Analogies: Two Paths in the Woods

You’re walking with a large group of people through the woods when the road splits into two choices. The path on the left is overgrown with weeds, the ground is wet, it takes some turns that make its final destination unclear. The path on the right heads through a thicket of poison ivy before starting up a treacherous cliff with loose rocks, the sound of hungry bears and buzz of stinging insects coming from its foreboding shadows. Both bad choices, but one worse than the other - more dangerous, higher likelihood of failure and injury, possibly death. The group must decide where to go but there is no leader. What argument do you make?

The natural instinct is to bitch and moan about your lousy choices. Point out the bad about each one but eventually, when it finally comes down to taking a vote, you know you’ll choose the one on the left, but you still won’t like it. The problem comes when you realize some people want to go right. In fact, many argue vehemently to the group that the right path is better, and if you sit by and grouse about the left path you’ll notice a lot of the people start to nod their heads. You see, most people haven’t bothered to check out either path very closely and just want someone else to do the thinking and tell them where to go. Maybe you get a little worried and start to argue for the left path, but they’ll just point out all the bad things you said about the left path a moment ago. You’ve undercut yourself and while a clear and rational approach would judge each path on its own merits, the truth is the mob mentality is often swayed more by passionate argument than facts and logic. Maybe you shouldn’t have spent so much time complaining about the better of the two choices, even if it’s far from perfect. Maybe you shouldn’t have spent so much time wishing for a third choice, longing for a straight path on solid ground directly cutting through a beautiful valley. Maybe your time would have been spent comparing and contrasting the two choices that exist and arguing strongly for what you know will be best in the end.

When the final vote is taken and the group heads off, you will know that you made the right choice regardless of what everyone else does. But that doesn’t matter if the group chooses the more dangerous path. Even if you’re confident in your wilderness skills to carry you through the danger there are many people who are stuck with the group. They don’t have the option to leave or the skills to survive without the group. Or maybe you know you can go it alone on the left path, but what happens when you reach your destination and there is no-one else there to share your success; what if none of the others survive their bad choice?  

In a lesser of two evils scenario it is an oft-mentioned truism that both choices are evil. Yet what really matters in any choice are not the similarities but the differences: one is lesser. So you should clearly choose the path on the left, the lesser of the two evils. We all know this even if we try to come up with some other third option, some excuse to avoid making the difficult decision. But if it’s really just the two choices, the choice is simple. What’s difficult is getting everyone to make it. And that’s where the decision-making process of a group is much different than the thought process of an individual. It’s not just the decision you make, but how you arrive there, the way you discuss it with others, the words you choose and the attitude you bring, it all helps drive the decisions of each other, especially those who may not be able to work their way through to the simple choice on their own. If you recognize the importance of choosing the lesser evil, you need to recognize the necessity of fighting for something you do not like.

The Poverty Cycle

There are way too many fucked up people in this country. At least that’s what I hear all the time from people on both sides of the political divide. They may be more polite in the terminology they use, they may have completely different basis for what’s considered fucked up, but it’s a given in our society that there are too many people who make bad choices, do bad things, and generally fail to contribute positively to the world in which the rest of us (the good people) live. Our political disagreements don’t really stem so much from the problems facing us as they do the solutions to such problems. It is those solutions that deserve careful analysis.

So let’s start with a basic problem: poor people. Poor people don’t have good jobs, they don’t pay much in taxes, they commit more crimes, use more drugs, and soak up government welfare. Let’s all agree that the world would be a better place if people weren’t so damn poor. How do we solve that?

Well, why are people poor in the first place? The conservative motto is that people basically choose to be poor. It’s not a conscious choice, per-se, but their financial status is the result of the life choices they have made. They aren’t hard-working enough to get a decent job, they haven’t educated themselves, they lack moral character which is why they make bad choices like using drugs, committing crimes, and having children out of wedlock. And if we, through government handouts, reward such behavior, we’ll only perpetuate the cycle of poverty.

Let’s go with this idea: the poor choose their own misery. They done fucked up and them’s the apples they gotta eat. Let’s cut off their aid and see what happens.

First, they no longer have health care. Every evidence says they will be sicker, have higher medical costs, and more die sooner. Hard to see how that will help them get out of poverty.

Second, no more welfare, like SNAP and WIC (food stamps). They’ll go hungry - see first point.

Third, no free education or training. Well, being poor, they can’t really afford to pay for education, so they will stay uneducated. Without skills or knowledge it’s hard to see how they will get a better job.

Fourth, no tax breaks. They should pay an equal share. Once again, how to see how taking money from the poor will help them get not poor.

And to circle back to the beginning: poor people are poor due to bad choices they’ve made. No one really expects that by making their lives more difficult they will suddenly start making good choices. But their misery is on them and it will serve as an example from which the next generation will learn to make smart choices. What about that?

We’ve transferred our hope to end poverty by teaching the world that it sucks to be poor so don’t do it. So let’s look at the poor kids (since it’s mostly those who are born poor who end up staying poor) and see how this message works.

First, poor kids have no health care, so like their parents they are more likely to be sick (starting with higher rates of infant mortality, which I guess in a way does reduce the number of poor people). Sick people have a harder time finding employment and use a greater share of their income from medical expenses. Sick people are more likely to end up poor.

Second, those poor kids are hungry. No SNAP, no school lunch programs. It’s well-established that undernourished children do worse in school, so it seems unlikely they will end up well-educated and capable of making good decisions.

Third, poor children do worse in school, hunger aside. They go to poorer public schools with fewer resources. They have less help and encouragement from their parents -who are apparently bad role models because they chose to be poor. How realistic is it to expect poor children to learn the value of education and hard work if they cannot see any examples of it?

Fourth, by making things harder on their poor parents, making them even poorer, you reduce all basic sustenance to their children. Fewer toys, worse neighborhoods, more crime, and yes, even worse morals.

If we write off the poor for being poor we write off their children. The cycle continues.

The whole premise is rather ridiculous. Does anyone really think the poor, child or adult, don’t realize it sucks to be poor? Talk to one and find out. They don’t need us to show them the hardships, to make it more obvious or more extreme. What they need is for us to teach them how to escape that poverty, and that doesn’t come from political speeches or church sermons. It comes from their daily life. It comes from getting enough food to eat in order to work hard or pay attention in school. It comes from having a school with enough funding to not only teach arithmetic but to enlighten a child’s soul. It even comes from having the ‘conveniences’ in life, like a working car, cell phone, and internet connection, that are not only factors in a quality of life that lifts spirits, but also essential tools in the modern workforce.

People fuck up. You can’t stop them. But you can limit how miserable they become, because their misery affects us all. Especially their children. You can only save the kids if you save the parents.  If you write off today’s poor you guarantee tomorrow will have more. Break the cycle.

The Criminality Gap

I believe the best way to protect the lives of law enforcement is to remove criminals from the streets. But I also believe history shows that arresting criminals and locking them up does not accomplish that goal.

If you think of criminality as a personal defect, that there are a group of people out there with bad morals who become criminals, then it’s natural to assume that if you lock up enough of them there will be fewer left on the outside to cause trouble. But the evidence suggests it doesn’t work that way. In the U.S. we lock up more people than anyone, but we still have higher rates of crime than most of our contemporaries. Unless you think Americans are particularly violent and immoral, then there must be some other explanation.

I believe that criminality is not so much a reflection of the individual criminals, but of society as a whole. Criminals are created through socio-economic conditions, through a system that often rewards such behavior and limits the other choices available to the disadvantaged. If you think of criminality as a layer of society then you realize removing the individual criminal will not change the layer as a whole. If you arrest a big-time drug dealer, a medium-level dealer will take his place. A low-level dealer will take the medium-level dealer’s spot, and some troubled kid who sees no way out of poverty and misery will step up to fill the void at the bottom level of the ladder. For every criminal locked up you create a replacement.

Truthfully, you create more than a one-to-one replacement. That criminal has family who is now without a father (even if he may have been a crappy father). That neighborhood sees crime continue and a system that focuses on punishment without resources to change the underlying dynamic. They all become more discouraged, more willing to fill the next gap when you arrest the next criminal.

We do need to lock up criminals. That in itself is not the problem. But neither is it the solution. The solution is to spend our significant resources attacking the structure that creates a criminal layer. Provide more for education. Give people the training necessary to find decent jobs and work within crime-ridden communities to create more jobs to be had. Work harder on building a society that values and rewards the right choices and you will diminish the appeal of criminality. Locking people up won’t lead to a better, safer world, but creating a better, safer world will lead to fewer people locked up.

The Anecdote isn’t Evidence, it’s Representation

Human beings are made from stories. Stories guide our lives, they tell us who we should be, who we want to be. They connect us to everyone else who shares our story and they allow us to understand the world in a way that facts and figures simply fail to achieve. Stories have power.

That’s why so many causes use a personal story as a rallying cry instead of merely reciting the evidence of a problem. Rosa Parks, Tamir Rice, Matthew Shepard. What motivates people is not the number of deaths, not the injustice to a group, but the loss of a specific person, a story that allows them to step into the shoes of the oppressed and experience pain through a shared reality. It works, but it generates a counter-productive reaction.

Since it’s well-known than an anecdote does not equal evidence, anyone opposed to the message a story carries will then attack that story to destroy the entire narrative. They focus on the particulars of the story, on the flaws or discrepancies every story has since no single action represents the whole in every detail. They dismiss it as mere anecdote and don’t bother with the underlying facts that create the sentiment behind the story. Segregation, racial injustice, women’s inequality - these are concepts too big and powerful to deny, too socially reprehensible to defend, so they approach from the side: that particular black man wasn’t innocent, that particular women wasn’t discriminated against.

And they may be right. There are always cases where the injustice is vague or circumstantial, where multiple factors make a single cause insufficient. So they may be technically correct to deny the story in its details. But that misses the point. The details of any one story don’t matter. The representation is never complete or perfect, so to pick it apart accomplishes nothing but distract from the reality behind the story. That’s what they don’t want to face. Maybe Trayvon Martin wasn’t innocent, but stereotyping of black youths and violence against them is impossible to deny. Maybe Ellen Pao lost her case, but the horrible record of Silicon Valley on women’s rights and equality is all too stark in the data. If you can’t answer the bigger picture problem, don’t tear down a single story and expect it to refute the whole.