The Ash Twins Blog

The other interesting aspect of these populist movements is that their bedrock premises are irrational. I can’t help but empathize with these just-plain-folks being shaken out of their anesthesia and wanting to stick it to the man. I think this emotional resonance draws people in to the cause.

Unfortunately, the movements’ plans for improving society are informed by obvious falsehoods (take your pick: global warming is a hoax, Barack Obama is a terrorist, death panels, socialism would lead to societal destruction+the current government is moving towards socialism, etc etc etc). This situation should prevent a reasonable person from supporting their cause. For those within the movement, emotional support comes first, and belief systems come second. Individuals become involved for emotional reasons, and take on the beliefs of their compatriots. Tragically, these belief systems are fundamentally corrupt.

Commentators in the public sphere (like Glenn Beck) may not induce the original emotion to become a part of these movements (socioeconomic loss is probably a major origin), but they do perpetuate the emotional intensity. They also perpetuate and introduce novel false premises, which prevents the movements from developing into an engine for social change. The corporate interests which drive the intellectual castration of these movements benefit from the castration, as they are motivated to maintain the status quo (from which they are profiting handsomely).

I read some articles this week about the Tea Party Movement. The first was in the New York Times by David Barstow (previously mentioned on the blog). The second was sent to me by my dad, from prisonplanet.com.

The excessive emotion in these debates is fascinating. Subjects as innocuous (to me)  as meteorology, clinical diagnosis, or income taxes gain an emotional charge that I would think would be reserved for coup d`etats or CEOs making billions of dollars a year.

There is a strong bias in the sort of person who becomes an actor in the public sphere, and I think the main selection factor is emotion. Subjects to which people can develop a strong (usually negative) emotional response gain dramatically disproportionate traction in the public sphere.

Why bland subjects like the average temperature of the Earth can become so emotionally charged is an important question. Is it due to the fact that we do not really have anything to complain about, so as a society we manufacture things to argue over? Are these debates instead manufactured by corporate interests to disrupt engagement of actual legitimate social problems (e.g. corporate greed)? Or are human beings cognitively unable on average to understand (and take a position on) genuine social problems, and thus debate simpler issues instead?

The scariest possibility – and most reasonable to me – is that the last two reasons are major contributors. The upside is that debates in the public sphere do not accurately represent public opinion. These issues that appear so important to those involved are paltry in the long run, so these raging debates probably don’t influence the course of history too drastically.

The following is an excerpt from Stone (2004) about the Pentagon Papers:

Although most of what was in the study was common knowledge, it shed important light on key aspects of America’s involvement in Vietnam. It documented, for example, that at the end of World War II President Truman had rejected urgent appeals from Ho Chi Minh for American assistance; that while the 1954 Geneva conference was still in session, the United States was actively planning paramilitary operations in Saigon against the North; that President Kennedy’s “advisers” in Vietnam had not merely advised the South Vietnamese but had participated directly in military operations; that the U.S. government had knowingly publicized false South Vietnamese intelligence reports about the extent of Communist infiltration; that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had been rammed through Congress under blatantly false pretenses; and that the U.S. government had concealed from the American public the fact that extensive bombing of North Vietnam had done little to impair the Communists’ military capacity, but had killed tens of thousands 0f Vietnamese civilians.

Why wasn’t this paragraph in my U.S. History textbook?

This 2009 paper by Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh discusses “the GDP Paradox,” which refers to the popularity of GDP as a measure of social welfare. GDP, which stands for “gross domestic product,” is defined as “the monetary, market value of all final goods and services produced in a country over a period of a year.” There are two main problems with using it as a measure of happiness, however, as I explain briefly:

1. GDP measures the money paid to purchase a good rather than the benefit accrued for using the good. This means that the relative happiness (“social welfare”) gained from different goods might not be equivalent to the relative prices paid for them. GDP only measures the latter. For example, my dad, brother, and I only had to pay $10 each for Civ 4, but that has given the three of us many many hours of happiness. Meanwhile, a relative spends $10 on a shitty gift that gives you zero happiness. These goods have different welfare value, but GDP treats them as equivalent.
2. GDP excludes externalities. Pollution is a good example. Two countries might have identical GDP in terms of how many manufacturing goods they sold, but they might have different levels of pollution. In the polluter country, people get cancer more often, which by most accounts significantly reduces happiness. But that difference is not included in GDP. In fact, purchases of the medical gizmos used to help the people with cancer would count toward GDP. So the less-happy country would have higher GDP.

Two other examples:

1. The military-industrial complex.The USA’s massive arsenal doesn’t really generate happiness for anyone, and generates death for thousands of others. But the $~1 trillion a year in our defense budget is counted in most measures of GDP.
2. Public vs. private media. Frontline is the best news show and generates immeasurable happiness in entertainment as well as sociopolitical effects. But it counts zero toward GDP. Fox News is ruining everything but its ad sales count toward GDP. (By the way, Fox is the most trusted source by Americans, according to opinion polls.)