Why would so many Democrats, women, young adults, and Blacks be unwilling to stay and fight the Russians in case of an invasion? Here are a few possibilities: the U.S. doesn’t deserve to be saved; one doesn’t truly belong to this country (feeling like an outsider); family safety more important; anti-war or anti-nationalist sentiments; feeling no special affinity for America or enthusiasm for the American project; lack of fellow-feeling or common purpose with other Americans; nihilism or relativism to the point that no country or system of government is worth dying for.
Experts are fallible. Experts often disagree with each other. How, then, does one go about trusting experts? And how do we figure out which experts to trust, or not? Take, for instance, medical doctors…
Emotional trust is the feeling we can count on someone, because they are fundamentally good and will not harm us. However, emotional trust doesn’t require that we agree with their opinions or follow their advice. Cognitive trust means we are confident of another’s competence in a some knowledge or skill area. We might even follow their guidance if we trust them on an emotional level as well.
Which got me to thinking…If all households were provided free home test-kits, without having to request them, and were advised to test themselves whenever they had symptoms or had been exposed to infected individuals…wouldn’t that alone slash Covid case rates? Add in better treatments, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Covid case and mortality rates quickly dropped to flu-like levels. My reasoning is as follows…
When you have strong opinions, you may be wrong. When you have weak opinions, you may be wrong. When you think it's all too complicated to have an opinion, you may be wrong. If you keep having the same kinds of opinions (strong, weak, oppositional), you're probably over-relying on heuristics and not thinking hard enough.
Homeostatic balance is a perfectly respectable concept meaning a condition of equilibrium. But my interest is in the “use value” of the word ‘balance’: what it is meant to evoke and accomplish in discursive communities…Balance is often coupled with “delicate” (over 3 million results on Google!). Delicate balance implies fragility, vulnerability, and lurking danger. Hence, reference to a “delicate balance” as a call to action, often evoked in perceived threats to biological systems, especially from outsiders – whether those outsiders are unnatural chemicals or invasive species.
…the ideal of ending poverty, facilitating economic mobility, and making sure everyone has access to the basics – healthcare, education, and family services – doesn’t have to pit Most of Us against a Despised Other (or at least an Undeserving Other). In Denmark, it’s more We’re All in This Together for the Long Haul.
Minimalist synopsis of the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments: subjects were willing to hurt others if they thought this was what authority figures wanted from them. Both studies serve as cautionary tales of how easily humans can be manipulated by authority figures into committing atrocious acts against their fellows. For me, the main lesson of these studies is a bit different – it is the danger of living in totalitarian environments. By “totalitarian”, I mean a social environment where there are no dissenting views expressed.
We’ve all been advised to “accept” some bad thing. You know: “it is what it is”, “embrace the suck”, and variations thereof. But what does it mean to accept something?
"Mind wandering" conjures up an image of random, accidental, and aimless thought fragments going hither and yon like a drunken sailor. My perspective is much more like Smallwood and Schooler (2006), in which they describe mind wandering as a “goal-driven process”. A lot of mind wandering does seem to be on a mission of sorts: rehearsing, planning, rehashing – as if trying to achieve resolution to some sort of unfinished business.
Think of thoughts as guests at the party of your mind. Imagine being at a family gathering and the relatives are a talkative bunch. You are “observing” the scene not as a detached bystander but as a loving, involved family member. You catch snatches of conversation, some not that interesting, some best to ignore.
Willpower consists of three competing elements: 1) I will – the ability to do what you need to do; 2) I won’t – the other side of self-control; the inability to resist temptation; and 3) I want – your true want, the ability to remember the big picture of your life. When we castigate ourselves for impulsive actions, we often say we weren’t “thinking”. I interpret that as saying we weren’t considering the Big Picture. We were operating on a concrete level, not thinking beyond the moment.
Under ranked-choice voting, the incentives push candidates to build broader coalitions. Since no candidate knows whether someone will garner enough votes to win in the first round, each candidate is incentivized to capture the votes of those who may not have picked them as their first choice. To do this, they must try to appeal to a wider array of voters than they would have otherwise. - How Ranked Choice Voting Can Increase Inclusivity and Voter Participation. Georgia Lyon/Campaign Legal Center May 21, 2021
5. Switching Costs: switching to new ways of doing things involves time, money, effort, uncertainty, risk, disruption, feelings of incompetence, and changing roles/relationships. These costs are especially high during the transitional period, as the comfortable and familiar gives way to floundering, doubt and subpar performance while everyone is still learning the ropes.
Social scientists are people too, with their own intuitions about human nature, happiness, inequality and ideal societies. I'm talking economists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists (etc). I'm talking about the people who made up the theory of inequality-aversion.
The research social scientists conduct and the conclusions they reach are not independent of their intuitions about what is and ought to be. That's no reason to dismiss their work, only a plea to be alert to possible lapses of scientific rigor in what they do and say.
But we Californians are already living the consequences of overpromising and underfunding pension benefits. To illustrate….
The US currently spends about $4 trillion on healthcare (splitting the difference between 2019 and 2020). To get to Switzerland, we’d need to get that down to under $3 trillion a year. That’s a tall order.
Any way you look at it, the US spends way more on healthcare than other developed countries, both as a share of GDP and on a per capita basis. So why are these other countries’ health outcomes so much better than ours?
Since the US public debt is already rather high, I would stipulate that government funding to boost social mobility come entirely from additional tax revenue. US tax revenue - across all levels of government, from local to state to federal - is currently around 25.5% of GDP. I suggest raising that to 30% of GDP, or another 4.5%. This is close to the government’s take 20 years ago but still less than the average for developed countries, as per the following chart…
“Contrary to popular perceptions, populist voters are not uniformly deplorable, stupid and racist; they are deeply motivated by perceptions of a rigged, socially immobile economy. Whether a citizen has an unlucky start in life or is knocked down by an economic crisis, too many Americans cannot get ahead on their own merits. Given the Democrats’ recent drubbing in Virginia, the party would do well to pivot away from condescending culture wars and towards a fairer economy where opportunity is more equal and reward is allocated in line with contribution.” - Eric Protzer/Letter to the Economist December 4, 2021