The Big Moral Question

The big moral question is whether we humans change ourselves to fit laws or whether we change laws to fit ourselves.

Belief in God, Belief in Love

Atheists often say that God is a delusion, but we should love one another. This is inconsistent. The criteria they use to dismiss the existence of God can also be turned against love. The atheist says humans tend to believe in God because it is an evolutionary “trick”—belief in a higher power had some evolutionary advantage in the past that made us believe in something not real. This is also true of love. Atheists say you can’t believe in God because you can’t see Him, but when has anyone ever seen the feeling called love? If someone claims to have felt God personally in their heart, the atheist dismisses this as a trick of evolution, so why isn’t feeling love personally in our heart also a trick of evolution? Why should we discard one illusion—God—but not the other—love? The atheist has no answer.

Is “Love it or Leave it” a valid slogan?

A common argument in favor of capitalism is that competition provides alternatives and therefore disciplines providers of goods and services. That is, if Albertson’s has bad products at bad prices and bad service, you can “just leave” and shop at Safeway. Some extend this logic to the political world and say, “If you don’t like your country’s political products, you can just leave, so don’t complain about your country’s policies or try to change them, instead just find a new country.” In other words, use the “competition” of different nation states and “buy” your political “products” from a competing nation state. This is the logic behind the “love it or leave it” slogan that was so popular among critics of anti-war protestors in the 1960s. This analogy doesn’t work and the “love it or leave it” slogan is incorrect for the following reasons: 1. Prohibitively High Cost: In the market for everyday products, such as groceries, the costs of “just shopping somewhere else” are close to zero—it usually entails just going across the street—while the costs of moving to another country are so high as to be prohibitive. Obviously, the monetary costs of moving to another country are high, but that is nothing compared to the non-monetary costs involved. “Cost,” in the most important sense, means what you give up to take a course of action and here are just a few of the things you are “giving up” in moving to another country: your job, your friends, your family, your spouse and children and grandchildren (unless they agree to come with you and incur all of the costs themselves), your social connections, associational belonging and personal networks, a sense of connection to a place as well as rootedness and heritage, familiarity with a place and its mores, the ability to communicate (if you go to a country that speaks a different language). You’d also have to undergo the costs of selling a home and selling all of your assets. Basically, the costs of moving to a new country are all the costs of hitting “reset” on life. The “plane ticket” cost of immigration is only the tiniest fraction of the actual costs involved. 2. Closed Countries. We don’t live in a world with open borders, so even those willing to “incur” the costs of moving to a new country are still stuck with the problem that the country might not want them. Albertsons keeps its doors wide open for you if you get tired of shopping at Safeway, but Japan does not keep its doors wide open for you if you get tired of living in the United States. 3. Non-Valid Alternative. Third, and finally, immigration usually does not solve the problem: the idea of marketplace competition between countries presumes that there’s another place you like better. We can’t assume there is an ideal society ready to receive us when our society goes in a less ideal direction. If someone doesn’t like the high tax rates in the USA, it’s not a logical response to “just leave” to Canada, because Canada has even higher tax rates. The logical response is to use democratic means to change the tax rates in the USA. So, yes, complaining about tax rates and working to change them is a much better response than the “just leave” response proposed by some people who haven’t thought through the issue.

My Predictions for the Year 2024

Everything I’ve seen suggests that the best way to make predictions about complex phenomena is to baseline using the status quo. So following that heuristic, here are my predictions for the coming year: - The American economy will continue to grow, albeit at a slower rate than the historical average (2-3% instead of 3-4%) - The labor market will continue to experience a shortage, with unemployment below the historical average (it will remain below 4%) - The inflation rate will continue to be low (1-4%) - Interest rates (federal) will continue at their current rate (5-6%) - The national debt will continue to rise quickly ($2-3 trillion) - Joe Biden will be re-elected president - The War in Ukraine will continue unresolved without U.S. direct involvement - The War in Israel will continue unresolved without U.S. direct involvement - AI will be increasingly used but won’t disrupt the job market, higher education, publishing, journalism, or any other realms it is supposed to “radically change” - We will not have widespread use of driverless cars - American Democracy will not be overthrown in a Trump or anti-Trump coup Will I be wrong about some of these predictions? Almost certainly, but I’m guessing that they will be less wrong than our notable pundits currently predicting the opposite.

Circularity in Higher Ed

One of the major problems with colleges today is that there are no exogenous sources of feedback. Businesses have customers who stop buying products with a decline in quality. Politicians can get voted out of office. NBA teams lose games to better competition. In other words, there is some external standard of quality that gives feedback to the organization such that they can make changes. This doesn’t exist in higher education because the quality of an institution is based on a circularity that goes like this: The best people attend a great institution because it is a great institution and it’s a great institution because the best people attend it. The prestige attracts great students and great students mean prestige. What if the university is not offering a good “product” (education)? It doesn’t matter because it still graduates the best students because it attracted the best students. Reform of higher ed., then, depends upon breaking this circularity and introducing some external standard of quality—it couldn’t be a test of just inputs (e.g., an “exit exam” or “bar passage rate” because better universities get better students who are more likely to score higher regardless of what they actually learned at the university). It would have to be a test of outputs—measuring change over the course of the education. Whoever is up to the task of developing an entrance/exit exam that can accurately measure what we hope colleges are giving their students will be doing the world a great service. This would discipline and reform higher education immediately. If we saw that Chico state produced a higher increase in critical thinking, creativity, and knowledge than did Harvard, then it would quickly displace Harvard as offering the better educational “product.” WE would see the processes happening in higher ed that we constantly see in business or sports, where the top firms of teams don’t stay there very long as they are disrupted by new, innovative entrants. We haven’t seen this disruption of education because there is no external standard of quality for disruptors to achieve, there is only a circular one (“great universities attract great students which makes them great universities”).

Equality without Agency

We live in an age that prides itself on being post-metaphysical without realizing that it is as metaphysical as any that came before, only selectively and without acknowledgement. During the era of Christian enlightenment (1700-2000), Americans believed in equality as well as agency. In our age of post-Christian enlightenment, we believe in equality without agency, which reduces everyone to victim status—puppets of systems rather than beings of choice. We’ll see how long the “equality” lasts in our post-Christian age since any non-religious ideology will have a hard time upholding any kind of metaphysics at all (since belief in both agency and equality are non-empirical and must be taken on faith).

The Scaling Up or Scaling Down Fallacy

A family is different than society, with different rules, workings, and incentives. What works for a family generally won’t work for society as a whole. Many of our political mistakes arise from the fallacy that society is just a family writ large—e.g., monarchy or socialism: if loving parents rule over a family, why can’t a loving “parent” (king or queen) rule over a country? If families just share the work and resources, why can’t nations? I’ve also seen the opposite error of starting from a macro, societal view of market economic assumptions (everyone is paid for their work) and then scaling down to say that “housewives” should be paid for their work. The same reason househusbands and house children aren’t paid: everyone is contributing communally in a micro, non-market situation. This is one of the reasons I’m bothered by the “it takes a village to raise a child” talk—it assumes that American society is like a village, but village workings don’t scale up to the national level.