(c) by Mark Dempsey
Most of the big problems we face today are systemic. Climate certainly qualifies, although crime, education, poverty, inequality, health care, and immigration all have large systemic components. The solutions to systemic problems are not available to individuals, and the sabotage of government--the means to address systemic problems--only makes the problems worse.
What do systemic problems look like? Imagine throwing nine bones out your back door, then releasing ten dogs to retrieve a bone. One dog will come up short. The system makes the outcome inevitable, no matter how good that tenth dog is.
The political right reduces every problem to individual responsibility and advocates punishing that tenth dog. That does nothing to solve the problem, but it has produced some winners. The real median for the bottom 90% of incomes has increased by only $59 since 1972. If that were an inch on a bar graph, the bar for the top 10% would be 141 feet high. The bar for the top 0.1% would be five miles high.
The solutions to systemic problems are often indirect, too, so it's easy for political opportunists to deceive the population. For example, the U.S. is the world leader in caging people. With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners. That's five times the world's per-capita average, seven times more than Canada's rate.
So...is Canadian crime worse than U.S. crime? No, it's insignificantly different, and Canada's age demographics are identical to the U.S., so we can't blame youthful criminals in the States. In both countries, aging populations mean crime is on a long-term decline--not because of the high U.S. incarceration rate.
One other thing distinguishes Canada from the U.S. There are roughly a half million medical bankruptcies in the U.S. every year. In Canada there are none, and healthcare is half as expensive. No Canadian needs to start cooking meth to pay his spouse's hospital bills (the plot of Netflix's Breaking Bad).
Putting people in a system producing desperate situations leads to crime. "If throwing money at police and prisons made us safer, we would probably already be the safest country in the history of the world. We are not, because insufficient punishment is not the root cause of violence. And if people are talking about how tough they are and how scared you should be, they care more about keeping you scared than keeping you safe...
"In Denver, a five-year randomized control trial of a program that provides housing subsidies to those at risk of being unhoused found a 40 percent reduction in arrests among participants. These kinds of results are why localities from New Jersey to New Mexico are restructuring their local governments to invest in the social determinants of health and safety...
"If you want policies that actually work, you have to change the political conversation from 'tough candidates punishing bad people' to 'strong communities keeping everyone safe.' Candidates who care about solving a problem pay attention to what caused it. Imagine a plumber who tells you to get more absorbent flooring but does not look for the leak." (from "The Root Cause of Violent Crime Is Not What We Think It Is," NY Times)
The Supervisors who voted for the $450m bigger County jail are asking us to get "more absorbent flooring." Supervisor Frost's newsletter portrays this decision as "Build a bigger jail" vs. "Let everyone go," but it's not so. There are alternatives, as other governments have found, but Sacramento County believes more punishment is the answer.
For a little perspective, the U.S. population increased by 42% between 1982 and 2017. Money spent on policing and incarceration increased by 187% during that same period. It's the definition of insanity: repeating the non-solution but expecting a different outcome.
Friday, June 16, 2023
Now this from the National Park Service
Hike in groups. Bears like to have options
— National Park Service (@NatlParkService) June 10, 2023
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Tucker Carlson takes on politics as usual
Ep. 3 America's principles are at stake pic.twitter.com/eJNSUVvvqY
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 13, 2023
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
Why Vote for Trump (the anti-Obama)? part 2
Obama, You Bum, You Are the Past and Unions Are the Future
[from How Things Work, via Naked Capitalism 5-28-2023]
…Obama—the guy who couldn’t even get card check passed during his eight years in office—has made a big shiny new series with Netflix called “Working: What We Do All Day,” which is supposed to be an homage to Studs Terkel, and which is supposed to celebrate the working class. And yesterday, Obama did an online discussion to promote the show, which is, my friends, effectively crossing the picket line, on behalf of a struck company.
This motherfucker crossed a picket line in homage to Studs Terkel. Bitch!!!!!!
….it is clear here that Obama violated the spirit of the strike by carrying on with his promotional duties for Netflix right now, something that a zillion very fancy and powerful Hollywood showrunners have stopped doing in order to help the union. It is equally clear that the simple gesture of not doing that single promotional event would have been a profound act of solidarity with a union on strike. And Obama, I assure you, has more leverage to tell the company “I’m not gonna do this now” than anyone else in the entire industry. Netflix will not fire him. I promise. He had very little to lose by making the tiny gesture of not doing this promotional event. He just didn’t care. The good thing, I guess, is that rather than typing out the entire disappointing history of the Obama administration and organized labor, you can just say, “Imagine a guy who would get paid millions of dollars to make a show called ‘Working’ in homage to Studs Terkel, and then cross a picket line for it.” That is as good a summary as you will find.
[from How Things Work, via Naked Capitalism 5-28-2023]
…Obama—the guy who couldn’t even get card check passed during his eight years in office—has made a big shiny new series with Netflix called “Working: What We Do All Day,” which is supposed to be an homage to Studs Terkel, and which is supposed to celebrate the working class. And yesterday, Obama did an online discussion to promote the show, which is, my friends, effectively crossing the picket line, on behalf of a struck company.
This motherfucker crossed a picket line in homage to Studs Terkel. Bitch!!!!!!
….it is clear here that Obama violated the spirit of the strike by carrying on with his promotional duties for Netflix right now, something that a zillion very fancy and powerful Hollywood showrunners have stopped doing in order to help the union. It is equally clear that the simple gesture of not doing that single promotional event would have been a profound act of solidarity with a union on strike. And Obama, I assure you, has more leverage to tell the company “I’m not gonna do this now” than anyone else in the entire industry. Netflix will not fire him. I promise. He had very little to lose by making the tiny gesture of not doing this promotional event. He just didn’t care. The good thing, I guess, is that rather than typing out the entire disappointing history of the Obama administration and organized labor, you can just say, “Imagine a guy who would get paid millions of dollars to make a show called ‘Working’ in homage to Studs Terkel, and then cross a picket line for it.” That is as good a summary as you will find.
Monday, June 5, 2023
Insurance Politics at the End of the World
Hamilton Nolan, May 30, 2023 [How Things Work]
Shall we do climate change the hard way, or the harder way?
…insurance can tell you things about reality… The people running them may be greedy, and the clients may be evil, but the business is all about understanding the true and unvarnished state of the world in order to manage risk in order to protect wealth, and therefore these firms do their very best to operate according to what is true….
The insurance industry is going to serve a very useful role in the climate apocalypse. It is going to be the tip of the spear that punches through all of the bullshit of climate denialism once and for all. Indeed, the process is very much underway already. Politicians and oil lobbyists can lie all they want, but their homeowners insurance rates are going up….
Watching this process unfold is going to expose the hidden bedrock of many people’s belief systems in a rather violent way. That bedrock, in most cases, will not be “socialism” or “capitalism” but rather “whatever is good for me, personally, I don’t care what it costs, please god save me.” We are well on the road to the inevitable political crisis that will be sparked by insurance. State Farm just stopped selling home insurance in California, due to wildfire and other climate-driven risks. Coastal states in the path of hurricanes have seen tons of insurers pull out altogether in recent years, and the ones left are handing down eye-watering premium increases to homeowners. Florida property insurance rates are rising 40% in a single year(!). In Louisiana, it was even worse—the state insurance of last resort bumped its rates 63% this year….
Just as a point of perspective, last September Hurricane Ian—which could have been worse!—caused $100 billion in total losses, $60 billion of which was insured. One hundred billion dollars is equal to the total budget of the State of Florida….
…when you brush away the soothing fictions and political slogans, there are only a few ways to handle this:
1. You let private insurers set rates appropriate to the actual risk of insuring billions of dollars worth of property that is increasingly likely to flood, blow away, or burn up. Those rates are very high and getting higher. Every year, more homeowners will not be able to afford to stay in their homes… in Florida there is $2.9 trillion worth of insured coastal real estate. That is a lot. A 2020 McKinsey report guesstimated that some parts of Florida could lose as much as a third of their real estate value by 2050, but it is fair to say that that could turn out to be low….
One important thing to say about this scary scenario is: This is the free market functioning perfectly!!! This is actually how capitalism is supposed to solve problems. In this scenario, adaptation to climate change is induced by price signals. People are forced to move away from the coasts because it becomes too expensive. This is economically rational. The human pain of this enormous dislocation does not change that fact. Everyone who loves to celebrate the free market: This is what you’re asking for. Every time you hear a Republican frantically decrying this rational economic progression, you are hearing a hypocrite.
2. The second possibility—the one that will actually happen—is that the private insurance market collapses and then the emergency quasi-fictional state insurance market fills the gap but then it runs out of money at the first big disaster and then all of these states and their homeowners go to Washington for bailouts. Republican warriors for free enterprise quickly become socialists when their donors’ beach houses are at stake. Climate change deniers quickly turn into climatologists when they start asking for the government to build sea walls to keep their garages from flooding….
I expect Florida to reach a point where Republican governors are demanding that every Republican donor’s house be hoisted onto an impermeable private island built at government expense while everyone else drowns….
Shall we do climate change the hard way, or the harder way?
…insurance can tell you things about reality… The people running them may be greedy, and the clients may be evil, but the business is all about understanding the true and unvarnished state of the world in order to manage risk in order to protect wealth, and therefore these firms do their very best to operate according to what is true….
The insurance industry is going to serve a very useful role in the climate apocalypse. It is going to be the tip of the spear that punches through all of the bullshit of climate denialism once and for all. Indeed, the process is very much underway already. Politicians and oil lobbyists can lie all they want, but their homeowners insurance rates are going up….
Watching this process unfold is going to expose the hidden bedrock of many people’s belief systems in a rather violent way. That bedrock, in most cases, will not be “socialism” or “capitalism” but rather “whatever is good for me, personally, I don’t care what it costs, please god save me.” We are well on the road to the inevitable political crisis that will be sparked by insurance. State Farm just stopped selling home insurance in California, due to wildfire and other climate-driven risks. Coastal states in the path of hurricanes have seen tons of insurers pull out altogether in recent years, and the ones left are handing down eye-watering premium increases to homeowners. Florida property insurance rates are rising 40% in a single year(!). In Louisiana, it was even worse—the state insurance of last resort bumped its rates 63% this year….
Just as a point of perspective, last September Hurricane Ian—which could have been worse!—caused $100 billion in total losses, $60 billion of which was insured. One hundred billion dollars is equal to the total budget of the State of Florida….
…when you brush away the soothing fictions and political slogans, there are only a few ways to handle this:
1. You let private insurers set rates appropriate to the actual risk of insuring billions of dollars worth of property that is increasingly likely to flood, blow away, or burn up. Those rates are very high and getting higher. Every year, more homeowners will not be able to afford to stay in their homes… in Florida there is $2.9 trillion worth of insured coastal real estate. That is a lot. A 2020 McKinsey report guesstimated that some parts of Florida could lose as much as a third of their real estate value by 2050, but it is fair to say that that could turn out to be low….
One important thing to say about this scary scenario is: This is the free market functioning perfectly!!! This is actually how capitalism is supposed to solve problems. In this scenario, adaptation to climate change is induced by price signals. People are forced to move away from the coasts because it becomes too expensive. This is economically rational. The human pain of this enormous dislocation does not change that fact. Everyone who loves to celebrate the free market: This is what you’re asking for. Every time you hear a Republican frantically decrying this rational economic progression, you are hearing a hypocrite.
2. The second possibility—the one that will actually happen—is that the private insurance market collapses and then the emergency quasi-fictional state insurance market fills the gap but then it runs out of money at the first big disaster and then all of these states and their homeowners go to Washington for bailouts. Republican warriors for free enterprise quickly become socialists when their donors’ beach houses are at stake. Climate change deniers quickly turn into climatologists when they start asking for the government to build sea walls to keep their garages from flooding….
I expect Florida to reach a point where Republican governors are demanding that every Republican donor’s house be hoisted onto an impermeable private island built at government expense while everyone else drowns….
Billionaires and the Evolution of Overconfidence
[from: The Garden of Forking Paths]
To understand billionaires, you need to understand horizontal inequality, illusory control, self-selection bias, quantified self-worth, and the evolution of overconfidence.
What would you do if you suddenly had a billion dollars?
The way you answer that question will tell you something about how likely you are to become a billionaire in the first place.
For most of us—myself included—the answer to that question gets split into two parts: logistics and philanthropy. First, for logistics, you might consider: what would you change about your life once I never have to worry about money ever again? This is the “would you quit your job?” or “would you move somewhere else?” part of the question. Second, if you’re a decent person, you’d probably consider who you’d help and how you’d allocate a substantial portion of your obscene, newfound wealth to people who need support. To us, money is for something, it’s not a goal in itself.
That means we probably won’t become billionaires.
When billionaires first become billionaires, they have a different answer to the question of what they’d do if they reached a billion dollars: “I’d figure out how to make two billion.” This is a trait that pretty much every billionaire has….
I’ve spent much of my career studying powerful people, interviewing more than 500 leaders all over the world, from America to Zambia, Belarus to Thailand, Madagascar to Tunisia. As part of my research, I’ve met many billionaires. And the most important lesson I learned in those interactions was that these people were not normal. I don’t mean that in a nasty way (though often they deserved it). I mean it in a statistical way — they were abnormal outliers….
Now, consider other social systems such as power and wealth. If you want to become powerful, you usually have to want power. We have a word for that: “power-hungry,” and it’s not a compliment. It quite literally means someone who seeks power — and rarely do you get power without seeking it. The most powerful people in our societies are therefore those who, by self-selection bias, seek power — and then have managed to get power and stay in power.
But now, unlike the spelling bee, there’s a bit of conceptual leakage. What we want is someone who is good at wielding power for the benefit of us all. But what we’re actually selecting for in our political systems is someone who wants power, is good at getting it, and then never letting go. Our systems select for the wrong thing. It’s as though you were to hold a spelling bee but then choose then winners based on who is best at convincing you that they can spell, rather than who can actually spell.
The same is true for wealth. In an ideal world, the people most rewarded financially in our social systems would be those who generate the most shared wealth and prosperity, or those who innovate and help humanity the most; or those who are the wisest and most selfless and could therefore use their wealth for its maximal impact.
But that’s not what our modern economies select for at all. Many of the smartest people on the planet are not driven by money, so they’re not even in the running to become a billionaire — just as many of the people who would make the best politicians are those who least want political power. They’re not in the game, so they can’t win. Many theoretical physicists are geniuses; none of them are billionaires.
By contrast, few billionaires are geniuses, but all of them think they are…. when someone becomes a billionaire, it’s the ultimate validation of their overconfidence….
This leads to a dangerous delusion known as illusory control, in which a person mistakenly thinks they can shape outcomes to their liking even when they can’t. This occurs frequently when someone who has been successful in one domain chalks that success up purely to talent rather than to a more accurate assessment of their abilities and knowledge. They then assume that everything they touch will turn to gold and are surprised when it doesn’t….
The problem is worsened by a phenomenon known as horizontal inequality. We measure ourselves not against society as a whole, but relative to those closest to us. Billionaires often live near other billionaires and socialize with them (this is why yacht clubs exist), so their benchmarks shift. They compete with each other, so assessments of their wealth are transferred within the 0.000033 percent of the population, rather than relative to the 99.999967 percent of the population they’re above…. because of their obsession with horizontal inequality, a billion dollars is never enough for a billionaire. They just keep angling for that next billion, in a Quixotic quest to entrench their status and outcompete their peers….
Rather, these lessons are a call to action. The billionaire class is the visible manifestation of a broken system, which attracts and promotes the wrong kind of people into wealth and rewards them in a way that is very unlike a meritocratic spelling bee. The good news is that, like all systems, these systems can be changed, to create stronger overlap between who we hope to reward—those who help society and improve our world—and who we actually reward too often: greedy overconfident narcissists who can never get enough of their grotesque wealth.
To understand billionaires, you need to understand horizontal inequality, illusory control, self-selection bias, quantified self-worth, and the evolution of overconfidence.
What would you do if you suddenly had a billion dollars?
The way you answer that question will tell you something about how likely you are to become a billionaire in the first place.
For most of us—myself included—the answer to that question gets split into two parts: logistics and philanthropy. First, for logistics, you might consider: what would you change about your life once I never have to worry about money ever again? This is the “would you quit your job?” or “would you move somewhere else?” part of the question. Second, if you’re a decent person, you’d probably consider who you’d help and how you’d allocate a substantial portion of your obscene, newfound wealth to people who need support. To us, money is for something, it’s not a goal in itself.
That means we probably won’t become billionaires.
When billionaires first become billionaires, they have a different answer to the question of what they’d do if they reached a billion dollars: “I’d figure out how to make two billion.” This is a trait that pretty much every billionaire has….
I’ve spent much of my career studying powerful people, interviewing more than 500 leaders all over the world, from America to Zambia, Belarus to Thailand, Madagascar to Tunisia. As part of my research, I’ve met many billionaires. And the most important lesson I learned in those interactions was that these people were not normal. I don’t mean that in a nasty way (though often they deserved it). I mean it in a statistical way — they were abnormal outliers….
Now, consider other social systems such as power and wealth. If you want to become powerful, you usually have to want power. We have a word for that: “power-hungry,” and it’s not a compliment. It quite literally means someone who seeks power — and rarely do you get power without seeking it. The most powerful people in our societies are therefore those who, by self-selection bias, seek power — and then have managed to get power and stay in power.
But now, unlike the spelling bee, there’s a bit of conceptual leakage. What we want is someone who is good at wielding power for the benefit of us all. But what we’re actually selecting for in our political systems is someone who wants power, is good at getting it, and then never letting go. Our systems select for the wrong thing. It’s as though you were to hold a spelling bee but then choose then winners based on who is best at convincing you that they can spell, rather than who can actually spell.
The same is true for wealth. In an ideal world, the people most rewarded financially in our social systems would be those who generate the most shared wealth and prosperity, or those who innovate and help humanity the most; or those who are the wisest and most selfless and could therefore use their wealth for its maximal impact.
But that’s not what our modern economies select for at all. Many of the smartest people on the planet are not driven by money, so they’re not even in the running to become a billionaire — just as many of the people who would make the best politicians are those who least want political power. They’re not in the game, so they can’t win. Many theoretical physicists are geniuses; none of them are billionaires.
By contrast, few billionaires are geniuses, but all of them think they are…. when someone becomes a billionaire, it’s the ultimate validation of their overconfidence….
This leads to a dangerous delusion known as illusory control, in which a person mistakenly thinks they can shape outcomes to their liking even when they can’t. This occurs frequently when someone who has been successful in one domain chalks that success up purely to talent rather than to a more accurate assessment of their abilities and knowledge. They then assume that everything they touch will turn to gold and are surprised when it doesn’t….
The problem is worsened by a phenomenon known as horizontal inequality. We measure ourselves not against society as a whole, but relative to those closest to us. Billionaires often live near other billionaires and socialize with them (this is why yacht clubs exist), so their benchmarks shift. They compete with each other, so assessments of their wealth are transferred within the 0.000033 percent of the population, rather than relative to the 99.999967 percent of the population they’re above…. because of their obsession with horizontal inequality, a billion dollars is never enough for a billionaire. They just keep angling for that next billion, in a Quixotic quest to entrench their status and outcompete their peers….
Rather, these lessons are a call to action. The billionaire class is the visible manifestation of a broken system, which attracts and promotes the wrong kind of people into wealth and rewards them in a way that is very unlike a meritocratic spelling bee. The good news is that, like all systems, these systems can be changed, to create stronger overlap between who we hope to reward—those who help society and improve our world—and who we actually reward too often: greedy overconfident narcissists who can never get enough of their grotesque wealth.
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