Dan Erwin

Sometimes Life is Beyond Our Control

I regularly enjoy conversations with seven or eight friends, retired university faculty, social workers and businessmen. Recently, I’ve become aware that a couple of them are profoundly alarmed and emotionally upset by Trumpism and the Ukrainian invasion and their impact upon themselves. They talk about both quite often and seem personally frightened. I’ve intended to tell them just to take a good stiff drink, do what you can do, and go on with your life. But I’ve come to realize that won’t work for them...

I certainly don’t disagree with their politics. It’s fairly obvious to me that our past president was an evil, greedy bastard who, thus far, has evinced little interest in the common good. Yet human personal and political reality is never that clear cut. Most of us know that good people can do bad things. But my friends seem unaware that sometimes bad people do good things. The current situation seems to bode fairly well for financially and physical secure guys like them, although not for the lower-middle and lower classes. So, what’s really intriguing to me is why some of these guys get so profoundly alarmed by the situation.

The issue, I realized a few months ago, is what’s referred to as locus-of-control...

Why Are People Hoarding Toilet Paper?

The answer is both curious and hilarious. I just got in from my local grocery where I noticed the toilet paper shelves were empty. Seeing a store employee, I asked him why people were buying so much. He shrugged and said he didn’t know. "Probably plenty in the warehouse." Because of my consulting business, I happened to know that there was at least one Kimberly Clarke plant in the next state over—Wisconsin. They make Scott and Cottonelle toilet paper as well as Kleenex. I’m pretty certain we don’t import any from China. I suspect, instead, that a lot of the Chinese forests have been felled long since, much like the Brits. But with all those nearby Wisconsin forests, I’m sure there’s no shortage for making paper of all sorts.

So why are people hoarding toilet paper? Lo and behold, several were curious about my question and did even more homework. 

All kinds of journalists and specialists weighed in on the “problem.”

Australia has also suffered from panic buying of toilet paper despite plentiful domestic supply. A risk expert in the country explained it this way: “Stocking up on toilet paper is … a relatively cheap action, and people like to think that they are ‘doing something’ when they feel at risk.” I didn’t know that, but I’d need a lot of research to believe it.

Brian Cook, University of Melbourne, said that his suspicion is that it is how people react to stress: they want an element of comfort and security. This is an example of “zero risk bias,” in which people prefer to try to eliminate one type of possibly superficial risk entirely rather than do something that would reduce their total risk by a greater amount.  Ummm, maybe.

“Fear is contagious,” says Steven Taylor, a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia and author of the Psychology of Pandemics. “We pick up cues by looking to other people—it’s how stampedes happen in stadiums—so if you’re in a shopping centre and you see some people around you acting in a frightened way and stocking up, that’s going to have a fear contagion effect that causes other people to start over-purchasing.” Really?

From the Atlantic's James Fallows. . . to Pete Buttigieg

In the Fall of Rome, Good News for America.

The October Atlantic just arrived and I was immediately intrigued by James Fallows fascinating article. Actually, it's a response to Peter Mellon's, The World of Late Antiquity and the new book, Walter Scheidel's Escape from Rome. Fallows argues that though the US government is essentially sterile and self-paralyzed, he's found a terrific amount of resilience in state and local governments. In fact, he's found that state and local government, and for certain large private organizations and universities, the country is mainly functional--in exactly areas where national governance has failed. 

Especially enlightening is "that by large margins, Americans feel dissatisfied with the course of national events--and by even larger margins, they feel satisfied with and connected to local institutions and city governments." An American Enterprise Institute team found that 80 percent of Americans found their own town to be an excellent or good place to live. And 70 percent said they trusted people in their own neighborhood. . .

Why Trump Is a Lot Weaker Than He Thinks

Again and again my acquaintances, liberal and even some of my Republican friends are running scared about what Trump is doing to our democracy and its institutions. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ignoring the mess Trump has created or even its impact on our culture, but I find that some, perhaps much, of the fear is overwrought.

So, one way to understand what’s going on in the US is, first, to step out of our democracy and look at parallels around the world. Trump is not unique, but in many ways comparable to what’s going on in other countries. Tom Carothers and Richard Youngs, specialists in foreign policy at the Carnegie Institute, published an article in Foreign Affairs in April 2017 about nations like Russia, Holland, Turkey and Indonesia where illiberal democracy is supposedly on the rise.

There’s no question that democracy has lost its momentum. That’s seen in the fact that there are only a handful of more electoral democracies in the world today than at the start of this century. It’s also true that many older democracies, like the US and the UK, are troubled.

There are a number of issues, however, that impact this gloom and doom. One issue is the theory that democratic transitions naturally move in a positive direction—and that established democracies don’t fall backwards. To a degree, these beliefs are driven by unconscious beliefs in evolution, a gross misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Back in the mid-twentieth century, George Gaylard Simpson, a giant of 20th Century biology, observed in a 1964 article in the journal Science that the fossil record shows very clearly that there is no central line leading steadily, in a goal-directed way, from a protozoan to man. Instead there has been continual and extremely intricate branching, and whatever course we follow through the branches there are repeated changes both in the rate and in the direction of evolution. Man is the end of one ultimate twig...

Figuring Out the 2020 Candidates by Counting Words

Back in 2004 Pete Buttigieg, his Harvard Colleague, Ganesh Sitaraman, along with Peter Emerson wrote an intriguing, fun article suggesting that by counting the number of words in the party platform, you could figure out who would win the presidential election. The smaller the page count, the more potential for winning the election.

They surfaced a great deal of examples to support their proposal. They found that since 1960 the average page count of the Democrats' platforms in losing years was 82 pages, but that the average of winning years was 46. The longest platforms at 128 and 124 pages came during the disastrous years of 1980 and 1984. 

They also found that another indicator was what they called the candidate-to-opponent ratio. In the Democrats long 1984 platform they were unable to spell out their platform without mentioning/comparing to the Republicans. That year Ronald Reagan was mentioned 213 times, while Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate wasn't mentioned once. Reagan won by a complete rout. 

These guys also studied the rhetorical use of words, specifically the use of "crisis." The Republicans used the term "crisis" a dozen times in their 1980 platform, including in the first sentence. Of course, that was the year that Reagan won in a landslide.

I've thought about this article and my own background of rhetoric in the past months by comparing Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren. I've listened to Buttigieg throughout his campaign and compared his positioning to that of Elizabeth Warren. Buttigieg was in no hurry whatsoever to create policy. In fact, he pushed back on media's demands for a lotta policy statements, wanting to keep his approach simple, while Warren made "I've a policy for that" her mantra. All along my rhetoric background suggested that what Pete's doing is very smart and that Elizabeth Warren's inundating us with policy will bring her down, even though right now she's getting all the attention...

Finally. A Highly Astute and Long Overdue Critique of Facebook

Chris Hughes, one of the original founders of Facebook, has an unusually astute analysis and critique of Facebook in today's NYT opinion page. He argues that Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy, but that his company is a threat to our economy and democracy. Facebook, he argues, needs to be broken up. It's an article every techie, techie wannabe and politician needs to imbibe thoroughly.

In an unusual response to the extensive analysis, the editors of the Times also provide 5 takeaways from Hughes' essay:

--Mark Zuckerberg is really powerful. Like cartoonishly, Bond-villain powerful.

--Facebook's founders had no idea of the power of what they were building.

--Facebook's concentration of power and influence is part of a trend that extends beyond Silicon Valley.

--There are no alternatives to Facebook. That's the problem.

--We have the tools to regulate Facebook but not the will. Yet.

A major problem we face is that the old, regular good-guy politicos are utterly clueless. So we really do need Mayor Pete Buttigieg. He's the only one running for the presidency who understands the shit, has the willpower, and can actually execute.

NYT: Chris Hughes: It's time to break up Facebook.  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html

NYT: Chris Hughes's call to break up Facebook: 5 Takeaways. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/chris-hughes-facebook.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

 

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..