Think Differently: An Idea, and a Calculus Link

If anything defines the thrust of my postings here, it is a repeated exhortation both to myself and to others to think about things differently.  To me, this is of upmost importance.  Far too often, we are limited in our thinking by predefined boundaries or conceptions.  This has the result of limiting our answer set to the various questions we ask ourselves, often without our even knowing it.

This is not an original thought on my part: what is more a cliché of our times than to “think outside the box”?  Yet, we do not think outside the box very often at all, and no place less than in the political arena.  Take, for example, the issue of public education in American politics.  What are the major political issues relating to this subject?  Vouchers, class size, teachers’ unions, merit pay, increased spending per student, standardized testing, and charter schools.  These issues have been the major political issues regarding public education for at least the last decade, the period of time that I have been a voting citizen in the US.  And the sides in the debate are fairly static; Democrats are good for reducing class size, higher spending per student, and supporting teachers’ unions, Republicans are good for vouchers, charter schools, and supporters of merit pay and standardized testing.  We are left with both a supposed “crisis” in public education which is persistent (and in many ways mythical) as well as with a static debate, with political impasse allowing for these issues to remain dominant and no theoretical reforms ever fully implemented.  Ideas outside of this spectrum, such as the expansion of either the school day or school year, tend to lack partisan support from either side and languish, undebated and unimplemented.
 

Why does this impasse persist, particularly if both voters (based on polling) and politicians (based on public statements) feel that our public education system is in crisis and of the upmost importance?  First of all, because the impasse feeds itself.  Failure to dismantle teachers’ unions leads to resentment and opposition by the proponents of the strategy.  The difficulty of the task leads to the formation of interest groups and lobbys to promote that agenda.  The concerted effort by proponents of dismantling teachers’ unions leads to the formation of counter-interest groups and lobbys.  As the battle consumes more resources from proponents of both opinions, fewer resources are able to be devoted to other concerns.  Second, people tend to associate difficulty with value.  The more effort put into an endeavor or demanded by an endeavor, the more important the endeavor becomes.  This is a concept which has been articulated by the President regarding Iraq: he claims that the prior investment of life and wealth into the endeavor is primary evidence of the import of the attempt.

But if we can recognize the fallacy of the President’s reasoning regarding Iraq, why do we, intentionally or otherwise, fall for it on other issues such as education?  Or is it not always a fallacy?  Certainly, some achievements are quantitatively more impressive due to no other factors than degree of difficulty.  If I have scaled a mountain, that would be mildly impressive.  If I had scaled Everest, people generally would find that more impressive.  Certainly, part of that is due to notoriety – more of you have heard of Everest than of other equally or more difficult mountain climbs – but generally speaking, the more difficult a mountain climb, the more impressive the feat.  So we can say that, in some absolute sense, the degree of difficulty does impact the value of the achievement – both in terms of its actual value, and in terms of the incentives to those making the attempt.  The incentive angle is also of crucial importance: individuals are more likely to attempt tasks when the rewards, both selfish and altruistic, are highest.

We can safely presume that the issues which dominate political debate on education are those which the various adherents consider to be those with the greatest potential rewards.  Advocates of school vouchers, increased per student spending, lower class size, and dismantling of teachers’ unions all tend to believe that these “solutions” will result in remarkable gains.  However, the political impasse over these issues ensure that those gains remain potential ones, rather than actualized gains.  Meanwhile, other issues, which may offer substantially lower gains, are not acted upon due to the lack of political import those issues have.  Yet, due to the lack of impasse over those issues, those lower potential gains have a greater possibility of becoming actualized gains.

Examine the problem mathematically.  One proposal has the potential to help fifty million students.  Another proposal has the potential to help five hundred thousand, a mere 1% of the population proposal A will help.  Yet, proposal A will require a concerted political effort of at least one decade, during which time it will dominate the debate.  Proposal B requires an effort of only one year, costing a fraction of the resources and providing for both the immediate assistance of 1% of the affected student population, and allowing for 90% of the minimum required time to accomplish proposal A to be allocated to other concerns.  The sensible course would appear to be to pursue proposal B; it allows for a higher chance of success, greater immediate returns, and costs a fraction of the resources, allowing them to be allocated to other concerns.

This is of course grossly simplified; politics is an adversarial process, and one political party choosing to remove focus from proposal A could well result in their opponents achieving victory on that issue, meaning that proposal B’s success could ensure proposal A’s failure.  And many upon many other complications exist.  Yet there is another inescapable problem: the above issues dominate the debate over considerable time, yet very little movement takes place on those issues, meaning that since these issues came to the fore, an entire generation of students have passed through the public education system with little substantive improvements to the system.  And to forbear mild improvements in the quest for substantial improvement has costs that can also be actualized.  We can, for instance, measure the time dedicated to the pursuit of a goal and contrast that with the costs of other, more humble goals not having been achieved.  If it takes, for example, one hundred and one years to implement proposal A when proposal B could have been achieved in one year, then the number of people who did not gain from proposal B outnumbers the number of people who will now be served by proposal A.

I realize that this is rapidly becoming both pedantic and reductive, and I apologize.  But I am trying to demonstrate what I feel is a considerable problem in today’s politics.  We tend to view politics out of context: we see political ideas and philosophies as individual entities, taken on their own merits.  But none of these ideas or policies exist independently, they are all part of a single system.  A finite amount of resources, both in terms of wealth and in human capital, exists.  Often, choices must be made between multiple worthy goals.  Wide arrays of interest groups will support, oppose, and profiteer off of possible policies as well.  Those groups will affect how policies get implemented as well.  The AMA and pharmaceutical corporations support the expansion of S-CHIP, because it will increase their wealth and influence.  Those same organizations whose support is essential to making S-CHIP expansion politically possible are deeply opposed to price negotiation and other aspects of single-payer health care which are key to making such policies cost beneficial to taxpayers.  This means that the national health care plans offered by Sen. Clinton and Gov. Romney, for example, will provide the guarantees of care that single-payer plans offer, but not the price reduction.  Is there a cost threshold beyond which universal health insurance is not a worthwhile investment for the American people?  Is a plan offering some of the benefits which is possible without major resistance worth declining, possibly forever, the full spectrum of benefits?

It is my belief that the netroots is the first step in the fulfillment of the original promise of the American Republic – that this will be a nation where the American people will be truly sovereign, and empowered to govern themselves.  But, in our infancy as a movement, we are currently being exposed as being as unready as we are to be self-ruled.  The displeasure and dissatisfaction with the results of the 2006 elections is manifest, and has resulted in not only deep displeasure with our President and our Congress, but with displeasure with the netroots, this site and others, from the netroots themselves.

Many of us take this as a sign of a failure of leadership, by the Democrats and Republicans in power, by the pundits and journalists of the conventional press, and by the leaders of this site and others in the netroots themselves.  I disagree with that.  My belief is that we should have expected these exact results from political leaders, journalists, and the netroots.  And this failure is significantly ours, yours and mine.  We are remarkably primitive in our abilities to be self-ruled and self-led.  These muscles were not nurtured and atrophied, and we must do the heavy lifting to build them up to the required strength to use them properly.  We need to practice thinking differently.  We must learn to be keepers of ourselves before we can master being our brother’s keeper.

Let’s begin with an exercise.  Here is a story about reasoning out when to first say “I love you” to a partner, considered in calculus.  Read it, and think about love, that most intangible of human values, a bit differently.  And then, let’s start the process of applying the same kind of exploration to the rest of our beliefs and lives.