wrote:
Thanks, Michael, for the link to Ezra Klein's very intriguing article.
Here's my take on the issue Ezra's raising. I don't think we have a culture of seeking wisdom; I think we have a culture of seeking certainty, and that folks of all political stripes participate in it. The result is that we don't actually get to the bottom of things; we go just deeply enough to confirm our prejudices, then we stop.
Here's a few examples. Social Security solvency. Framing the global warming problem. Figuring out how to create better schools for poverty children. Clever certainties displace wise inquiry in each of these areas.
Social Security. Liberals will tell us that Social Security is in good shape. Even Alan Greenspan brags in his book about how the reforms of 1983 put Social Security on the right track. But it isn't in good shape, and one of the many reasons for that is that the program's dominant metric, a tool called "actuarial balance," isn't really a solvency metric. It's an insolvency postponement metric. A reform that achieves actuarial balance is a program that postpones the program's insolvency crash until a few seconds after the end of the forecasting period.
A wiser approach to Social Security would lead folks to set aside actuarial balance as their metric, and choose one that reflects genuine solvency. A steady Trust Fund ratio, perhaps. If the ratio of the Trust Fund to annual benefit payments were holding steady, over the years and decades to come, that'd be a trustworthy indication of lasting solvency.
Global warming. Or what about the way in which the global warming issue has come to be framed as an "emissions reduction" issue, as though we were engaged in a rerun of the Clean Air Act?
The logic of this situation tells us otherwise. The greater the total stock of CO2 in the atmosphere, the warmer the Earth becomes. The warmer the Earth becomes, the more climate change we get. Warming may be governed by rules of proportionality, but climate change is trickier than that. Climate change is also a matter of tipping points. Small adjustments in temperature can cause major changes in behavior.
Work the logic backward and it leads to a hard conclusion: Climate change cannot end till global warming ends. Global warming cannot end till total CO2 has been capped. And total CO2 cannot be capped till the the consumption of fossil fuels has ceased. And the consumption of fossil fuels cannot cease till we've had a complete changeout of our energy technologies.
It is a mistake - given this logic - to characterize our situation as an "emissions reduction" situation, as though we were engaged in a rerun of the Clean Air Act. That's a seriously inapt analogy. We're in a technology replacement situation. The Montreal Protocol is a better model. As old refrigerators wear out and need replacement, the new ones will use ozone-safe refrigerants. The heat pump we bought last summer is ozone-safe; the one it replaces was not.
"Emission reduction" is a friendly term, but it badly understates our responsibilities. One wonders why our environmentalists are so weak in thinking this through.
Schools. Or what about the way in which the challenge of educating low income children has been framed by policy partisans? Let's measure. Let's test. Let's grade teachers by the amount of progress children make. Let's shed teachers whose kids make no progress. In short, let's address this challenge by fiddling with the way we manage the adults.
There is another, and wiser, way to explore this opportunity. It's to pay close attention to the principals who have done especially well, and dig deeply enough to figure out why.
What one finds - in doing this - are principals obsessed by reaching every child, motivating every child, and making sure every child learns. One discovers a few implicit hypotheses: Children succeed when (a) they're highly motivated, (b) the lessons are learnable, (c) coaching from teachers is perceptive and on point, and (d) they invest enough time. Great principals find a hundred and one success factors that can help them motivate kids. They test kids to learn how far along they are, and then they pitch their instruction to kids at a level they're capable of understanding. They promote teacher observations and discussions, so that every teacher gets regular feedback on how well he/she responds to each child in the room. And they put in longer school days and bring kids to school on Saturdays.
If we started by asking, "what's it take for every child to learn," instead of "what's it take to manage the grownups better" we'd make more progress. One gets fast certainties by asking how to manage grownups. One gets more wisdom by asking what it takes for every kid to engage, and learn.
So I'd push back on the issue of information and certainty. I'd say that Klein's article confirms a larger theme - that our culture cultivates shallowness, not wisdom. We cannot be a mature public till we learn the difference between clever certainties and genuine wisdom, and our hearts begin to lead us toward wisdom.
How do we become wise? I can spot symptoms of not being wise. I'm not sure I have the knack to practice wisdom. Or inspire wisdom. I do think it's a higher quality, one that we need a lot more of.
Best to all,
Steve Johnson
On Apr 8, 2014, at 3:10 PM, Michael Strong wrote:
Thanks, Michael, that was an excellent and highly relevant article. This statement by Kahan,
" I asked Kahan how he tries to guard against identity protection in his everyday life. The answer, he said, is to try to find disagreement that doesn't threaten you and your social group - and one way to do that is to consciously seek it out in your group. "I try to find people who I actually think are like me - people I'd like to hang out with - but they don't believe the things that everyone else like me believes," he says. "If I find some people I identify with, I don't find them as threatening when they disagree with me." It's good advice, but it requires, as a prerequisite, a desire to expose yourself to uncomfortable evidence - and a confidence that the knowledge won't hurt you."
articulates an appropriate norm for a transpartisan group.
Political scientists who study political ignorance are also acutely aware that more information usually leads to greater political polarization. I see this well-established empirical fact as devastating to those who would believe that "more information" or "better informed voters" would lead to any improvement in outcome.
On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 6:49 PM, Michael Briand wrote:
Here's a link to a very good article (http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid ) that's directly relevant to the challenge of achieving transpartisanship. It explains why, if we want dialogue instead of "dueling monologues," we need to deal with the human need for a robust personal identity.
Michael Briand
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For the definitive Conscious Capitalism book, see Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems, by Michael Strong with John Mackey, CEO Whole Foods Market, Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Hernando de Soto, Co-Chair of the U.N. Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, and others, and listen to John Mackey's audio CD Passion and Purpose: The Power of Conscious Capitalism, both available at amazon.com or www.flowidealism.org .
Liberating the Entrepreneurial Spirit for Good
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
Leonardo Da Vinci
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