Two Kinds of Problems

My Not So Humble Wife and I recently moved into a new house, and I discovered that moving when you are middle class and in your late 30s is a lot different from moving when you are poor and in your middle 20s. My past experience with moving involved a lot of grunting, lifting, swearing, sweating, and general disorganization. This time there was far less of all of that, mostly because my wife was there to organize things, but there was also another very notable difference: money.

You see, when you’re in your 20s and poor, you lack the resources to do much besides rent or borrow a truck, call a bunch of friends and offer them beer and pizza in exchange for their labor (the barter system at work), and then bust your hump as hard as you can to get the job done. It may take all day, it may even take all night, but you do what needs doing because there are no other options. Money changes things. Specifically, it enables you to pay someone else to do the heavy lifting. When you’re in your late 30s and it’s a lot harder to get a bunch of friends together (especially friends who are capable of doing hard labor), that makes a huge difference.

There were also all the little things that can go wrong that went so much more easily this time around. Lost something in the move? Sure, we can go digging around for it, but do we have the time? There are fifteen other things we need to do. Just buy another one. Something got broke? Not to worry, we can replace it. The old place needs to be cleaned before we move out? Why spend three days doing it ourselves when we can hire a cleaning service?

This may sound profligate and wasteful, but there was a method to the madness. The philosophy here (as I explained it to my wife, and she was kind enough to quote back to me in a moment of panic) was that there are two kinds of problems in this world: the kind you can throw money at and make them go away, and the kind you can’t. The former are the easy ones. I know that’s a bit reductive, but it’s true. What I discovered in this latest round of madness… excuse me, moving is that there are any number of difficulties we face, and we are both at a point in our lives with multiple competing priorities for our time. If there is a way to “buy off” one or more of those priorities, or just to make a problem not be a problem by spending money on it, it’s well worth the cost to do so.

Of course, being me I couldn’t just leave that thought alone, so I had to chase it down a bit. I followed that line of logic and realized that it sounded an awful lot like the sort of thing I have for so long accused politicians of doing: mindlessly throwing money at problems rather than considering whether or not the money is actually fixing anything or improving the situation. I am well aware that applying lessons from microeconomic situations to the macroeconomic is a dangerous game that tends to lead to faulty conclusions, but it did lead me to some interesting realizations.

Politicians, little as I think of them as a class, don’t just throw money around for the fun of it. They have to have some reason, if only because there are so many competing priorities for the money and they want to support the best of them (defining “best” as you see fit and as your view of politicians demands).  Only there are so very many problems, and it’s so hard to stay on top of them all. Drugs, childhood obesity, unrest in the Middle East, civil rights, gun control, education reform, energy policy, foreign intelligence, minimum wage, income inequity, NSA spying… the list goes on and on. It’s not like when our country was young and could just call up a couple of friends, rent a truck, and move out West. How do you know which are the problems that can be solved by throwing money at them and which ones need more complicated solutions?

There has to be some problem, some issue that someone has brought to their attention, and that someone has convinced them can be made to go away by throwing money at it. This makes it an easy problem. And solving problems is what we send politicians to Washington for, right? Those people are called “lobbyists”, and they’re very good at what they do. It’s not that they don’t care, or that they don’t believe, it’s that they do care, and they do believe, and that’s why they need the money: because they have a problem to fix.

So I think I understand a little better now. It’s seductive to try to solve problems by throwing money at them. There are just a couple issues with that approach, as we’re finding: you can’t solve every problem just by throwing money at it, and no matter how easy it is with someone else’s money, sooner or later you run out.

Political Fallacy

We’re going to have an off-off-year election this year. That’s kind of like an off-off-Broadway show, except with more money, more crying, more divas, and more losers (if you can believe it). The results of these elections will be indicative of roughly nothing, but the great and mighty political prognosticators in our country will take it as gospel that it portends Mighty Things. What things, exactly, depends on which side of the aisle you’re on and who wins at the end of the night (and not necessarily in that order).

The problem with any election, and particularly off-year elections, is that they only tell us what did happen, but they are seen as signs and portents of Things To Come. Never mind that each race is determined as much, if not more so, by the individuals involved and the special circumstances of that race and the events that happened along the way as by the mood or beliefs of the “average voter”. This insistence on reading the tea leaves is what I have dubbed the Political Fallacy. It’s going to be even worse this year because there are so few races to be had.

Here’s how it’s going to go: assume that the person speaking roots for Team Edward, and Team Edward had a strong night. Lots of wins across the country, and resounding wins to boot. This will be seen as “a clear mandate for change/to stay on course”, depending on whether or not Team Edward is seen as in control of the government generally. On the other hand, if the speaker happened to be supporting Team Jacob, they will point out things like how this is a very off-year election, low voter turn-out (because voter turn-out is historically so high in the U.S. anyway), how this was the only game in town so all the big money players were all over this, and how these are all basically local races and don’t really reflect on the “true” feelings of the nation as a whole.

The only way it could be worse is if it turns out to be a mixed night all around. Then we get the joys of both sides declaring victory and trying to spin the facts to show how the races they lost were “unimportant” or “not competitive” but their guy “made a strong showing” anyway. And all of this is just the warm-up act for the mid-term elections, which themselves are just the prequel to the quite possibly years long presidential campaigns. (No, that wasn’t a typo, I did intend for that to be plural. Not that I want it to be, but even I have to face reality at some point.)

Am I going to vote? Of course I am. Because I’ve fallen victim to the greatest political fallacy of them all: the notion that one vote can make a difference. I even know it doesn’t, except that if the guy I hate wins on election night and I didn’t vote, I’m going to hate myself for not voting no matter how wide his margin, and so will everyone else who didn’t vote.

And isn’t that what America is all about anymore?

The Three Hardest Words

Some guys will say that “I love you” are the hardest words in the English language to string together, but “I was wrong” are even harder, for both men and women. If you don’t believe me, make a mistake about something, anything, but make sure to do it in front of at least one person. It’s even more difficult when we have to challenge our own sacred cows, our most cherished ideas and beliefs.

Once we’ve staked out a position on just about anything re-evaluating it, even in the light of new facts, can be hard. It’s not just a matter of admitting error; most of us are personally invested in our opinions and beliefs, and we have defended them in arguments, sometimes passionately, and to go back and admit that each one of those passionate defenses was wrong can feel shameful. The desire to double-down and discount any contradictory information can be alluring (what psychologists refer to as “confirmation bias”), and the more invested we are in our own position the more likely we are to fall prey to it.

I understand this tendency as well as anyone. Back in late 2002 and early 2003 I truly believed that invading Iraq was the right course of action and would end in a quick victory for the U.S. and its allies. I believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; I believed that we were doing the right thing for the citizens of Iraq and for our allies; I believed that we would have a quick and relatively easy victory; and I believed that the benefits would vastly outweigh the costs. I was wrong.

When No Child Left Behind was first passed, I believed it was good legislation. I believed we needed some kind of accountability in schools, some way to measure when children were actually learning and to end “social promotion” so as to stop graduating kids who couldn’t read or do math. I believed this new system would fix the problems we had; instead it just created new ones. It endowed us with perverse incentives ranging from “teaching to the test” to cheating for cash and prizes. And kids still aren’t learning. I was wrong.

When I was barely a teenager, 13 or 14 years old, I was honestly a little homophobic. I was very uncomfortable around homosexuals or even the idea of homosexuality. I don’t know why; maybe because I was just starting to understand my own sexuality and everything was awkward, and I had to reject everything that I couldn’t understand. Maybe I thought there was something wrong with them. Maybe I thought they were “coming to get me”. I honestly have no idea. I was wrong.

It’s hard to admit that you’re wrong. It’s hard to admit that what you truly, deeply, firmly believed was absolute, unvarnished truth at one point in time simply isn’t. I think that’s because nobody holds these ideas and takes these positions planning to be wrong; we honestly believed we were right at the time, whether it’s because we didn’t have sufficient information, or because we were misled, or simply because we were endowed with certain prejudices, or maybe just because it seemed like a good idea at the time but since then it’s proven not to be.

There’s nothing wrong with being wrong. It doesn’t make you a bad person, it doesn’t make you evil. What’s bad and wrong and makes you a bad person is when you’re wrong, demonstrably wrong, and you refuse to acknowledge it, own up to it, and change. Unfortunately more and more often what we’re not only seeing but demanding in our politicians is that they stake out a position and they cling insistently, tenaciously, viciously to that position and refuse to back away from it regardless of how the circumstances might have changed, or how it might have been proven that what seemed like a good idea at the time simply wasn’t, or how it might have been proven that “Look, you were never right in the first place, just admit it and move on.” We call them flip-floppers, we call them wishy-washy, we use it as an excuse to attack rather than acknowledging that they’ve grown and matured.

We tell kids “When you’re wrong you should admit it.” We expect of adults that when they are wrong they will acknowledge it and change. What we need to demand of our leaders that when they are wrong they admit it, they acknowledge it, and they do something about it.