Dan Erwin

Plainly Corrupt or "Legally" Corrupt?

Recently a delightful, young Middle Eastern couple and their small children moved into my apartment building. Like a number of new residents, they are exceptionally well educated. He, for example has a PhD in health economics from an American University. Both worked for a few years at well-known Silicon Valley corporations, but are here for further education.

Knowing my background, the young man and I sat down to talk about some linguistic rules. He was searching for day care for his younger daughter and wanted to know what he could and couldn’t say in an interview. And how best to find out whether a given school center would be best for his daughter. It’s rare for an international to ask about linguistic rules, so his questions of me were not only unusual, but especially astute.

After I laid out some protocols and suggested several different ways to gain as much information as possible for his decision, we got to talking about...

Walking in the Snow Like a Penguin

Tom Sacco shot me this cartoon, reminding me that walk like a penguin also needs to be added to walking in winter.

Thanks again, Tom.

The Impeachment Process Is Worthwhile--Even If the Senate Refuses to Impeach

Though this historical review of the impeachment process won’t be published until the March edition of the Atlantic, all of its subscribers received a copy of Yoni Applebaum’s intriguing study a full month early. Applebaum, the senior editor for politics at the Atlantic, has all the right credentials—if that matters to you--including Columbia, a Brandeis PhD and teaching at Harvard. Obviously, an attempt to get the public thinking, I noticed a number of reviews of the study just a day after its publishing.

Because of the fiasco with Clinton, many legislators are wary of moving to impeachment. But the real worth of Applebaum’s review is to limit Trump’s power. From the initial pages of the review, Applebaum argues that the most serious charge is the attack upon the “bedrock of American democracy.”

Here then, are the five arguments Applebaum lays out in support of impeachment...

Failing Your Way to Success

Walter Russell Mead, an astute historian and commentator on American history and current events, recently wrote an article on our American history of failing our way to success. His first paragraph is a fun mind game.

As Americans struggle to make sense of a series of uncomfortable economic changes and disturbing political developments, a worrying picture emerges of ineffective politicians, frequent scandals, racial backsliding, polarized and irresponsible news media, populists spouting quack economic remedies, growing suspicion of elites and experts, frightening outbreaks of violence, major job losses, high-profile terrorist attacks, anti-immigrant agitations, declining social mobility, etc. etc. etc.

Sound familiar? Really? Actually, it’s a description of the American Democracy in the years between 1865 and 1900.

Mead then reverts to our world. He’s aware that it will a very long time before it becomes clear what a fully mature information economy might look like. He points out that if people and the 1860s and 1870s had been told that only two percent of the population would earn a living on the farm in the twentieth century, they could never imagine what jobs the displaced farmers could find. The full consequences of the knowledge economy and the information age will only come into view on a very slow time table. The implication, however, is that getting caught in the grip of profound pessimism and giving up on government, business and the nation is highly unrealistic.

But he draws some interesting conclusions about...

Deciding Whether to Buy a Book. . . .

Or, why I bought Yascha Mounk’s The People vs Democracy.

If you have only so much time to read and you’re watching your pennies, how do you decide whether to buy a new book outside your area of expertise? One way to go at that is to check out who’s reviewing the book. You may not know all the reviewers, but you can probably flag bias pretty quickly if you read a few of the online reviews. Next you have to ask yourself what you think about the bias. And then, decide. I bought Mounk’s book on the above basis!

Mounk’s recent book The People vs. Democracy has been reviewed or commented about positively in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Economist, Washington Post, The Atlantic and the New Yorker. That says “buy me.” I had read his earlier book with much admiration, and this was another fascinating study to buy and digest.

Mounk points out that democracy—not just in the US—is going through its worst crisis since..

Bret Stephens and the Paranoid Style

I graduated from college in 1959, a few years before Richard Hofstadter's essay on The Paranoid Style in American Politics came out in Harper's. As an associate in a Pasadena (California) church, the conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society were driving me nuts. One of the promulgators of conspiracy, a retired naval officer and member of the "society" was teaching in adult classes. The senior minister, a nice guy, but utterly gutless, let it go on and on. I was a history major, so I was familiar with American conspiracy theories. I was amazed how many in that well-educated, upper-middle-class church were believers in the process.

Shortly after I left that position, Hofstadter's essay came out in Harper's magazine. I have viewed it as a touchstone ever since. Still I never thought the essay would be as valuable today as it was then. Yet here's Bret Stephens, a "never Trump Republican" using the valued essay again. What's especially helpful...

Is Job Security Really All About “Who You Know”?

A little exercise in critical thinking.

Recently, I received an email from LinkedIn with the familiar heading regarding job security, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Let’s suppose you have no history with this kind of statement. How would you assess its truthfulness? For that matter, how do you test the truthfulness of any claim, whether email, text, tv or conversation?

 The either/or format of the LinkedIn claim is a common persuasive technique, often called the black or white fallacy because readers are asked to decide between two positions. Many business people recognize decision biases like anchoring, over-confidence and vivid anecdote, but few yet recognize the common fallacies of decision-making such as the false dichotomy, name-calling and card-stacking.  From the get-go, the ability to recognize a dichotomy like the LinkedIn claim is a kind of “sensitivity training” and a cue that the solution being offered is probably wrong.

Vantage point

LinkedIn has over 500 million users and, I assume, is the largest and most prominent professional network, suggesting that their pronouncements come with a lot of clout. So, it’s important to ask whether their claim, like those of other major institutions, is actually true.  Critical thinkers assume that when you construct an entire argument on one cause, you face the temptation to leave out anything that complicates that notion. It’s inevitable, therefore, that LinkedIn minimizes job performance, skips over issues of economic or organizational stability, ignores the job destructive digital technology—and avoids mentioning any other potential issues...

Gloria Steinem's New Category for Gory, Blood-and-Guts, Terrorism Filled, Male Movies

 

Maybe it's just the fact that we're both the same age--82 years--that causes Steinem and me to get a real bang out of creating new terminology and laughing at ourselves. She really did me one better a short time ago, revealing her ability to create new linguistic categories. I burst out laughing three or four times the same day, just thinking about her obscene category label.

Steinem was on a plane from New York to Seattle when a long delay on the tarmac prompted the airline to offer a free movie. When the flight attendant read the choices out loud, the man across the aisle from her said, "I don't watch chick flicks!" She knew the language as well as I...

A Better Understanding of the Trump Presidency

Inevitably, as we face the losses of Republicans and Democrats to Trump, we're trying to make sense of the situation. Making sense of Trump is relatively easy: very little in the toolkit which makes for a great deal of unpredictability. This presidency is unique in that it's the only successful response of American populism. Historically, populists have failed to elect a president.

For years, however, both Republicans and Democrats have failed or were unable to understand how to deal with the social and political discontent of many Americans. In spite of years of denial, it's...

So 80% of Adults Think They Can Spot Fake News??

Nahhhh! That makes no sense. In those very few areas where I’ve done a lot of homework and some listening to conversations about the news, it’s very clear that very, very few (say 20%?) can spot fake news (enough adverbial uses of “very?”). The newscasters and opinion writers can’t or don’t, and neither can John Q Public.

Though not the same thing, we know, based on hundreds of studies, that people can spot a liar 54 percent of the time — a ratio that is perilously close to pure chance. Spotting lies from people suggests that