Michael Graham Richard

There is a rule in big media: Don’t show regular people doing normal things in countries that your country is at war with (or might soon be at war with). So you will rarely see in the US media images of Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, etc, just buying things at the market. Children playing. Normal street scenes that wouldn’t be out of place - except for the visible local cultural differences - anywhere in the world.

So that is what I would like to see. If there are any people living in or visiting these countries reading this, please flood youtube and your blogs with videos and photos of normal life. Lets get these images out as an antidote to the pernicious pro-war propaganda (which now works in more subtle ways than before, sinning as much by omission as by what it clearly says).

Anti-war people have shown enough blood & guts, cadavers and dismembered bodies. It’s time to try something else. I believe that people will be more empathic to images of people in situations they can related to rather than in the alien (for them) world of war.

For those interested in learning more, I highly recommend Antiwar.com and Antiwar Radio.

Photo: Children in Iraq.

Acropolis of Athens. Photo G. Larson. Public domain.

Democracy: It is the best system we know to take group decisions and it has a very strong and positive ‘brand’. But is it possible that we use it too much? By that I mean that there are many things that we decide democratically that actually don’t require group decisions to achieve the best results — there are many areas of life where individuals would be best positioned to decide what is best for themselves, but others force their decisions on them.

Humans have a tendency to see groups everywhere, and democracy can compound the downsides of that flaw. Liberals, conservatives, people of various religious beliefs, atheists, whites, latinos, blacks, arabs, jews, Americans, Chinese, Frenchmen, environmentalists, rich, poor, middle-class, urban, rural, majority, minorities, etc. Within that framework, people start to actually identify with their group and to dislike others, especially those they are in a power-struggle with. It’s a rational reaction because within a democratic system, some groups hold power over others and nobody wants a group they dislike to impose decisions on them. No, they’d rather impose their truth on others. This allows power-hungry politicians to play identify politics and try to have groups identify with them and thus overlook things that they would never accept on an individual basis. It’s all very tribal-like (you can also observe that phenomenon in sports).

When people stop seeing individuals, it can quickly lead to dehumanization and polarization (and we know where these can lead). They see caricatures and don’t take the time to get to know people who are in groups that they dislike: as soon as a label comes up, their minds shut down and whatever their reasons (based on reality or not) for disliking that group, they project them on the individual. “Surely if I hate jews, I’ll hate that jew.” “Surely if Frenchmen are annoying, I’ll be annoyed by that Frenchman.” Then confirmation bias kicks in…

Opposite factions rarely make the effort to really understand the positions/culture/etc of the other side(s) (liberals read liberal blogs, conservatives read conservative blogs), which means that few people change their minds and even fewer pick rational positions based on the best available information that can be gathered from all sides.

Free yourself from these shackles. Force yourself to see people as individuals, because that’s what they are. And so are you, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want others to look at you as some insignificant part of a larger over-simplistic monolith.

As if we needed more evidence that rationality is a good thing, it now seems like irrationality is not just something that will lead you to have crazy beliefs and not understand how the world works; it can also kill you (among other things).

Scott Beaulier and Bryan Caplan argue in a paper titled Behavioral Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State that the traditional explanation about crime being more attractive to the poor because their legal options to improve their situation are limited is unsatisfactory.

It might seem intuitive that more poor people commit crimes because they are trying to get out of poverty, but evidence shows that most crimes are not very lucrative.

Their theory?

What’s my alternative? Crime is just one of many, many “social pathologies” that are over-represented among the poor: alcoholism, drug abuse, smoking, obesity, illegitimacy, etc. None of these are good escape routes from poverty. So instead of trying to explain why “poverty causes crime” or “poverty causes obesity,” it makes sense to look for common causes of poverty and social pathologies.

Like what? In a paper just accepted by Kyklos, Scott Beaulier and I point to a simple candidate: irrationality. People who have biased beliefs about practical matters, and/or exercise poor impulse control, are likely to screw up their lives across the board. So it’s hardly surprising that poverty and self-destructive behavior go hand in hand. Rather than being a natural response to poverty, a lot of crime can be seen as objectively self-destructive behavior that happens to have an unusually large amount of collateral damage. (link)

This seems consistent with anecdotal evidence that poor but educated people aren’t as likely to suffer from these social pathologies (and by educated I most certainly am not talking only about formal schooling).

It’s not about how much is in your wallet, but how much is in your head. So get smart (you can if you have a growth mindset).