A Bully Pulpit or a Bully’s Pulpit?

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

Have you ever been bullied? I have. I would assess the situation and decide whether to fight back or ignore the bully (or even better, make fun of him—it was usually a him) or put some distance between the bully and myself. I just finished reading  Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes about a school shooting prompted by years of relentless bullying. Bullying is indeed very much adolescent behavior, but some people never move beyond adolescence.

Theodore Rossevelt coined the term to describe the office of the president as a “bully pulpit.” He meant bully in the now semi-obsolete British use of bully as an adjective, meaning excellent, outstanding.  He used that pulpit to promote conservation and other good causes during his term of office. He used that pulpit to exercise moral leadership, which we expect to hear from a pulpit. Most of the presidents who preceded or followed him did likewise.

As a verb, bully is defined as treating someone in a cruel, insulting, threatening, or aggressive fashion, and as a noun, it is someone who regularly engages in that type of behavior.  We are told, in our adolescent days, to stand up to a bully, but it’s not always that easy.  Bullies often travel in packs and gang up on those who can’t win by fighting.  Or they have some kind of power. A principal can be a bully. A teacher can be a bully. A boss can be a bully. It’s about having power and choosing to exercise it in ways that are self-centered and destructive. Or at least demeaning

No one has more power in this day and age than the president of the United Staes.  Until now, we have had a variety of presidents, but the only one prior to Trump that was a bully was Andrew Jackson—who adorns Trump’s office. Trump has given a new meaning to bully pulpit. Knowing that such people existed and could charm their way into office, the authors of the Constitution created guardrails to rein in abuse of

So how do we, individually, collectively, stand up to a bully?

I know not everyone can risk their livelihood, their safety, their communities to stand up to bullies.  But there are people who can and do.  Governors in blue states. Celebrities who took on Disney over the firing of Jimmy Kimmel. Ordinary citizens who cancelled their subscriptions to Disney’s media empire, causing its stock to tank. (That’s one of the safest and most effective ways to tackle bullies with financial power!) Law firms doing pro bono work for those who struggle under abuse of power. Universities that (unlike mine) stand fast to their belief in academic freedom and the First Amendment. Cities, churches, and individuals who shelter immigrants and assert their rights.

I belong to a significant minority of people who are free to protest, challenge, or otherwise defang the bully. That minority consists of old people with pensions and Social Security who cannot be bought, bribed, coerced, or otherwise persuaded to go along with the bullying because they have so little time left and are so much more aware of their legacy.. We can speak up without fear of reprisal.  At 84, I don’t have a lot to lose, and much to gain by trying to ensure that my grown daughters and grands live in a world where bullying is constrained, not performed, by law enforcement, where we are free to express our opinions with nothing more at risk than disagreement. We can attend protests, write letters, annoy legislators without fear of reprisal, or file lawsuits, as my friend Eleanor and I have done In exchange for that freedom of old age.  Along with the privilege of being old, there is a moral obligation to use it.

And the rest of you?  Encourage us gray panthers as well as other brave souls who defend our rights and those of others.  Use your power of consuming and investing to reward and punish bad behavior by private firms. VOTE and get others to the polls, especially in primaries and special elections. Use the power to embarrass.  When I was president of  Clemson’s Faculty Senate, I used to remind my fellow senators that the most powerful weapon we had was the power to embarrass, and we needed to use it selectively and effectively.

Every day for the rest of Donald Trump’s term, find one small act of resistance that you can use, whether it is changing your brand of detergent or supporting a candidate or attending a protest or attending a school bord meeting to protect the freedom to read. The time is now. Our nation’s future is at stake.

The Percentage Fallacy: A Modest Proposal

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

Have you noticed how many financial choices are calibrated, not in dollars and cents, but in percentages?  Raises. Cost of living adjustments. Tips for servers. Taxes. One of the insidious effects of such percentage adjustments is to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, hie rich and the poor.

A few examples.  You and a friend go out to lunch, paying separately. You are hungry, she is not. The effort by the server is not proportional to the dollar value of your order.  Your bill for food including tax is $45, hers is $20. You both give a 20% tip. You add $9, she adds $4. Does that make any sense? If you are paying the waiter for his service, shouldn’t the tip each of you pay represent the quality of service and not the price of the meal? I’m not trying to stiff servers here, just being a little more egalitarian.  I don’t tip at drive-in windows or fast food restaurants where the service is minimal, but I will probably tip more at a fancy restaurant than a pizza joint. Perhaps it should be a function of how long we spend sitting there, preventing someone else from claiming that space and generate another tip. Or, if there is a single payer, perhaps the tip should reflect the number of people served rather than the total cost.

Second example. Social Security, or anything that else is adjusted for the increase in the cost of a representative basket of goods and services purchased by the average household.  Let’s take this coming year, where the COLA for Social Security will be 2.7%. The average monthly Social Security benefit in July 2025 was just over $2000. A 2.7% raise is another $54 a month for a single individual.  The maximum benefit is $6000, resulting in a raise of $162 a month.  Don’t these two retirees pay the same price for a gallon of gas or a loaf of bread?  And what if you are down at the lower end of the scale, say a monthly benefit of $1000 a month?. Your raise is a stingy $27 a month. In fact, it probably won’t even cover the increase in your Medicare premium except maybe for those at the top of the scale..

A similar inequity exists when an employer, often a state government, proclaims percentage raises across the board.  The $15,000 a year custodian gets a 5% raise to $15,750 and the $90,000 engineer sees his salary rise to $94,500. Basic costs go up for both, but the difference in COLA widens the income gap.

There is a place for percentages.  I give 10% of my income to charity, a guideline set by Hebrew scriptures that has had remarkable staying power. The tithe embodies the idea is that one has been blessed, the more one is expected to contribute. And I certainly understand the rationale for other kinds of raises, for meritorious performance or to retain a valued employee in a competitive market.  But if it is a COLA, both the poor and the rich see the increase in price of bread, the rent or mortgage for housing, the gallon of gas, the kilowatt of electricity. Wealthier households have more flexibility in adjusting to inflation.

So, what’s the answer?  For tips, it’s a matter of personal preference. If I am taking my daughter and granddaughter to lunch, I tip on the basis of the number served. If it’s just me, I usually tip $4-5 unless the service is exceptional. For a COLA, a solution is even simpler. The average Social Security recipient’s monthly check is $2,000. The COLA is 2.7% of $54 a month. Why shouldn’t everyone get the same dollar amount? should one person get $27 and another $162 and someone else get $27 a month when the basket of goods being priced is the same? In a nation of rapidly rising inequality, why do we let COLAs exacerbate the gap?

Mabon: It’s All Downhill from Here

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

The least known of the eight seasonal Celtic festivals is Mabon, this earth holiday celebrated at the autumnal equinox.  If Lammas (August first) is first Harvest, Mabon is second harvest, at least where the Celts lived in the British Isles and the northern part  the giant peninsula that is Western Europe. Apples. Pumpkins (not in Europe!). Root vegetables. The days grow short, the temperatures fall.

The equinoxes are what mathematicians call inflection points, as compared to Litha (the summer solstice) and Yul, which are peak and trough, mountain and valley. We climb the mountain after Yu, head back toward the valley of delight at midsummer.. Unlike many mountains, the length of days is on an accelerated path at the beginning, slowing down at the inflection point and climb more slowly toward the midsummer peak.  The reverse comes with the decline into winter.

We notice peaks and valleys in the wheel of the year, but often neglect the turning points in our own lives until long after the fact.  Mabon and Ostara (the vernal equinox) remind us to be more attuned to the changes in the seasons that mirror the changes in our lives.

The interval from Litha or Lammas to Mabon is the beginning of aging in the seasons, including the Corn God or the Sun God.  It is a time of anticipation of both death and birth.  The children are grown, perhaps we are retired or planning to retire. It is a good time to take stock of our own aging process, to notice the changes in our bodies, our interests, our daily activities.  We can try to slow the aging process so that these later days of autumn leaves and fires in the fireplace can be enjoyed in different and more leisurely ways. 

My aging friends and I can assure you that travel is fun and inspiring but also is not a full- time occupation. If you haven’t taken care of your health until now, that can too easily become a full- time activity!  But if your health and memory are good, and your income is adequate to your needs, it is a good time to give back to the earth and human communities that have nurtured us. Volunteering, mentoring, teaching, coaching, helping rescue animals, organic gardening, are among the many options. So is part-time work in something completely different. Many of my friends have turned to writing fiction.  Always a nonfiction writer, in retirement I have written nine more books to join the nine I wrote when I was working. Currently I am writing my autobiography,  not in hopes of publication, just for family and friends.

There are two poets with contrasting views of the aging stage of life.  Dylan Thomas        : Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, Rage against the dying of the light.”  Or Robert Browning, “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.  With Browning, I vote for the goodness of aging.  My role model for engage aging is Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer, humanitarian, disease eradicator, Habitat for Humanity worker, Sunday School teacher, and fiction writer until his death at age 100. Who is yours?

Celebrating Labor Day

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Labor Day. observed on the first Monday in September, is celebrated in many other counties on May 1st as International Workers’ Day.  Americans thought that holiday had overtones of socialism, so a different date was chosen.  This holiday weekend marks the end of summer, not too far from the autumnal equinox (the pagan holiday of Mabon) on September 22nd.  For many years the week after Labor Day was time for back to school, but in many states, public school schedules have been shifting as schools experiment with shorter summer vacations and longer breaks during the year. Our state went back to school at the beginning of August.

Labor gets short shift under capitalism.  Labor is a commodity, bought and sold in labor markets, the price being determined partly by supply and demand and partly by power or lack thereof.  The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has been unchanged since 2009. At that rate, a full -time worker (40 hours a week for 52 weeks) would have a gross income of $15,170 before deductions, like social security tax and maybe even health insurance.  The poverty ceiling for a single adult is $15,650, In most states, that wage would be barely enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment, with nothing left for food and other necessities.  Among workers paid by the hour, 843,000 workers were paid the minimum wage OR LESS in 2024.

Regardless of our income, work or labor takes up a very large share of our lives. At some time between ages 16 and 22, people typically enter the labor force, and stay there with breaks for unemployment, health issues, domestic responsibilities and other reasons, until age 63 (typically 62 for women, 65 for men). Many people spend that long stretch of their lives working at a job that they find physically demanding, boring, high pressure or long hours.  Or at least not the answer to “What I want to do when I grow up?”—our favorite question for small children.

 Work or labor is a part of life, but not all of life.  Many of us view our labor as primarily a way to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. It can provide those essentials,  but our work can and should be more than that.  It is interesting that labor gets a negative religious cast. When God evicts Adam and Eve fromf the garden, She says that Adam shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow and Eve shall suffer in bringing forth children (labor). Economists share that biblical perspective, that labor is suffering for which we must be compensated by some reward—bread or a baby among other possibilities. Labor or work is equated with suffering. 

Yet some of us are privileged to choose  whether to work or not because of inherited or acquired wealth.  Better yet, many of us to choose work that enables us to harness our gifts and our passions to engage in a vocation. Even a vocation has its downsides—a difficult boss or customer or client, tasks associated with the job that are distasteful, or other drawbacks. I used to joke that if I was paid for the distasteful side of my work as a college professor, then I was being compensated for grading papers and attending committee meetings!

Those who are fortunate enough, or wise enough, experience their work as a vocation at which one can excel and through which one satisfies the need to be useful, do develop and parcixe one’s skills,  and to have a community of fellow workers. Almost any kind of work can be a vocation, whether it is cleaning houses or raising chickens or putting out fires or managing a household or teaching grooming dogs.

 Sometimes we make the wrong choice. When I went to seminary at age 59 to study theological ethics after an early retirement from teaching, I met an ex-lawyer at orientation. “What are you doing here?” he asked.  Jokingly, I said,” I’m doing penance for 30 years of teaching economics.”  (I really liked being an economist and still do!) He nodded. A candidate for the ministry, he said he was doing penance for seven years of practicing law. I was just seeking a way to broaden and redirect my efforts as an economist, but he was making a much bigger change. As my former department chair Bruce Yandle used to say, if you try, you can fit three careers into a lifetime.

I was fortunate to work part-time early and late in my 50 year career. I continued to do public policy work and teach two graduate courses, one each semester, in an interdisciplinary program in Policy Studies. That light schedule freed me to do other things—travel, community leadership, writing. That’s one way of having a career AND a life.  It comes with a lower income, but when your children are grown and your mortgage is paid, it doesn’t seem to matter as much.

Labor is one of the ways we find meaning and purpose in life.  All kinds of work deserve our respect, and opportunities for the workers to feel useful and to have some degree of autonomy. And a decent wage.

So on your last visit to the beach before the start of college football, falling leaves, and shorter days, do something fun. You’ve earned it!

Women’s Equality Day

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

Twenty-five years ago, when I put together my holiday essays in a book called Economics Takes a Holiday, I sorted them by month.  I came to August and there was no holiday. Somehow, I had forgotten about the Celtic holiday of Lammas, August 1st, the celebration of first harvest.  But there was an even more important omission.  I failed to include Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th amendment, which can be celebrated on either the 19th (ratification by the 36th state) or August 26th, when it was officially added to the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal.  Man is a troublesome word in English. Sometimes it means a human being and other times it means a male human being. I took four years of Latin in high school.  Despite the patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian, slave-owning culture of the Roman empire, Latin did distinguish between a homo as a human being and vir and mulier as, respectively, as a male human being and a female human being. Jefferson must have missed that lesson.

The Declaration of Independence assumed an even narrower view of man., It meant a white male property owner. It took a Civil war and four constitutional amendments and several Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act to broaden our definition of man.  T

As we celebrate the right to vote, women are once again fighting for women’s rights, the right of reproductive choice and control of our bodies, which we have enjoyed for fifty years.  I was married in 1962 in my native state of Connecticut where contraception was illegal.  That law that was not being enforced. Fortunately, condoms could be purchased for the prevention of socially transmitted diseases and birth control pills could be prescribed for menstrual irregularity, both of which were apparently epidemic in the state.  In 1965, SCOTUS handed down a ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut overturning the state’s contraception blue law on the grounds of a right to privacy inherent in the 14th amendment. That case set the stage for Roe v. Wade.. 

Only in recent years have we learned the extent to which assumed rights are fragile—voting rights, civil rights, privacy rights, safety rights. A major difference between the contraception ban in Connecticut before 1965 and the new abortion laws was enforcement. There was no enforcement in the earlier era, but now some states have established criminal penalties for doctors, clinics, and women for having abortions—even miscarriages that someone claims were actually abortions.

How did it finally happen after 72 years of agitation that women got the right to vote?  The movement was launched in 1948 at the Seneca Falls Women’s Convention with a Declaration of Women’s Rights. Soon that agenda had to take a back seat to the battle over slavery.  In 1868, after the War of the Rebellion, as it was sometimes known in the north,, the lesser-known 15th amendment was ratified. It prohibited the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Efforts by women to explicitly include gender were ignored.

Four other significant events took place in the intervening years that helped the suffrage cause. One was the settlement of the west, which was less conventional about women’s roles than the east. One by one, western states gave women voting rights.  Another was the 1913 constitutional amendment requiring direct election of senators by the people instead of appointed by state legislatures.  Western senators had to court the women’s vote, and increasingly, so did presidential candidates in states where women could vote.

The third event was the service rendered by women in so many ways for the war effort during the first world war.  They could fight, nurse, or do men’s jobs while the men were away, but they had no say in the government they were serving.   A fourth and final factor was the victory of the female-dominated temperance movement in enacting prohibition, passed in 2018. Many men and especially liquor interests saw a link between suffrage and prohibition, but when liquor became illegal even without women being able to vote, the opposition lost its steam. 

Back in the days before the 19th amendment, when my great-grandmother was marching for women’s suffrage, there was a split in the movement over strategy. Two splits, in fact.  One was whether to over focus on suffrage or push the ERA.  Realistically, the ERA would probably not have made it, but suffrage did.  Sometimes compromise is the best path.  But if the ERA had been enacted as a Constitutional amendment, then or later, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The other split was more tactical.  Get the right to vote state by state or focus on Congress and a Constitutional amendment? And the answer was yes.  It took both to get the 19th amendment through Congress and ratified by 36 of the 48 states. In August 1920, Tennessee put the amendment over the top by a single vote by a first term young representative responding to a request from his mother.

The majority of Americans value their civil liberties and those of their fellow citizens, not to mention immigrants and refugees.  For almost 50 years we have taken these rights for granted—freedom of religion, a right to privacy, the right to vote in free and fair elections, the right to engage in peaceful protest. The right to an equal and not separate public education. More recently, we have added the freedom to marry a person of the same gender or a different race. 

When one Constitutional right is threatened by the courts, all rights are at risk.  As Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister during the Nazi era,  wrote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The 19th amendment in 1920 was the culmination of a 72-year battle. Tennessee, the 36th state to ratify, passed it into law by a single vote, giving the required ¾ majority on August `19th. The Secretary of State in Washington enrolled in the Constitution on August 26th, giving us not Women’s Equality Day but Women’s Equality Week.  A fitting length for such a long labor before it was birthed. Only one of the original suffrage leaders was still alive in 1920 but too ill to vote.  My great-grandmother Alice Stewart, who was born in the 6th year of that battle, marched in New York for the suffrage movement in 1913 and lived long enough to vote in 1920 and 1924. Given my birth family’s Republican leanings, I am guessing that she voted for Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

There are lessons in that struggle about compromising and holding firm, about strategy and tactics, and about the truth of Reinhold Niebuhr’s dictum that nothing worth accomplishing is ever accomplished in our lifetimes. Therefore, we are saved by hope. As we struggle to keep hope alive and make a difference in democracy, voting rights, and human rights, let us hold up and retell the stories of these past struggles to revive our commitment and determination.

Tariffs Again?

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Donald Trump is not the only president to wax ecstatic over tariffs.

Here is what Wikipedia had to say about the so-called Tariff of Abominations two centuries ago: ” The Tariff of 1828 was enacted on May 19, 1828, and aimed to protect Northern industries by imposing high duties on imported goods, with rates reaching as high as 50% on certain items. This tariff was designed to bolster American manufacturing by making foreign products more expensive, thereby encouraging consumers to buy domestically produced goods.”

 It was signed by soon-to-be departing President John Quincy Adams but enforced by Trump’s favorite president (other than himself) Andy Jackson.  When John C. Calhoun argued that the Port of Charleston didn’t have to enforce a tariff the state disagreed with (the Nullification doctrine of states’ rights), Jackson said he would send federal troops to enforce it.  He also refused to renew the charter of the nation’s central bank, the Second Bank of the United States, because the bank’s president had supported his opponent in the 1828 election. (Sound familiar?)  While there was some compromise on tariffs, the combination of the two led to a severe recession in the 1830s.

Fast forward to the 1920s.  The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was enacted in 1930 and signed by President Herbert Hoover, just six months after the stock market crash on Black Friday in October 1929.  To quote Wikipedia again, “Hoover signed the bill against the advice of many senior economists, yielding to pressure from his party and business leaders. Intended to bolster domestic employment and manufacturing, the tariffs instead deepened the Depression because the U.S.’s trading partners retaliated with tariffs of their own, leading to U.S. exports and global trade plummeting. “The combination of financial disaster and disruption of world trade repeated itself, plunging the nation into a severe depression.

Apparently, it takes a hundred years to repeat the same mistakes. Trump’s tariffs and quarrels with the banking system, both with the Fed chair and with trying to loosen the already loose bank regulations that led to the financial disaster of 2008, look all too familiar to anyone who has more than a nodding acquaintance with U.S. economic history.

As philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Efficiency: First Among Equals

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Brace yourself, dear readers.  My economist self wants you to hear my confession.

For many years I taught introductory economics, as well as more advanced classes. I taught the introductory classes because a colleague and I had a multi-edition principles text, and it was important to road test it regularly. In one of the earlier chapters it was customary to introduce the claim, which was in most mainstream textbooks, that economics was value-free. Economics was just a set of tools for making choices about how to use resources wisely that was useful for all of us as workers, owners, consumers and citizens. A few pages later, we introduced them to goals, which we insisted were not values.  Microeconomic goals (WHICH WERE ASSUREDLY NOT VALUES!! were efficiency, equity, and freedom. The next semester, students were introduced to the macroeconomic goals (WHICH WERE ASSUREDLY NOT VALUES!!) of full employment, price stability (as opposed to inflation) and economic growth.

Having defined the goals, it was easy to discover and implement decisions processes, anticipate the effects of changes in the marketplace or in government policy, and prepare our students for life in a capitalist society.

If economics were a religion (which it might be), my heretical self might be seeking penance for the sin of inflicting this mindset on innocent adolescents, but I was just expounding on doing what my colleagues and I routinely taught.  If I were to start over, I would hope that some of those students would question who set these goals.  At least for macroeconomics I had an answer. The Employment Act oi of 1946 created a Council of Economic Advisors to serve the president and guide him in pursuing these “self-evident” goals.  Actually, I feel less penitent about the macroeconomic goals, although the powers that be seem to worry more about price stability than full employment and never question the conflict between growth and sustainability. But it is the microeconomic goals that I feel called to challenge, and especially the presumed incompatibility of efficiency and equity.  (Freedom we will save for another day.).

Not all goals are created equal.  Efficiency is the primary goal, equity gets a greeting card on some holidays, and freedom is loosely defined and somewhat hard to pin down.  Efficiency is defined in economics in either of two ways getting the most (most WHAT?) out of our available resources or satisfying our wants/needs/desires at the lowest possible expenditure of time and effort. Want to insult an economist? Just tell him (more hims than hers) that his proposal or idea pr practice is INEFFFICNENT.  You will not get nearly the same reaction if you claim it is inequitable.  In fact, Economist Arthur Oken argued that these two goals are constantly in conflict. Equity means a leveling of incomes and assets, but it threatens efficiency because it reduces work incentives.  Some of those who pay more taxes to provide benefits and those who receive more government benefits will just drop out of the labor force. A  nation of idlers! Parasites on those who continue to work and pay taxes! Reducing work incentives Is clearly inefficient.

Efficiency versus equity is another false binary.  We need both.  As a result of this false idolatry of efficiency we have an income distribution that is more like that of a third world oligarchy than a prosperous democracy.  The very rich can use their wealth to redirect government policies to their benefit rather than the needs and desires of the confused and misled majority.  We have outrageously expensive health care costs and a severe shortage of affordable housing, a minimum wage that has not been increased since the Clinton administration, falling life expectancy and a growing environmental crisis.  Other nations that choose to strike a healthy balance between these two goals are more prosperous and more democratic.

When we name these “goals” as the values that they are, values that are the driving forces in our political economy, the choices are much clearer.  The values of efficiency and equality that both support a healthy economy and a democratic polity are not enemies, but partners.

Read my 2023 book, Passionately Moderate: Civic Virtues and Democracy, available from amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.

Head or Heart Again

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Before the election in 2025, I wrote a political post about head and heart and the role each played in our choice at the ballot box.If you speak Myers-Briggs, you might call it Left Brain/Right Brain, T or F for short. No,. that’s not true/false, it’s another dichotomy, thinking/feeling. Or sometimes reason and emotion. We could take on all of he four Myers-Briggs binaries–introvert/extrovert, Intuition/Sensing, and Judging/perceiving, and judging/perceiving, but let’s save those for another day..

We use both halves of our brains, sometimes one more than the other, although we tend to have a preferred first response. A classic example is being at the scene of the accident. The T, left-brained person sees it as a problem to be solved. Everybody out of the car? Police? Do we need a medic? Meanwhile, the right-brained F is feeling empathy and compassion and trying to offer comfort..At our best, we humans try to cover both bases. But if not, we can pair up, the left-‘brained person (more likely a man but not necessarily) can problem solve while the right-brained persons offers consolation and hope.Ultimately, everyone at the scene will engage both halves of the brain.

Challenging the assumed superiority of thinking or reasoning or logic over empathy or affection or compassion led to some useful answers to bothersome questions in multiple fields of thought. I am mainly aware of the the effect of this challenge to my own academic discipline, economics, but I am sure it has influenced other and ethics.( Or as one of my economist friends said, shouldn’t that be economics or ethics?)

The standard textbook in economics introduced the young scholar to homo economicus (economic man), the basis of a simplistic model of how we make economic decisions about money, spending, working, marrying, having children, investing, retiring. and so forth. Homo economicus has two sterling qualities. He is a fully informed master calculator who can do cost/benefit analysis in his head, or occasionally on a spreadsheet. And his sole goal is to maximize his personal self-interest, to get as much out of life as he can with the least expenditure of effort or money.or both. I personally find this person to be rather obnoxious, but I have encountered people who do seem to conform to that model much of the time….

There has always been an undercurrent in economics suggesting that the average actual human does not exactly conform to that model. That undercurrent can be traced from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (a precursor to his Wealth of Nations) through Keynes’ animal spirits to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman’s work earned him the only Nobel prize in economics awarded to a psychologist. Back in the 19th century, Charleston Dickens satirized economic man in his novel Hard Times, in which a paterfamilias subjected his family to cost-benefit analysis of every decision and couldn’t understand why his wife gave up and his children left home at the earliest opportunity.

What were those challenges to homo economics? First of all, most of us can only acquire a limited amount of information about all the details of all t he choices we have to make every day. There goes the assumption that our hero is fully informed. In fact, we make better choices when we employ what is called bounded rationality, limiting our options to a small number.. Second, we often lack the complex calculation skills to determine which choice would most meet our needs an desires. Finally, many of us feel that there is more to life than narrow self interest. There is family. There is culture. there is community. There is play. There is being in nature. Some of the best things in life really are free! We care with and for others and they do the same. It’s called altruism, and it messes up those tidy one-person decision models concerned only the decider’s self-interest..

There are lessons in this rethinking of our model of human choice that impact public policy choices as well as our personal choices.If we rep;lace Homo economics with homo not so sapiens, we find that we may need to revise the way we present choices to citizens and taxpayers. The first Medicare drug coverage programs offered way more choices than sick people and their caregivers could adequately evaluate. People often need a default that can make a decision for them if they forget or can’t decide. Usually the default is the one that works best for the average person. Making wise choices is itself a demand on our scarce resources of time and attention that might be better–or more joyfully!–employed elsewhere

A 20th century British philosopher, Mary Midgeley, applied the same challenge to to the practices in many fields ofdeveloping “universal”;explanations, including philosophy, history, biology and ethics–even physics in its evolution from Newton to Einstein! These theoretical models must be qualified by the diversity of context and circumstance, diversity and complexity, that challenge overly simple explanations to life’s complex questions.

Lie my blog? You may like my book. Passionately Moderate: Civic Virtues and Democracy. Available from amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.

First Harvest, Celtic Style

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Got some Irish, Scottish, Welsh in your ancestry? Or maybe some of the original Brits (Celtic) in your English ancestry, or Gallic that came to he islands with the Norman conquest? Celttc culture once covered a huge part of the European continent only to be run off to Britain those annoying Romans. Some of these holidays were baptized and melded into Christianity, especially . Easter with Ostara (the spring equinox, with bonfires at dawn), as well as Sammain/Hallowe’en (All Saints’ Day), Yul and Christmas(and midnight mass).. Others live on in other customs, like Groundhog Day (Imbolc) and the fertility festival of Beltain (May Day, the maypole as a mating ritual).. Lithia, the summer solstice was celebrated with midday bonfires, a midsummer holiday that is most closely kin to July 4th in this country.

But one lonesome little Celtic holiday seems to have disappeared from memory. This sweet little holiday on the first day of August is Lammas or Lughnasad, the celebration of first Harvest. I sit at the table with my friends eating fresh corn and tomatoes from the farmers’ market just two days before the holiday. As the Druids disappeared and the Celts turned to Christianity, Lammas was celebrated by bringing the first fruits of the harvest to church for a blessing, a custom carried on in this country into colonial times. I myself have led a blessing of the vegetables service, which is must less disaster-prone than a blessing of the animals and also provided fresh vegetables to our local food bank.

So add an upbeat holiday to your calendar the first of August and celebrate the abundance of harvest and the rich taste of fresh fruits and vegetables!

Speak Up, My Silent Generation!

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Sandwiched between the Greatest Generation (born 1902-1927) that saw us through the Depression and World War II and the Baby Boomers/Me Generation (born 1946-1964) is my generation, (1928-1045)  known as the Silent Generation.  Silent, perhaps, because there were fewer of us and we lived in fairly pleasant times. Life was pretty good for most of us. 

We weren’t entirely silent.  We cheered the election of John Kennedy and supported Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to civil rights and the war on poverty while opposing Vietnam. In college and after, I remember protesting everything from letting women wear Bermuda shorts on campus and making them observe curfew in dorms to Vietnam We had lots of babies (I contributed three) and women explored new careers after ignoring their mothers’ recommendation of teacher, nurse, secretary. We had TV and Rock/n’ Roll, the pill and polio vaccine.  It was an era of, as they say in  New Orleans, to “laissez les bons temps router.”  (Let the good times roll.) It was the best of times, just as the millennials —our grandchildren–are coming of age in the worst of times.

As we did in the 1960s of fond memory, it is time for our small but powerful generation to stand up and speak out.  Now in our 70s to 90s, many of us are financially secure and not vulnerable to threats from the emerging police state. I recently listened to a retired general on TV who would like to continue working part time as a consultant but can’t be hired because he spoke out against the Trump administration and lost his security clearance. But he has another kind of security, financial security, and as a retired military person a strong sense of patriotic duty, he is using his time to fight Trump instead.

We have resources that can be put to work to retrieve our democracy.  We have money. We have time. We have experience and skills.  We can shelter immigrants, boycott businesses (Washington Post, CBS, Fox News)) that kowtow to Trump. WE can volunteer for community groups to provide mutual support while also engaging those who live in the other world of Trump and Fox News. We can vocalize our opinions, contribute to ACLU  and PBS and private foreign aid, attend protests, annoy our representatives in state legislatures and Congress, support candidates or run for office, and file lawsuits (I am a party to one against our Trump-like City Council). What we cannot do is sit at home and say “Woe is me” Withdrawal is not an option, it is amoral obligation for those of us for whom the danger is smallest.

Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister in Nazi Germany, left us these immortal words: \

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

When your great0grandchildren want to know what you did in the face of this challenge to our democracy, what will you tell them?