective solutions that do improve matters?

Now let me take a lesson from some recent TV shows I've watched, which go back and forth between the present and the foreshadowing events that happened earlier.  I will mention two pieces I've read in the last couple of days that discuss current major social issues.  One of those is this opinion piece by Chris Hayes about boredom, I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own.  I struggled with this piece, first because initially I thought it was about why people voted for Trump, but that turned out to be a just a throw-away line.  Then later I felt that while the premise is probably right, boredom is widespread, there were many points that might have been made but weren't, so the picture Hayes paints is far from complete.  I will get to some of my criticisms later in this post.  

The other piece is from the Chronicle of Higher Education by Beckie Supiano, Some Assembly Still Required How K-12 reforms and recent disruptions created Gen Z’s baffling habits.  I was much more in agreement with what was said in this piece, though I believe there is a tendency to attribute most of the problems to Covid, and not consider trends in (non)learning that were forming prior to Covid.  Certainly, at the Higher Ed level, the student mental health crisis was manifest in 2019, if not earlier. Covid exacerbated the situation but wasn't the initial cause.

Now let me go to the foreshadowing.  In a post from June 2005 called Connections Across Cohorts of Students, I referenced a piece that George Kuh had written for Change Magazine back in 2003, What We're Learning About Student Engagement from NSSE.  Kuh's essay offers us language for the antonym of boredom, engagement. But, more importantly, this paragraph which I quoted in full in my post is worth reproducing even now.

And this brings us to the unseemly bargain, what I call the "disengagement
compact": "I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone." That is, I won't make
you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won't have to grade as
many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this
bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many
students get decent grades--B's and sometimes better. There seems to be a
breakdown of shared responsibility for learning--on the part of faculty members
who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part
of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions
provide.

I would argue that the disengagement compact is still alive and well in Higher Ed, though campuses like Illinois worked in certain very specific areas (notably undergraduate research) so they could score higher in those metrics that NSSE focused on and so as not to have to face the issue head on.  And Supiano's piece makes it seem that K-12 is also witnessing the disengagement compact.  I don't have any evidence, one way or the other, whether the workplace offers yet another locus for the disengagement compact, yet I would not find it surprising if others could readily provide such evidence. 

Over the years, I've been somewhat idealistic as to how to address these social issues.  Maslow has been my hero this way and self-actualization seems the evident answer to the prayer that such a solution might be found.  Another post from the first year of my blog entitled, Maslow, gives some then relevant examples of self-actualizers and provides a link to this site, which offers a primer on Maslow's work.  It also offers a list of attributes a self-actualizer will exhibit, which I thought would make for a good set of aspirations for any student.  The list is reproduced below:

Truth, rather than dishonesty.
Goodness, rather than evil.
Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity.
Unity, wholeness, and transcendence of opposites, not arbitrariness or forced choices.
Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanization of life.
Uniqueness, not bland uniformity.
Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or accident.
Completion, rather than incompleteness.
Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness.
Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity.
Richness, not environmental impoverishment.
Effortlessness, not strain.
Playfulness, not grim, humorless, drudgery.
Self-sufficiency, not dependency.
Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness. 

The questions I asked myself then are whether an ordinary student can be encouraged to become a self-actualizer, if becoming a self-actualizer was mainly nurture rather than nature, and if it is possible to make up for lost time when early forms of nurture prove insufficient in this dimension.  I'm still asking myself these questions now.  

But on one point, I think clarification should be given now.  Sometimes, the Hierarchy of Needs is interpreted too primitively - when some of the being needs are not satisfied then that fully blocks the possibility of self-actualization.  This is not right.  In a post from 2013 called Some thoughts on the new Campus Strategic Plan, I quoted directly from Maslow's book, which gives a more nuanced view:

If we wish to help humans to become more fully human, we must realize not only that they try to realize themselves, but that they are also reluctant or afraid or unable to do so. Only by fully appreciating this dialectic between sickness and health can we help to tip the balance in favor of health.
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

The dialectic between realizing oneself and being unable to do so is in all of us.  Some may be more able to attain a better balance, but nobody is all of one and none of the other.  If that's right, then encouraging someone to self-actualize must help both with those behaviors directly but also with managing the inevitable bits of sickness, bits which most of us are loathe to talk about.

Now let me get to my criticisms of the piece by Chris Hayes.  There are things he should have taken up, but didn't.  First, he didn't talk at all about time spent with friends.  His focus was on solitary activity.  Extroverts, in particular, get their mental sustenance from having conversation with others.  Hayes could have written something about this, including that loneliness is prevalent nowadays, even when there is electronic communication with others, though that is better than no communication whatsoever.  But loneliness didn't get a mention.  Sticking with this theme about conversation, I wrote about my personal take on it in a post called, The virtues of making it up as you go along.  In that post I made reference to this paper by Kenneth Bruffee, Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind", which relates conversation to thinking and to writing.  They form the vertices of a triangle.  Hayes would benefit from reading Bruffee's paper.  And, perhaps anticipating reading Bruffee's paper by a decade, I wrote a series of 7 posts on Inward Looking Service Learning, which was about how to promote conversation between more experienced students and other students just getting started, in the belief that such conversations would encourage learning, with that general idea then applied to a variety of contexts.  

I did something similar in my own teaching in the late 1990s, though I paid the more experienced students rather than try to give them course credit for doing the work.  The latter idea comes from the observation that helping/mentoring/teaching others offers its own lessons about how to communicate, and those lessons are quite valuable.  Alas, this idea never saw the light of day on my campus because institutional practice ran too far afield from heavily relying on undergraduates to support instruction.  Further, though there is the alternative of conversations between students and instructors during office hours, and back in 2007 I wrote a rather extensive post about this alternative called Rethinking Office Hours, my experience in teaching the one course a year I taught in retirement till Covid is that most students are too shy to attend office hours.  The shyness is explained by the fear of looking stupid in front of an authority figure. Students would rather forego the experience entirely as a consequence.  

Indeed, Hayes could have spent some time in his piece on considering fear of failure and its relationship to boredom.  In particular, Hayes might have made mention of Later, a book review by James Surowiecki, which talks about procrastination.  It leads off with an example that features George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize winning economist.  That Akerlof procrastinates in some circumstances is the writer's way of saying that everybody does.  And then Hayes could have amplified matters with the following sort of question.  Are we engaged in fun things while we procrastinate or are we bored then to seemingly punish ourselves for not engaging in the task we should be doing?  I don't know the answer to that question, in general, but I can say that I procrastinated some in writing this post and I confess that I was bored some during that time.  

I do want to look at the other end of the tunnel, after the task has been completed.  Over the years I've learned you can't always be on.  After a period of high stress, there is a need to decompress, to relax, and then recuperate.  Similarly, after a long period of high concentration, which may not have been stressful but which was quite intense nonetheless, there needs to be some time to veg out.  Yet we are creatures of habit.  Might those down time intervals get longer, just because we get used to what that feels like?  If so, does that encourage us to be bored?

Hayes might have also taken on multiprocessing, supposedly our way of dealing with information overload, but does that too encourage boredom?  And then he might have talked about exceptions that prove the rule, folks who are fully engaged in the task at hand.  Does that mean they are self-actualizing?

I have two distinct recent examples.  This essay by Louise Glück, Writing As Transformation, is a personal story of a writer who at a very young age seemed to already understand her life's path, and that for her writing was completely absorbing as an activity and as a means for personal growth.  Others might read this piece just to learn that it is possible to be so inspired.  But I suspect that for other writers the story is different, as it was different for me.  I had a preference for face-to-face conversation or, if you will, argument with a friend, done over a coffee, and on a recurrent basis, say for a couple of hours once or twice a week.  (When I was under 30, it might have been later in the day and then done over a beer.)  When I was a campus administrator for educational technology, I had such colleagues who had parallel jobs at peer institutions.  Being with them was very pleasurable for this reason.  But, it wasn't frequent enough.  I had many ideas swirling around in my head that needed to find some form of expression.  I started this blog as an alternative to these conversations.  After a couple of weeks of posting without letting anyone else know about the blog, writing blog posts became a habit for me.  A few months later, Scott Leslie wrote a post about my blog and it soon became known within the edu blog universe.  ( A few years after that I had to move the blog off of the campus server, Guava, and relocated it to Blogspot, losing quite a few subscribers in the process.  Some years after that I dropped Technology from the blog's Title, though not in the url as I didn't want to lose more subscribers then.)

The other example is from the world of sports.  I'm a fan of Illinois Men's Basketball.  I not only watch the games but also watch the post-game press conferences on YouTube, which features Coach Underwood and also a couple of players who did well in the game.  It is interesting to hear both coach and players talk about the intensity of practice and that to perform at a high level in a game, the players need to do that first in practice.  This level of intensity is for physical performance and I wonder if Maslow, were he still alive, would term what the players do as self-actualization.  I also want to note that I've watched a bunch of short television series about men in a military setting engaging in fierce combat of some sort.  The esprit de corps among these men is very similar to the feel one has about the Illini basketball players.  The achievements are a team effort, though in a particular instance individual effort does matter.  Yet there doesn't seem to be any within team competition. All the competition is with the team they are playing against.  This intensity is quite the opposite of boredom.  

The fans also share in this intensity.  While I only watch on TV these days, I still feel it when viewing the game from home.  But, it is hard as a fan to maintain this when it's known that the team is mediocre.  I used to be a fan of the New York Knicks in basketball and the New York Giants in football, but I stopped watching both pro sports years ago because there just wasn't enough pull to keep me going (and I was a fan of New York teams while living in Central Illinois).  

I want to mention a couple of solutions I've attempted, as theoretical exercises, to promote self-actualization in our students.  The first one was about developing an explicit program for teaching intuition.  Students should be encouraged to express their curiosity about a subject and see where that leads.  They should then drive the inquiry that follows from the questions they have generated up front.  The thought was that if this is done on a repeated basis, the interplay between the questions and the inquiry would help teach what makes for good questions up front as well as how to conduct an inquiry that really does address the questions.  So, I started to draft a book which I called Guessing Games, to pursue this idea, with each chapter a stand alone essay on a particular sub-theme.   While it started out well, and I was happy with the early chapters, I eventually hit a snag that I didn't know how to resolve.   The chapters themselves needed to be written in the style of inquiry, but I have a very strong tendency to lecture, and revert to that in my writing quite often.  The last few chapters I wrote seemed like lecturing to me, and it caused me to lose interest in the project.  This does not mean that the underlying idea is bad.  It does mean, however, that for the underlying idea to see the light of day in a completed work, I need a co-author who embraces these themes, or some other writer needs to write a complete work on these ideas, taking my early chapters as a launch point for that.  

The other solution is a site I set up during Covid to encourage college students who were then time abundant to embrace a program that would have them read more and teach themselves about learning-to-learn.  I called this the Non-Course.  (If you go to that site, it would be better to read the various tabbed pages before going to the Non-Course Blog, which then gives an overview of a self-directed program that might be followed.)  I never had any students to try it out. (Generating ideas like the Non-Course is something I do okay. Marketing those ideas is a different matter, one where I'm pretty much clueless.). I want to note that the self-help sites Chris Hayes mentions in his essay are meant to be fully consumed in a matter of minutes.  These two possible solutions that I've linked to require a far greater time commitment.  Are my possible solutions DOA just because of that?

Let me wrap up.  I don't normally ask myself whether I had been self-actualizing.  I ask a different, but perhaps related question.  Was I so absorbed in the activity that I completely lost track of myself.  This could be while reading a book, watching a movie, or listening to music.  It's not just from the writing activity or really the pre-writing - letting the imagination wander to figure out, in general, what I plan to say in the piece.  It's different in editing mode, where I'm more self-critical and therefore not so unaware of self.  I've found over time a transference in my own focus from pre-writing to an emphasis on editing (though I can't say that my proofreading is above suspicion in spite of this transference).  Some of this, I believe, is health related.  I'm a geezer and the various aches and pains get in the way of being fully absorbed.  It wasn't that way 20 years ago. Another part may be less stimulation from which I feel a need to write in order to make sense of what I'm experiencing.  It is different to blog when you are working full time than when you are retired.  With the former, there is a lot going on and a need to get the blog post done, to get back to the day job and so the thinking can move on to other matters.  In retirement there is less going on and less urgency to get things done.  And further, my audience now is mainly bots.  I have a few human readers, but not too many.  Does that matter?  Should it matter?  With a large audience the writer may feel some obligation to the readers.  There is no such obligation with bots.

I read Toward a Psychology of Being fairly early in my career as an ed tech administrator.  Doing so was part of my regime to self-instruct about how people learn.  I recall that at the time I felt that Maslow was speaking directly to me.  I read it again somewhat later, and while it didn't produce quite the same reaction, I did find the re-read rewarding.  Yet after that I had a work colleague who had a PhD from the College of Education who reported reading it for one of her classes, but not getting much out of it at all.  Frankly, I couldn't say whether that was because her inclinations are different from mine or if reading as an opt in activity is quite different from reading in a course when that is required by the instructor.  Indeed, my own inclinations also lead me to read a book of Maslow's later essays, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.  Within that collection there are essays about Maslow's belief that creativity and self-actualization are intimately linked.  He utilized an expression that I really liked - the creative attitude.   Now, I don't know how to get this done, but I have a sense that a voluntary reading group on Maslow aimed at those confronting current learning issues would be quite helpful.  It wouldn't provide the answers, but it might very well encourage the asking of interesting questions that aren't currently being considered.

Correlation, Causation, and Inference in Big Time College Sports

The past day or two I have been puzzling about whether the results of the Rose Bowl, a college football game where Ohio State overwhelmed Oregon in the first half, and the Illinois basketball game against Oregon on Thursday evening, played on Oregon's home court, where the Illini set the record for the largest point spread victory by a visiting team in NCAA basketball, are somehow related.  In each case Oregon was the higher rated team going into the game.  Ohio State had played Oregon previously during the regular season.  The game was close and played on Oregon's home field.  Oregon won by a small margin.  Illinois had played other higher rated teams tough, notably Tennessee, even though that ended as a loss for the Illini.  So, ahead of time, one might reasonably have predicted that these games would be close.  That they each ended up as blowouts was quite a surprise.

As a fan, I care more about Illini basketball than I do about Illini football, though I did watch the Citrus Bowl.  And I don't generally watch college football on TV, but I did watch most of the first half of the Rose Bowl.  With basketball, not only did I watch the game against Oregon, but I also watched on YouTube the postgame interviews with the head coaches.  Dana Altman, the head coach of Oregon, bemoaned the lack of defensive effort his team showed against Illinois.  He said that Illinois was a good offensive team, but not that good.  They looked unstoppable because Oregon didn't play defense.  Defense is mainly an effort thing, and Altman was taking to task the effort of his own players.  But he never said why the effort level was so poor.  Nate Bittle, the Oregon Center, and supposedly quite a good player, appeared for 21 minutes, while he averages over 25 minutes a game.  He was out quite a bit during the second half.  Again, one wonders why. 

Might it be that the Oregon football team, particularly the defensive unit, had a low level of effort in the Rose Bowl?  If so, one again would want to know why that was.  And, maybe, the underlying explanation for the basketball team's poor defensive performance is similar to or even identical to the underlying explanation for the football team's poor defensive performance.  

Now a bit on probability that I'm taking from Daniel Kahneman.   In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he warns the reader about making inferences from small samples.   Fans are prone to do that and, in particular, if the team has struggled some in the past then to take account only of the recent successes, as if the team "figured it out" and is now on the path to greater glory.  But it is possible for there to be an outlier great performance that doesn't become a repeat event.  I am particularly reminded of Brandon Paul's great performance against Ohio State where he shot the lights out.  Further, if the opponent is not up to snuff, for whatever reason, it would seem that the outlier becomes somewhat more likely, especially if that is unknown by by the other team, which might otherwise lessen its own effort to keep the situation from becoming too embarrassing. 

There are now several sports pundits who produce their own ratings of college sports teams.  I'm behind the times on this.  I used to follow the college basketball ratings that Jeff Sagarin produced, but he no longer seems to be doing this.  I only mention this here because I'm guessing that no matter which rating you follow, they don't use information from other college sports.  In other words, Oregon losing to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl won't impact at all how to account for Oregon losing to Illinois in men's basketball on January 2.  But might there be relevant information content that should be accounted for?

Likewise, it seems there is now a huge industry of sports betting.  In that, the odds set by the bookmakers depend not just on past team performance, but also on the latest poop about the team, such as if a player has been suspended, or injured, or has some emotional issue to cope with.  But do the teams disclose all that might matter here?  During Covid, rules were imposed that forced disclosure of players who had tested positive and when that was.  I believe it to be the norm, however, that many "minor" injuries are not disclosed.  So, what I'm really wondering here is whether at Oregon there was some illness or emotional trauma that impacted players on both the football and the basketball teams but it was kept hidden.  A big time gambler, who might be a donor to the athletic program at Oregon, could have made a lot of money if in possession of this information when the rest of the world wasn't.  I mention this only because it gives some possible explanation for why the information wasn't disclosed.

But what I'm really interested in is the perception of how good Ohio State football is as well as how good Illinois basketball is.  It would seem that each of them would be overrated if there were such private information about Oregon that wasn't disclosed.   Performance of these teams in the upcoming game(s) will speak to how good they are.  I'm wondering whether anyone will find out if there is important information about the Oregon teams that wasn't disclosed.  I'm unaware of mechanism that might reveal that now.

Of course, everything I've said here is speculation. It's possible that Oregon football under performed simply because they hadn't played in a while (they had a bye in the first round of the playoffs) and Oregon basketball just had a bad hair day.  I have no way of knowing which it is.  It's just that the juxtaposition of two highly unlikely events happening in tandem creates a situation that raises one's eyebrows.   And I'm surprised that nobody else has brought up the possibility, though maybe they have and I'm just ignorant of it.

My Hubris

Many of my friends and family are feeling malaise now, given the outcome of the election.  I am no different.  But where I'm likely to be quite different is to have the urge to come up with a strategy for the Democrats, first by doing a SWOT analysis on their positions, then by coming up with a sensible path that emerges thereafter.  I need to say that as somebody outside the political machinery, in many respects I don't know what I'm talking about.  That I will come up with something both sensible and realistic is unlikely.  My hubris is that it will be otherwise.   Yet knowing that ahead of time I will still go through this exercise because I know myself well enough that if I don't do it, the ideas will just fester inside me. On the other hand, if I do the analysis and write about it, I can get it out of my system and move onto something else, perhaps not returning to thinking about politics for a good long time.

Let's begin.  Perhaps surprisingly, I'm going to take as my inspiration my World Series viewing on TV, particularly the commercials. Up through the League Championship Series, there were two main networks that covered the games.  TBS had the American League games.  Fox had the National League games.  It was Fox that had the World Series.  I don't know whether that mattered for what I say next.  Maybe it did.  

The commercials were repetitive and the bulk of them were about selling product.  Some were political, in support of one Presidential candidate or the other.  All of these were attack ads.  Rather than praise the candidate who endorsed the message, the commercial would rip the other candidate.  There were commercials from both parties, though there seemingly were more pro-Trump commercials than pro-Harris commercials.  I should also note that, except for viewing sports, I don't watch Fox.  So, I don't know whether the commercials during the World Series were the norm for that network or were specific to the World Series.

We should take a moment to reflect on why attack ads prevail rather than ads which might uplift and educate the public, while attack ads breed cynicism and contempt.  Apparently, it is believed by those who make the commercials that negative emotions are stronger motivators, particularly for voters who are undecided, as to the candidate they will choose or whether they will exercise the franchise. Given this, what's fair is fair.  Harris commercials told us that Trump would be a disaster.  Trump commercials reciprocated.  But the reality is that Trump had been President, so there was a record of how he operated in office.  Harris, as Vice President, played a much lesser role. The Trump commercials focused on what Harris said in interviews rather than what she did in office.  Further, the Harris commercials were delivering a condensed version of what a viewer would see when watching a segment on MSNBC, condemnation of Trump.  The Trump commercials, in contrast, focused on a very specific item to concentrate the fear about Harris.

The focus was on Harris embracing equal rights for Trans people.  Now, that a Democrat would support equal rights for all Americans regardless of (you can give quite a few qualifiers here) is not surprising. But instead of condemning this general principle, evidently doing that would be a political loser, the Trump commercial instead zeroed in on this incredibly small portion of the population.  I don't know whether this was a coincidence or not, I suspect otherwise, but around the same time there were news items about other schools cancelling their women's volleyball matches with San Jose State, which has a Trans player on the roster.  

There is an unspoken question in the background that needs answering.  Do voters truly embrace equal rights for all?  Or, instead, do they believe something else such as - they are entitled to have their own prejudices against others and don't want to be forced to feign otherwise?  Perhaps there could be some hybrid that is closer to the mark - the former is the ideal we strive for while the latter is the current reality.  This provides a backdrop for the evident resentment over the last few years against DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Programs in Higher Education and the far earlier pushback against 'political correctness' that should also be taken into account.  The Liberal Elite forced these ideas on the rest of the population, who didn't want them.  And the Democrats have been captured by the Liberal Elite.  At least, that's one interpretation of our recent political history that I've heard repeatedly.  But there is another question that's not being asked, but should be.  If the hybrid is a good first pass at the current reality, how does one get closer to the ideal?   As it is a difficult question to answer, I will move on.

It may be that all of this is a red herring and that the only thing which matters to the voters is given by that famous James Carville line - It's the economy, stupid. Here's my little bit on that, based on reading this piece from NBC on why we had the electoral outcome we had. There were only two real factors mentioned, immigration and inflation, which is what I'll focus on here.  The entire rest of the piece is about what I'd term political ephemera.  It may matter in the moment, but its significance is far more symbolic than real.

Ordinary people are pretty good at identifying economic problems, though there may be some issue with labeling.  For the typical consumer, inflation is associated with high prices of the goods and services they purchase, rather than associated with the economist's definition - it's the rate of increase of those prices which is inflation.  And while the official statistics measure that rate of increase on an annual basis, many consumers are likely to compare now with their pre-COVID experience.  On that score, gas prices are quite modest, at least around Champaign IL, where I live.  Grocery store prices, on the other hand, are much higher.  For people with a modest income, that's a biggie.  Interest rates are much higher now. And, while I don't mean to be frivolous about this, it's seems that TV prices are much higher, with many of the shows you want to watch found on subscription channels that you don't currently subscribe to.  The sellers of the TV programming are practicing death by a thousand cuts with their buyers, or so it seems.  Plus, the labor market is much softer now.  I have two sons, both in their early 30s.  Each was laid off earlier this year.  So I'm saying this based on personal experience.  That the labor market is softer matters.  It matters a lot. 

As to causality, however, especially when the causes are non-proximate, ordinary people tend to blame the current occupant in the White House, in this case Joe Biden, even when the root cause of the issues happened before the current occupant was elected.  The story is something like this.  COVID was the root cause.  Prior to COVID, the economy was doing quite well.  When COVID arrived,  it disrupted global supply chains in industries across the board.  In some cases, those were temporary disruptions.  In other cases, the suppliers went out of business.  When supply lessens, price rices.  That's elementary economics.  That is not the whole story, but it is the beginning. The next part is that other suppliers used the situation to act opportunistically - they raised their prices even without the drop off in supply, because it was profitable to do so and under the circumstances they wouldn't be blamed for price gauging.  This made the situation worse.  Then the final part is that once there is a general rise in prices, it tends to self-perpetuate as others try to catch up, since their own purchasing power has eroded.  In other words, an inflation expectation has been created.

The Federal Reserve has as one of its mandates to combat inflation.  It does this by raising interest rates, which makes borrowing more costly and thereby lessens demand.  That this happened during COVID makes Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, seem like an evil demon.  He was creating financial pain for many people at a time when the entire population was scared for their lives because of the disease.  In some sense, the experience mirrored my time in graduate school during the late 1970s, which was a period of Stagflation.  Prices were rising while the economy operated well below capacity.  The Fed worried about the former and assumed that when COVID came under control, overall economic performance would improve.  Alternatively, purchasing power can maintain under inflation if income rises at the same rate as prices.   The American Rescue Plan of 2021 did just that, so you might argue that the raising income bit should be handled by fiscal policy rather than monetary policy.  In my view, that plan should have been renewed for at least the next two years.  But politics is such that if the situation starts to seem almost normal, it is harder to get bills through Congress.  Biden does own that.

Let me turn to immigration and why so many Americans now seem to be against it. It is fundamentally about competition in the labor market and the belief that workers who are willing to accept low wages and poor working conditions should be deterred from entering the market, if at all possible, so that the wages of other workers get boosted as a consequence.  This means the jobs themselves must remain within the U.S. and not be exported abroad.  Further, there is a hidden hope that the work can remain labor intensive and not be automated in a way that fewer workers are needed.  This became explicit during the recent longshoremen's strike, where that was one of the contract demands.  But note that the longshoremen are unionized.  To my knowledge there has been no connection made between being anti-immigration and being pro-union.  

One can consider Trump's proposal to put tariffs on imports in this light.  It would have the effect of bringing supply chains for some products more inside the U.S. and in some cases entirely so.  Of course, it will also artificially raise product prices.  That's what protectionism does.  What will be the net effect on 'real wages,' which can be defined as the purchasing power of the income earned?  In any particular case it can go either way.  Normally economists think that protectionism lowers national income because it blocks potential gains from trade.  But there is a literature on 'strategic trade policy' (think of the Chinese here) where restricting imports and promoting exports in certain specific industries can raise national income.  As I have yet to hear anything about strategic export promotion, and the strategic trade literature focuses on a small trading country, not the U.S., I would bet on the policy shooting us in the foot.  Here I'm just trying to get at its origins, not at its merit, and with the origins get at the mindset of many Americans.

As I said, Biden owns this.  And Harris inherited it.  Given that, the polls should have predicted that Trump would win in a walk.  But the polls didn't do that.  This is a puzzle for which I don't have an answer.  It could be that polls were systematically wrong.  (But why?)  Alternatively, there might have been more shenanigans than have already been reported.  Possibly, it could be both.  I hope that the press can untangle this and do so soon, well before Christmas.  I believe that our reaction now depends on an understanding of the truth here.

* * * * *

Now I want to consider Trump moving America toward fascism by giving two possible ways to consider this.  Regardless of approach, it is helpful to consider the messaging that Trump employs entirely as misdirection.  He is manipulating the public, no doubt.  The question is this - manipulating toward what end?  That's what I will take on here.

One interpretation is that this is a replay of Germany in the 1930s.  I'm guessing that many of my friends are fearful that is the case.  I am fearful too; I don't want to deny that.  But I want to keep open the possibility that there is another take on the situation.

This is that Trump throws the MAGA types a bone now and then, but in actuality treats them like dogs who can largely be ignored on economic matters.  Getting the followers stirred up is a way to attain the necessary votes for reelection.  But the economic spoils will not be shared with them.  It's the plutocrats who lurk in the background, including Trump himself, who will get those spoils.  In this sense the followers have been played by Trump, but they don't seem to realize that they have been played.  Will they wake up to what is going on?

If this other alternative better explains things, then you might imagine that the fascist machinations of the next Trump administration will be mild, when the economy is going okay, because the masses will be content, more or less.  If the economy sours, however, or if there is some other crises a la COVID, then those fascist machinations will ramp up, as a way to distract the masses from their own situation.  In this case there is a risk that the first alternative will obtain.  Consequently, one might ask whether many among the masses might sour on Trump before this happens and in addition ask whether they'd be open to messaging from other sources that suggests there might be alternatives for them.  This, it would seem, is entirely unknown and unknowable now.

Let me overlay on this the twin issues of Trump's longevity and Trump's senility, curiously parallel to the situation with Biden.  On the one hand, one might imagine that he doesn't last two more years in office and that Vance takes over then.  On the other hand, one can also imagine that he seems to get through the four years but he doesn't want to leave office, so he challenges the 22nd Amendment or simply bypasses it.  In the former case, the issue is whether the cult of personality that is Trump can carry over to others or if the magic will be gone then.  In the latter case, I can only imagine this happening if we are headed for a replay of Germany in the 1930s.  It is the most worrisome case.

* * * * *

We've reached the part where it's time to ask how the Democrats should respond to the circumstances.  Let me give a word of caution first.  The temptation to find answers quickly is very strong.  That temptation needs to be resisted.  Much thought needs to be put in trying to understand the situation fully and then giving an accurate description of what is going on.  As I said at the outset, I'm an outsider.  My analysis makes sense to me, but there is a lot I don't know.  Similar analyses need to be done by insiders.  If some agreement among them can be found, then there will be a good basis on which to determine the appropriate reactions.

Now a few things occur to me, which I'm comfortable affirming, even as an outsider.  First, the Democrats have a credibility problem because too much of their prior message has been on other than - It's the economy, stupid.  They have acted as if the agenda can been quite broad.  This works for those who always vote Democrat, but at present that's a minority.  If they are to broaden their base the agenda must narrow and the bulk of what's in it must be on economics.  This makes sense as long as Trump is pursuing the throw-the-dog-a-bone approach to governing.  Second, the messaging should be directed to ordinary working people, ignoring Trump and his indiscretions as much as possible.  The Democrats are not as good at propaganda as Trump is.  They should realize that much of what they've done has backfired, that they've been helping him with their overt attacks on him. Third, there needs to be persistence in this, not a quick one and done.  Many of the rank and file won't be happy with that, so there needs to be messaging with them too.  The thrust of such messages is that you can't move closer to the ideal if you remain in the minority.

And what should be done if the replay of Germany in the 1930s seems the likely outcome?  I would want to know this.  How many of those who voted for Trump are not MAGA types at all and would oppose overt fascism rather than support it?  The form of such opposition needs to be beyond the electoral.  You see batted around in the press the expression - civil war - which is easy to say but much harder to understand what it would mean now.  Some violence, I'm sure, would be part of it.  But resistance in other forms will be needed as well - a war of information, if you will.  The specifics on that are beyond me.  There is no good in me speculating about it further.  Others who better understand the situation need to fill in the details and then explain what should happen.

* * * * *

Let me wrap up.  While I have had some difficulty in writing blog posts for the last couple of years - the pre-writing activity would take much longer than it used to - this post was comparatively easy to write, even if it still took a few days from gestation to final product.  I take that as an indication that these thoughts were prominent for me and I needed to express them.  I'm less interested in trying to persuade others with this piece as to my recommendations, but am strongly interested in them demanding to get other analyses done similarly that get at describing the current political reality.  I'm suspicious that such an analysis can't come from the press, because it needs an arms length perspective and being less wrapped up in moment to moment matters.  I think it requires a social science background to provide.  With that, I hope others who are qualified have a go at it and, in turn, that gets the rank and file to reflect on what Democrats should be doing for now.