The Questioning Christian

Category: Progress

  • We just don’t know enough about human motivation

    In a Facebook thread, a conservative friend writes: "And yet, those economies where it was 'sink or swim' have thrived throughout history (in contradiction to those that were socialist)." I moved my response here.

    That's an oversimplification. Sink or swim does provide a certain motivation, but humans generally aren't willing to just let others sink, even when the others' problems are their own "fault."

    That's why we have laws requiring hospitals to treat emergency cases, even when the patients should have bought health insurance. That's why we have food stamps.

    For that matter, that's why first responders and volunteers risk their lives to rescue people from their Harvey-flooded homes and streets, even though those people had [fouled] up by ignoring earlier warnings to evacuate.

    We simply don't understand human psychology as well as we need to. In particular, we haven't developed a broadly-accepted, tested, general theory about what it takes to promote socially-desirable behavior.

    Sure, we have various notions along those lines. A lot of those notions, though, are no more evidence-based than, say, bleeding a feverish patient to (supposedly) reduce the fever, as physicians used to do centuries ago.

    In that vein, I thought this Kristof piece from a couple of months ago was quite thought-provoking:

    … Consider baseball: Some teams pay players much more disparately than others do, and one might think that pay inequality creates incentives for better performance and more wins.

    In fact, economists have crunched the data and found the opposite is true. Teams with greater equality did much better, perhaps because they were more cohesive.

    What’s more, it turned out that even the stars did better when they were on teams with flatter pay. "Higher inequality seemed to undercut the superstar players it was meant to incentivize, which is what you would expect if you believed that the chief effect of pay inequality was to reduce cooperation and team cohesion," Payne notes.

    Nicholas Kristof, What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fairness (NYTimes.com June 3, 2017) (emphasis added).

    This lack of a true understanding of human motivation, and how to apply that understanding to motivate "useful" behavior, is the basis of a lot of political disagreement. For example:

    • Today's GOP leadership thinks that tax cuts for the wealthy are a panacea for the economy; they think that such cuts will supposedly incentivize the wealthy to create jobs. Sure, the Laffer curve ~sounded~ good back in the 1970s. But from what I've read, most non-right-wing economists have concluded that, at the very least, the Laffer curve has been taken too far. ("If a little is good, then more would be even better — right?")
    • On the other side of the aisle, some leftists seem to think that we could solve all our social ills by imposing punitive taxes on the rich and giving everyone a universal basic income (UBI) and free health care. That strikes me as likely to be a fantasy, for several reasons I won't take the time to discuss.

    In sum: We just don't know where the sweet spot is for getting people to do useful things. Hell, we don't even agree that much on what we mean by "useful." And in any case, the sweet spot is likely to move around over time, just as weather patterns do.

    The best we can do, I submit, is to stay focused on seeking the best for others as we do for ourselves, and to face the facts as they are revealed to us.

  • Success: How much is due to effort, and how much to luck?

    This is an interesting discussion thread about how success depends not just on our own efforts, but on luck, too — especially in our choices of parents and of upbringing — and so we ought to have plenty of sympathy for those who come up short in the luck category. Excerpt: "When once asked for the secret of financial success, he [the Duke of Westminster] replied it was to have an ancestor who had been a close friend of William the Conqueror."
     
     

  • Breathing, Photosynthesis, and the Continuing Creation

    Think about what happened the last time you took a breath, and consider the cosmic machinery that made it possible:

    • Within your body, the oxygen that you inhaled got combined with the energy-storing molecules in your food to release energy. That energy was used by your brain, your muscles, etc., to leave the cosmos just a tiny bit different than the way it was before.
    • The energy you used to make that cosmic change had to be packed into your food somehow.  As we know from high-school biology, plants stored that energy in the food's constituent molecules, using CO2 from the air and sunlight as "feedstocks" for photosynthesis.
    • One of the byproducts of your changing the cosmos was your release of a certain amount of carbon dioxide back into the air when you exhaled.
    • Your exhaled CO2 will eventually be recycled by other plants — again using solar-powered photosynthesis — into still more molecules that will show up in foods, building materials, etc.
    • Oh, and this:  All those molecules we've been talking about?  Every single molecule on the planet (apart from hydrogen and maybe some of the helium) is composed of atoms from the ashes of one or more exploded stars.
    • And those dead stars? They came about as a result of a titanic process that's been in progress for billions of years, starting with the unimaginably-huge release of energy at (what we call) the Big Bang.

    So let's sum up:  We humans are part of a very-long-term process by which the energy from the Big Bang is being busily transformed into an ever-evolving universe.  

    If we wanted to speculate, we might even call this process a project — a continuing creation — in which we get to participate.

    (Inspired by an NPR commentary yesterday by astrophysicist Dr. Adam Frank reminding us of the wonder of photosynthesis.)

  • Now it’s Africa’s turn to get new job opportunities for low-skilled workers

    This seems like a long-term Good Thing:  Chinese workers' expectations are rising, and so some Chinese manufacturers are starting to export their jobs to Africa, whose poorer workers can certainly use the income and a chance to get a foot on the economic ladder.  Here's an excerpt from a NY Times report:

    … Global brands flocked to China to tap into the country’s cheap and willing labor pool.

    Today, Chinese workers are less cheap and less willing. More young people are going to college and want office jobs. The blue-collar work force is aging. Long workdays in a factory no longer appeal to those older workers, even with the promise of overtime pay.

    * * *

    Citing labor costs and the country’s foreign investment push, Huajian is building a sprawling complex of factories, office buildings and a hotel on the southern outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Mr. Zhang’s shoe factories there already have 5,000 employees. …

    (Keith Bradsher, Chinese Maker of Ivanka Trump’s Shoes Looks for Cheaper Labor, NY Times, June 1, 2017.)

     

  • “But they’re working on that ….”

    My wife and I were talking while walking the dog this morning. I'd made the comment that 60 was the new 40; she said there are still a lot of ways aging can and does kill you, like Alzheimer's (her mother died of it).

    I responded "but they're working on that."

    Then it dawned on me: These days, an integral part of our mental framework is the dollop of optimism that comes with "they're working on that."

    I wonder whether people 100 years ago had the same feeling.

    Related:  NPR Planet Money podast, Would You Rather be Rich in 1900, or Middle-Class Now?; see also the discussion of that podcast at Hacker News.

  • Solar cells on cell-phone towers in developing nations may help save lives by powering vaccine refrigerators

    See ‘Off-grid’ cellphone towers could save lives, by Harvey Rubin and Alice Conant.

  • Red House furniture commercial: Maybe society is getting more so-what about our racial diversity

    The Red House furniture store in North Carolina has a truly schlocky commercial on YouTube, explaining how their furniture is good for white people and for black people. It caught the eye of CNet correspondent Chris Matyszczyk as possibly the worst video on YouTube.  I’m not so sure about that.

    In a weird sort of way, I kinda like this. Here’s why:  If advertisers chasing a buck are becoming less inclined to tiptoe around racial differences, pretending they don’t exist, it could mean that society as a whole is gradually getting more so-what about race. That would not be a bad thing at all, IMHO. 

    In the same general category, I’m glad to see the increasing number of bad-guy roles, on TV and in the movies, that seem to be played by black actors. I hope this means that casting directors are less inclined to restrict those roles — and their paychecks — to white actors for fear of being branded a racist.

    Of course, the Red House furniture store is probably thrilled that their commercial is going viral ….

  • The about-face reaction to Scottish singer Susan Boyle exemplifies how we eventually learn to do better

    I watched the YouTube clip of Susan Boyle.  She’s the frumpy, cheerful, middle-aged Scottish singer whose appearance on Britain’s Got Talent became a worldwide sensation. What interested me most was the sense of mild shame shown by the judges and the audience for having made a derisive snap judgment about Boyle, based solely on her appearance and demeanor. As one commentator said:

    Part of the joy of watching her performance was seeing the obnoxious, smarmy grimaces disappear from the faces of Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan, two of the show’s judges, and seeing the audience shift, in an instant, from tittering condescension to open-mouthed admiration.

    Amanda Holden, the third judge, said apologetically to Boyle that her performance had been "the biggest wakeup call ever.”

    That’s one of the things that gives me such great hope for humanity: Not that we can be thoughtless and mean and even vicious to each other, but that we can recognize, eventually — and often after inflicting horrendous damage — that we need to change our hearts and minds and the way we conduct our lives.

    Some claim that this capacity to learn is innate to our nature; others insist it’s the result of undeserved divine grace.  One thing’s for sure: We don’t have enough real data (as opposed to speculation) to enable us to argue the question intelligently.

    So for now, we should simply be grateful we have the capacity, and seek out opportunities to exercise it.

  • It’s a good thing people are different

    From the “conversations with my wife while walking two miles with the dog” department:  Not only would life be boring if everyone were the same, but we wouldn’t get the progress that comes from mixing genes and ideas into new combinations, and then keeping and propagating the combinations that work out OK.

  • Think life hasn’t been getting better? Try Paul Graham’s Frankish-nobleman thought experiment

    Successful Internet entrepreneur turned venture capitalist Paul Graham proposes a thought experiment:

    … try living for a year using only the resources available to the average Frankish nobleman in 800, and report back to us. (I'll be generous and not send you back to the stone age.)

    This can be seen as a variation on a similar thought experiment offered by Gregg Easterbrook in The Progress Paradox:  How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (2003).