Is Capitalism Making Us Stupid?

Odd heading for this - but that is the name of the book cited and reviewed here.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/04/is-capitalism-making-us-stupid.html

I like the review a lot - it talks about a lot of things I am concerned about and have been thinking about for a decade or more. But when I finished reading it, I was not sure I wanted to buy the book. So I thought I would explore that a little bit myself, and share it - if I think it is worth anything.

Here's some of my basic premises that have developed over the last 15 years.

1. Capitalism is a pretty good system, provided we manage it intelligently.
   Economics is not well understood by most people, it is more governed by schools of belief than any scientific method - but  . . .  the market approach has great potential, if we use our brains to manage it.
2. Democracy is similar - could be worse. As Churchill famously said, it is the worst political system, except for all of the others. But we need to remember that we invented it, and we could still improve it. God did not hand it down. In fact, he (or she) seems prone to a somewhat more hierarchical approach. 
3. Humans are not rational - we make decisions by gut and emotion. That does not augur well for either capitalism or political systems, given the general failure to be rational about how we run them. I love the example cited of our innate ability to project the trajectory of a thrown object - Angry Birds - but the great difficulty we encounter to do the same for a dropped object. We "evolved" our society from blood feuds, dictators and wars. Why do we think this talking and negotiating approach is going to work?

What this reviewer, and I assume the book points out is:

1. Rational thinking is under attack. Our rationality is not only a biological imperative, it is under attack from a mass of "believers" who really do not value any rational approach to anything. How else explain the rejection of global warming, the mass attacks on information and data on any topic. Our political actors generally call on fear and loathing, belief and lies, rather than cite anything that resembles science or information. For heaven's sake, we are still fighting about evolution. 
2. Capitalism and Democracy were crazy inventions. Given the propensities of humans, neither should really work at all. We are competitive, vicious, fight to the death, hierarchy prone, strong leader followers. How can a "market" or a "consensus" approach ever lead to anything but disaster. The same was said for things like "invisible little beings cause diseases". Or "some problems with people's actions come from the physical make up of their brain and are not 'fixable'." We seem to have finally understood these two - it may take us a while to get to the evolution one. There seems to be some confusion with the "religious" stuff.
3. Advertising is not rational. Well, duh. And most political discourse is the same. I am not sure it is making us more stupid - we already have a lot of that. And our politicians are persuading us of lies and idiocies with the same techniques.
4. Being rationally informed about politics is not an efficient or rewarding investment. I've seen this before, but this brought it home. If you make a buying decision, you can be pretty effective about reading reviews, comparing products, pricing, etc. It takes some time and effort, and you have to overcome that instant urge to buy - but we can do it, and there is generally a reward. I get a good product at a fair price. The effort has a reward. But in the political world, my one vote has NO real positive returns. Why spend the time and effort to do any research, to meet the candidates, to understand the issues. Especially in the face of the barrage of misinformation that gets thrown at us. There is no reward to that effort. My vote makes no significant difference at all. So why should I undertake a lot of work to analyze positions and possibilities. Just go with the group.
5. Solutions to all of this are woefully lacking. I've been there. No one yet has any bright ideas on how to overcome all of this lack of reason in these two realms. I think the political one is key. If we could actually make decisions based on research and data, I am persuaded that we might adopt a "nudge" political framework, to help people make better, more rational decisions. I don't see any other approach that might work at the moment. 

Thanks for reading this far. Help me out here. What do you think?

Rational Or NOT?!

OK, if that last one on The Righteous Mind rang any bells, you really should read this one:

https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us

I have been stumbling along here reading a bunch of things in psychology and economics and culture and world views for about 15 years now. This piece cited above sums up about 5 books that I have found very interesting. Kahneman, and McCraney and Haidt, and Thaler.

The basic idea is that evolution has pretty much tuned us to be not quite rational. Oh, we have a brain, and that brain CAN stop and think about things, but mostly, it does not. And that is just fine - it works well. Just imagine walking into the supermarket and approaching the cereal aisle. You want to buy ONE box of cereal. If you were a purely rational animal, how long do you think that would take? Just think of the factors: cost, cost per unit, ingredients, health claims, packaging, etc. There are easily 4,000 choices in that one aisle. This could take a while - or NOT. For most of us, it is simple - I only want to spend 5 minutes at this max - good enough works just fine. It's called satisficing - an economist won the Nobel Prize for coming up with that idea for economic decisions.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/satisficing.asp

And that is the case when we KNOW we are thinking and we intend to make a rational decision. When we are not even aware of how we are leaning, it takes a lot less time. When the lion appeared in your path in the jungle, you were moving even BEFORE your brain registered the thing. MOST of our responses are that kind - an instinctive reaction brought about by the wonderful pattern recognition software in our head that KNOWS and reacts before our brain can even process it. It takes you less than a second to make a judgement about someone else - but it takes your brain about 8 seconds for that to register, and it takes your thinking brain somewhat longer to do anything about it.

The best thing about this article is that he holds out hope that we can figure out how to improve on our fast brain for the things that really matter. He cites Keith E Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind, who is persuaded that we can do better as a society, by reflecting together in a more civil way. Part of our genius, from Haidt, is that we have these powerful motivators that enable us to act as a larger group, to accomplish amazing things. If we can empower that group effort, with more civil discussion and reflective reasoning - we might have a shot at moving forward here.

I'm working on it - how about you?

Why Are Those Idiots from the Other Political Party So Crazy?

I just started a book I bought a few years ago. I wish I had read it then. This has the potential to be my “best book of the decade” – like I have never said that before. The book is The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. If you liked Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman, this book applies those ideas to morals and politics. Research indicates that we act mostly from our instinct, not our reasoning.

When I watch the presidential candidates on the news, I always say to myself, how on earth can these idiots be so popular? They are clearly lying through their teeth. Don’t these people know about PolitiFact? They cannot possibly believe what they say. They are not in touch with reality, they are rude, uncouth idiots. People must be crazy to support them. Ahhhhh!

Come on – you’ve thought that too, haven’t you? Of course you have, and I KNOW I am right – just as you do.

When you look at the result of that in the political arena, and mix in a bit of brutish incivility, we end up with the current nightmare of idiots on both sides, unable to even talk to the other side, or treat them with respect. How on earth will we ever get out of this divide that is destroying our country? Other developed nations seem to be making good headway on important things, like health care and education. And they all seem to have a healthier attitude toward national defense spending. What is wrong with US? We are the most threatened people on the planet. We spend more on defense than the next 7 nations combined – and 5 of them are our allies!

http://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison

This book will help you understand a bit what is going on here with those “idiots”. It will help you see where these fears come from, and how people deal with them. It also offers a possible way out of this craziness. There is some hope – not much, but some. It may also help you to have a civil conversation with your neighbors across the back yard fence. They seem like nice people – what is wrong with them?

I will share more as I read the book – I’m only one third in – but I wanted to get this out there. Just watch the videos below. They say it pretty well. The first one is Steven Colbert in his old character, so it’s good fun, and it’s short. Colbert picks up on the important stuff in the book.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/luw0ia/the-colbert-report-jonathan-haidt

We make snap judgments. We lose sight of the truth. Not me! But, yes, me and you. Absolute certainty? Hmm. I may have said that on occasion.

Next, watch this TED talk by the author. It’s a bit longer, but it is well done. The genius of this is that he uses what he learned in writing the book to present the information. He is appealing to your “elephant”, not your “driver”. The metaphors are wonderful, and so are the stories. They will stick with you.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind

All of this comes from experiments with people around the world. I am NOT making this up, and neither is the author. Here are the key ideas:

•   We are right! They are wrong. We are by nature self-righteous bigots. And that’s NOT a problem – it’s normal! We are always absolutely certain that we are right.
•  We go with our gut. Evolution has given us this gift of rapid decision making. If we weren’t so primed to jump to rapid conclusions, we would never make any decisions.
• Thinking comes after the fact. We marshal other ideas only to support our gut call. Rational arguments on the other side just confirm our belief. You can’t make the dog happy by wagging its tail.
• We tend to be a bit more conservative than not. It’s what worked! The guy who first tried that strange mushroom didn’t leave any kids.
• We work off 5 basic moral imperatives that are in our genes. They pretty much govern how we work. The flavor of the imperatives changes a bit given our “world view” or social culture, but they are key to our rapid decisions.
• Progressives / Conservatives are different. Progressives tend to use just two of our moral rules, while most Conservatives seem to use them all.
• We are Tribal. Team or tribal membership is a big part of us. And then our tribe blinds us to the real world. We take our values from the tribe, the culture we live in, the group we identify with.

The five foundations of morality:

1. Harm / Care.
2.  Fairness / Reciprocity.
3. In Group Loyalty. Only humans can form very large groups, which was a major step in enabling us to create civilization.
4.  Authority / Respect.
5.  Purity / Sanctity. Sex on the right, food on the left.

 www.yourmorals.org – You too can take part in the study.

The “liberals” or “progressives” work more from the values of harm / care and fairness / reciprocity. Conservatives tend to use all 5 more equally. The big insight for me was to understand that they feel that “order tends to decay”. I am usually on the progressive side – we need to move forward, to change adopt new technology and ideas. I tend to ignore the risks that this carries. The basic conservative position tends to be that civilization is pretty fragile, and we could lose it all if we are not careful. They see order as really precious, and anything that goes counter to the present structure is dangerous. It was also interesting to me that punishment seems to be a key part of our moral motivation – including religion and the threat of hell.

In another conversation, the author sums up his findings in this way:

But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Jonathan Haidt 
https://edge.org/conversation/jonathan_haidt-what-makes-people-vote-republican

Finally, here is a longer interview with the author by a Wharton School professor. This one focuses a bit on Business Ethics – which is another interest of mine. Where was this guy when I was teaching that course? This one is longer, but you will learn a lot more.

https://youtu.be/qN42ZLwNFBY

That said, I promise to come back and share more after I finish the book. Let me know what you think. The author also has a website and many other resources out there.
http://righteousmind.com/

I trust this helps a little bit to understand the "crazies". Later.