Things That Perplex Me: Set 3

A Word With Marty: "CONTRACEPTION"

My Favorite Recent Tweets

The longer I’ve tried to be a change agent, the more I’ve become convinced that brevity yields readers the most benefit per minute.

Hence I tweet a lot. I’ve posted about 250 tweets in the past six months. As my PsychologyToday.com article today, I post my favorite 39.

Who Should Influence Our Public Policy?

In theory, we'd all agree that our views on policy should reflect the input of wise, circumspect people, those wise men and women able to weigh the conventional wisdom du jour against enduring principles and reasoning.

Alas, in fact, public opinion and the resulting policies and whom we elect are heavily determined by less wise folks:

• teachers and professors, people who have opted out of the real world. Compared with the pool of successful people in the real world, teachers and professors are more out-of-touch and less efficacious. Despite protestations to the contrary, there is some validity to the overgeneralization that those who can, do; those who can't, teach.
• members of the media. This is another group with minimal real-world experience, whose opinions have been too heavily influenced by their theory- and ideology-rich but practicality-impoverished professors. Most journalists today, egged on by their new-style, ideology-driven journalism professors, believe they know how the world should be changed and thus have the right to forgo their near-sacred responsibility to present intelligent perspectives from across the full range of the ideological spectrum and, instead, manipulate the public into believing their own solutions are the correct ones. From Rachel Maddow to Rush Limbaugh, the New York Times' Bob Herbert to Fox News' Sean Hannity, these are people driven far more by ideology than by wise circumspection.
• politicians. They are too driven by saying what will get them elected rather than by what's best. For example, for decades, the research has been unequivocal that Head Start yields no enduring benefit, but politicians continue to tout it because the public likes the concept, even though it ends up costing the taxpayers billions of dollars and wastes enormous toddler and parent time.
• public intellectuals. I am less concerned about this category of influencers. After all, these primarily are thinkers. But the (liberal) media, by definition, creates public intellectuals. And it disproportionately anoints leftists--think Robert Reich, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Malcolm Gladwell. And to stay on the air, those public intellectuals must keep their messages liberal so as to please the media's gatekeepers. Another weakness: public intellectuals, by definition, spend a larger percentage of their work hours on promotion rather than creation than do private intellectuals.

Most troubling, public opinion on policy matters and political candidates may be most affected by:

• people in the creative arts: filmmakers, actors, rock stars, etc. Of course, there are many exceptions, but people in the arts are likely to be longer on offbeat creativity than on intellectual rigor and discipline. They are less likely to be emotionally well-balanced and more likely to be in and out of rehab, literally or figuratively. Do you doubt that the parents of those in the creative arts are more likely than average to deem their kids "misfits", "poorly adjusted," or downright "weird?" Isn't it absurd that our public policy views are less likely to be affected by circumspect thinkers than by drug abusing, convicted of assault Sean Penn, punk rocker Bono (both pictured above,) Michael Moore whose career is spent criticizing capitalism while holding onto an eight-figure net worth he created via capitalism, five-times-married, violent-tempered James Cameron (Avatar, Rambo, The Terminator) comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, crooner Barbara Streisand, even the hosts of The View for God's sake?!

Who are these circumspect thinkers who, in relative anonymity, write and speak about what would be good for the world, not unduly swayed by fads, whether the environmentalist religion from the Left or Constitutional fundamentalism from the Right?

These Wise Men and Women are most likely to be found as key influencers but not as top dogs in corporations, nonprofits, think tanks, as consultants, and occasionally, academia. They are people who realize that to be The Leader is too likely to require ethical compromise, backstabbing, and other non-productive effort. These sages seek not power and acclaim but societal influence. They are the respected geniuses in or as consultants to organizations that generate brilliant ideas that incorporate a wide range of thoughtful input from across disciplines and ideologies.

Arguably the most important thing we could do to improve society is to develop our policy and political views heavily on the input of such Wise Men and Women instead of from escaped-from-the-real-world professors, media news readers, power-hungry politicians, air-time-addicted, ideology-driven pundits, and stoned-out rock stars.

Update: A commenter asked me how should we select our leaders? I have previously proposed two approaches that I believe are dramatically better than that status quo. I reproduce that here:

Reinventing How We Select Our Leaders

More and more money pours into election campaigns, heavily from special interests. That enables ever-more sophisticated Madison-Avenue types to concoct truth-obfuscating messaging to manipulate us. Today, nearly every sentence spoken by major politicians is dial focus-group tested.

As troubling, those special interests wouldn't be pouring billions into campaigns unless they were confident that it would result in politicians doing their bidding rather than what's best for us all. The following would ensure we elect far better and less-corrupted leaders:

• All campaigns would be 100% publicly-funded. This has been proposed and rejected in the past as a denial of free speech. I believe that abridgment is far outweighed by the benefit to society.
• All campaigns would be just two weeks long. That would control cost and only minimally reduce voter knowledge: Most voters have long forgotten what they heard months earlier about the candidates.
• The campaigns would consist only of one or two broadcast debates. Those would be followed by a job simulation: running a meeting.
• A neutral body such as C-Span or Consumers Union would post each major candidate's biographical highlights, voting record, and platform on key issues.

Such a system would reduce candidates' corruptibility while increasing the quality of information voters would have about the candidates. As important, better candidates would run, knowing they needn't run an endless, expensive, press-the-flesh, beholding-to-special-interests campaign.

Here is an even more radical approach to reinventing the way we choose our leaders: Our government officials would be selected, not by voting, but using passive criteria. For example, the Senate might consist of the most newly retired of the 10 largest nonprofits, a randomly selected CEO of the S&P Midcap 400, the Police Officer of America's Cop of the Year, the national Teacher of the Year, the most award-winning scientist under age 30, etc., plus random citizens.

Of course, both of those reinventions of our electoral system are subject to the criticism, "The incumbent politicians would never allow it--the foxes are guarding the hen house." I'd address that by working with the media to urge the electorate to support candidates that would vote for a fairer electoral system.

Another objection is that the U.S. Constitution requires our political leaders to be elected. While amending the Constitution is a huge undertaking, it has been done 27 times.

If I Were President of the United States

If I were the president of the U.S., these would be my priorities:

1. No bailouts. Bailouts reward mismanaged corporations and overspending states as well as people who bought more house or car than they could comfortably afford, while punishing the innocent taxpayer and upstart companies.

2. Encourage a thrift-based, much less materialistic society, in which you don't buy what you can't comfortably afford. A home is the only item that one should borrow for. 

When I came of age, I wanted a car and bought only what I could comfortably pay for in cash: a $300 ten-year-old Ford Falcon with a manual choke. (And I loved it more than if I had bought a brand new car and had to endure the constant pressure of car payments 

3.  Increase CAFE standards so that all cars must get at least 40 mpg, with further increases as car efficiency technology improves. That increases energy independence while saving people money and minimally impeding their freedom to travel. Compare that with environmentalist proposals to raise gas taxes (regressive) or not build freeways so people, sick of gridlock, are forced to take time-wasting, often sardined-in mass transit.

4. No sloppy-thousandths spending of taxpayer money on alternative energy schemes. Corporations are investing in alternative energy, but only in what can reasonably expected to be cost-effective over the next decade. What's left are largely those schemes deemed unworthy. I can't look the struggling working- and middle-class taxpayer in the eye and says it's worth my taking more money from your pocket to pay for sloppy-thousandths schemes.

5. I would talk with my enemies, yes, including terrorists. That increases chances of finding solutions.

6. Stop trying to compete with China and India in science and engineering, for example, by forcing even very non-academically-oriented high school student to take Algebra 2 and math-centric science courses. In an era in which ever more science and engineering work can be sent over the Internet, it's too unlikely that the U.S. can ever compete with Asian countries, which have many more people, a culture that has long valued science and engineering, and countless people willing and able to do the work for a small fraction of what American engineers and scientists charge. 

Replace required science/math courses with courses in entrepreneurship, conflict resolution, financial literacy, information literacy, and ethics. Of course, capable students should be allowed to elect to take challenging science and math courses. 

7. Reestablish ability-grouped classes in school beginning in the 1st grade. Ensure that placement is fair and fluid.

8. Replace professors with master practitioners in all professional training programs: in health care, law, business, etc. Master practitioners would not only improve the training but would shorten it--professors add length to their training programs, not because it's time-effective for students, but because it feeds their scholarly interests and keeps them employed. 

9. Eliminate the enormous redundancy in government: Many agencies governed Katrina relief with disastrous consequences. Every word a teacher utters is constrained by multiple government bureaucracies' rules.

10. Tort reform. Too much of American GDP goes to preventing and responding to unjustified lawsuits. 

11. Ensure that basic health care and housing  (dormitory style) are available for all. But the people who pay into the system would get a higher quality of health care. I am agnostic on whether it should be a single-payer system. 

12. Restrict unions' power to ensure lifetime job security despite bad performance, especially among teachers. Lifetime job security (along with other factors) has ruined all the major unionized industries: car, airline, and steel.

13. Negotiate toughly with the World Bank and China to ensure true free trade.

14. Privatize most things, for example, schools, prisons, police, fire, road construction. Example: CalTrans (a public agency) normally takes years to build a road. But after an earthquake, when the San Francisco Bay Bridge needed immediate retrofitting, after Caltrans diddled with it for years, it finally hired a private company CC Myers--and it completed the project in one weekend. I have been told that City of San Francisco carpenters all make each other work as slowly as possible--or they get their tires slit. Even worse, they build, for example, a fence, then tear it down and build it again so they can say they need to hire more workers to complete the assigned workload.

15. Lightly increase regulation of financial institutions. Heavy regulation brings more problems than it solves--to wit, Sarbanes Oxley, which costs corporations billions. If someone smart seriously wants to be crooked, an extra layer of government regulations won't deter. 

16. Prosecute reverse discrimination, which is rampant and devastates the quality of the goods and services we receive as well as deprives the most meritorious candidate of jobs and spots in colleges. I know an eminent person who serves on three large corporate boards (a Latino woman I might add) who said that to avoid government sanctions, all three companies are forced to reject or not promote more qualified whites and Asians in favor of less productive African-Americans and Latinos even to very high positions, and to mitigate the damage, "put them where they'll do the least harm."

17. Reduce taxes by 50%, while ensuring that corporations pay their fair share--I'd look hard at why many profitable corporations pay no tax. Make equivalent spending cuts, for example, the ideas in #1, 9, and 14 above, and in reducing defense and entitlement spending. I would, for example, means-test Social Security.

18. Move toward a balanced budget. It's the only long-term guarantor of a stable economy. 

 

The result of my proposals: China and India will have more money but America will have a stable, competent, integrity-based quality of life. 

Education is Not the Magic Pill

Linda Chavez, in her Commentary article, "Let Us by All Means, Have an Honest Conversation About Race, wrote:

" Despite what many critics claim (about how to address low achievement among African-Americans,) is the problem traceable to a lack of funding for predominantly black urban schools as opposed to the predominantly white schools of the suburbs? A recent General Accountability Office study found no consistent pattern of underfunded city schools. Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis, for example, spend more to educate their mostly black and Latino student populations than do the surrounding suburbs with their largely white student populations. Perhaps the most glaring example of the disconnection between funding levels and achievement is the school system of Washington, D.C., which spends more than $15,000 annually per pupil—almost twice the national average—but produces among the lowest achievement scores of any school system in the country."