Let's go, people!

I went to graduate school because I thought that I would find answers to the pressing questions of development.  Within a couple of years, I realized that plenty of highly capable thinkers had already thought up everything that I was worried about.  If everything had already been discussed, then what the hell?

I started understanding that addressing the human condition was not really about finding technical solutions.  Instead, it came down to the power of persuasion and, ultimately, politics.  I would no longer be fooled by fancy-shmancy data-driven models.

Which is also when I seriously started thinking about persuading others through easy to understand approaches.  One of the big topics then was free trade, and NAFTA in this part of the world.  I did not oppose free trade, especially after my experiences in the socialist India.  But, my logic told me that freely moving goods and capital alone merely provides advantages to those who are better-off.  I wanted free movement of people also. 

I went to talk about this with one of the professors.  He disagreed with me.  He gave me the same old textbook argument of how the movement of capital will counter and complement the controls on movement of labor.  I was not convinced.  I wrote an essay and sent that to Economic and Political Weekly.  Of course it was not published--I bet that it was one horribly written essay, stylistically and content-wise.

Over the years, I have been more convinced than ever that globalization ought to include freer, if not completely free, movement of labor.  Yes, I know that this exactly what the fascist thug campaigned against and for which he was rewarded with 63 million votes.  But, hey, the fascist can and will bullshit and lie.  But, the truth cannot be simply tweeted away.

One of the best contemporary thinkers on the distributional aspects of globalization, Branko Milanovic, whom I have quoted before, writes this:

income gaps are unlikely to be eliminated. Which, in turn, shows the importance of migration.  If a borderless cosmopolitan world is to be achieved (an objective with which I agree but see enormous political difficulties in reaching it), migration is absolutely essential. But as economic migration faces increasing obstacles in rich countries (and, it has to be added, not solely because of xenophobia but for economic reasons as well), the ideal of a world “without injustice of birth” recedes.

Yes, the injustice of birth.  Click here if you need a refresher on that.

Milanovic concludes:

I am very sympathetic to the borderless world but to believe that it can be achieved through trade alone, and without significant migration, is unrealistic. And once we say “migration”, we immediately open the Pandora’s box that the most recent elections in Europe and the United States have shown is a reality, not an imagination. Thus, our new “intellectual revolution” should be rather to address the issue of migration and citizenship than free trade. Free trade alone cannot solve world’s problems.

We need to think about migration and citizenship in new ways.  And we need to be able to think about that while dealing with the fascist thug's tweets and rants channeling his narrow and nativist takes on migration and citizenship.  Eventually, in the long run, truth will prevail.  But then, we need to also keep in mind that wonderful line: In the long run we are all dead.

"The art of remembering is the art of thinking."

A few days ago, I was taking a quick walk on campus, after my lunch and prior to my class.  I heard a student yell out my name from the car that was passing by.  I looked at the car.  The driver stopped the vehicle and rolled down the window.

"I didn't expect to see you here, Jessica,"

We talked for a few minutes.  She was one of the more self-motivated and smart students I have met in this university.  It has been six years since she graduated.  I inquired about her sister and her nephew and her husband. "You have a steel-trap mind," she said.

Fortunately, yes.  I pay attention to important things in life, and they register in my memory.  (I know I am setting myself up for the flip side of this: I am bound to insult somebody when I do not remember the details that are important to them, right?)

Apparently remembering is becoming even more challenging for people because of one particular development: Smartphones.  They are hijacking our minds!

Now that our phones have made it so easy to gather information online, our brains are likely offloading even more of the work of remembering to technology. If the only thing at stake were memories of trivial facts, that might not matter. But, as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, "the art of remembering is the art of thinking." Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.

But, of course.  Duh!  This is exactly what I have been telling students (and anybody who asks me about this) for a few years now.  In my intuitive understanding, we need to keep working the brain and its memory functions.  However, this is not about memorizing per se.  Just as fluency with the English language is not about memorizing words in the dictionary.  All these help us think, and think clearly.

It gets even worse:

It turns out that we aren't very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones or computers. As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though "their own mental capacities" had generated the information, not their devices. "The advent of the 'information age' seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before," the scholars concluded, even though "they may know ever less about the world around them."

You can see how we were ripe for the Russian fake news campaign that gave us the fascist, who turns around and calls all the real news as "fake news."

So, what can you do?  You can read that entire WSJ essay by Nicholas Carr, whom I have cited many times before.  Or, you can do what I have been suggesting for years: Keep that smartphone away from you as much as you can.

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our gadgets won't solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

Not only will that help you think clearly, it will also reduce quite a bit of angst that the smartphones give the users.  Because, our brains are wired to be hijacked, and it is our responsibility to protect our brains that can then serve us well:

Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. ...
But even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a "supernormal stimulus," one that can "hijack" attention whenever it is part of our surroundings -- which it always is. Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can't take our minds off it.

Seriously, have I not been saying and writing these through all these years that you have been listening to me and reading my blog?  You don't remember? ;)

We have flown into the cuckoo's nest :(

While watching yet another segment of yet another late night comedian severely critiquing the fascist and his allies, I told the friend that I was getting more and more agitated.  Politics, which was to me the theatre of the absurd that entertained me more than troubled me, has now become a stress agent in my life.

Many of us knew well that this was bound to happen with this thug who was elected by 63 million.  But, I was confident that I would ride it out.  Wrong I am.

Soon after the election, this NY Times piece said it best:

[trump]  is, in a strange, meta way, a spectator of his own performance. For the next four years at least, we are living in a TV show that Mr. Trump is simultaneously starring in, consuming and live-tweeting.

A few months ago, this essay in Foreign Policy noted about "the impact of the shift to All Trump, All the Time News" that "is making it hard to focus on much of what might otherwise be worthy of our attention."

we need to tear our eyes away from the spectacle of this clusterfuck of a presidency and its daily dramas and periodically look up and out to our horizons, recognizing that the narcissism aside, there remains real greatness in America that needs tending, planning, and nurturing in the context of the real world — even if, at the moment, there is very little evidence of that greatness at the center of our government.

That was back in March, which seems like eons ago in trump time!  Like billions of people all around the world, I too have been unable to shift my eyes away from the "clusterfuck of a presidency and its daily dramas."  The result: I feel like I cannot take this anymore, even as I know well that it has not even been one year into his four-year term!

At least television shows have commercial breaks when we can rest a while.  No breaks whatsoever with this "All Trump, All the Time."

Late night shows that used to do silly comedy routines now have no time for silliness.  It is "All Trump, All the Time."  Initially, the laughing was therapeutic.  But, increasingly, it is obvious that even the show hosts are plainly angry.  They are even weepy.

Dinner conversations quickly turn to talking about the fascist thug and his people.  In the classroom, students seem to be referring to him without naming him.  It is no longer about I'm mad as hell and am not taking it anymore, but I am exhausted as hell and can't take it anymore!

Yet, I fully understand that I don't have a choice either.  I cannot afford to not fight back and resist.  I wonder how Gandhi and his people kept it up day after day.  Or how MLK and the millions kept at it day after day.

Maybe this stress and exhaustion will be the route to nothing beyond 75!