How much do the rich owe the poor?

First, read the following excerpt:

It is impossible to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth without Bill Gates’s ingenuity and effort. But it is far easier to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth being produced by someone other than Bill Gates within the institutions of modern American economic society than it is to imagine Bill Gates generating Bill Gates’s wealth in a different time and place – in France in the 1700s, or in the Central African Republic today – in which society was or is less tolerant of entrepreneurial capitalism and the accumulation of personal billions, and where the community of engineers that gave rise to and became America’s tech sector is absent. Indeed, at some point in Microsoft’s history it was Microsoft the information-processing organism that was more critical to Bill Gates’s wealth accumulation than Bill Gates himself. People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can then capture for himself.

That paragraph can easily be used as some kind of an ideological  Rorschach test.  Upon reading that, one can get pissed off and defend Gates's gazillions, or one might applaud in agreement that Gates has been unfairly hogging it all.

In the essay, by Ryan Avent, from which I had excerpted that paragraph, he makes an argument that will certainly make one sit up:

The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

His follow-up sentence?  "That is not a radical statement."

I want to get back to the example that Avent uses. Bill Gates has made gazillions.

Could Gates have amassed that wealth if he were in the Central African Republic? The answer is easy--he could not have.

Could Gates have made it that big back 200 years ago in France. He could not have.

Which means, there is something special about the very specific time period over which Gates was able to make his gazillions. The question then is how much Gates owes society for the special circumstances in which all these were possible.

Bill Gates, his wife, and Warren Buffett, have all made it abundantly clear--through their interviews and speeches over the years--that they fully recognize how lucky they were to have been in this special circumstances that made possible their gazillionaire status. Buffett refers to even being born in the USA as having won the "ovarian lottery." In addition to their humanitarian views, this is also a reason for them to turn almost all of their wealth over to the foundation that then spends it on various domestic and international projects.

After quoting Adam Smith and the wonderful advantages of trade and specialization, Avent writes:

Secure in the knowledge that societal growth would not reduce redistribution (and could indeed increase the value available for redistribution by increasing global output) the incentive to draw the borders of society tightly would be curtailed. The challenge, of course, is to create the broad social interest in an encompassing redistribution. How to do that?

Isn't that the challenge that I have been struggling with all my adult life!  How do we create the broad social interest in redistribution that is needed along with the open borders, trade, and specialization?  How do we develop a social contract that will include redistribution, which the ideologues from the right hate, while also allowing for free trade that the ideologues from the left hate?

Avent writes that Adam Smith the philosopher wrote about that too.  "The force of human empathy can be made to serve either openness or societal mercantilism."

Here again the problem is that we are far more empathetic to people like us, but not towards others who are completely unlike us.  We conveniently forget that deep down we are all humans, but only view each other through nationalistic or religious or ethnic, or whatever divisive lens we want to use.

There is a better answer available: that to be ‘like us’ is to be human. That to be human is to earn the right to share in the wealth generated by the productive social institutions that have evolved and the knowledge that has been generated, to which someone born in a slum in Dhaka is every bit the rightful heir as someone born to great wealth in Palo Alto or Belgravia. ...
Rich societies can find ways to justify their great wealth relative to others: their members can tell themselves stories about the great things they did that others could not have done that made them wealthy beyond imagination. Alternatively, they could recognize the wild contingency of their wealth, cultivate human empathy, and do what they can to extend the wealth of humans to everyone.

If only we had more empathy.  If only even a couple of million among the 63 million had even a little bit of a respect for the value of empathy!

The high road is a red herring

In my personal life, I have ended friendships with people who voted for trump.  I have no space in my life for people who willingly sided with a horrible human being who has not only said and done godawful things but even boasts about them.

But, that is my personal life.

If I were running a business that is open to all, then if any of those trump supporters came into my establishment to buy my goods or services, well, I won't be happy to see their faces but will still serve them.  Not because of my interest in making money of those people.  But because a business transaction has nothing to do with who those fucked up people voted for.

Which is why even though the personal side of me is delighted that a restaurant owner turned away trump's "Baghdad Bob," I don't agree with it as a social practice.

This is not about Michelle Obama's "when they go low, we go high."  Nope. In fact, I believe that this taking the high road made it all the easier for trump and his 63 million voters to gain power.

Taking the high road works only when the other side recognizes the moral high ground.  Which is why Gandhi's moral war won against the British bayonets, and he could drive the bastards back to Britain without firing a single shot.  To their credit, the British bastards recognized their own moral weakness in how they screwed the browns, and also recognized the awesome power of Gandhi's nonviolence and civil disobedience.  Had Gandhi been against hitler, for instance, the maniac would have gassed Gandhi and hundreds of millions without a second thought.

In the case of the restaurant owner, I am not advocating any moral high ground.  Just as a baker ought to serve gays and lesbians similar to how he serves straight people, a restaurant ought to serve the fucked up trump voters too.

I was happy to read that one of the senior lawmakers on the good side, and a fierce critic of trump, saying this:

"I think, as far as the restaurant incident, I think the restaurant owner should have served her," said Cummings, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee.

Cummings also added: "But again, I think President [Donald] Trump has created this."

Instead of restaurants turning away the trump people, I would way prefer that people take it upon themselves, like what happened to the baby-snatcher secretary to trump, kirstjen nielsen.

Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, a fierce defender of the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy toward immigration, heckled by protesters while eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant. https://t.co/porjCrCGbw pic.twitter.com/O1CrH3GW3P

— ABC News (@ABC) June 20, 2018

There is no high road with these trump maniacs.

Epoch of Single Women

When I was young--yes, I was young a long time ago--women were actively discouraged from pursuing higher education and careers.  There were two big issues of those days: It could become a challenge to find a suitable groom, and an educated/career woman might not fit into the multi-generational household that was the norm then.

As a young boy, I bought into that.  But, at the same time, I could not understand how anybody in their right minds could prevent my aunt or sister from higher education or careers.  As I got into high school years, the more I observed my female classmates from afar--we couldn't talk to them!--I became convinced that it was wrong to stop them from doing whatever they wanted to do.

So much has happened within my life time.

Now, women everywhere seem to be ready to do, and as that old Hollywood expression goes, "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels."  Women are doing some serious butt-kicking!

Further, I now notice something else too--women don't seem to care all that much whether they are married.  Young men don't seem to care either.  Young women are awesomely independent these days.  We have seemingly transitioned into a society of singles.  All within my life time!  (Of course, it is the American context in which I now operate.)

The visionary feminist, Susan B. Anthony, foresaw this:

In the 1800s, Susan B. Anthony wrote: “In women's transition from subject to sovereign, there must needs be an era of self-sustained, self-supported homes.” Traister says that her prediction was correct, and that this has led to what Anthony once described as an "epoch of single women" in America.

All these are mind-blowing stuff.  If only we paused to think about them.  Daily life is changing so rapidly that I cannot even begin to imagine how it will be when my lifetime comes to an end.

I, therefore, have no problem with this statement:

The 21st century is the age of living single.

What a continuation of the two-hundred-year story!

And, oh, I can personally relate to this, even though the author is talking about young people:

Those who cherish their alone time will often choose to live alone. Some have committed romantic relationships but choose to live in places of their own, a lifestyle of “living apart together.”

So, in this century's chapter of the human story:

As the potential for living a full and meaningful single life becomes more widely known, living single will become more of a genuine choice. And when living single is a real choice, then getting married will be, too. Fewer people will marry as a way of fleeing single life or simply doing what they are expected to do, and more will choose it because it’s what they really want.
If current trends continue, successive generations will have unprecedented opportunities to pursue the life that suits them best, rather than the one that is prescribed.

A full and meaningful life ... as a single woman.  Something that my grandmothers could never ever have imagined!
 
But, our politics has yet to catch up with the reality.

So what we have is the need to reform all kinds of economic and social policies to better reflect the way that Americans are actually living, not the way that they used to live 50 years ago.

Amen, sister!

If only the Tea Party activists ate rice every single day!

Margaret Thatcher famously commented that there is no such thing as society, in her articulation of a political economic thinking that promoted the individual and individual's rights.  Thatcher and Reagan set the world onto reexamining the role of the individual and the individual's contract with others.  As we look around, it is hard not to notice that we are yet to arrive at any definitive version of the contract--in fact, our disagreements appear to be getting more and more intense on the issue of individuals and society (think Obamacare, for instance.)

An anthropology professor notes in the NY Times forum, "The Stone":

modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.

"Plus" is the operative word there.

The sanctification of the rights of individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals. There was never a time in history before civil society when we were each totally free to do whatever we elected to do. We have always been social and caring creatures. The thought that it is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous fabrication. This is not how we got to be the kind of species we are today.

I don't imagine the patron saint of the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, reading that essay and thinking about the ideas discussed there.  It is a shame that from the intellectual weights of a Jefferson and Franklin and more we have now arrived at the likes of Palin as powerful leaders.  This surely cannot be evolution! ;)

So, why the rice, you ask?  There is a reason, dear reader.  Keep in mind that this blogger does not simply rant like how Palin does!

Here is what a report in the Scientific American notes:

research from the U.S. and China indicates that northern Chinese may have a mind-set closer to individualistic Americans than their southern compatriots. And the reason is rice.

Got your interest there?

Farmers north of the Yangtze predominantly grow wheat, and those to the south grow rice. Cultivating rice is very labor- and water-intensive, and it therefore requires sharing resources. Communities have to cooperate to plant and irrigate. Growing wheat requires half the labor and depends more on rainfall patterns, so it can be managed with much less reliance on one's neighbors.

Sets up well for the question, which is:

[University of Virginia doctoral candidate Thomas Talhelm] wondered if agricultural practices could help explain the more individualistic, or Western, mind-set he found in the north compared with the more holistic, or Eastern, way of thinking in the south.

Aren't you dying to know what Talhelm found?

As expected, the researchers found that holistic thought and loyalty were higher in provinces with rice cultivation and that individualism was more common in wheat-farming areas. To see if the rice theory applied beyond students, the researchers also looked at provincial divorce rates, another indicator of individualism. “Wheat regions had a 50 percent higher divorce rate than rice regions,” Talhelm says.

Aha!  There is more:

The rice theory jibes with other cultural research into how agriculture influences thinking, explains Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study. For example, Nisbett found that in Turkey, farmers (an interdependent occupation) were much more holistic than herders (an independent occupation).

If only Sarah Palin and the Tea Party nutcases would do some serious reading and thinking before they opened their mouths, and if only people across the political spectrum engaged in reading and thinking!

Yep, from the New Yorker ;)

Science is hard. Will get harder. Learn to deal with it!

Throughout my early years in school, math and the sciences came naturally to me and I found the subjects to be absolutely wonderful as well.  Decades later, a classmate, "S," recalled how I had helped him with calculus, and much to my disappointment I had/have no memories of that.  But, I can easily imagine having helped him because those were topics that I could have dealt with even in my sleep!

My heart and emotions were not in the math and sciences, however, and slowly I drifted away from that part of the intellectual world.

After I returned to academe as a faculty--this was in California--I once organized a term-long series on introducing freshman students to various intellectual pursuits.  One week, it was an English professor who came over to talk with the students.  Very fashionably did she sit on the table, as opposed to on the chair, and in her remarks emphasized to students how much she didn't get math when she was in high school and college, and didn't get it even as an older adult, and that it really didn't matter because, well, she was a professor.  Her message to the students was, well, don't sweat the math!

I was shocked that she would so actively encourage impressionable freshmen to stop worrying about math and sciences if they didn't get them or weren't interested in them.

Turned out that she was not the only faculty to talk to students that way.  Over the years, I have come to feel that most faculty outside the sciences have actively made sure that students feel legitimized about not wanting to do science or math.

And then there is the whole GPA issue.  Students know really, really, well that they can easily boost their GPAs if they took as minimal as possible courses in the sciences and math.

The pursuit of the perfect GPA is a distraction that leads too many students away from the challenges they should be facing in their undergraduate years. At a time when public understanding of science is critical, fewer and fewer non-majors are taking demanding science courses, due at least in part to their fear of getting penalized for their efforts with a less than stellar grade.

Thus, we end up graduating students with high GPAs, making sure that all students being above-average is not merely the case in a fictional Lake Wobegon!  Commencement ceremonies now routinely have magna- and summa-cum-laudes by the dozens--of course, very, very few of them from math and science, and nobody seems to even acknowledge that!  Once, when I participated in the university's deliberations on choosing the outstanding graduates, I made a mistake of commenting that it would not be fair to compare GPAs of students who were in different majors; I was surprised that there was no discussion on that point. Keep ignoring and eventually people like me will go away, I suppose!  It worked--it has been years since I participated in those discussions.

It is not merely a CP Snow kind of worry I have about the decreasing emphasis on science.  That is certainly a worry.  Of even more concern is the message we convey to students--find easy ways out, and don't struggle with things that are hard.

Such a message is the worst education we can ever provide.  Students don't even realize how much we are shortchanging their lives this way.  That message is the worst return on their investment.

Through education, which is more than a paper diploma, we would hope that students understand that life is a long haul, with quite a few complexities that they will have to deal with individually and as members of society.  The struggles in the classroom are more than merely about the subject content, and are metaphors for life.  Life is no cakewalk and is bloody hard in so many different ways.

If they can fight their way to the truth, the truth will make them free, just as it did for me that day in high school physics.
What is true for science is also true for the other great human endeavors.
To engage with the world in search of any kind of Truth is an expression of the search for excellence. That, by its very nature, is desperately difficult. There will always be a price to be paid in time, sweat and tears. We should never sugarcoat that reality.

Beyond all these, think about the implications for public policies.  A citizenry that is not educated in the sciences is a nightmare that we are already living through.  A classic example is the paranoia over GM crops.    That is also the example that is the point of departure in this essay, where the author is concerned about irrationality holding back good science:

What lies at the root of this panic, and others like it? One factor that is often ignored by champions of reason is that science is hard, and getting harder. In the mid-19th century, the ideas of British naturalists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace took hold in part because they were so simple and intuitive (and in part because Darwin was such a clear writer). In those days, it was just about possible for an educated layman to get a grip on the cutting edges of science, medicine and technology. The same feat would be laughably impossible today. 

The more science becomes difficult to understand, the easier it is to grab a hold of "alternative" explanations:

It is hard to become a molecular biologist, or a doctor, or an engineer. Yet it is relatively easy to grasp the ‘precautionary principle’ — the belief that, in the absence of scientific proof that something is harmless, we must assume that it is harmful.

Yes, because it is easier to play this game, we then have an increasing population of reactionaries.  Conservatives in an unscientific way.  Things have gone so bad that:

Scientists are distrusted in a way they were not 100 years ago. The whole scientific enterprise looks to many like some sort of sinister conspiracy, created by the industrial establishment to make money at the expense of our health and our planet. ‘Science’ (rather than greed, incompetence, laziness or simple expediency) gets blamed for the degradation of our environment, pollution and threats to species. 

As the essay points out, if the early humans had adopted such a reactionary approach, fire and the wheel would have been banned even before they were adopted!

Oh well ... I will keep ranting away, though nobody listens to me, ever ;)

At the (new) biology lab at my old school, during the class reunion after 30 years