Know your audience

Arthur Brooks made a great point in his Wall Street Journal opinion piece yesterday, Republicans and Their Faulty Moral Arithmetic.

Raging against government debt and tax rates that most Americans don’t pay gets conservatives nowhere, and it will always be an exercise in futility to compete with liberals on government spending and transfers.

Instead, the answer is to make improving the lives of vulnerable people the primary focus of authentically conservative policies. For example, the core problem with out-of-control entitlements is not that they are costly—it is that the impending insolvency of Social Security and Medicare imperils the social safety net for the neediest citizens. Education innovation and school choice are not needed to fight rapacious unions and bureaucrats—too often the most prominent focus of conservative education concerns—but because poor children and their parents deserve better schools.

That reminds me. I have made headway with liberal friends on the subject of school choice by doing exactly what Brooks suggests, making it about the kids and the parents who need the most help.

I pointed out that middle-income and wealthy folks already have school choice because they can afford to live in an area with a good public school district or pay to send their kids to private school. That may contribute to why these schools are successful.

I then asked why low-income parents shouldn’t be given more choice, too.

Several told me that changed their mind about school choice and they became supporters of it.

Liberty

Add Bob Higgs to the list of non-pathetic economists, with his excellent essay on two libertarian camps and his thoughts on how best to persuade others that freedom is good (thanks to Don Boudreaux on Cafe Hayek for the pointer).

To describe the two camps, Higgs uses two words whose meaning may escape the causal reader who doesn’t even know that libertarians support liberty (notice the same root word).

Aside: I’ve found that many non-libertarians haven’t yet made the connection between the two words liberty and libertarian, as the word libertarian seems to occupy the same space in their brains as ‘conspiracy theorists with tinfoil hats.’

I’m often asked, “What does a libertarian believe in?”. I respond, “Uh…liberty.” They respond, “Really? Ah!”

The two camps Higgs describes are consequentialists and deontologists.

The first camp supports liberty because they believe it produces the best results, the most prosperity (i.e. has good ‘consequences’; same root word as camp name).

The second camp supports liberty because they believe that freedom is morally right.

Higgs admits that his journey to libertarianism started with understanding the consequentialist argument, after becoming convinced that central planning ruined civilizations like the Soviet Union. I too came this route.

Higgs then recognized his natural appreciation for the deontologist argument that liberty is morally right. He describes the deonologist argument as plainly as I’ve seen:

Yet no one really needed to persuade me that people by nature deserve to be free, that each person possesses a natural right to control his own life insofar as the exercise of that right does not conflict with other people’s exercise of the same right.

Higgs then wonders which strategy would be best to convince others to support liberty. Show them how liberty produces better results or convince them that it is morally right? He worries that the former leaves folks open to flip-flopping as others may present convincing cases that less liberty produces better results.

Higgs and I agree that the moral argument is intuitive for many people, maybe most people. But, even the moral argument has the flip-flopping weakness of the results-based argument.

Some folks are good at framing non-liberty-related-issues as anti-liberty arguments to play on our moral intuition.

Home ownership is a good example. Somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking of home ownership as a privilege earned by being responsible by making such choices as paying bills on time and saving for a down payment, and started thinking of it as a right.

If a lender denied you a loan because of your bad bill-paying history, then it was framed that the lender was oppressing your freedom to own a home, instead of correctly recognizing that you hadn’t earned the privilege because you had made bad choices. See how that re-framing works? Loads of people bought that argument.

Politics is filled with these arguments. Do we have a right to a living wage? Do we have a right to health care? Do we have a right to live comfortably? Many people think yes.

I also think Higgs overlooked more than the flip-flopping potential of the moral argument for liberty.

It’s not just by luck that people deserve to be free and that produces the best results. There’s no need for two camps for liberty. It’s part of the same idea. Separating that into two camps is like separating the component gases of air. You no longer have air. Those two things make liberty.

Having two camps entertains the belief that you might have one without the other. But, in this reality, you don’t. Having one without the other is an idea, liberty is real.

There’s yet another part to liberty that we don’t recognize. Higgs said that people, by nature, deserve to be free.

I disagree. We earn our liberty by respecting the liberty of others. Higgs said this in the second part of his quote. In my opinion, that eliminates the need for terms like ‘by nature’, because any study of history shows that liberty does not exist by nature. It only exists with others respect it.

When I think about my journey to liberty and what moved me to it, I recall a couple of  stunning revelations.

The first, which made me the most cautious about throwing my support behind seemingly well-intentioned (though I would come to learn the lesson of the bootlegger the Baptists), “for-the-greater-good” (and I come to learn that greater good cannot be measured) program was when I realized that a lot of the do-good beliefs I advocated conflicted with the liberty of others. I simply hadn’t recognized it before.

Do we have a right to a living wage? That sounds nice and well-intentioned. Breathing any hint of skepticism of this ‘right’ can bring on the wrath of the do-gooders. But, the reality is that trying to guarantee this right necessarily conflicts with the liberty of someone — even the very people you think you are helping. If you tell them that you do not want them working for a wage less than what you consider a ‘living wage’, even if they are perfectly willing to and their situation allows for it, then you are infringing on their liberty and you are making the heady assumption that you know what is right for them.

If you do not respect the liberty of those folks, why should they respect yours?

My second stunning revelation: I had not accounted for the risk that the actions I advocated to help some might be wrong and could hurt the very folks I thought I was helping.

Do we all have a right to a living wage? Again, sounds nice. But attempting to put that into practice has trade-offs beyond infringing on liberties, which is the is the source of the results-based argument for liberty. Rather than guaranteeing someone a living wage, you may reduce their opportunity to earn any wage and deprive them of chances to gain work experience that could lead to higher wages for them in the future, because you’ve priced them out of the market.

What if someone came along and determined that your wage is too low and forced your employer to raise it 20%. You might be happy. Until your employer decides it’s not worth it and eliminates your job. Your new buddy will claim they were just trying to help you out. You might tell them to mind their own business next time.

To convince others of the virtues of liberty, I favor two approaches. First, we should find eye-opening, compelling and truthful ways to demonstrate clearly when folks are trampling on the liberty of others. I don’t think many of them think of it that way.

Second, we should do the same to demonstrate that many arguments framed as a restricting liberty are dishonest and wrong. For example, expecting prospective homeowners to establish a pattern of responsible (especially financially responsible) behavior is a reasonable and effective hurdle for home ownership and not a restriction of their liberty.

“…generally pathetic”

In The Chronicle of Higher Education,Tom Bartlett writes about his meeting with Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness and his latest book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.

Taleb is known for his gruffness. That turns off a lot of folks. Not me. I’ve always had a penchant for substance over style and I think Taleb offers substantive observations on how the world works.

I believe a key observation from his latest book is to avoid having a single point of failure. Why? Because things fail and they fail more often than not. What thing have you seen that never fails? A single point of failure is dumb.

Engineers design their electrical and mechanical systems with redundancies to try to avoid single points of failure. Electric utility companies, for example, usually have more than one way to get power to your service drop. If one path fails, they can switch to the backup path while they’re fixing the main path. That’s one reason most folks usually don’t experience more than a few hours of electrical outages in a given year.

However, for your home, your service drop is a single point of failure. If it fails, you will be out of service until you get an electrician to fix it. Unless, of course, you’ve invested in a backup generator.

But, we rarely consider single points of failure in our social systems. Central planning is a single point of failure, yet many folks tend to support moving things in that direction whether the topic is health care, education or charity.

For example, I often hear folks advocate a single, national K-12 education standard. What if that standard fails? The answer they give is easier said than done, fix it. How do we fix something that has no competing models to learn from?

Below are a couple of my favorite passages from Bartlett’s piece on Taleb.

It would be for the greater good if more of us shared Taleb’s view on economists. Bartlett describes it as such:

He saves his iciest hate for economists. Taleb has no use for the “charlatanic” field, comparing economic research to medieval medicine. Economists are, in his estimation, weak, ignorant, fearful, and generally pathetic.

This is a good observation. Entrepreneurs and innovators have generated the wealth that’s made our standard of living so much better than our ancestors, not economists.

Here’s another interesting passage:

Taleb is a professor of risk engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Despite his wall of degrees (he has an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a doctorate from the University of Paris), he believes that universities propagate “touristification,” another term he coined, a phenomenon that occurs when what should be an exciting exploration turns into a programmatic exercise. It’s better to be an adventurer than a tourist. Education isn’t the only result of this modern sin; gym machines and “the electronic calendar” fall short as well.

Wise words from Seth Godin

I agree with what Seth wrote in this blog post:

You can’t argue with success…

Of course you can. What else are you going to argue with? Failure can’t argue with you, because it knows that it didn’t work.

The art of staying successful is in being open to having the argument. Great organizations fail precisely because they refuse to do this.

Bono 4 Capitalism

Amazing timing.

I had a conversation about the band, U2′s, lead singer, Bono, with a co-worker. I quipped that I thought it was funny how Bono made so much money from commerce while being so critical of commerce.

Then I read this post at The Pretense of Knowledge, about the reformed Bono, who now recognizes that commerce and capitalism is key for lifting folks from poverty and creating prosperity.

Not only that, it’s as if he heard me poking fun at him. From the article:

The Irish singer and co-founder of ONE, a campaigning group that fights poverty and disease in Africa, said it had been “a humbling thing for me” to realize the importance of capitalism and entrepreneurialism in philanthropy, particularly as someone who “got into this as a righteous anger activist with all the cliches.”

I think this is good news and bad news.

It’s good news that a popular entertainer gets it now. Maybe someone will listen to him. It’s also good news that someone like Bono admitted to changing his mind. We don’t see enough of that.

It’s bad news that it took him so gosh darned long to figure it out. That’s a key reason folks the world over try to restrain capitalism — they don’t understand it, even when it provides them with so much prosperity.

How I aspire to behave

When talking to others: This is what I think. I could be wrong. What am I missing?

When I’m listening: What do you think? Do you mind if I ask why?

Great ground rules for dinner table discussions

From Bertrand Russell (via Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution via Brainpickings)

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

If we had a course or two in critical thinking and discussion in the junior high or high school curriculum designed to teach mastery of these ten ground rules plus some common fallacies, politically we’d be in better shape.

Similarly, an oath from Bryan Caplan of EconLog:

Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it.  My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is.  When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant.  When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening.

Similarly, several years ago a friend told me of a rule his workplace had implemented. It went like this:

If you are to point out a problem, you must follow it with, “…and this means we should do…” to show that not only have you discovered a problem, but you thought of a solution and you are willing to publicly advocate that solution.

At first blush, it may not be apparent how this last one is similar to the first two.

But, I’ve worked in companies that rewarded problem detection rather than problem solving. That led to a lot of, to use Caplan’s words, blathering talk as many people floated trial balloons of  problem detection in order to be rewarded for finding a problem. And, of course, they were not punished if it turned out that the problems they found were not problems at all. They were given credit for “at least, trying.”

My friend’s company had a similar problem. The leaders recognized it and put the new rule in place. It significantly cut the blathering talk. They correctly reasoned that if people were to have to present solutions along with their problems, that would be like asking people to put their money where their mouth was.

Why? Because it’s easy to see whether a solution solves a problem or not.

In other words, it’s easy to be a critic when you have nothing on the line.

One more story…I coach my kid’s soccer team. After a loss where our team looked scared of the ball, one grandparent told me after the game “You need to get them more aggressive, Coach.” I said, “I’d love to. Do you have any suggestions on how to do that? If so, I’m all ears.” He laughed and said “Nah” and I believe he realized that talk is cheap and it’s easy to criticize with nothing at stake.

How much of what you advocate, especially strongly advocate, would you bet on? Our opinions are typically much more refined in topics where we pay the direct costs of being wrong.

Through trial and error, I learned that paying a plumber to do what they know best is well worth the cost. It saves time, headaches and future catastrophes.

But, I can go on a whole lifetime holding damaging political beliefs, mainly because I never directly pay for the damage it causes. I can claim good intentions, without ever knowing whether those intentions actually ever helped.

Be careful of the Pied Piper

I recommend listening to the latest Freakonomics podcast, The Power of the President. In it, Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt admits he was wrong about Obama.

At the 12:30 mark Levitt says:

I’ve probably never been more wrong about anything than I was about my projections for what the Obama administration would look like.

Levitt usually doesn’t pay much attention to politics and usually doesn’t vote. But he did in the last election. He credits Obama for being a great speaker and compares him to the Pied Piper, because:

…even though I disagreed with most of what he said, I immediately wanted to do them. I would have done whatever he would have told me to do.

That’s why I voted for Obama. I never vote, but I thought there was a good chance that Obama would be the greatest president in the history of mankind, and I wanted to be able to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Barack Obama.

One reason Levitt usually doesn’t vote is because he doesn’t think a president “matters all that much,” but he thinks the president can set a tone for the nation, and he thought “Obama would be able to set an incredible tone for our country.” He goes on:

…and what’s strange and surprising to me is that almost exactly the opposite happened. As soon as he got into office, it was just rancor and off-tune, off-pitch.

I’m glad someone can admit he was wrong. I wish he’d give other people, who weren’t wrong, more credit. Maybe we should more carefully consider their position in the future.

I’m reminded of a time where I participated in a mock government exercise as a high school student. In the gubernatorial campaign speeches, one candidate passionately recited some non-sense lyrics from a Prince song.

I remember thinking “what a disaster, this guy is bombing big time.” Much to my surprise, the auditorium erupted in applause and gave him a standing ovation. Myself and the guy sitting next to me were among the few who remained seated and silent with furled eyebrows. I asked him, “What the hell did he just say?” He responded, “I have no idea.”

That’s when it first occurred to me how many people could be swayed by style and emotion and there are very few of us that are more resistant to that.

Even Levitt, an economist, duped himself. He didn’t agree with much of what Obama said, but he would have done whatever Obama told him to do. For some reason, I have a natural tendency to put more weight — nearly all weight — on whether I agree or disagree with what someone is saying, not whether I like the way he or she says it.

I’m usually scanning for content and filtering out style. Much to my chagrin, I’m at the mercy of a population that appears to do the opposite.

But, they don’t just do the opposite. They often know they disagree with the person, but rationalize it away. I had friends in ’08 election who tried to convince me that while Obama appeared to be a bit far to the left (judging from what he said and his voting record), but he’d move to the middle when president. One even told me recently that while Obama hadn’t really moved to the middle in his first term, he expects that he will if he gets a second term. I’m sorry, what?

I would appreciate hearing Levitt say something like, “I’m going to make a point to be more careful about being swayed by style, emotion and fallacy in the future, and I encourage all of us to do the same. Listen to what people are saying. Ask yourself if you agree or disagree and then ask yourself why. Then find someone who can represent the disagreeing position well and talk to them.”

Thanks to Breitbart

Andrew Breitbart died yesterday at age 43.

I’m no apologist for the guy. He was a conservative provocateur. He seemed to make a good living stirring up the leftist provocateur hornets nest using pretty much the same tactics they use. Except, in most cases, he didn’t have to follow the leftist doctrine of “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” He usually relied on facts. Even when he was accused of stretching the truth, if you did your homework and didn’t have a slanted view, you’d probably find that Breitbart’s story had more merit than the other side wanted you to believe.

But, I didn’t follow his work much. I find agitating exhausting. Seems like a lot yelling with folks that are not inclined to reconsider their positions, no matter how much evidence they are provided.

But, he did have one influence in my life. Or, at least I think it was him. I believe he inspired the name of this blog, Our Dinner Table.

A few years ago he guest hosted the Dennis Miller Radio Show, in Miller’s absence. I downloaded a podcast of it. I was listening to it on my iPod while shoveling eight inches of snow off my driveway.

During the show, he mentioned Ronald Reagan’s quote:

All great change begins at the dinner table.

I had been writing a blog for a while. I used it to catalog some of the things I read and wanted to remember. It also helped me think through and figure out how to articulate and structure my own ideas and think out loud.

I found find it useful to be able to access my blog from anywhere with an internet connection and use the Search box in the upper right margin (if you’re looking for something, type in key words, I may have written something about it) to recall things when I needed them for a conversation, or to recommend to someone, to quote or just to help me think through something else.

I had horribly named the blog “Mind Changers”.  I meant it to be a collection of ideas, phrases, arguments that made people reconsider their position –because I found them compelling and at one time made me stop and reconsider mine.

The description sounded better than the name. I had been trying to think of a better name.

When Breitbart said the Reagan dinner table quote through my iPod earphones, I dropped my snow shovel and went inside immediately to change the name on my blog. That quote captured perfectly what I wanted to accomplish here — have productive dinner table conversations that might change a few minds, even my own.

The names “Dinner Table” and “The Dinner Table” were already taken.  ”Our Dinner Table” was the next version of the name I checked. It was available. I liked it, because it captured the Reagan quote and it seemed inviting.

After I reviewed Russ Roberts’ book, The Price of Everything, in December 2010. Russ saw my blog and it inspired him to add a category to his and Don Boudreaux’s blog, Cafe Hayek, called “Dinner Table Economics“.  Here’s all of the posts they’ve made in that category.  All of Cafe Hayek is worth reading, but I especially recommend the posts in that category.

From Breitbart’s mouth, to my blog and then to Cafe Hayek.  It’s funny how things work.

I thought if I ever happened to meet Breitbart, I’d thank him for helping name my blog. Looks like I won’t get that chance in person.

Andrew, If you’re out there, thanks man.

I could be wrong

Don Boudreaux, George Mason University economist, gets annoyed when non-economists make economic pronouncements.  Boudreaux writes in his Pittsburgh Tribune column:

Economics — unlike chemistry, electrical engineering and almost any other subject matter you can name — is a discipline that people routinely opine on even if they have zero formal exposure to it. No taxi driver or movie star offers, for example, his opinion on the molecular structure of radium or the process by which the magnetron led to the development of microwave ovens. On such matters, that person defers to trained chemists and engineers.

But that same cabbie or movie star is often eager to give his opinion on matters such as the causes and consequences of expanded international trade, the effect of minimum-wage legislation and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the salaries of professional sports stars.

I’m embarrassed to confess that I often get annoyed at non-economists making pronouncements on economics.

Later in the column he softens his credentialism a bit:

Please don’t mistake me as saying that someone must have a degree in economics to offer worthwhile opinions on economics. I don’t believe for a second that that task requires formal training in economics.

What is necessary is at least some exposure to serious, formal economics — for example, taking a good course in principles of economics or reading at least two or three of the many good books on the market today that aim to introduce non-economists to the economic way of thinking. (Superb examples of such books include my colleague Russell Roberts’ “The Invisible Heart” and James Gwartney’s, Richard Stroup’s and Dwight Lee’s “Common Sense Economics.”)

I happen to think that Boudreaux is wrong about folks not opining on chemistry or electrical engineering.  I don’t think he pays as close attention to those fields.

Folks may not opine on the molecular structure of radium, but as a former electrical engineer, none of my friends or family who make pronouncements about the potential of solar or wind energy or electric vehicles ever ask for my opinion on the matter.

I also see plenty of non-chemists make pronouncements on the effects of chemicals and substances in our air, ground and water.

I also think Boudreaux does an injustice by singling out ‘non-economists’.

I get annoyed at anybody who makes pronouncements on any subject without considering that they might be wrong.  Economics is a wide field with plenty of different specialties and  economists can stretch their resumes and make dumb economic pronouncements on subjects they know little about too.

In my groups of peeps I try to gently enforce an informal rule.  If someone makes a pronouncement, I may ask them to explain to me how they arrived at their position.  Then I listen. I also request that they listen if I think they missed something in their thought process.

If they are unwilling to participate, I kindly request that they refrain from making such pronouncements unless they are willing to discuss.  It seems to work.

Now, everybody, let’s practice. Take a deep breath. Count to 3 and repeat after me.  1…2…3: I could be wrong.

It really doesn’t hurt that much to say it. Once you feel comfortable saying it, you open yourself to learning, teaching and seeing the world differently. But, of course, I could be wrong.

I use to have a tough time saying this.  Many of my family and friends have a tough time saying it. I still struggle with it at times.  But, I’m better now, and when I find it tough to say, I usually get over it quickly.

When you can say it, it’s amazing how disarming it can be.