September 24, 2008.   Power of Negative Thinking

Somebody has been swiping my ideas.  In The New York Times today, a writer has published an article stating how we are all deluded by the emphasis on positive thinking that pervades such venues as the Oprah show and the self-help books.  This op-ed piece begins by noting that irrational optimism is as responsible for the current economic meltdown as greed is.  If investors and financiers had been more realistic – that is, a tad more pessimistic – we wouldn't be in such a pickle.

This is what I've been saying to my Pollyanna friends for a long time, with respect not only to economics but to life in general.  It has become a theme in my manuscript-in-progress, The Joy of Grumbling (though, if I diddle around much longer, I may need to retitle it The Trouble with Procrastination).  Grumbling, I submit, is a sign of negative thinking or, as I prefer to look at it, critical thinking.  Contrary to the popular view advanced by the everything-is-fine-and-will-get-even-better crowd, positive thinking may create more problems than negative thinking ever did.  My view is that it's OK to hope for the best, but one should prepare for the worst.

Nobody likes a "Gloomy Gus" outlook, but I often lose patience with cockeyed optimists, especially when they rationalize their way out of reality.  Whenever anyone identifies a problem and points to possible consequences, they try to shrug it off.  This is what makes the Pollyannas so dangerous.  They don't even want to look at the possibility of a negative outcome; therefore, they ignore many potential problems.

The economy is a case in point.  Early this year, after examining what was happening with the economy, I wrote one of my perpetually optimistic friends that I thought a crisis was looming.  He said, among other things, that I was just getting into a panic by reading the bad news in the papers.  The media, he said, always report only the bad news because that's what sells newspapers (a favorite theme of his).  Even when the subprime mortgage mess hit, he shrugged it off.  After all, he argued, real estate is a small part of the economy.  I replied that trouble in the housing market would have a ripple effect.  Still, he said, there's no crisis.  He ridiculed those who were declaring a recession and had nothing but scorn for those who were making comparisons to the Depression.  I wanted to say that the handwriting was on the wall, and he was refusing to read it, but I bit my tongue because he's a good friend.  I didn't want to push it.

Now that everyone is scrambling desperately to prevent a total meltdown – which, of course, hardly anybody foresaw (something that is even worse than what I, the Gloomy Gus, predicted) – my friend admits that "it's worse than I thought" but persists in viewing the crisis through rose-colored glasses.  He takes refuge in the rationalization that "in the long term, the economy always improves."  His "long term" has expanded, however, from "a year or so" to "a few years."  All I can say to that is:  "I'm nearly 72 years old and on a fixed income with investments that I depend upon for living expenses.  My 'long term' gets shorter every day."

My point applies to more than the economy.  The trouble with irrational optimism is that it puts blinders on people.  They don't see problems because they will do anything to avoid looking at negatives or potential negatives.  In so doing, they not only fail to solve the problem in a timely manner.  They become part of the problem.

October 4, 2008.    Politics

I'm becoming disenchanted about the political process.  I've been disenchanted about politicians for a long time, but what bothers me most in the current election is what it reflects about the people.  Let's see if I can talk about this without taking sides.

Maybe I'm viewing the past through a distorted memory lens, but it seems to me that people used to vote for people they thought could lead.  Of course, we voted for leaders who were likeable, but we didn't want people who were like us.  We were smart enough and humble enough to recognize that a member of Congress and certainly a President needed to have deeper and better knowledge of the issues and the art of governing than we did.  In at least these respects – and probably several others – we voted for people who were smarter and more able than we were.  After all, if I hire a mechanic to work on my car, I expect him to have more knowledge of and expertise with automobile engines than I do.  If he doesn't, he will probably botch the job.

What I hear from many quarters these days, however, is that people are planning to vote for the candidate with whom they identify the most.  They don't want someone smarter than they are; they want a "regular guy or gal."  That's what "identity politics" is all about.  That's what causes millions of people to vote for someone who fits into a certain subgroup that they feel they belong to as well.  That's why many whites will vote only for white candidates, blacks for black candidates, women for female candidates, men for male candidates, and so on, whenever they have that option.  Most will deny that this is the only reason for their choice, but it is often the determining reason that overshadows all others.  Intelligence, experience, and other qualifications take a back seat to how "like us" the candidate is.

I shudder when I hear people tell interviewers that they're going to vote for so-and-so because he's a black man like me, she's a mom like me, he's a businessman like me, he or she talks like me (referring to speech patterns, not content), or when they say they're going to vote against someone because he or she is "not like me."  When people give this as the main reason, I suspect that they have no other, that they haven't much of a clue about how the candidate stands on many of the issues (if any).

Politicians know that this is the way millions of people think and vote.  Nowadays, every politician has an army of consultants trying to figure out what influences our votes the most.  Therefore, if "identity" is the driving force, politicians cannot be blamed for playing "identity politics," what the pundits call "playing the race card" or "playing the gender card."  I'm certainly not a fan of politicians, but I cannot hold them solely responsible for campaigning on the basis of "identity" rather than issues.  If that is what sways voters, they must use it to get elected, either by capitalizing on an identity that they perceive as helping them or attacking their opponents on an identity matter that they perceive as harmful to their opponents.

I could be wrong about this, but I think that one of the ironies of the "information age" is that fewer voters vote on the basis of facts – the candidates' positions on the issues, their voting records, and so on – than did so in the past.  Or possibly, because voters have so many ways of getting information, they are overwhelmed and thus take recourse into voting on identity.  Furthermore, when the available information contains a huge mix of lies and truths, charges and countercharges, they may no longer know exactly what to believe, so they decide on the basis of what is obvious and indisputable – the candidate's gender, skin color, or appearance.  It has always been true that a candidate who doesn't smile very much is dead in the water, but we've gone too far in making the candidate's demeanor or appearance the dominant criterion.

I believe it's yet another symptom of the "dumbing down of America."  That remark, of course, immediately makes me an "elitist" and would ruin any chance I would ever have of getting elected to public office.  It isn't an elitist remark at all.  I know I am ignorant of many issues, that I haven't the knowledge to deal with the complexities with which a nation's leaders must deal.  I don't want the country to be run by people like me.  I want them to be better informed and smarter, at least wise enough to select expert advisors.  Individual voters are almost all, like me, too ignorant to run a country.  However, they are stupid to vote for people who are as ignorant as they are just because they identify with them in some superficial way.  The more we do this, the dumber we are, and we will get the kind of leadership we deserve.

October 14, 2008.  Musings

I had a number of ideas for wonderful, thought-provoking, original entries during the past ten days, but, like many of my ideas, they fell into a deep crevasse in my brain, and I can no longer find them.  So I'll settle for a few random musings.

> When I read a weather report, I never know the difference between "partly sunny" and "partly cloudy."  Does anyone?

> I understand that, despite four years to get ready, many states still have glitches with their voting machines and procedures.  No matter who wins this November, I hope it's a landslide.  Otherwise, we're in for all sorts of legal challenges.  The only people who should not be praying for a landslide are the lawyers.

> No matter how much I study it, I am confused about the financial crisis – its causes, effects, what to do about it, and so on.  So is everyone else I know, ranging from people who have played the market all their lives to people who have never before had much interest in high finance.  Even experts who are comfortable talking about billions and trillions of dollars (which are too mind-boggling for me to comprehend) appear to be clueless.  I'm beginning to think that economic policies are created by analysts who consult the entrails of pigs.  Flying pigs.

> Apropos of the above, I have shifted my small investments into a "virtual shoe box" that earns a very low fixed rate.  Since I'm literally "out of the market," I'm missing the chance to make lots of money when the market rebounds, but I'm sleeping better.  If I had followed my gut instead of "expert" advice, I would have done that almost a year ago.

> I shall miss George Bush.  Though I believed all along that he was a terribly inept president, I have a twisted sense of humor.  Therefore, having a president who mangled the English language as if he were still learning it has been highly amusing.  Neither of the candidates in 2008 promises to be that funny.  I shall say nothing about a certain vice presidential candidate lest I get her supporters in more of a twitter than they already are.

> The so-called information age has produced two paradoxes:  (1) The more information we have, the less informed people seem to be.  (2) As information and misinformation appear to flourish in equal proportions, fewer and fewer people seem to have the capacity to tell the difference.

> What's the best word or phrase to describe the cockeyed optimists these days – dense?  stupid?  in denial?  While there's no point in running about like Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling, reality is what it is.  For months now, a friend whom I call Mr. Pollyanna (to his face) has been spinning a web of optimism out of arcane market theories as he proclaims that all my negative views are extreme and self-defeating.  Then, after admitting (at long last) that "things are worse than I thought," he says that we're now "at or near bottom."  Housing prices continue to fall, jobs are being lost, pension funds are evaporating, consumer confidence is zilch, retailers are looking toward their worst holiday season in decades (about 75% of the economy is driven by consumer spending, a large part of that during the holidays), etcetera ad infinitum.  We're at or near bottom?  Hardly.  "If you can keep your head while everyone else is losing theirs, you probably don't understand the situation."

> I guess I understand "partly sunny" and "partly cloudy" after all.  "Partly sunny" is the way my optimistic friends describe a gloomy but not utterly black day.  "Partly cloudy" is how I see it.  Optimists are convinced that the "partly sunny" day will inevitably segue into brilliant sunshine; pessimists feel that the "partly cloudy" day inevitably means rain.  Realists admit that it could go either way and dispassionately view the evidence to try to discover which is more likely.  Nobody really knows.