The Debate Over Agency

Catherine Rampell of the NY Times finds some commentary from the president of Tax Analysts, interesting in that he makes a solid defense of the rich as not being wealthy merely because of luck but because of hard work.

I’m all for a progressive income tax system. And I’m all for a strong estate tax for the idle rich. But the people I know who are well-off work hard for their money. They worked hard in school and worked hard in business. They took risks, which weren’t backed by government safety nets. They created things. And, as they rose, they learned that there are some in this country who like to demonize success — even fear it.

Rampell writes:

But even if the word choice was not deliberately intended to provoke class warfare, it does seem to epitomize one of the key fault lines between liberals and conservatives: to what extent the wealthiest (as well as the poorest) members of society have earned, or rather simply received, their present fates.

I think this is right.  And I think it doesn't get near enough attention.  The deepest divide between conservatives and liberals is their very different views of human agency.  Liberals tend to believe that we are social creatures, largely determined by circumstance.  Conservatives tend to believe we are individuals who determine our own destinies.

But I think much of the confusion lies in the fact that both these sentiments can be true simultaneously.  We can be a society that is held responsible for the outcomes of its citizenry, who are then in turn held responsible for their individual actions.  The two - macro and micro - are inseparable, and part of a broad continuum of shared responsibility.  In much the same way as a parent is ultimately responsible for their child's well being, the child must be held accountable for their actions.

In this way, the rich may indeed have achieved their wealth through hard work and innovation, but their ability to do so was built upon a framework of agency that they were lucky enough to have had developed in them;  their desire to work hard was learned from some prior experience; their ability to take (intelligent) risks was likely due to a combination of learned intelligence and innate personality.  These are all behaviors that should be encouraged and rewarded (to a degree), but we cannot pretend that they originated in a vacuum, that there was not a vast array of human and social factors lining up in just the right way.  The individual simply cannot take complete credit for them.  The evidence for this is just overwhelmingly clear.

Obama Still Doesn't Get It

Speaking before a "large civil rights organization" Thursday, Obama attempted to address some of the push-back he has been receiving from those on the left who have found his administration's policies misguided.

From the Times:

"[Obama] said the “Race to the Top” program, which provides additional federal funds to local schools that meet administration standards — and a companion effort to overhaul the nation’s 5,000 worst schools — were ultimately aimed at giving good teachers higher salaries, more support, from supplies to smaller classes, and more training to provide them with career opportunities and financial rewards. About $4 billion is being invested in each initiative.
... All I’m asking in return, as a president and as a parent, is a measure of accountability. Surely we can agree that even as we applaud teachers for their hard work, we need to make sure they’re delivering results in the classroom. If they’re not, let’s work with them to help them be more effective. And if that fails, let’s find the right teacher for that classroom.”

My problem with Race to the top and Obama's other initiatives has nothing to to with a comfort with the status quo. I'm incredibly saddened by the continued failure of our public education system to close the achievement gap. But the reforms he champions are deeply misguided.

His operating assumption is that poor teaching is the problem. But this is simply not true. Students come to school with varying levels of human and social capital. Depending on socio-economics, one school might literally be twice as hard to teach at as another. That is to say, the teacher of one classroom of students might have to work twice as hard to bring those students to proficiency as they would at another. Of course, this is simply impossible for most teachers. We hear stories of truly amazing teachers who occasionally manage to produce these kind of results. But these are the Michael Jordans or Red Barons of their field. The fact is that it is unreasonable for us to expect teachers in overwhelmingly more difficult situations to perform at such a high level.

On top of this, determining teacher performance is, and always has been, tremendously difficult. Students are not widgets, classrooms are not production lines or monthly sales tallies. Schools are complex systems of human transformation. This isn't to say that there aren't bad teachers, or that it is impossible to evaluate them, but that it is complicated. Teaching is a profession that is as much an art as science. Poor schools tend to be the first place rookie teachers start and - as they are the most difficult environments - the easiest places to fail, thus either forcing many teachers to leave the profession altogether or to transfer out asap.

Now, what should we be doing *instead* of Race to the Top? If students have a constitutional right to an equal education, this should include a rectifying of any lack of human and social capital they might have had the misfortune of having received. Starting as early as birth, society should make it a priority to see to it that every child encounters the best possible environment we can help them receive. This might include home visits by a qualified specialist to monitor nutritional needs as well as intellectual and emotional support. It may involve parenting classes or child-care support. It might involve the establishment of more and better community centers in which both parents and children can enrich their lives, thereby increasing their human capital.

Upon entrance into school, the classroom should be tailored to each student's level of human capital. For some students, one teacher and 25 peers might be just fine (in higher SES neighborhoods, many children enter school with 3x the vocabulary and basic reading skills). But other students, with lower human capital, may require remediation and/or intervention. They may need an extra teacher's aid, a smaller class of 10-15 students, possible counseling sessions, extra language, support, etc.

The crucial step in real, meaningful reform to public education will be in recognizing that all students have not had the same life experiences, and that our schools should be organized accordingly. In this way, we will be truly meeting the needs of each student, and finally breaking the wretched cycle of poverty and dysfunction in America.

Grappling with Determinism

In a piece in the NY Times today, Galen Strawson takes on the question of Free Will and moral responsibility.  I'm in basic agreement with his fundamentally deterministic take. 

(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself—because of the way you then are.
(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are — at least in certain mental respects.
(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

The thrust of this argument comes in the empirical observation that everything we do has to have had either some biological or environmental origination, or simple chance.  Every choice we make is based on a prior choice, based on a prior choice, etc. - all confined within an interaction between our brain tissue and our environment.

I think the trouble we have with this is that we feel as though we have free will, or a choice in our own agency that is free from our past.  When we look at a set of options, we see nothing pushing us towards one or another and assume that we are originating a choice.  But the reality is that the great majority of our mental processes are unconscious.  We simply have no way of seeing every tiny droplet of unconscious impulse that churns within our psyche. 

I'm reminded of the idea that everyone believes himself to be "above average".  Similarly, few of us believe we are horrible people - destined to do bad things; or great people - destined to do great things.  Somewhat ironically, those most likely to think in these terms are the mentally ill.  Yet most great and terrible things are not done by the mentally ill at all.  They are done by people who were likely just living their lives and well, one thing lead to another.  If we think back on the best or worst things we have done, they were largely unplanned. 

From the heroic acts of kindness to the selfish acts of impulsive cruelty, most were likely done with little to no thought at all.  When we wonder whether we have free will, we tend to ask ourselves whether or not we could do some or another task.  Like, say, scratching our elbow.  The obvious answer is, "Why yes, I am in complete control!"  But rarely in life are we in such a zen-like state of perfect consciousness.  In fact, such an existence would be overwhelmingly exhausting.  Thank God for autonomous behavior  (I get much of my best thinking done while doing something else!).

The biggest trouble people have in accepting determinism is the idea that they might no longer in control of their lives, or that personal responsibility is impossible.  The simplest answer is: you never were, so what is different now?  We still have all the dreams and desires and flaws that we have always had. 

But doesn't life then become pointless, says the nihilist?  Well, it depends on what you thought the point was to begin with.  If you thought you were playing this really interesting game in which you were the supreme controller of your own universe, like a little God, maybe this is a bit of a let down.  But relax, aren't glad that you weren't really in control anyway?  Personally, I feel it's a considerable burden lifted.  But just in case you're feeling a tad claustrophobic, try this experiment: do something without causing it. 

OK, that's a little determinism joke.  You can't.  Whatever you do, or do not do, will have been determined already.  So even if you say, "FUCK THIS SHIT!" and run screaming naked out into the street you will only be someone who has decided to run screaming naked out into the street.  I guess it is kind of like the ultimate claustrophobic nightmare.  But hey, might as well get used to it, right?

This is getting long, so I don't have time to go into what determinism means for morality, or society at large.  Which is unfortunate, because I think that's when things get really interesting.  Another day!

The Tea Pretense, P.2: Yes, It Is About Race

     Apparently the Tea Party is going to hold a summit on race July 31st in Philadelphia.

The rally, called Uni-Tea, will feature white and black Tea Party supporters in all-day event that will feature live music, a web cast and plenty of Obama bashing.
The site for the event features 13 speakers, with at least 8 speakers being persons of color.

    I’d like to see the Tea Party spend even a small amount of time addressing steps to end poverty in America and the achievement gap in our schools.

    I may be wrong, but my general impression is that they believe that A) poor people are the only ones to blame for their poverty, and B) the only way to “help” them is to leave them alone and let them solve their own problems, and C) any government help is only making things worse by creating a sense of grievance and dependence. Further, any attempts to point out racism are just a natural outgrowth of the politics of victimization, and the only racism that really exists any more is by angry minorities and the organizations that advocate for them.

    Is that about right? Well, its sickening, and wrong on multiple levels.

A) Poor people are the only ones to blame for their poverty 
    This is true to a degree. But there are structural problems that created it in the first place. Poverty tends to be generational. This means kids are getting poor parenting and education: having more kids: repeat. Geography isolates low property values, creating ghettos of dysfunction and distress. This means neighborhoods of kids with dads in prison, moms on drugs, no supervision, no college education or training, etc. Environmental hazards, such high lead content, have been found to reduce cognitive development in poor children. The educational system is no equipped to make up for what are essentially very low levels of human and social capital.

B) The only way to “help” them is to leave them alone and let them solve their own problems 
    This is clearly not true. From a safety net standpoint, absent health services and food stamps, people will be sick, starve, and die at higher rates. Charity has never been able to handle everything on its own. Talk to the charities out there today and they’ll tell you there is x, y, z they could do with more resources. From a skills standpoint, there is much we can do to increase human and social capital. From nurse home visits for young mothers, to early childhood education and parenting classes, to jobs programs and better city college funding, to health services that allow people to be productive, to nutritional help for kids and parents to learn how to take better care of themselves… none of this is possible without help. It’s mostly a matter of education on how to be successful.

C) Any government help is only making things worse by creating a sense of grievance and dependence.
    This has been a problem in the past – and arguably still is to a degree. But the vast majority of social programs do nothing to create dependence. What they are designed to do is to increase personal agency so that people are able to get their lives on a productive track. No one involved in social programs wants people stuck relying on government help. They are obviously so much more happy and productive when they can do things for themselves. It is no coincidence that the Tea Party is largely made up of people who have little contact or understanding with minority poverty – or any poverty – in the US. Because they are that much less likely to have witnessed first hand how social programs can help change peoples lives. This also explains how people can seem so out of touch and unconcerned with the real-life travails that people in this country are facing, people that the programs they disparage are designed to help.

    The Tea Party is conceptually built around the diminishment of government spending on social programs, specifically for poor minorities they feel are only “leeching” off the rest of America. Race is at the very core of their anger. It may or may not be directly, consciously or unconsciously, motivating them – as in, “I don’t like black people so I don’t support health care subsidies”. But to the extent that they are specifically motivated by a sense of injustice at having to pay for social programs that are disproportionately used by poor minorities, their stance takes a certain racial perspective. And it is one that actively delegitimizes the sense of grievance that minorities feel in seeing their communities continuing to fail disproportionately. It is no wonder then that the movement has been attractive to racists.
    
    One last thing on race: people are not either “racist” or “not racist”. People are mostly operating from unconscious impulses. Our intelligence and wisdom allows us to peek our heads into consciousness and control our lives. The percentage of people who are admitted racists is very small. But even they don’t understand why they don’t like minorities. They just do. It’s mainly unconscious response. Then there is the rest of us who, to varying degrees, are conscious of patterns of thought that are racist and wrong. We learn to control them and adjust our thinking accordingly. We never really escape it, but we can be on guard for it.

    To me, the scariest “racist” is the one who thinks he isn’t racist at all, yet hold all kinds of creepy unconscious biases and allows them to corrupt his thinking without any attempt at self-reflection. Many people are often indeed quite full of racist ideas. And they would recoil from the thought. But because they’re so afraid of being labeled a “racist”, they never have the opportunity to grow. It feels like that’s where we got stuck post-civil rights. There was so much confusion and acrimony, that we never learned how to have an honest and forgiving dialogue about unconscious bias.

The Tea Pretense

   I recently came across a comment by someone sympathetic to the Tea Party movement. As outrageous as it sounds, they actually felt that the Tea Party was in many ways an underclass, although not what we normally think of as such, that is in any kind of socio-economic terms.  And that of all people, liberals were the least interested in helping poor Americans.  In a way, the commenter seemed to feel, while not any actual political alignment of interests, a sort of camaraderie with them.

    “You guys just kill me with your bleating about the underclass. You looooove the underclass, but you despise every single person in it. A bunch of rubes, a bunch of cheap votes. I have volunteered (that means working free of charge) hundreds of hours of my time as an EMT in a small jerkwater town plagued by poverty and meth. I’ve seen and smelled squalor you soft-handed pansies can’t imagine. I’ve repeatedly walked among criminals, crazies, and puddles of bodily yuck to help some human reject from society who was sick or hurt. I’ve foregone many a night’s sleep and risked infection with horrible diseases, just because it’s kind of a rush to be a small-time hero. By my hands and the strength of my back, I’ve done more to provide access to healthcare and reduce costs, than all of you put together with your holier-than-thou posturing and whinging.”

    I won’t bother posting my resume.  But I will say this. He's just described the real underclass pretty well. It’s a really sad situation. Yet how many of those poor people go to Tea Party rallies? How many of them are complaining about paying too much taxes, or that their health insurance is being redistributed to the sick? How many of them are concerned about too much government “help”?

    The reality is that these are the people the Tea Party hates! They are the ones that all the government spending is being directed at. They are the supposed constituency “pay-offs” democrats are supposedly after. They are the ones with drug problems, incarceration problems, mental health and behavioral problems, working for low pay and not raising their children well enough. What does the the Tea Party have to offer them?

    Nothing! A big fat, “Get lost you lazy losers!”, “Quit sucking off the government teat!”, and “Get a job!”. These are the people the Tea Party doesn’t want their taxes to go to. These people are who “big government” was designed for. It pays for their rehab, their childcare, their social security, their food stamps, their job training, their mental health services, their children’s free lunches and after school programs, their city colleges, their tax credits. These are the people that the Tea Party says would do better if we just left them alone, and let social Darwinism reign.

   Of course that doesn’t actually happen. People simply can’t take their medication anymore. Old people starve or freeze to death. Kids get raised by unfit adults. Children go hungry or eat candy for lunch at school. People don’t go to college. Kids don’t graduate from high school. Whether you think that these people deserve these services or not, they have effects.

    Because if they do deserve help, then we need to make sure we are providing effective services. I think we’re doing a pretty good job. I can make a strong case for most social service programs not simply creating dependency but in supporting people’s ability to take care of themselves. But what we can’t do is nothing.

    Because for every conservative who is out there selflessly sacrificing his time, there are plenty of communities struggling without adequate resources. Talk to almost any service provider and they will tell you that they can’t do enough because there aren’t enough resources. Take away government help and the delivery of services severely drops or disappears outright.

    But if they don’t deserve it – and this is what I think most Tea Partiers believe, then all this government spending on services does seem an awful waste. I think most would say that these people need to pull themselves up. As Glenn Beck puts it, “They need the freedom to fail.” Well, tell that to a 75 year old grandmother on social security. Tell that to a schizophrenic who isn’t under a bridge tonight because of the clinic down the street. Tell that to the diabetic who lost his job but can now find an insurance carrier who will accept him. Tell that to the child who’s got nothing to eat at snack time because his mom never made him lunch, and then who’s three grade levels behind and need some after-school support. Tell that to the single mom who works 40 hours a week while baby is with her aunt and still finds time to take an affordable night class.

    This may sound harsh, but when an EMT arrives at the scene of a disaster does he ask whether the victims need the “freedom to fail”? Well, poverty and dysfunction are also tragic disasters. It usually starts young and by the time they reach adulthood their course has been set. These people don’t need the freedom to fail, they need the freedom to succeed. And government is usually the only thing in their lives that has the power to help them. And no, they often can’t help themselves! Children can’t help themselves. Diabetics can’t help themselves. Single moms can’t always help themselves.

    So, this is why you won’t find any liberals at Tea Party rallies. Because we believe in helping these people, this underclass. We think its fair that society looks after the least among us. We think its possible to give people a hand up, and not just a “hand out”. If you want to get philosophical about it, we believe there are larger reasons for why this class exists. We believe there are structural inequalities at work. For the same reason we think it is only fair that the upper income white people at Tea Parties should redistribute some of their money so that it goes toward rectifying some of these inequalities. And if they don’t want to, then they should be forced to.

   You can call it fascism if you want, but I think that’s quite a stretch. The question is whether they really earned that income – that they really deserved it – or they just took advantage of a system that was rigged in their favor. Just because the structural inequality is complex that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Say it was something simple, like a monopoly. If one family in a town owned all the resources and profited from everyone’s labor, would it be fair to require them to pay a higher share of taxes to help pay for common services?

    So if it is fair the question is how far should we go. What is a fair rate? What is an effective rate? We had marginal rates of up to 90% in the fifties and people seemed to be doing fine. I think the reason conservatives dislike progressive income taxes isn’t that they think they’re bad for the economy. I think they simply find them unjust. Which is principled. But I hope I’ve at least made a case that they’re wrong.

    In the end the Tea Party loves to play the American underclass. Oh, these poor white Christians! The terrible racist Black Panthers! The terrible Shirley Sherrod oppressing white farmers. Obama’s hatred of whites. His hatred of Christians. It is all just really silly. But as for any real American underclass, they show little sympathy – even downright contempt. Let’s not even get started on illegal immigrants. 

    Now that’s an underclass.

Race to the Meaningless

The NY Times has a piece today on a principal who was forced to leave her position so that her poor, low-performing school could maintain eligibility for the Obama administration's Race to the Top stimulus funds.  By all accounts, it appears she had been doing an excellent job.  But:

under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.

 The story illustrates, tragically, how a school can be doing everything right, yet still be considered failing.  The problem is that many schools simply lack the resources to meet the needs of their students.  Policies like Race to the Top operate from the assumption that no matter what kind of student population a school serves, it is expected to perform as well as any other.  This completely ignores the socioeconomic realities of student capital development.  As long as we continue to ignore it, our attempts at reform will be meaningless.

Forces of the Universe and Cats

A question I've often had is, "What is a thought?"  Where exactly does it exist?  Obviously it exists in the physical world, via physical interactions; a mind must make a thought, not a rock.  But upon what principles is it operating?  Maybe an example might help:

That cat is there.

Now we have something.  Light is shining off the cat and into my eyes.  I take that information and create a model that tells me a range of things: shape, color, movement, dimension, location, texture, etc.  I then fit it into a narrative of meaning: a small mammal with specific features, a pet.  I then recognize it among my memories: I have seen this cat before.  All of this and who knows how much more happen at the conscious and unconscious level - the latter making up the majority of the processing.

So all of this is thought and it is essentially a transference of electromagnetic energy from the cat into the photoreceptor cells of my retina.  These cells transfer specific positional data via the interaction of each photon/wave against the electron state of specific pigment atoms within the optical cells, triggering specific enzyme cascades that transfer that "data" into my neural network, or mind.  The photons' vast variabilities are then fed into my cerebral structures that process and re-process, at near-light speed, and eventually rise to the well-ordered simplicity of "thought".

Through fundamentally simple principles then, this process unfolds, involving the physical interaction of impossibly large numbers of particles.  The process by which we "think" is the realization of all of this activity:

That cat is there.

While the physics of it all is relatively straightforward, the trick is wrapping one's mind around how this all relates to consciousness.  If I take all of this information and a "thought" is created in my brain - how is it that I am conscious of it?  Douglass Hofstadter describes the brain as a fundamentally self-reflective instrument.  He points to Descartes' ultimate definition: "I think, therefore I am."  The first think one ever knows about one's self is that one is actually thinking.  One is able to have a thought, and then perceive it.  "Look - a thought!"

That cat is there.

 If one imagines capacity for reflection on a scale, Hofstadter says, at the furthest end - at one, say - you might have a simple device.  He uses the example of a toilet ballcock as having basically one point of reflection: when the water rises to a certain level, a valve is closed and the flow is shut off.  At the other end of the scale, you might have the all-seeing, all-knowing omnipotent god who's capacity for reflection is as limitless as the information available to him.  The human mind might be somewhere in the middle, some of us more than others possessing the cognitive and emotional skills to be able to process and reflect on information.  While the mammalian brain, or that of the corvid might rank relatively high, as we move down the scale, the brain gets progressively smaller until we reach animal systems that are largely autonomic, and then largely dependent on individual cell regulation.

In this way the human brain is simply an organ that is capable of taking in large amounts of data from itself and the environment and "fleshing" out meaningful metaphors that we are able to essentially live within.  These become useful narratives in that we are able to construct them out of past experiences, and then predict future events with great accuracy.  To the extent that we are social creatures, we are so in no small part because not only are we able to create this narrative for ourselves, but we are able to sort of geometrically place a similar narrative onto others.  And our cats.

That cat is there.

The Four Fundamental Forces of the Universe


Strong Force: Holds quarks and gluons together, and protons/neutrons residually.

• 10⁻¹⁵ m range
•  mediated by gluons, which carry charge

Weak Force: Causes certain kinds of radioactive decay.

• 10⁻¹⁸ m range
•  mediated by W and Z bosons, which carry no charge

Electromagnetic Force: Acts between electrically-charged particles.

• infinite range 
• mediated by photons, which carry no charge

Gravity: Causes objects with mass to attract one another.

• infinite range 
• mediated by gravitons (?)