I Resolve To…
As I lay awake last night, listening to the fireworks go off in the far distance, I pondered some of the things that I’d learned recently. I asked myself what, out of everything that I’ve experienced, had impacted me or influenced me the most in the last year. Most of this breaks down into knowledge about human behavior that now drives my decision making process. I’m hopeful these observations can also help guide yours!
People experience life differently from one another. This is a hard lesson to really learn. Superficially, it makes sense. But if you consider the implications, allowing this lesson to sink in is difficult. It means that even me and my brother, who have shared almost half of our lives, the same parents, and the same house moves, experienced life differently from the very beginning. Even the experiences we shared were perceived in different ways. I think the recent political divisions illustrate this point more than anything. I'll explain more in the following bullets.
We build our values based on our experiences. Taken with the previous bullet, you can see where I’m going here. Someone who perceived a childhood rife with abuse and neglect might value fairness and taking care of children, and might strive for systemic change more ardently than someone who perceives their life to be more free of such things. This you see in the battle of the memes all the time, where some people claim, basically, “I was beaten as a child and I turned out fine” and others decry capital punishment for children. Which leads me to my third point.
Anecdotal evidence is often frightfully and terribly wrong. We, as society, know how to scientifically examine things such (following the same example) as the impact of physical abuse on children. Several studies have been done which illustrate that physically harming children, even in the interest of “teaching” them something, is destructive to them and makes a society generally more violent. It perpetuates the cycle of abuse as well, so violence begats more violence. So those who suggest “anecdotal evidence,” such as “I was beaten as a child and I turned out fine” with the implicit assumption of “so others do to, stop yer bitchin’” is a dangerous way to think.
Many, many, far too many, people rely and make decisions based on anecdotal evidence. Several intelligent people I know fall into this trap. One example is arguing about “Obamacare.” A person I know told me that everyone they know who use Obamacare have experienced rate increases and not the savings they were told they would get. This person happens to live in Texas. The fact is that Obamacare, or the ACA as it is officially known, has reduced the overall number of uninsured in Texas by 23.7%. But with regard to premium increase, which is what the person was arguing about, there was a rise in premiums in the first couple of years. In part, this was due to the fact that Texas did everything in their power not to embrace the ACA. So in this case, anecdotal evidence didn’t tell the entire story, which leads to the next point.
It’s very difficult for many of us to understand the impact of systemic change. Changes like the ACA, and the Infrastructure plan, and others, are decisions that often take years to work through the system. The executive branch has the job of trying to hasten the positive impacts of changes while diminishing the negative, at least it should. When things like the ACA go into effect, people in the United States expect immediate impact. This allows politicians to play games like front-load wait periods into bills (like the ACA) to delay benefits until hopefully their politicians are in office. So for those power-focused politicians, they tend to ignore the longer-term impacts of systemic changes in favor of soundbites and slogans. $1.3 trillion dollar tax cut, for example. We would have recovered much more quickly without that albatross hanging around our necks.
Many people tend to focus on themselves only. So true. I was talking with someone and asked them what they didn’t like about the current administration. Their answer? “I feel like I’m worse off than I was four years ago.” They hadn’t even done analysis to figure out whether they truly were, they just felt that way. But that’s not what irked me the most. It was all about them. Positive systemic changes are lasting and provide benefit for people and their children and, hopefully, their children’s children. Short-term changes provide benefit for people, but ignore the long term potential problems that may arise. Short-term thinking is exactly what’s wrong in politics and why we can’t successfully seem to address climate change, though current leadership is making in-roads there.
These above lessons taught me that, really, is that “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” The short-term thinking of the people enables the short-term acting of the politicians, which enables profit takers to game the system ($1.3 trillion, anyone?). It’s a sickening game of wag-the-dog-wag-the-tail, a kind of race-to-the-bottom where ultimately, as we can see in our climate battle, everyone loses. This clarified for me one more thing: the war on woke is really a war on long-term thinking. Why? Because ‘woke’ is really just understanding that there are lasting adverse impacts to our past racist policies. Knowing that, it becomes impossible to avoid wondering just what the lasting impacts will be of our current decisions.
Consider: if you have long-term thinking, stuff like $1.3 trillion tax cuts don’t happen. They can’t happen because it’s so very clearly detrimental to the public welfare, and has been demonstrated to be so. And, to be clear, it was demonstrated to be so before it even went into effect. Also, consider things like ACA. Long-term thinking would have illustrated very clearly the impact of ACA and how it can help Texans, but did we get that? Nope.
If we, as Americans, don’t start focusing on something besides immediate gratification, then our country will not survive. Because whether you and I are focused on the long-term outcomes or not, you can bet that there’s a class of Americans who are, and they are intent on bleeding as much from the system as they can in the short-term, by convincing us to ignore the long term. Follow this hard-won wisdom, and you will contribute to making better choices for your society (good ol’ USA) and yourself.
To this effect, I propose the following New Year Resolutions. They’re easy, quick, and help build a better society for us all:
Question anecdotal evidence whenever presented. Demand studies or at least do robust thought experiments if studies aren’t available. Don’t let anecdote drive your decision-making. Don’t take advice from the one person you know from Canada who left because they thought they were getting ripped off by Universal Health Care. That person is clearly biased. Look at studies and wide impacts instead.
Focus on the long-term impacts. There are some great opportunities that take a while to show returns, like Universal Basic Income and Universal Healthcare. Even if you don’t like these as ideas, look at the studies that have been done on impact to individuals and to societies. If you can leave your personal biases at the door, you might be surprised to learn that the long-term benefits are better for both the benefit recipients, and the society at large, for both of these types of programs.
Leave personal biases behind. It’s 2024. Time to let go of some of your built-in stereotypes. Taxation is not theft (see points 1 and 2 above for why). What other biases do you have? Look closely, these can be sneaky.
