Urban Legends: Chapter 0Page 1
Every city of decent size has a place where the unsavory elements of society hang out. In San Francisco it is called The Tenderloin; in New York City, The Bowery; and in Billings, Montana, it is Minnesota Avenue. Urban renewal may change the location, but as long as there are people who are down on their luck, they will congregate somewhere. The generic term for such a place used to be Skid Row[1] until that term was abandoned by the media as being “politically incorrect.” But, it doesn’t matter what it’s called, the locals know to avoid that part of town.[rsh1] Mixed with the homeless and runaways are drunks, pimps, whores, pushers, users and others whom we call the derelicts of society. These are all people who are different from those we normally encounter, whose day-to-day reality is difficult—if not impossible—for us to comprehend. People like that make you uncomfortable. When you encounter them, your pace quickens and you refuse to meet their eyes…if you did, you might see their humanity. Avoiding personal contact with them is more comfortable; it depersonalizes and dehumanizes them.
Nonetheless, both you and they ARE human—as were the zealots who commandeered the planes on 9/11, as are the captains of industry and all of the political leaders of the world—good guys and bad guys alike. We share this planet with over six-and-a-half billion other human beings, most of whom—if the truth really be told—we choose not even to try to know. In fact, most of us think (if not openly, at least secretly) that the world would be a much better place for us if a good chunk of them would just go away. Yet, they are there and are just as unwilling to go away for you as you are for them. That is reality.
Here is another reality: many of those 6½ billion out there act and make decisions that influence your happiness and well being. Think about it: of all the people whose actions influence your life, you are personally aware of a very, very small, miniscule portion of them. They are as nameless as the skid row bum you try to ignore. What’s more, most of them are simply unknown and unknowable to you. Yet, their deeds and actions affect your opportunities. A trivial but real example involves me, the author. How many readers of this book do you suppose would know me if they encountered me on the street? How many share in my personal joys and sorrows? How many care? (Go ahead, be honest!) Yes, you know my name and might be able to track me down, but how many of you could track down the person who felled the trees that were made into the pages of this book? Yet, without us you would be doing something else right now.
Though the population of the world is becoming incomprehensibly large, technology and transportation improvements closely link our fates to an extent never before experienced. In olden days, the clothes you are wearing would have been made from local wool or cotton, spun or woven locally (if not in your own home), and tailored or sewn together by a family member or neighbor. As with many things consumed in the old days, there was a pretty good chance you would have actually known many of the people who had a hand in their manufacture. How different it is today. Your clothes are designed in Paris, New York, Milan, or Tokyo; they are made from both natural and synthetic fibers that could originate almost anywhere; they were cut and assembled in yet another location and then shipped to a store near you. The chances are very good that you do not know (nor can you remember) the sales clerk that assisted you when you purchased the garment. In fact, in our modern world, it is very likely that some unnamed person who lives in a place you cannot even pronounce (like Kyrgyzstan) may have a more profound impact on how you dress than a close and intimate friend. You do not know that person, yet, in a way, you interact with them and you both are part of each others’ lives.
These unnamed masses of individuals—whose capabilities, dreams, and experiences are all unique—have affected our lives and our personal well being in ways both subtle and overt. And, to an extent greater than many of us wish, they will have a hand in determining our future choices. Since reliance on more people in a shrinking world is inevitable, how can you and I possibly influence them so we will have better choices ahead?
Before anyone can answer that, you must understand what makes them tick. Unfortunately, that is literally quite impossible. Almost two-and-a-half centuries ago a Scottish Professor of Moral Philosophy named Adam Smith wrote:
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations…It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. [2]
Ironically, while it is quite impossible to perfectly empathize with someone else, there might be a way to analyze and understand a person’s decisions if one doesn’t try “conceiving what we ourselves would feel in the like situation.” Instead, we should try to identify attributes of how people make decisions regardless of our feelings of the particulars of their lives and circumstances. That is the methodology of economic analysis.
Though many instances of human interaction (especially those in which we are personally involved) evoke our sense of passion, we must recognize that passion usually involves the projection of our own senses of righteousness into the analysis. How many people can truly analyze the effects of abortion dispassionately? What about pre-marital sex? Recreational drugs? Smoking? Even the amount of playing time your children get in their youth sports programs provokes immediate, passionate and self-righteous advocacy, not analysis. “Debate” over such issues quickly degenerates to a level reminiscent of the schoolyard bickering from our youth. Remember these: “She said…” “No fair,” “Is too,” “Nuh huh,” and “I’m tellin’”? Not surprisingly, few remember what those arguments were all about, but we do remember that they were passionate. Those spats rarely solved any problems we faced as kids, so we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the same approach can solve the more serious and weightier problems we face as adults. Good resolutions to disagreements arise from clearheaded dispassionate understanding of the problems and the consequences of the potential solutions.
The difficulty in truly being dispassionately objective is explicitly recognized in legal proceedings. The pre-trial questions asked of potential jurors seek to determine whether they can be dispassionate in their analysis of a legal tort or crime. I, myself, was once part of a pool of 150 people considered for service on a 12-person jury for a capital murder trial. Though I was excused at the request of my employer, I saw first-hand the care taken to screen jurors for the inability to be objective in making what was literally a life or death decision.
The goal of dispassionate objectivity is also the basis for parts of professional ethical codes of conduct that deal with “conflicts of interest.” For example, the “Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct” of the American Psychological Association directs psychologists to avoid establishing a client relationship with someone with whom they have other relationships that “could reasonably be expected to impair the psychologist's objectivity, competence, or effectiveness in performing his or her functions as a psychologist.”[3] These other relationships could include everything from a lover or immediate family member to a friend-of-a-friend.
This last example points out that it is easier (but often still difficult) to be dispassionate in analyzing behavior of those whom you do not know. The more distant someone is perceived from being able to influence our personal well being, the more likely we can be dispassionate and objective about their behavior. A sidebar in the newspaper will curtly report the deaths of 20 people in some mishap thousands of miles away (in Kyrgyzstan?), but the opening of an old folks home in your city would garner front-page headlines. Like it or not, proximity matters. Analysis of many social institutions and interactions is made easier because the vast majority of those with whom we interact are distant and personally unknown to us—the previously-mentioned untold masses of individuals.
Being a professor, I probably have succumbed to the occupational habit of beating to death an idea: that we must recognize that our humanness often clouds our objectivity. So to help seal this important issue permanently in your mind, perhaps it is better to turn to a cartoonist named Walt Kelly to summarize the problem we have described. Kelly’s wildly popular comic strip, Pogo, was one of the first to inject social satire into daily comic strips. The most famous of Pogo’s sayings is particularly appropriate as we set off to try to dispassionately analyze the actions of our fellow homo sapiens: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”[4]
With that in mind, let’s proceed.
Contrary to popular belief, economics is not just the study of the stock market and other financial institutions. Neither is it strictly concerned with material and monetary wealth. Fundamentally, economics is simply the study of how people interact. Those interactions cover all facets, from the ongoing, intimate relationships within a family to the one-time dealings that impact unnamed people in distant places (like Kyrgyzstan!). Since all interactions involve people making choices, it is helpful to look at some aspects of choice making.
People make decisions. People make choices. This is the first and primary thing we must understand. We always hear about how various impersonal entities such as “the university,” “ the company” or “the government” decided this or that. But none of these entities can make decisions. It is individuals or defined groups of individuals who make decisions, and when a decision is made it is ultimately traceable to a human being. While the decision-maker may prefer the shield of anonymity afforded them by depersonalizing the decision, to paraphrase the words of President Harry Truman, the buck always stops at the desk of a human being. Keeping this fundamental truth in mind is helpful because if you want to influence a decision, you must know first who is responsible for making the decision. Then, you have to figure out what makes them tick.
Fortunately, people do not make decisions randomly. There is method behind every decision which can be described easily:
People make decisions that at the time are the best choices for them given their state of being and their knowledge of the alternatives and consequences.
Read it carefully. It states that anythingsomeone does is defined as that person’s best choice given the constraints of time, place and knowledge. In the study of logic, such a statement is called a tautology in that it is always logically true by definition. So, why belabor the point? The answer is that the statement’s real importance is in how it guides our thinking. Its helpfulness in the study of human behavior arises because keeping this statement in mind forces one to start looking at the reality of the situation—to explicitly recognize that their “analysis” of a situation may be based more on fantasy and wishful thinking rather than on the facts. A case in point involves a question I put to students in class. I ask each to take out a piece of paper and write down at least three things they would most like to be doing at that very moment. I then compile a sample list of their ideas and put it on the board. The list is laden with ideas from the mundane to the exotic: “Hanging out with my friends,” “Laying on a beach in Cancun,” and always, “Sleeping.” It is amazing that “being in class” is never on the list. I ask them, “Why?” Nobody ever answers that, because it becomes apparent that of all of the alternatives they can name, they chose to come to class. Nobody forced them to come to class. Indeed, if there is something they truly believe would be “better,” why aren’t they doing it? To drive this point home, for several days thereafter I remind the students at the beginning of class that anyone who has something better to do over the next hour is quite welcome to leave and go do it. After all, I am a teacher, not a prison warden. Though it is a tautology, our behavior construct serves the purpose of forcing people to confront their choices and make their reasoning recognize and become more consistent with reality—a reality that is defined by actions and deeds rather than by daydreams and fantasy.
The other benefit of using this behavioral model is it forces you to view decisions from the vantage point of the person making the decision rather than from your own. When you go out to a restaurant with friends or family, you all order different things off the same menu. Someone might even order something that you loathe such a Brussels sprout and okra casserole while your choice is a nice juicy cheeseburger. You accept the other person’s choice easily even though in the recesses of your mind you might be thinking that[rsh2]eevennnevev “there’s no accounting for taste” or—if you have had a few beers—that the person’s “taste buds were shot off during the last war.” But, you accept it. Perhaps you do so because you would not want them dictating your choice from the menu. Live and let live.
Now, let’s stretch your analysis. Imagine walking through the Skid Row introduced at the beginning of this chapter. There, huddled in the shadow of a dumpster, is a shivering young woman wrapped in a threadbare blanket. Her exposed inner arm flashes white in the darkness. As you watch, she jabs it with a needle and shoots up. Many could not identify with her action. Can you? How could shooting up even be a choice let alone a best choice? It is beyond comprehension since most of us cannot imagine ourselves in that situation. I know it is tough, but for you to understand why this is happening, you cannot impose your values into the analysis. By using the construct that the decision to shoot up was at that moment in timethe best choice for that woman given her state of being and her knowledge of the alternatives and consequences you are logically forced to the next level of questioning and understanding. What were the choices she faced? Obviously, there was a choice to not shoot up, so the follow-up question would involve asking why shooting up was better than the alternatives. What were the alternatives and their consequences? What were the circumstances and past choices that lead to this moment? Now you are starting to analyze the situation in a clear-headed manner. The answers to these questions might have revealed what heroin withdrawal symptoms are and that heroin withdrawal is generally considered less traumatic and less dangerous than alcohol withdrawal.[5] But, your scientific knowledge as a bystander notwithstanding, the young woman could have experienced past attempts to quit and made her decision to shoot up knowing first-hand that the alternative was “drug craving, restlessness, muscle and bone pain, insomnia, diarrhea and vomiting, cold flashes with goose bumps,…kicking movements…and other symptoms.”[6] Could she have sought help? Sure, but that choice would have involved going to the authorities and admitting that she had been involved in illegal activities. Would she have been treated sympathetically or as a criminal? How might she have known the answers to those questions—given her living conditions and considering that the primary source of information she uses is her fellow Skid Row denizens? Now, you might understand how, given her knowledge and understanding of the alternatives, the simple act of shooting up allows her to avoid—or at least delay—confronting those alternatives. Your decision on if and how you will now react to the situation will be based on better understanding of the reality of her choices. It will be more likely that the outcomes of any actions you take will be more aligned with realistic expectations. Without such understanding, proposed solutions will be ad hoc at best and likely to lead to several unintended consequences. Sound economic analysis will help you avoid many regretful decisions.