My mother used to lecture my sister and me about the importance of treating other people well; her (very outdated) measure of other women’s character was how they treated their maids.
Maids are in very short supply these days, but the sentiment remains valid. You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat subordinates or strangers.
Or–as I was recently reminded–by the way they act behind the wheel of a car.
My husband and I were driving home from South Carolina a couple of days ago and encountered one of those construction sites requiring the merger of two lanes of interstate traffic into one. Most of the affected motorists dutifully “lined up” when they first saw the signs, but there were several who immediately sped up–passing the patient/obedient drivers who were inching along waiting their turns, in order to get to the head of the line where a courteous person would allow them to merge ahead of the rest of us suckers.
This behavior, of course, further slowed the progress of everyone else.
Drivers who do this are sending a pretty clear message: “I matter, other people don’t, and if some of the schmucks obeying the signs are inconvenienced, I couldn’t care less.”
I can think of few behaviors that are more revealing of essential “assholery.”
These are the people who go through life making everything harder for the rest of us. If they had maids, they’d treat them badly.
Indiana has long suffered from “brain drain”–we have great universities that draw very bright students from around the country (and increasingly, the world), but we don’t keep many of them. In fact, the higher a student’s level of education, the more likely the student is to move away from the state after graduation.
Only about 16 percent of PhD recipients remain in Indiana’s workforce one year after graduation.
There are various reasons advanced for this situation; the nature of Indiana’s job market, the attractions of urban life (with few exceptions, Indiana is a pretty rural state), and the relative absence of other college graduates.
We aren’t the only state with this problem. Michigan, for example, is in a similar situation, and a Michigan legislator has proposed an interesting “fix.”
State Sen. Glenn Anderson, D-Westland, recently introduced SB 408, which offers a tax credit to recent college graduates who choose to stay and work in Michigan. This legislation will make it possible for talented young professionals to earn their livelihood in the state by easing the burden of student debt. The bill offers a tax credit to recent graduates who remain in state that lowers annual payments on student loans.
Student loan debt is increasingly seen as a drag on economic growth, as well as a burden on the indebted individuals. A young person who has to divert a significant percentage of her disposable income to loan repayment isn’t buying a new stove or car or house.
I don’t know whether the numbers in Senator Anderson’s proposal are the right ones, and there may be downsides to his proposal that aren’t immediately apparent.
A tax credit might not be enough to keep graduates in Hoosier cornfields. But it’s an intriguing idea.
The “War” Was Started By the John Birch Society: If you’ve never heard of the John Birch Society then you probably get a better night’s sleep than I do. Founder Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer, started off with a fairly legitimate organization dedicated to fighting communism in 1958, but like most people who made fighting communism a life-long goal what he started turned into a paranoid conspiracy that accused everything from fluoridation of water to the Book of the Month Club to being sinister, subliminal plots from hidden American commies to overthrow the capitalist nation.
One of their earliest campaigns, though, was the idea that Christ was being eradicated from Christmas celebrations as a classic communist strike at undermining religious belief in order to make people less able to resist the state. From the 1959 pamphlet “There Goes Christmas?!” by Hubert Kregeloh:
“The UN fanatics launched their assault on Christmas in 1958, but too late to get very far before the holy day was at hand. They are already busy, however, at this very moment, on efforts to poison the 1959 Christmas season with their high-pressure propaganda. What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.”
An interesting response to recent, transparent efforts in several states to suppress the votes of “those people” has been the suggestion that America make voting mandatory. Many other democratic countries–notably Australia–require people to vote and fine those who don’t. (Actually, as I understand it, what is mandatory is appearance at the polls. There is apparently something akin to a “none of the above” option that will fulfill the legal obligation.)
If America ever did go to a “vote or pay a fine” system–something that we might do at about the same time pigs fly over a frozen hell–I’d lobby for a vote-by-mail system like the one in Washington State.
Be that as it may, what are the pros and cons–real and theoretical– of a mandatory voting law?
Arguments for such a system generally include the following: increased participation would ensure that election results mirror the preferences of the entire population, not just those sufficiently motivated to express those preferences at the polls. At least some percentage of the currently disengaged would take more interest in government and politics–knowing that they would have to cast a ballot, at least some Americans would make an effort to know something about the people on that ballot.
Arguably, universal turnout would require candidates to craft more inclusive messages, since targeting an ideological sliver would no longer be the path to victory. (That targeting is one reason for our currently polarized politics.) Candidates and parties would also save a lot of money and effort currently spent on GOTV (get out the vote) efforts. The role of money in politics would thus abate somewhat.
So what are the cons, the arguments against mandatory voting?
Requiring people to vote would assure the participation of low-interest, arguably uninformed people, “alphabet voters” who would simply pull a lever in order to avoid a fine. (You can lead a voter to the polls, but you can’t force him to think.) A fine would fall most heavily on the poor and disadvantaged–the very people who have difficulty getting to the polls in our current system.
The most compelling argument against mandating voting is a First Amendment one: the Supreme Court has recognized that, just as government cannot censor what Americans say, the government cannot compel Americans to speak. If voting is compelled speech, if it is tantamount to an endorsement our electoral system, then requiring people to cast a ballot would be unconstitutional. (Proponents respond to this argument by pointing out that jury duty is mandatory, and that participation on a jury can be seen as an endorsement of the justice system.)
At least one scholar has suggested that–rather than making voting mandatory (which we are highly unlikely to do)–we should work to make elections more competitive, because turnout increases when voters have meaningful choices.
Last Sunday’s New York Times ran an op-ed by Arthur Brooks in which he reported the current state of research into that elusive quality we call happiness.
About half of human happiness appears to be “hard-wired”–a genetic inheritance for which we can thank or blame our parents and other forebears. Another forty percent or so apparently comes from relatively evanescent events in our lives–a great new job, an inheritance, divorce ….the sorts of “stuff happens” for good or ill that people post to their Facebook pages.
The remaining 12 percent, Brooks tells us, comes down to four elements: faith, family, community and work.
Actually, while Brooks doesn’t cite it, there is also a fair amount of research suggesting that the first three of those–faith, family and community–are really just surrogates for an underlying data-point: the strength of an individual’s social support system. (It doesn’t matter, for example, what “faith” one cites–the value, and contributor to happiness/contentment, lies in the existence of a supportive congregational community. That need for connection can be met by avowedly secular communities as well as deeply devotional ones.)
It was when he discussed the importance of work that Brooks made a less-appreciated and important observation.
This shouldn’t shock us. Vocation is central to the American ideal, the root of the aphorism that we “live to work” while others “work to live.” Throughout our history, America’s flexible labor markets and dynamic society have given its citizens a unique say over our work — and made our work uniquely relevant to our happiness. When Frederick Douglass rhapsodized about “patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put,” he struck the bedrock of our culture and character.
Brooks uses the data about the importance of rewarding work to emphasize the role of the free market, and that’s fair enough. Certainly, the ability to choose the work we do is an important element in finding that work meaningful. But I took another, darker lesson from his data.
Americans do indeed measure our self-worth in terms of our jobs. That means that people who are unemployed don’t just face financial challenges–they face the loss of self-respect. Despite “makers and takers” talking points and the deeply-seated scorn displayed by comfortable Americans who are sure that “those people” don’t really want to work, decades of research underscore the humiliation and deep despair of most unemployed workers–especially those who have lost their jobs in economic downturns.
Policymakers give great lip-service to job creation, but regularly ignore evidence that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs about which policies actually create those jobs.
Brooks has done us a service by reminding us that high unemployment doesn’t just run up the bill for unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid and the like. It increases human misery, and makes a mockery of the American Dream.
