Dude, Look at the Sky

While I was heading from the Student Center to Langston to get my bike, I was stopped by a young man sitting on one of the dividing stumps that separates Ring Road from the main plaza of the Student Center. He gave me a simple, “Hey, bro, wait just a second,” and I turned on the basic instinct and in order to make it not so obvious that my gaze was trained on a cute young college girl wandering around in the twilight as well.

When I turned to the young man, I braced myself for an offering of how Jesus can save my immortal soul. I’m rarely stopped by a perfect stranger on campus for anything other than proselytizing a cause, and more often than not the cause that stops me involves Jesus Christ. When I turned to him, he told me, “Dude, look at the sky.” At first, I gave it a cursory glance. It was partly cloudy. The sun was in its waning hour. I somewhat expected a surprise. Why would anyone stop me at random if not for some rare novelty, like a UFO or a rainbow? I looked back at him and he said to me, “Isn’t that beautiful man?”

When I looked back, I looked back with greater pause. It was, indeed, beautiful. The fog of yesterday that had cooled off the coast had transformed into mid-altitude clouds of intricate patterns. The twilight sun danced colorfully inside the forms of water vapor, set against the backdrop of the deep twilight blue. I realized the truth in the young man’s words. He said to me, “You know, sometimes you’ve just gotta stop and look around, right?” I agreed, smiled, and gave him a “Thanks, man,” accompanied with a peace sign before heading on my way. All he had stopped me for was a beautiful sky.

The man on the stump offered me nothing except what was already there in front of us. I was immensely pleased with his actions on the stump there. In many ways, this man on the stump embodies what I think is so deeply missing in higher education and the modern culture in general. This man took the time to sit, observe what was in front of him, and attempt to share what he saw with others. He didn’t force anything, and let his discovery speak for itself. That is the key to great academic work, in my not so humble opinion. I would take one of this man over a hundred of the other youth that are being churned out on the assembly line of competitive higher education today.

It is certainly a situation that gives one a bright ray of hope. Not only are you not the only person looking at the sky, but you were stopped by another to remind you of your own ethos. The thinkers are not dead, and maybe all it takes is one great sunset to bring them out of hiding again.

Transitioning from Anger to Policy

For the most part, the Occupy Wall Street protests and all their derivatives have elicited in me a small range of responses that fall between eye rolling and mild distaste. While the significant and unapologetic narcissism of the movement would like its audience to believe that this is a unique and special movement, the only unique aspect of this particular iteration of angry, young Americans (accompanied the hip Baby Boomers clinging to their own 1960s  relevance) is the spread of the movement and its detachment from any one particular event. Otherwise, this protest could easily be just another hodgepodge of slogans thrown in front of any particular meeting of the IMF, World Bank, or the G8 leaders. In terms of novelty, and the ability to actually generate some degree of change, the OWS populist uprising has thus far come up flat.

While passing by the Occupy Irvine encampment today, I noticed a sign that read “Don’t Just Honk” and felt compelled to consider that statement for a moment or two. The Occupy Irvine protesters were not just honking. The action they were taking was staging this low grade occupation of the lawn of the Irvine Civic Center. However, in terms of the actual effect that will be achieved by honking, as opposed to what the protesters themselves were doing, there will be essentially the same outcome. The Occupy Irvine protest, in similarity with the OWS protest, has done nothing more than complain about one evil or another that they can blame everything on while attempting to increase the size of their Facebook groups. Being Orange County, it is somewhat amusing to note that the Occupy Irvine protest tends to take on a much more Ron Paul style “End the Fed” message than their other national counterparts.

In some ways, this outlines the main problem I have with these kind of OWS or Tea Party movements. They are populism in a very dangerous form. When they do translate into slogan based policy, we end up with the kind of disastrous results that we’ve been achieving with the Tea Party in congress. Rather than trying to solve the problem of persistent unemployment, in many ways a cause of these OWS protests, congress has been hijacked by a bunch of slogans about the deficit. There has been no honest discussion about how to solve long term deficit problems. Instead, there has been a haphazard destruction of discretionary spending programs without much reduction in the long term budget outlook. We start looking less like a reasoned republican democracy, and more like a populist South American nation that throws bananas at the wall until one of them transforms into a functioning republic. Often, none of them transform anything and the real losers in the end are the same people who put the populists in office.

The reason people like myself get agitated by movements like OWS and the Tea Party is because it is almost impossible to take an honest policy position that occupies less than 200 words, let alone less than 140 characters. The only slogan I know how to give that is concise is “I don’t know yet. Let me explore that issue until I can make an informed opinion.” In person, when I’m talking about economic topics, it is usually a minimum of ten minutes, and I have to spend extra time attempting to infer what degree of prior knowledge they have that I am drawing on to make my point. None of this would be popular with the OWS movement, for the most part, since it would involve an attention span that was greater than a piece of cardboard with sharpie on it and a Like button on Facebook.

That being said, there have been interesting ideas that have come out of OWS that tend to get buried in the cacophony of self-importance. Among them, I heard of an ex-accountant attempting to advocate that the maximum compensation at publicly traded firms be set at fifty times the median wage of the firm’s employees. (She couldn’t fit that on a cardboard sign, so she was trying to hand out pamphlets.)  This is a significant policy proposal that deals with a real problem in the compensation of executives and it deserves its day in the light. Essentially, this rule would attempt to solve a principle-agent problem that exists within publicly traded firms in how executive salaries are set. I’ve often believed that the very high level of executive compensation has a great deal to do with the principle-agent problem whereby the executives are able to pay themselves the profits of a firm, instead of those profits being returned to shareholders. Of course, it is also the case the CEOs work harder than the average person and deserve a much higher level of compensation than most people. However, there are issues that go much further beyond the marginal productivity of CEOs that have not been honestly addressed.

Furthermore, sloganeers from both OWS and the Tea Party demand changes in the way taxes are levied. However, in order for actual change to take place we need to have honest discussion about the details of our tax system. It seems generally agreed that the tax system should be progressive, but by exactly how much? We also don’t think that the most desperate among us should have to pay taxes, but exactly where is that cut off and at what marginal rate should taxes be introduced? These are real questions that need real answers. They deserve in a reasonable world much more than a line on a cardboard sign or a man dressed up as Paul Revere. I tend to advocate for the following system. Let their be a VAT as the main collection mechanism of taxes. Then, issues a rebate such that the 10th income percentile pays no taxes, effectively creating a negative tax system for persons in the lowest income decile, but keeping the marginal effective tax rate low. Then, to fulfill the roll of progressivity, place a flat income tax starting at the 90th percentile (which is a little under $150,000 per year). The argument that the rich “do not pay their fair share” currently is an obscene argument.  The top decile currently pays almost 70% of the Federal income tax burden (I realize that the income tax is not the only form of tax and that there are other taxes that burden the middle class significantly, but this is not a valid argument for the rich don’t pay their fair share. Rather, it’s an argument in favor of simple and honest tax collection.).  If the OWS and Tea Party groups put down their megaphones and cardboard and actually demand a reasoned discussion across the political spectrum, we might be able to get a decent taxation system within our lifetimes. A simpler and more reasoned tax system would help greatly with both the problems of how to finance a long term deficit, and how much each person should have to pay given their place in our social structure. Instead of asking the 1% to pay more, ask everyone to sit down and determine the long term path of government revenues and services.

In conclusion, this idea of coming together and actually getting things done greatly highlights the difference between our current political era and the era of the mid and late 90s, and before. Some of the more memorable pictures I have in my mind of the Clinton administration were the pictures of the gigantic tables Clinton would set up at the White House. At these tables, he would bring together thinkers and players from across a massive spectrum and they would talk into the early hours of the morning. They would sit there, and they would get the very hard, nuanced, and detailed task of managing our nation done. Furthermore, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would engage in bitter, though necessary, political sparing, and yet still be able to share lunch or a drink as human beings and Americans together. When we elected the current administration, we elected it on the slogan of “Hope and Change.” Perhaps next time, it would be better to elect our politicians on their ability to drink coffee until the wee hours of the morning, and their ability to share a drink with co-workers. However, in order to get those kind of politicians, we as voters first need to commit to an ethos that goes above and beyond cardboard in Zuccotti Park.

However, I will gladly yield and say that the OWS protests did some good if this particular writing actually has an impact on anything outside my own ego. I did, after all, write this because I saw a sign that said “Don’t just honk.”

Facebook: A Retrospective

It has been a little under a year since I wrote my piece about Facebook and then left Facebook. Now, with the beginning of a new, and final, school year, I will likely be creating a new Facebook account. Going for this last year without Facebook has allowed me a good time to truly evaluate the points that I made when I started this “experiment” and to determine what exact values can be extracted from the social network that don’t appear available elsewhere. In this post, I hope to evaluate the arguments that I made in the previous post about Facebook and develop justifications for starting a new Facebook profile.

To start with, I would like to wholly dismiss my argument regarding the opportunity cost of time spent on Facebook. This argument was the only argument I made about something completely personal, as opposed to the other arguments being about social consequences. The simple idea behind this argument was that I could be doing better things with my time. The truth of the matter is, however, that I did not spend more time doing things that I deemed more “productive” than I would have done with Facebook. If instead of looking at Facebook as a social tool, I look at it simply as an entertainment, or content delivery, system then it is really no better or worse than a lot of the other entertainment options out there on the internet today. The conclusion to this idea seems to be that when it’s time to relax and do something mindless, I relax and do something mindless. The absence of Facebook just moved me into other mindless activities, rather than into more “productive” hobbies.

This leads into my new perspective of how Facebook is actually useful. Rather than being a tool for helping one develop social relationships and fulfill their social needs, its primary usefulness comes from being an entertainment platform and a personal marketing tool. Facebook is entertaining, and the characters and stories with which you can amuse yourself are people you actually know. It also does have some organizational ability for groups that cannot really be done by other (arguably better) technologies since they do not have the massive network size to back them up. Furthermore, I miss the use of Facebook’s ability to deliver content to me from organizations and “non-friends.” When I used Facebook, one of things that I used it most for was to get daily articles and blogs from The Economist. I haven’t really found a decent substitute for that.

From the marketing perspective, I find that I do need some kind of effective way to market myself. I had the idea that I would spend more time blogging here after I left Facebook, which as stated above was not the case. In the particular of writing new blog posts, I find that without the incentive of knowing that there will be an audience for something that I write, I end up being less inclined to write. Since I’m also considering some other creative projects, such as potentially developing a weekly podcast, I need a platform to get the word out. The bottom line is that when I had Facebook, I got click throughs to this blog. When I stopped using Facebook, those click throughs stopped. That in turn made me want to write less, which in turn meant the little audience I might have had evaporated.  If I changed the title of Facebook members from “friends” to “audience members” or “followers” or “listeners,”  then the impersonal nature of the Facebook environment seems much less troubling.

In my original post, the arguments about the impersonal and socially destructive nature of Facebook still hold a great deal of water, and was probably the main thrust of my leaving Facebook at the time. This is where I still believe that my original argument got a lot of things right. Facebook is still being used as a substitute for real human interaction. I see the effect of the network in my daily life here on campus, as people are engrossed in their phones. Furthermore, my idea that leaving Facebook would allow me to develop richer and more meaningful relationships with people also held water. However, the new richness of my relationships could partially be a side effect of recommitting to developing friendships at the same time as leaving Facebook and so the causality is suspect. These observations though justify why the use of Facebook as a kind of enjoyable diversion, as opposed to an actual social necessity, is critical. These two opposing uses, the entertainment purpose which I would consider reasonable, and the social fulfillment purpose which I would consider destructive, have yet to have been looked at in much seriousness as separable. Most of the people I encounter find Facebook absolutely necessary, and have commented to me that they would not have a social life in absence of Facebook, which from my new experience I believe to be wholly false.

I find that summarizes that conclusion of my little experiment. First, a social life will emerge regardless of Facebook usage, and one can find more clarity in relationships by not using it. The anxiety that people feel about not having that connection to Facebook is unwarranted, and in many ways I would encourage taking an extended absence from the service if one has found themselves trapped in Facebook as a social existence. Not being a part of Facebook will get rid of the “false” or virtual social life, and allow for an understanding of where someone actually fits in the social picture. It is enlightening, rather than isolating once one gets over the fear of being alone. Second, the size of the network and its use in disseminating information cannot be denied. While I would love for everyone to live in a Project Diaspora dream world and use better and better technologies that expand how we think about obtaining and spreading information, the network effects of Facebook will ensure that other technologies will remain marginal at best until a deal breaker technology emerges. It could be some time before something unique enough comes along to change the Facebook paradigm.

Finally, I am still a believer in the ill effects on socialization that Facebook and the always connected world causes. I recently watched a commercial for the iPad in which a family was sitting around a campfire, and the person had to stop and take out their iPad to tweet “Out camping with family!” In yet another dream world of mine, people should be openly revolting against this vision of the world. It is a world in which nothing is real and in which there is no experience of the place in which one is currently existing. The entire experience, even the one right in front of you, becomes a part of the virtual, make-believe world. However, I can’t help the revolution from outside the world. The world needs to begin a conversation about what they really want from their connected electronic devices, and what they don’t want. Figuring this out will mean starting to require people to experience some amount of depth of thought. Ironically, however, the only place large and connected enough to begin such a wide discussion would be inside the network itself. If I want to have that discussion, it has to be from the inside.

So what do you all say, will you be my audience members?

And if all of these arguments fail to convince, the truth of returning to Facebook is simply that I need a place to post more ponies.