Category Archives: Society

Shared Sacrifice

You hear a lot these days about the concept of shared sacrifice from Republicans.  Judging from the ideas they present, they have absolutely no idea what shared sacrifice actually means.  In order to sacrifice something, you actually have to feel the sacrifice.

Raising the eligibility age of Social Security or Medicare is not shared sacrifice.  It would affect me not at all.  It would affect almost everybody who makes more money than me not at all.  We all have jobs that we can work at until we die or go senile.  Working an extra year or two is not a sacrifice.  People who perform manual labor, for a living, though, are hugely impacted by raising the eligibility age.  Despite the fact that the average lifespan in America has slowly raised, most of the gains have been in lowered infant mortality rates and upper income individuals.  Blue collar workers’ lifespans have barely increased at all.  Adding a year or two is basically telling blue collar workers that they have to work until they die.

Same thing applies for taxes.  It would take increases of a few percentage points for people like me to even begin to feel the effects of higher taxes.  No sacrifice there.  Whereas the 20% of the population who live at or below the poverty line would significantly feel the sting of even a slight raise in taxes.  Huge sacrifice there.  People who are making millions of dollars a year would need their taxes raised enormously in order to feel any type of sacrifice.  And no one is asking to raise their taxes enormously.  They are not being asked to sacrifice anything and screaming about the need to share the sacrifice.

Look at it this way.  Poor families have an ice cream cone and have to split it among the whole family.  Middle class families have five ice cream cones, one for each person with a little left over to share.  Upper class families have thousands of ice cream cones.  Republicans are basically asking the country to give up just one ice cream cone.  Poor families will be devastated by this.  Middle class families will have to make adjustments, but they’ll pull through.  Upper class families won’t even know they lost an ice cream cone.  But that is the Republican idea of shared sacrifice.

 

What We Have Here is a Failure to Empathize

A study from a few years ago shows that college kids are forty percent less empathetic than their counterparts from twenty or thirty years ago.  This is incredibly disheartening.  Not only because forty percent less empathy is a severe drop, but because I am from their counterpart group from twenty years ago and I can tell you, there ain’t much empathy in my generation either.

There are all sorts of suggested causes for the drop:  Social media, video games, increased exposure to media, being too busy.  I don’t buy any of these.  I think if they did a study of all ages, they’d find that the United States as a whole as dropped forty percent in empathy.

The United States has developed a really bizarre form of tribalism.  We spend our teenage years torn between wanting to be an individual and needing to belong to a group.  Most of the time, the need overpowers the want and we give up our individuality and ability to be introspective in order to belong to a group.  But once we’re in a group, a strange dynamic occurs.  We don’t concern ourselves with the daily sufferings of our fellow members.  Instead, we focus all our energy on maintaining the existence of the group.  Any criticism of the group thus results in an all-out-of-proportion backlash on said critics.  It doesn’t matter how pertinent this criticism may be, a wave of anger and hatred must rise up to smash down on any mortal who dare question the group.  And woe to the member of the group who dares question her own!

The best defense against falling into this sort of tribalism is to question yourself.  It sounds like an easy thing to do, but we are best at lying to ourselves.  We have all had those moments in life where we look back on an event and say to ourselves, “What was I thinking?”  But we somehow never make the connection that we are lying to ourselves.  So, when we question ourselves, it’s also important to then ask if we are being truthful with ourselves too.

This, I believe, is where the old adage “the truth shall set you free” comes from.  It’s not learning the truth about people or places or things.  It’s learning the truth about yourself.  Know yourself and you shall know enlightenment.

Good News, Everybody!

File this one under the very worst possible good news imaginable.  Uganda has decided to not make it legal to kill homosexuals.  Instead, they’ll just put them in jail.  Yay?

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins took time out to tweet the group’s support of Uganda:

American Liberals are upset that Ugandan Pres is leading his nation in repentance – afraid of a modern example of a nation prospered by God?

This was interpreted by anyone with a brain as inherent support for the anti-homosexual bill, given that the two pieces of news came so close to each other.  FRC, though, claims that Perkins was just tweeting about the fact that heathen liberals are up in arms because Uganda’s president is dedicating the nation to repentance from god.

This is a pretty laughable claim.  First off, try finding anyone anywhere who is complaining about Uganda’s prayer ceremony.  You’ll just find Perkins complaining about the mystery complainers.  All the outcry has been about the bill.  Plus, it’s still support for a person and a country that would pass such a law.  It’s as if the FRC were to say, “We don’t support Mussolini at all!  We’re just praising him for his efficiency in getting the trains to run on time.”  Or maybe more to the point, “We don’t support apartheid at all!  We’re just praising South Africa for rededicating themselves to god by speaking some gobbledegook.”

And that’s American Christianity in a nutshell these days.  As long as you speak the right words, your deeds don’t matter at all.

What are Anthropologists Up to These Days?

Do you ever wonder what anthropologists are doing for fun these days?  Sure, there are still plenty of ancient cultures to figure out and there are plenty of modern “primitive” cultures to study, but that’s their bread and butter.  No one would do a double-take if an anthropologist said at a party, “I’m studying the ancient Mayans’ socio-cultural relationship with the llama.”, even if they had no idea what it actually meant.

It turns out that modern anthropologists mostly study much closer to home.  One anthropologist, Gabriella Coleman, spent three years studying the mysterious hackers of the San Francisco Bay Area.  Here’s the most interesting bit:

Wired: It’s hard to tell a good geek joke because there are all these layers to them.

Often, the humor you talk about is used as a way of identifying like-minded people. I think that a lot of people from that community spend a lot of their time not being understood or talking to people who don’t care about the same things that they do. So they need a shorthand to figure out, “OK we can have a conversation.”

It’s actually a hack that allows you to connect with people who it’s worth your time time talk to.

Coleman: One of the things in that chapter that I argue is that hackers, first of all, are good at joking because to hack is to rearrange form. That’s what jokes are. That’s a pragmatic utilitarian argument, but they really culturally value it for all sorts of reasons.

Even a wonderful piece of code is up for debate, but a very funny joke, it gets affirmed with laughter and then it’s kind of indisputable.

How cool would that be?  Following a sub-culture around for a few years and figuring out how they work.  Anthropology would be an awesome job to have if I were independently wealthy.  Just sitting and studying people.  Though, I guess I do quite a bit of that now.

Voter ID = Voter Suppression

Ever since voter ID laws became the latest craze with Republican voters, there has been a steady trickle of prominent Republican politicians who have let slip the real (and obvious) reason for voter ID laws: To allow Republicans to win seats that they normally wouldn’t be able to win.

First it was Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai claiming that voter ID laws will provide a path to victory in the state for Mitt Romney.  Now it’s two Florida Republicans.  Former Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer says that it’s state voter ID law was specifically meant to suppress Black and Latino turnout and former governor Charlie Crist echoed that voter ID only suppresses voter turnout though he doesn’t specify that it is targeted mainly at minorities.

We’ll leave aside the implicit racism of voter ID laws for now because all you get from that is a chorus of “I’m not racist!  Some of my best friends are of an oppressed minority!”  I will say this, though: If you consistently favor laws that happen to disproportionately disfavor minorities, you need to do some deep introspection because you both walk like a duck and talk like a duck so you shouldn’t get upset if people mistake you for a duck.

On the almost certain chance that you don’t think you’re racist and that in-person voter fraud is totally a thing and that it decides elections, I say learn statistics.  It is statistically impossible to win an election by in-person voter fraud.  Please note that “statistically impossible” doesn’t mean impossible, it just means that an improbable series of events would have to occur in order for in-person voter fraud to decide the election.

First, the election would have to be close.  Unless you are off-the-wall crazy and believe that organized in-person voter fraud is capable of producing more than a handful of votes here and a handful of votes there, you have to conclude that, right off the bat, 95-99% of all election decisions in any given year simply cannot be decided by in-person voter fraud.

Second, if the election is close, there is a far greater chance that the election will be decided by a counting error.  Neither machines nor people can count ballots with 100% accuracy.  Statistical models show that final tallies normally have a margin of error of between 1.8% and 2.0%.  That’s right, a close election that, by law, calls for a recount would be much better served by a flip of the coin than by a recount and would also save tax payers tons of money.

Third, “but what about the smaller local elections”, you ask?  Yes, the smaller the election, the greater the chance of fraud, but that fraud isn’t going to come from in-person fraud, it’s going to come from collusion.  You see, the smaller the election, the harder it would be to commit in-person voter fraud because it becomes much more likely you are going to be identified by poll workers as a stranger in a town where everyone knows each other.  So the only way to safely get away with it is to collude with the poll workers and voter ID laws aren’t going to stop that.

Voter ID laws are and always have been about voter suppression.  At best, they solve a non-existent problem.  At worst, they’re reminiscent of the Jim Crow era poll taxes. Please stop supporting them.

Your Privilege Is Showing

It often surprises me how out of touch most people are with the plight of the poor.  One “journalist” who stopped surprising me long ago is Megan McArdle.  She is ostensibly a business and economics reporter, but she quite often has issues with basic economic theory and even basic math sometimes.  She is at her best (read worst) when she shows just how clueless she is about the people she is covering, though.

In a recent article about the recent Black Friday Wal-Mart strike, Megan says the following:

Recessions are also a time when employers don’t necessarily have a lot of profits to give up.  Walmart’s $446 billion of revenue last year was eye-popping, but its profit margins are far from fat–between 3% to 3.5%.  If they cut that down by a percentage point–about what retailers like Costco and Macy’s have been bringing in–that would give each Walmart employee about $2850 a year, which is substantial but far from life-changing.  Further wage improvements would have to come out of the pockets of Walmart’s extremely price conscious shoppers.  Which might be difficult, given how many product categories Amazon is pushing into.

Yeah, Megan, you’re right, for you, an extra $2,850 a year is far from life-changing.  You waste more than that in a year.  For a person making $20,000 a year, though, it is huge!  You would suddenly have 14% more money than you did previously.  Who wouldn’t be thrilled with a 14% raise?  Megan McArdle, apparently.  You would have $200 extra each month.  You can pay for groceries with that.  You can not get kicked out of your apartment with that.  You can maybe start planning for a future with that instead of having to constantly worry about the present.

But, no, Megan, you continue to live in your fantasy world.  Continue believing that $2,850 wouldn’t be life altering for almost 15% of the U.S. population.  Your persistent writing with blinders on gives us bloggers plenty of fodder.  I mean, it’s not like we can all just pick on David Brooks.

Being poor

My friend Eric commented in my “The poor think differently than you” post about an old post by John Scalzi titled “Being Poor“.  It’s worth reading in its entirety.  It’s hard to wrap your head around, but choice is a privilege.

The poor think differently than you

My post about socioeconomic blindness triggered a memory of a study from a few years ago that shows that poor kids really do think differently from rich kids.  This is both fascinating and completely understandable.

There is an immediacy to being poor.  It’s very hard to plan a future when so many resources are spent providing for now.  This immediacy causes all sorts of problems, as shown by the kids in the study.  Throwing poor kids into a classroom and expecting them to learn because it’ll be good for them in 20 years is like giving a bear a honeycomb and telling it that it can either have that or the giant barrel of honey just in the next room.  The sad thing is that so many people then blame the kids for failing.

The good news is that there are tools that we already know will work that can help these kids.  The bad news is that society has decided that teachers are greedy and lazy and evil and we spend way too much on education already so getting them those tools will be nigh impossible.  And this is an area where rich people think like poor people.  They are too blind to see that spending some extra money now could mean huge savings in the future, with respect to necessary social services that many people would also like to see cut.

Socioeconomic blindness

A thought from the Ta-Nehisi Coates/Chris Hayes video that I posted yesterday.  They talk about how the socioeconomic ladder is so stratified and there are huge gaps of understanding between the layers.  Meaning that a person who makes $30,000 cannot begin to comprehend what a person on welfare’s life is like and a person who makes $100,000 can’t even begin to comprehend what life is like for the person who makes $30,000 and the person who makes $100,000,000 a year can’t even begin to comprehend what life is like for the person who makes $1,000,000 a year.

This, I believe, is where the whole “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality comes from.  People who say that don’t have the slightest idea what the other person is even going through.  This is also why the Romneys can say they were struggling so much in college that they had to sell some of their stock in order to survive and believe that they’re sharing an experience with the common man.  On the surface, it’s absurd, but seen through the lens of socioeconomic blindness, it makes complete sense.  You may laugh at the Romneys’ complete lack of self-awareness, but chances are you’re just as guilty of committing those fouls as they are.

This socioeconomic blindness is not an easy problem to solve.  The best thing to do is to interact on a meaningful level with people not in your economic comfort zone.  And that’s almost impossible to do.  Volunteering at a soup kitchen doesn’t really give you meaningful interactions nor does volunteering in general (though you should volunteer for something, anything).  But you can ask yourself questions while volunteering.  What would I do if I had no money, no job, no house, and was hungry?  (Hint: If you’re thinking at all about solving the first three, you’re doing it wrong.)

In the end, though, the most important thing to do is recognize that socioeconomic blindness exists.  Maybe then, you’ll recognize that you shouldn’t be passing judgements on someone who is so far removed from your situation you can’t even see what she’s going through.

A video worth watching

It’s a bit long, but it’s a great discussion about power and inequality.  Plus, it features my man-crush, Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Gah, the embed isn’t working for some reason.  Here’s the link.