Parts to Wholes: the Socionomic Systems Nexus

 

The State of the Union

 To some extent, aside from all various discussion about the state of the economy, policy (especially Healthcare), etc. we can look at an interesting little survey put together by our friends at the Atlantic Monthly that looks across a bunch of different issues and indicators. It really is worth your while to click on this and work your way around the spinner indicator to see what surveys tell us about ourselves, our attitudes and our situation. But the wedge titles pretty well capture it - we're suspicious, twitchy, fragmented, untrustful, cranky, FEUDAL and over-extended among other things.

The real legacy of the 60s seems to be a profound mistrust of our institutions, somewhat well-earned in our humble opinion, and a general sense of malaise. For those of you old enough to remember the 70s there are certain similarities. But the period this really matches is the 1870s and on when the huge depression of 1873 caused people to loose faith as well and for a surge in populism to dominate the political discourse. There's always been a major populist strain not to far underneath the surface in this country but it's likely to dominate thruout the decade as we wrestle with all these issues. Again, some of it's well earned too. Right now the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is starting up in D.C. and just the first two days of hearings have been a revelation. What we've all suspected is already confirmed, even though they have a lot of work to do. The Finance Industry did take advantage of us all, screwed up terribly and while sorry for our pain is not apologetic about how it runs itself. What's that you say - you smell tar being heated? You'll find a fuller survey of the hearings plus extended readings in this post: Pecora 2 Hearings, Malfeasances, Your Future & Cusp Points.

On the Cusp Point of Our History .... Again

We may be crossing the threshold where the costs and pains are so high that the citizenry is aroused enough to do something. I sure hope so.That hope is why I keep trying to stoke these discussions. The graphic details the institutional re-engineering that should be our agenda for this decade. What it doesn't discuss is the "lizard-brain", the propensity of people to hear what they want to hear, listen to folks who tell them what they want to hear and pick representatives who cater to their short-term whims.

Now we're going to find out if the pain of ignoring problems is great enough for us to tackle them or we try and coast on thru again, with more pain in the future. We'll also find out if the public is mature enough to step up to its responsibilities. We don't guarantee success but we do guarantee failure if we don't try. Oh, and one other thing, win, lose or draw we also guarantee interesting times - which were long over due IOHO.

By the way, if you think we're making this up, we suggest you watch the three segments of PBS's recent special on "This Emotional Life". Extremely well done and, among many other things, it talks about how we deal with life's roller coaster and how that's related to the latest findings on brain structure and decision-making.

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Consequences, Challenges & Inheritances

It hasn't been pretty In November 2008 Mr Obama won 53% of the popular vote, and the Democrats won handsome majorities in both chambers of Congress. That looked like a strong mandate to govern. And yet the battle for health-care reform has been both close-run and unedifying. Last year’s “town-hall meetings” spread the wild falsehood that Obamacare would create “death panels” to determine who would live and die. But the drama in Congress itself has been no prettier. Critics concentrate on four defects: the “undemocratic” Senate, the extreme partisanship of the parties, the lobbying of well-heeled pressure groups and the lure of the pork-barrel.• Extreme partisanship In a legislature of rugged individualists, the supermajority rule might at least force the majority to seek a broad consensus—no bad thing when far-reaching laws are proposed. But if the minority votes strictly on party lines the rule cannot work this way and becomes something less defensible in a democracy: a way for the minority to thwart the majority’s wishes. Whichever side deserves more blame, the partisanship on display in the health fight followed a well-established trend. In its 57th annual study of voting patterns, published this week, Congressional Quarterly reported that Congress was more partisan than ever in 2009. More than seven out of ten Senate votes were what CQ calls “party-unity” votes, pitting a majority of one party against the majority of another. Cross-party coalitions of the sort that created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 have become virtually extinct as politicians have deserted the middle ground. • Lobbying Senator John McCain memorably called the 2003 energy bill the “no-lobbyist-left-behind” act. But the Centre for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan think-tank, expects that the amount spent on formal federal lobbying by the health and health-insurance industries (some $425m in the first nine months of 2009 alone) will break all records. And this is just a fraction of the two sectors’ total spend on television advertising and other efforts to influence the debate.

Arnold’s Last Yodel Schwarzenegger had everything going for him – no ties to party leaders, interest groups or the past. Now the swagger, the audacity, the blush of the new — it’s all gone for the Governator in Winter. He was grim-faced and hollow-eyed last week in his final state of the state speech, standing in front of the Bear Flag, a reminder of the days when giants ruled California, and further back, when even the Los Angeles basin had grizzly bears. The governor had no choice but to talk like one of the “economic girly men” he used to deride. The new budget numbers, like the old ones, are catastrophic. Despite furlough Fridays and hocus-pocus spreadsheets, despite college tuition spikes and long lines at understaffed licensing bureaus, he still needs another $20 billion just to keep the ship of state from sinking. Does his fall — down to 27 percent approval — signal the end of a certain kind of citizen politician? Or is it because modern California destroys anyone who dares try to govern it? In his six years as governor, he took on state employee unions, entrenched and cynical Democrats, entrenched and anti-tax Republicans, a bloated pension system that has seen costs rise by 2,000 percent in 10 years. And he lost — to every group. He tried to make California a role model for a clean energy state, to make it more European by championing smart design and caring for its citizens. But when the economic crash came, he was left with the DNA for disaster that has determined this state’s fate for a generation. The simple tragedy of California is that its tax and budgeting restrictions — voted in by citizens’ initiatives — make it impossible to pay for the prison, school and health mandates OK’d by those same people. The state is broke, and broken. The latest Band-Aids — plans to legalize marijuana so it can be taxed to pay for substance-abuse clinics, and drilling for oil off Santa Barbara to keep parks from closing — will do nothing to fix it. What it needs, as many are advocating, is a constitutional convention — and there a chance to rewrite its basic governing documents. And the governor, in his final year in office, should join the call. Yodel it, if he wants.

• California Will Survive Its Crackup

A Nobel Economist Asks: Is Wall Street Ruining America? Today, of course, no one is against markets. The only legitimate questions are: What are their limitations? Can they go wrong? If so, how can we distinguish the ones that do from the ones that don’t? What can be done to fix the ones that do go wrong? When is some regulation needed, how much, and what kind? More broadly: how to protect the economy and society against specified tendencies to market failure without losing much of either the capacity of a market system to coordinate economic activity efficiently or its ability to stimulate and reward technological and other innovations that lead to economic progress? Now comes the layer of ideology: advocates, some of whom may know better, use the “efficiency of free markets” to argue against taxes and regulation in general--they are distortions--and in favor of laissez-faire. Any interference with the free market, they declaim, is ipso facto a bad thing. There are at least two things wrong with this ploy. The first has already been discussed. If a tax or regulation creates an inefficiency, “better” outcomes are available, but the pre-tax or pre-regulation situation is very unlikely to be among them. Some group will have gained from the regulation or from the tax and the use of its revenues. The second reason is that the Invisible Hand Theorem is valid only under certain assumptions, some of which only need to be stated to be seen as very dodgy. Clarifying those assumptions is the role of Cassidy’s “reality-based economics.” Of course such imperfections are ubiquitous in every modern economy. Yet another requirement is the absence of significant external effects or “externalities.” Again, externalities are ubiquitous in a densely populated modern economy. Some taxes and subsidies, instead of being distortions, are designed to correct the distortions that arise from such externalities (carbon taxes, cap-and-trade systems), and many regulations are intended to prevent or minimize negative externalities (no pig farms in city limits, no billboards in scenic areas). Faced with this list of obstacles, one might be tempted to give up on the market economy altogether. That would be as much of a mistake as the one made by doctrinaire free marketeers. The real point is that the choice is not either/or, but when and how much. Many distortions, imperfections, and externalities are small. To try to correct them all would be intolerably bureaucratic. The large ones cannot be wished away or ignored for reasons of piety; they cause large inefficiencies, and they can redistribute income in ways that most people would reject. And so there is no good alternative to case-by-case decision-making. The market evangelists, who tend to claim more for unregulated markets than solid theory can justify, are ideologically motivated. They dislike and distrust governments so much that they overlook the exceptions and the implausible assumptions, and simply propose the blanket principle that the market knows best. What is improper in this manner of argument is the frequent casual hint that it is authorized by economic theory. Nothing so general is ever authorized by economic theory.

How America Can Rise Again  Since coming back to the United States after three years away in China, I have been asking experts around the country whether America is finally going to hell. The question is partly a joke. One look at the comforts and abundance of American life—even during a recession, even with all the people who are suffering or left out—can make it seem silly to ask about anything except the secrets of the country’s success. Today’s fears combine relative decline—what will happen when China has all the jobs? and all the money?—with domestic concerns about a polarized society of haves and have-nots that has lost its connective core. They include concerns about the institutions that have made America strong: widespread education, a financially viable press, religion that can coexist with secularism, government that expresses the nation’s divisions while also addressing its long-term interests and needs. How should we feel? I spoke with historians and politicians, soldiers and ministers, civil engineers and broadcast executives and high-tech researchers. Overall, the news they gave was heartening—and alarming, too. Most of the things that worry Americans aren’t really that serious, especially those that involve “falling behind” anyone else. But there is a deeper problem almost too alarming to worry about, since it is so hard to see a solution. If we’re worried, perhaps that’s a good sign, since through American history worry has always preceded reform. What I’ve seen as I’ve looked at the rest of the world has generally made me more confident of America’s future, rather than the reverse. What is obvious from outside the country is how exceptional it is in its powers of renewal: America is always in decline, and is always about to bounce back. That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation.

• The State of the Union Is ... ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers.
• The Happiness Index Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier.

Nixonland,  by Rick Perlstein This is not a political biography, though. Rather, it offers a disturbing, detailed look at how America was torn apart during the sixties to a degree rivaled only by the Civil War. Unlike many political histories of the sixties, it doesn’t place the locus of action in the South, where civil-rights pioneers marched, but instead in the big cities: Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Detroit, where blacks rioted and whites revolted against integration. Meanwhile, in Berkeley and Chicago, the New Left hijacked liberalism and helped drive it into the ground.  Perlstein explains that not Nixon but Reagan was the first major figure to campaign against liberalism by linking it to the chaos afoot in America. It was in the course of watching Reagan run for the 1966 California gubernatorial race that Nixon picked up Reagan’s tactics and rhetoric. Two years later—just four years after LBJ’s landslide presidential victory—Nixon successfully campaigned for the presidency by casting the election as a contest between the “Silent Majority” and liberal elites. And in 1972, he built on those divisions to turn that narrow win into a landslide. Perlstein’s master argument is that we are still living in Nixon’s America, where politicians claim to represent us against a ruling class that threatens to corrupt and take advantage of us. (Perlstein makes the case that this trope was integral to the rise of the right, from Barry Goldwater through George W. Bush.) Nixon didn’t just adopt this us-against-them stance for the sake of his campaigns—it was an outlook that characterized his thinking well before he ran for president…

The Glenn Beck effect It's official: Americans admire Glenn Beck more than they admire the pope. This news, at once unsettling and unsurprising, came from the Gallup polling organization on Wednesday. Beck, the new Fox News host who has said President Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people" and alternately likens administration officials to Nazis and Marxists, was also more admired by Americans than Billy Graham and Bill Gates, not to mention Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. In Americans' esteem, Beck only narrowly trailed South Africa's Nelson Mandela, the man who defeated apartheid. The 45-year-old recovering alcoholic and Mormon convert has become the first true demagogue of the information age. His nightly diet of falsehoods and conspiracies on Fox, and his daily outrages on the radio, have propelled his popularity past even Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. His method is simple: He goes places where others are forbidden by conscience.

The Tea Party Teens The United States opens this decade in a sour mood. First, Americans are anxious about the future. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. Only 27 percent feel confident that their children’s generation will be better off than they are. Second, Americans have lost faith in their institutions. During the great moments of social reform, at least 60 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing most of the time. Now, only a quarter have that kind of trust. The country is evenly divided about President Obama, but state governments are in disrepute and confidence in Congress is at withering lows. As Frank Newport of the Gallup organization noted in his year-end wrap-up, “Americans have less faith in their elected representatives than ever before.” Third, the new administration has not galvanized a popular majority. In almost every sphere of public opinion, Americans are moving away from the administration, not toward it. The Ipsos/McClatchy organizations have been asking voters which party can do the best job of handling a range of 13 different issues. During the first year of the Obama administration, the Republicans gained ground on all 13. The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year. A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity. The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation. The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally. Moreover, the tea party movement has passion. Think back on the recent decades of American history — the way the hippies defined the 1960s; the feminists, the 1970s; the Christian conservatives, the 1980s. American history is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life. In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate. But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.

Attitudes and Values

The economics of happiness Though the success of the U.S. economic model has long been driven by individual initiative and economic growth, today, with millions of Americans dealing with the loss of jobs, incomes and assets, it does seem like a good time to find better measures of how we're doing. For the past 10 years, I have been studying happiness around the world, in countries as different as Afghanistan, Chile and the United States. It has been an amazing foray into the complexity of the human psyche and the simplicity of what makes us happy. What is most remarkable is how similar the forces driving happiness are in various countries, regardless of a nation's level of development. Wherever I look, some simple patterns hold: A stable marriage, good health and enough (but not too much) income are good for happiness. Unemployment, divorce and economic instability are terrible for it. On average, happier people are also healthier, with the causal arrows probably pointing in both directions. Finally, age and happiness have a consistent U-shaped relationship, with the turning point in the mid- to late-40s, when happiness begins to increase, as long as health and domestic partnerships stay sound. All of this seems rather logical, suggesting that if a government wants to get into the business of promoting happiness, it can pursue some straightforward policy goals, such as emphasizing health, jobs and economic stability as much as economic growth. But here's the complicated part. While there are stable patterns in what leads to happiness, there is also a remarkable human capacity to adapt to both prosperity and adversity. Thus people in Afghanistan -- a war-stricken country with poverty like that of sub-Saharan Africa -- are as happy as people in Latin America, where typical social and economic indicators are a good deal stronger. Kenyans, meanwhile, are as satisfied with their health care as Americans are with theirs. Being a victim of crime makes people unhappy, but the impact is smaller if crime is a common occurrence in their society; the same goes for corruption and obesity. Freedom and democracy make people happy, but the effect is greater when they're used to such liberties than when they're not.The bottom line is that people can adapt to tremendous adversity and retain their cheerfulness, while they can also have virtually everything -- including good health -- and be miserable.

The Battle of the Brain Why is the brain divided? If it is about making connections, why has evolution so carefully preserved the segregation of its hemispheres? Almost every function once thought to be the province of one or other hemisphere—language, imagery, reason, emotion—is served by both hemispheres, not one. There is nonetheless a highly significant difference in how the two hemispheres work, giving rise to two wholly distinct takes on the world. Normally we synthesize them without being aware that we are doing so. But one of the two hemispheres can come to dominate—and just as this may happen for individuals, it may also happen for a whole culture. The neuropsychological evidence shows that the right hemisphere pays wide-open attention to the world, seeing the whole, whereas the left hemisphere is adept at focusing on a detail. New experience, whatever its kind, is better apprehended by the right hemisphere, whereas the predictable is better dealt with by the left. And because the right hemisphere sees things in context, as inseparably interconnected, it recognizes the vast extent of what remains implicit. By contrast, because of its narrow focus, the left hemisphere isolates what it sees, and is relatively blind to things that can be conveyed only indirectly. There is a reason we have two hemispheres: We need both versions of the world. Yet in the West there has been such an imbalance. And as a consequence, over the past 2,500 years, there has been a kind of battle going on in our brains, the result of which has been, despite swings of the pendulum, an ever greater reliance on the left hemisphere. The two hemispheres also differ in their attitude to their differences. The right hemisphere is inclusive in its attitude to what the left hemisphere might know, but the left hemisphere is exclusive of the right. Where the right hemisphere's world responds to negative feedback, the left hemisphere gets locked ever further into its own point of view. Its capacities are limited to doing the same things it has always done, and no more. And so our world has become increasingly rule-bound. Loss of the implicit damages our ability to convey, or even to see at all, aspects of ourselves and our world that transcend the mechanistic. Perspective in art has receded along with harmony in music: We tend more and more to see the world as a heap of intrinsically meaningless fragments. There is an inevitable rise in bureaucracy, with paper replacing people, and experience increasingly virtualized. In going all out for what we believe will be our own happiness, we exploit the world and see ourselves as alien to it, rather than seeing that our happiness depends on being part of it, and therefore on helping it to thrive. This is the world of the left hemisphere, ever keen on control. Yet the pursuit of self-interest has not left us happier.

• Adult Learning | Neuroscience: How to Train the Aging Brain Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age. Many longheld views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.

Topple the false idols of Wall St. But at its core, this is also a spiritual crisis. More and more people are coming to understand that underlying the economic crisis is a values crisis, and that any economic recovery must be accompanied by a moral recovery. We have been asking the wrong question: When will the financial crisis end? The right question is: How will it change us? This could be a moment to reexamine the ways we measure success, do business and live our lives; a time to renew spiritual values and practices such as simplicity, patience, modesty, family, friendship, rest and Sabbath. Many of our religious teachings, from our many traditions, offer useful correctives to the practices that brought us to this sad place. Jesus's Sermon on the Mount instructs us not to be "anxious" about material things, a notion that runs directly counter to the frenzied pressure of modern consumer culture. Judaism teaches us to leave the edges of the fields for the poor to "glean" and to welcome those in need to our tables. And Islam prohibits the practice of usury. (Muslim-owned financial institutions that charge fees for service rather than interest have done amazingly well during this crisis; their practices offer some interesting models.)

The church was too silent in 2009 It is the last day of 2009 and in my mind the most important religious story of the year has been the silence of the church in the wake of the hatred that has been exhibited by Americans as we have struggled with change. It saddens me that The Church seems to be more interested in becoming wealthy, or maintaining its wealth, than in producing a wealth of love and respect among people. Isn't that what religion is supposed to be about? Rick Warren, in "The Purpose Driven Life," begins the book by saying, or getting the readers to say, "It's not about me." In other words, this walk in God is not about what I feel or want, but how I can help make life better for others, and in so doing, better my life as well. There seems to be a burst of political-religious fundamentalism happening in this country. Karen Armstrong writes that fundamentalism erupts when a group feels its status quo, what it is familiar with, is being threatened. That group then vehemently holds onto what it has known for so long. Newness is frightening. It seems that there is a lot of newness happening, and people are frightened. And The Church is silent. So awfully silent. Would that The Church would develop a spine and not care that it is more concerned with tithers, big buildings and well paid clergy. The harvest is past ... and we are not saved...because The Church is way too silent.

Look Ahead With Stoicism—and Optimism The accomplished and sophisticated attorney was asked what attitude he was bringing to the new year. "Stoicism and mindless optimism," he laughed, which sounded just about right. He meant it, he said, about the stoicism. He had immersed himself in that rough old philosophy after 9/11, and had come to adopt it as his own. But he meant it about the optimism, too: You never know, things get better, begin with good cheer, maintain your equilibrium, don't lose your peace. We're at the clean start of a new decade, and it wouldn't be bad if the national watchwords were repair, rebuild and return, with an eye toward what is now our central project, though we haven't fully noticed, and that is keeping our country together. So many forces exist to tear us apart. We have to do what we can to hold together in the long run. We have been through a hard 10 years. They were not, as some have argued, the worst ever, or even the worst of the past century. The '30s started with the Great Depression, featured the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and ended with World War II. That's a bad decade for you. In the '60s we saw our leaders assassinated, our great cities hit by riots, a war tear our country apart. But the 'OOs were hard, starting with a disputed presidential election, moving on to the shocked pain of 9/11, marked by an effort to absorb the fact that we had entered the age of terror, and ending with a historic, world-shaking economic crash. Maybe the most worrying trend the past 10 years can be found in this phrase: "They forgot the mission." So many great American institutions—institutions that every day help hold us together—acted as if they had forgotten their mission, forgotten what they were about, what their role and purpose was, what they existed to do. You, as you read, can probably think of an institution that has forgotten its reason for being. Maybe it's the one you're part of. So what to do? Here my friend the lawyer's stoicism and mindless optimism might come in handy, for turning around institutions is a huge, long and uphill fight. It probably begins with taking the one thing we all hate to take in our society, and that is personal responsibility. If you work in a great institution: Do you remember the mission? Do you remember why you went to work there, what you meant to do, what the institution meant to you when you viewed it from the outside, years ago, and hoped to become part of it?