United States of the Traumatized!

In November of 2006--yes, twelve years ago--a faculty "colleague" emailed me, in which he wrote:

I did lack a bit of courtesy; however, if you are going to exist in an administrative/director position at any level at any university I suggest you quickly develop a thicker skin...faculty are frequently, mostly without intention, discourteous and disrespectful.

In another context more than a decade ago, a philosophy professor had some choice words for me in his lengthy email: "please shut up."

It is an endless list of faculty freely dishing out.  The irony is that many of these are the same ones who "fight" to protect students from words and ideas!

Of course, way back in graduate school, I had been educated enough on how unprofessional faculty can be.  I was mentally prepared for what academia will be.  But, every unprofessional response was a shock that continued to shatter into a million pieces the noble ideal, if ever it existed, of a Socratic exchange of ideas.

It is not only in academia.  Everywhere, all the way from the current Oval Office, people seem to simultaneously exhibit two attitudes: One in which they seem to want to always hit below the belt, and another in which they constantly whine that their feelings are being upset.  Bizarre!

So, what can be done?

[If] we are going to beat back the regressive populism, mendacity and hyperpolarization in which we are currently mired, we are going to need an educated citizenry fluent in a wise and universal liberalism. This liberalism will neither play down nor fetishize identity grievances, but look instead for a common and generous language to build on who we are more broadly, and to conceive more boldly what we might be able to accomplish in concert. Yet as the tenuousness of even our most noble and seemingly durable civil rights gains grows more apparent by the news cycle, we must also reckon with the possibility that a full healing may forever lie on the horizon. And so we will need citizens who are able to find ways to move on despite this, without letting their discomfort traumatize or consume them. If the American university is not the space to cultivate this strong and supple liberalism, then we are in deep and lasting trouble.  

Nope, the university has long ceased to be place for the professional and courteous battle of ideas.

Source

In support of peaceism

In my classes, when students pepper their responses with any "ism"--capitalism, in particular--I tell them to avoid those usages.  At least in my classes, even if they continue with that practice elsewhere.  I tell them that while we think that we know what any "ism" means, and while we believe that everybody else agrees with that understanding, the reality is very different.

Most of us will find it difficult to define and explain any "ism."  Ask a devout Hindu what Hinduism is and you will stump them.  They will give you some rambling answers.  Even if their answer seems brief, chances of other Hindus agreeing with that brief definition are as rare as a snowfall in Chennai.

Capitalism seems like a word that we are all familiar with, and yet most of us will be hard pressed to articulate a clear and succinct understanding of it.  Even worse is when students beat up on capitalism because their professors did.  I would rather that students developed an understanding of issues and ideas, instead of merely mouthing about "isms."

One of my favorite political economic philosopher writes about capitalism that further reinforces our need to understand what we are talking about:

That we insist on ruminating on something called "capital" does not prove that its accumulation was in fact unique to modernity. And it is not. Romans and Chinese and human beings back to the caves have always accumulated capital, abstaining from consumption to get it.

Accumulating and owning capital is not anything new, right?

But, didn't "capitalism" make us rich?

What made us rich were new ideas for investing it, not the investments themselves, necessary though they were.

Which is what I tell students over and over again: The story of the last two hundred years is a story of ideas.  And, for that matter, it is through new ideas that we have gotten to where we are from the time we figured out permanent agriculture.

Even the capital, or investment capital if we want to be clear, alone does not work. Without new ideas, any amount of capital is mere crap; "financing is merely a necessary condition, not a sufficient one."

Back when I was a bullshitting teenager, I was convinced that it was a lack of money that was holding India back.  I freely and strongly opined that if people did not waste their money by buying gold, then there would be plenty of money for other things.  I forgot to ask myself: "What other things?"  Those other things are the new ideas that have transformed our lives.

So, financing is a necessary condition.  Like many other necessary conditions.

Necessary conditions are endless, and mostly not pertinent—"having liquid water at the usual temperatures" and "the absence of an active civil war" are necessary too, but nobody wants to call it waterism or peaceism.

If only we can make peaceism the dominant ideology!

So, if ideas are what transformed the world, and will continue to transform the world, then where do those new ideas come from?

Now, that is a completely different question from merely beating up on, or praising, capitalism, right?  Like I remind students, understanding the world requires us to ask the right questions.

I also tell them that I rarely ever have the answers.  My job is only to ask questions! ;)

The economic geography in proximity versus proxy

There are a few simple guidelines that I use to understand the world.  Like, I will believe corporations are people the moment that Texas executes a corporation, or, MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) will be the future if and when a majority of Harvard's students graduate after taking a whole bunch of MOOC classes.

Texas will not execute a corporation because, well, no corporation is a human who can be sent to the chair.  Students do not go to Harvard in order to take online classes.

Sure, those are big issues.  How about a "smaller" truthiness that we can think about?

Take business travel.  We are long past the days of the phone alone--we have email, video calling and conferencing, and whatever else is out there.  Yet, the suits travel, even if only for brief meetings.  The day this travel dies out, I will change my mind and agree that proxy beats proximity.  Until then, I refuse to budge from the idea that proximity rules.

Am I talking in the abstract?  You need data and trends to make your own call on this?

a country with a per capita income that is 100% higher than another receives 130% more business travelers and sends 170% more people abroad. This means that business travel tends to grow more than proportionally with the level of development.

Get that?  Despite all the communication technologies at their disposal, richer countries generate and receive way more business travel than the less-affluent countries.  Why so? "why do we need to move the brain, not just the bytes?"  Why do the business people need that proximity when there are all those proxies?

First, the brain has a capacity to absorb information, identify patterns, and solve problems without us being aware of how it does it. That is why we can, for example, infer other people’s goals and intentions from facial expressions, body language, intonation, and other subtle indicators that we gather unconsciously.
Second, the brain is designed to work in parallel with other brains. Many problem-solving tasks require parallel computing with brains that possess different software and information but that can coordinate their thoughts. That is why we have design teams, advisory boards, inter-agency taskforces, and other forms of group interaction.

 So, what do all these mean?

The fact that firms incur the cost of business travel suggests that, for some key tasks, it is easier to move brains than it is to move the relevant information to the brains. Moreover, the fact that business travel is growing faster than the global economy suggests that output is becoming more intensive in know-how and that know-how is diffusing through brain mobility.

Therefore?

Rather than celebrate their thrift, countries that are out of the business travel loop should be worried. They may be missing out on more than frequent flyer miles.  

We are humans.  Without the human-level interaction, it is not easy to get ideas across.  Newer ideas are how we have gotten to where we are from the vast African Savannah.  Businesses are built on ideas, which means that travel becomes a necessary expense.

That human-interaction in order to learn new ideas is also why I enjoy the real-world classes way more than the online ones.  When we humans are together at the same time and in the same room, the diffusion of ideas happens way more and way better than when I merely exchange bytes with students.  But, then I don't get to set the rules.  Hence, I, too, teach online classes, and corporations are the most powerful "people" ever on this planet!

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

During my graduate school days, I worked as an intern at a transportation planning agency in Los Angeles.  One day, during a conversation on some planning issue, my supervisor, Debra, commented that I seemed to enjoy being a contrarian.  I tried explaining to her that I wasn't contradicting her for the sake of arguing, but that those were serious issues we had to think about.

I knew what she meant though.  In a planning agency, one is expected to follow a certain bottom-line set of ideas.  I, with my free-thinking, either didn't always go along with them or sometimes even explicitly questioned them.  Such a trait has been a constant in my life, perhaps working against my professional advancements, but the free-thinking has been one immensely rewarding intellectual life.  And enriching in my personal life too.

Thus, even now, when I opine in favor of nuclear energy or genetically modified rice, or criticize higher education, but at the same time champion a whole lot of left-of-center values, I am more easily tagged a contrarian than otherwise. Even worse is the contrarian label if I happened to change my mind on issues after years of reflecting on them, even though revising our thesis based on compelling evidence is what the scientific method is all about!

The "contrarian" streak is very much alive when it comes to food and diet.  When academics praise organic foods and advocate for them, I point out that almost always the poorest of poor in the villages of Asia and Africa eat nothing but organic food.  And that organic food hasn't gotten them very far.  Not that I want strange chemicals in my food, but I want to be realistic about "organic."

When people talk about going on diets, I keep quiet mostly because as a thinly built fellow my contrarian comments can be misconstrued in many ways.  But, I would always want to tell them that a diet by itself is not the problem or the solution. Especially when they fondly talk about the food and diet of the old days; because, I then have the urge to remind them that in the old days not only was there not enough food, but even the available food was not good enough.  Under-nourishment was more the norm than otherwise.  I would never want to go back in time. Ever. Because, going back in time means that I have to re-live all those problems our ancestors had to deal with.

In a wonderfully informative and an engaging essay on our "Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past," Professor Marlene Zuk writes:

It's common for people to talk about how we were "meant" to be, in areas ranging from diet to exercise to sex and family. Yet these notions are often flawed, making us unnecessarily wary of new foods and, in the long run, new ideas.

Yes, it makes us wary of new ideas.  And that is one awful downside.  As I often remark in my classes, what I teach is merely an example of how much humans have progressed from the African Savannah thanks to new ideas.  If we had had nothing but nostalgia for those good old days, then, hello, I wouldn't be blogging this and you wouldn't be reading it either.

Some of our nostalgia for a simpler past is just the same old amnesia that every generation has about the good old days. The ancient Romans fretted about the young and their callous disregard for the hard-won wisdom of their elders. Several 16th- and 17th-century writers and philosophers famously idealized the Noble Savage, a being who lived in harmony with nature and did not destroy his surroundings. Now we worry about our kids as "digital natives," who grow up surrounded by electronics and can't settle their brains sufficiently to concentrate on walking the dog without simultaneously texting and listening to their iPods. ...
Given this whiplash-inducing rate of recent change, it's reasonable to conclude that we aren't suited to our modern lives, and that our health, our family lives, and perhaps our sanity would all be improved if we could live the way early humans did. Our bodies and minds evolved under a particular set of circumstances, the reasoning goes, and in changing those circumstances without allowing our bodies time to evolve in response, we have wreaked the havoc that is modern life.
In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello, president of the renowned Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, called "paleofantasies."

 Damn, these people write so well!  I love that phrase "paleofantasies" :)

[In] a larger sense, we all sometimes feel like fish out of water, out of sync with the environment we were meant to live in. If gnawing on that rib or jogging barefoot through the mud is therapeutic, enjoy. But know that should you wish to join us, the scientific evidence will gladly welcome you to the 21st century, in all its inevitable anxious uncertainty.

Perhaps this nostalgia, the paleofantasies, are their defensive approaches to deal with the uncertainties that envelop life.  But, hey, life has never, ever, been for certain.  More importantly, the good old days were not all good old days.