Category Archives: Random Blogging

Correlation is Not Causation

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Indiana’s Governor has been emphasizing the importance of strong families, and promising that measures taken by his administration will be “family friendly.” (Well, to be accurate, they’ll be friendly for heterosexual families…)

Family is a key indicator of success and we’re looking for ways that we can encourage more young people to get married, to stay married, to wait to have children until they’re married is very important,” he said.

Very nice. Unfortunately, the Governor’s cart is in front of his horse.

There is a raft of research showing that people who enjoy financial security are more likely to stay married. There’s a reason for the statistic the Governor shared, to the effect that upper-income folks and college graduates are more likely to have stable marriages–people who aren’t sweating the rent are more likely to stay married.

The Governor also said that his administration has been putting “the interests of strong families at the very center of our policies on development.”

Sorry, but without policies that help the working poor make ends meet, that’s just blowing smoke.

A living wage is what enables and facilitates stable marriages. It isn’t the other way around.

Comments

Your Assignment for Today…

…is to read Don Knebel’s most recent post at the Center for Civic Literacy blog.

You need to read the post in its entirety, but here’s the lead-in, to whet your appetite:

When some American reporters described the recent election in India as a victory for the Hindu Nationalist Party, an Indian comic tweeted that Indian reporters should begin referring to the Republican Party as the “Christian Nationalist Party.” The tweet was sarcastic, but nonetheless close to home. As the primary defeat of Virginia Representative Eric Cantor emphasizes, the current incarnation of the Republican Party is increasingly both Christian and nationalistic.

Don notes that today’s GOP is most popular among citizens with the least education and the lowest incomes, and posits that those are the Americans who are also the most fearful– those most threatened by immigration and social change in general.  He also notes that those citizens are also more likely to be Christians. (I would add a few descriptors: older, white, male, heterosexual…). And he concludes:

Ironically, the Republican Party, long considered the party of the rich, seems increasingly to be the party of the poor or at least the working poor. While Republicans continue to advocate for lower taxes and less government spending, because of the correlation between a state’s poverty and its likelihood of voting Republican, eight of the ten states most heavily dependent on federal assistance also voted Republican in the 2012 Presidential election. Who would have thought?

Read the whole thing.

Comments

It’s the Culture, Stupid!

One of the many ways we might “slice and dice” humanity is to describe the wide gulf between people who understand the importance of systems and those who see the world entirely as a creation of individual actors and actions.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of leadership, because ultimately it is leaders and those they persuade who move the culture, but folklore to the contrary, that kid who stuck his finger in the dyke did not singlehandedly avert the deluge.

I understand the temptation to attribute social ills to personal failures. Saying “that guy is poor because he’s lazy,” is a much more satisfying analysis than one that tries to quantify the role(s) played by an inferior education or economic shifts that made his skills obsolete or bankrupted his employer–let alone public policies with unintended consequences.

There are two possible responses to a recognition of the immense influence of culture and social systems: you can shrug your shoulders, accept the brutal truth that you cannot change the world or even a small portion thereof, and spend your days cultivating your own garden (a la Candide); or you can join with others working for systemic changes, recognizing that life offers no guarantees. If and when change comes, its form will be unpredictable, its trajectory uncertain and its emergence maddeningly slow.

A lot of us struggle with that reality, and that choice, every day.

My garden is pretty appealing….and the magnitude of the cultural change we need is pretty daunting.

Withdrawal is tempting.

Comments

Money money money….

Ignore all the sanctimony in political oratory. The most reliable guide to the real priorities of our elected officials is where they spend our money. Talk is cheap.

War, however, is very expensive.

A new study says the Iraq War has cost the United States $2 trillion. By the time all the veterans’ bills are paid, it will likely cost us up to $6 trillion.

Let that sink in for a moment. Per National Priorities, here’s an estimate of how much money is allocated for various programs in President Obama’s 2015 federal fiscal year budget:

Education: ~ $70 billion
Health: ~ $58 billion
Unemployment and labor: ~ $58 billion
Energy and Environment: ~ $35 billion
International Affairs: ~ $35 billion
Science: ~ $35 billion
Transportation: ~ $23 billion
Food and Agriculture: ~$11 billion

Think about what we could have done with $6 trillion. With a “t”. As in, one thousand billions.

Almost eight years ago David Leonhardt wrote about what $1.2 trillion could have bought, which was the estimated cost of the Iraq War at the time:

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

From City Hall to Washington, D.C., our elected officials have made it very clear where their priorities lie. And it isn’t with veterans’ health care, or education, or public safety or the many  admittedly dull public services that virtually all citizens believe government should provide.

Instead, too many of our lawmakers think they’ve been elected to tell everyone else how to live. At home, that means trying to control women, marginalize gay people and impose their narrow religious beliefs on others. Abroad, it means showing “strength” –which for people like Dick Cheney means spending trillions of dollars on wars of choice, and opting for military “solutions” to any and all problems.

I guess it’s more fun to play soldier than it is to make sure that our children are fed and our bridges don’t fail.

Comments

Why I Think It Matters

Yesterday’s post dealing with privilege generated a number of responses, both here on the blog and on Facebook. One of those was from Doug Masson, who is always thoughtful and balanced: his (fairly lengthy) comment seemed to me to boil down to one very fair question: what does discussion of privilege accomplish? What purpose is served?

My post on the subject was motivated by several articles I’ve recently seen dismissing the notion that “privilege” exists. In each case, the concept itself was mischaracterized–the classic “straw man” technique–in order to justify criticizing or ridiculing it.

But an explanation of what prompted my post doesn’t answer the question about why the discussion matters.

It matters, I think, because reasonable debates over policy, reasonable discussions about our different policy preferences, need to originate from a shared reality.

I’d analogize to the periodic accusations that extending civil rights to GLBT people would be granting them “special” rights.  If someone’s reality doesn’t include an understanding of the ways in which gay people are marginalized, calls for equal treatment may seem like special pleading. (Granted, most of the folks making these accusations probably know better, but some do not.)

Or take global climate change. The people who don’t believe it exists are much more likely to accept the arguments against moving to Green energy sources being made by those with a vested interest in the status quo.

If it has never occurred to a white guy living his life in accordance with the social conventions of his time and place that those conventions confer benefits not available to women and minorities, he’s likely to reject efforts to level the playing field. Once he understands the ways in which social attitudes advantage people who look like him, he may be more open to change.

Or he may not.

It may well be that humans will never really occupy the same reality–it may be that we all have worldviews based upon religion or philosophy or personality that require us to see  realities consistent with those worldviews, and to ignore facts that are inconvenient or disturbing. If that’s the case, however, there’s no point to blogs or other efforts to communicate with each other.

At the end of the day, I use this blog to describe the reality I inhabit, and to generate discussion of appropriate policy responses. When my reality isn’t familiar to those of you reading my posts, I hope you will tell me why. I learn a lot from those who comment here.

Comments