(#193-1) April 14 2015. Just because everybody does it, does not mean it’s right. Indeed, it is probably wrong. Carry that thought further—and one has to wonder about democracy (even the representative kind).

I THINK A GREAT DEAL ABOUT HOW TO WORK BETTER—AND I HAVE HAD EXCELLENT RESULTS

BUT I SUSPECT I WOULD ACHIEVE MORE IF I WORKED LESS

The following may well be the most important article I have read in a long time—and it is certainly going to result in my changing the way I work.

The problem with ultra-long hours and failing to take vacations (very much the American way) is that the quality of your thinking is affected—and you lose perspective.

I have been guilty of it. Time to change.

How Charles Darwin used rest to be more productive — and how you can, too

Brigid Schulte April 13 2015

Washington Post

In the United States, we work among the longest hours of any advanced economy, and we tend to most highly prize workers who log the most hours at the office. But what if we’re wrong? What if the most productive and creative work gets done when we also take what author, consultant and futurist Alex Pang calls “serious rest?” He explains:

Q: What is “serious rest,” and why do you argue that it’s critical for doing better work?

Pang: When I was writing The Distraction Addiction, I had a chapter about digital Sabbaths, restorative practices, the things people do as a way of recovering some balance in their lives with their digital existences. In the course of that, I was looking at the life of Charles Darwin, and his daily practice of taking long walks on what he called his “thinking path.”

This was a man who was arguably the most important scientist of the last 300 years. He published a dozen books. He’s still read by lots of active scientists. But when you look at his daily schedule, you see he worked – conducting experiments, doing things a university committee or project leader would recognize as labor – about four hours a day.

At first I thought, well Charles Darwin was a super genius. Of course he didn’t need to spend thousands of hours in a laboratory. This is a one off.

Then I got more curious. I started poking around at the lives of other writers, scientists, artists. And started to realize there were a lot of really creative people who followed a similar rhythm in their daily work: they spent four or five hours a day on their most intense work, the stuff that required the most focus and the most attention. That would be the centerpiece of their day.

They might spend, another 10 hours writing letters, applying for grants and other things. But their really critical work occupied only about four or five hours.

The other interesting thing I realized is that there were pretty consistent patterns in how they rested, or what they did with the rest of the day. An awful lot of them were more physically active than you might have imagined writers or scientists of being.

Charles Dickens walked about 10 miles a day. Scientists I looked at turned out to be avid, sailors, hikers, skiers.

[Related: To flourish creatively, embrace daily routines like Georgia O’Keeffe]

Q: And they worked four-hour work day? That seems impossible!

Pang: Right! I began to think about the lives of these wonderfully creative and productive people – and how they managed to be so fantastically productive while working what seems like an irresponsibly small number of hours per day.

We think if eight hours of work a day is good, ten must be better, 12 must be awesome and 16 even better. We live in an era in which overwork is rather literally like a drug. All the cool kids, the really successful people, all seem to be doing it. So there’s both some peer pressure and the sense that, in order to be successful, you’ve got to do it, too.

It feels good at first. You get a kind of high. But it starts to taper and wear off. You’ve got to do more and more to get that same initial buzz. And while it may seem to work for a little while, in the long run – and it’s not going to be that long – it’s probably going to kill you.

Q: So that’s where serious rest comes in?

Pang: I realized that there’s a second way to build a career and be creative. That involves a more measured, paced kind of way of working that takes rest really seriously. When you give rest space, it allows you to be really productive and really creative. But it lets you do so for your entire life.

The last thing that convinced me was reading (psychologist) Anders Ericsson’s work on deliberate practice, the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to be really great, like it’s this magic number. He looked at conservatory students and saw that future recording artists, future first chairs, practice more than other musicians, but they do so in a consistent, deliberate manner. And they sleep more –about an hour more a day than others, and usually a nap in the afternoon.

So just as they were engaging in deliberate practice, they were also engaging in what they called deliberate rest. And they were more thoughtful about what they did in their downtime, and why they did it. It seems to me, that rest turned out to be an important part of how they became who they are.

Q: If rest makes us more productive and creative, why don’t we do it? Or why don’t people believe it?

Pang: This is a battle we’ve been fighting for the last century, when Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James began talking about the American mania for overwork and how stupid it is.

James knew firsthand that overwork leads to all kinds of stresses in ourselves and our family lives: he worked himself into a breakdown as a student at Harvard and felt the effects of it more or less the rest of his entire life.

James was fighting a long American suspicion of people who lead leisurely lives. It goes back to the Puritans. The idea that work is virtuous and leisure is suspect, is kind of woven into the DNA of American culture. In business, it’s always easier to make the argument for working more rather than working less. There are always competitors, there’s always more stuff to be done. And our understanding of business and work is that – if you want to get more out of it, you put more into it.

This is an especially tricky thing today, as fewer of us are working in places that have very set schedules, like factories, and as more of us take on responsibility for scheduling ourselves. And as we have more kinds of work for which there is no immediate, tangible output, like a bunch of widgets we can point to that show how productive we were.

These performative dimensions of work become more and more important both as a way of showing how dedicated you are, how productive you are, and defensively, to keep from getting more work thrown at you. It is, in a way, in our best interests to look constantly overworked and overstressed.

Q: A lot of people work in cultures that expect and reward overwork. And if you aren’t in a position to change that culture, what do you suggest people do?

Pang: Take rest seriously. Recognize that it is an important part of your creative life, your productive life and just your life. In order to honor it, give it time to work its magic.

Pare down your life to just a few critical things. There is now an awful lot of stuff that I say no to – little projects, stuff at the kids’ schools, volunteer stuff. I often regret having to say no, but I make the calculation, in order to do the kind of work I need to do, I really need to focus on doing the work, and doing rest, and doing stuff with my family. And the dogs. That’s pretty much my life. But it turns out, that’s a full life.

Start with your evenings and weekends. It’s really difficult to change a workplace culture. It is easier to begin to change how you work or whether you work outside it. We really underestimate the value that disconnecting from the office, both psychologically and digitally can make for us. The better you are able to disconnect, when you’re away, the better a job you can do while you’re there.

Practice what (sociologist) Robert Stebbins calls serious leisure – one really absorbing, rewarding hobby. That’s one thing that a lot of really creative people do, especially if their regular jobs are very busy.

If you have the flexibility, play with your schedule to figure out the rhythm that works best for you. There’s lots of research on ultradian rhythms, our cycle of natural energy peaks and valleys about every two hours or so. So take 90 minutes of really focused time, and taking a break, doing something completely different, like going for a walk around the block. If you can incorporate this practice into your days, it makes it easier to say it’s not slacking, but life hacking.

Do what you can to cultivate focus for the first part of your working day. That means, to the extent possible, don’t schedule meetings and don’t keep your email open.

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(#192-1) April 13 2015. Our enemies are most unlikely to be able to destroy us. They won’t have to. We’re doing a pretty good job of it ourselves.

THE THREAT OF FOREIGN ENEMIES IS MUCH USED TO KEEP US FEARFUL--AND THUS EASY TO MANIPULATE

HOW NICE TO READ THE FOLLOWING HEADLINE FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE OF APRIL 12 2015

“The world of threats to the US is an illusion”

By Stephen Kinzer

WHEN AMERICANS look out at the world, we see a swarm of threats. China seems resurgent and ambitious. Russia is aggressive. Iran menaces our allies. Middle East nations we once relied on are collapsing in flames. Latin American leaders sound steadily more anti-Yankee. Terror groups capture territory and commit horrific atrocities. We fight Ebola with one hand while fending off Central American children with the other.

In fact, this world of threats is an illusion. The United States has no potent enemies. We are not only safe, but safer than any big power has been in all of modern history.

Geography is our greatest protector. Wide oceans separate us from potential aggressors. Our vast homeland is rich and productive. No other power on earth is blessed with this security.

Our other asset is the weakness of potential rivals. It will be generations before China is able to pose a serious challenge to the United States — and there is little evidence it wishes to do so. Russia is weak and in deep economic trouble — not always a friendly neighbor but no threat to the United States. Heart-rending violence in the Middle East has no serious implication for American security. As for domestic terrorism, the risk for Americans is modest: You have more chance of being struck by lightning on your birthday than of dying in a terror attack.

Promoting the image of a world full of enemies creates a “security psychosis” that misshapes our view of the world. It tempts us to interpret defensive steps taken by other countries as threatening. In extreme cases, it pushes us into wars aimed at preempting threats that do not actually exist.

Arms manufacturers profit from the security psychosis even more directly than militarists. Americans take our staggeringly large defense budget almost for granted, and lament continuously that other countries do not build as many exotic weapons systems as we do. Finding new threats is always good business for someone.

The primary threat to the U.S. is internal and comes from the current American Business Model. Any system which makes only the few ever richer—and leaves most of the population suffering a decline in terms of real earning power—has to be deeply wrong.

But, it is much worse than that. Our political system has now been largely suborned by Big Money, our legal system has gone much the same way, our infrastructure has been neglected for decades—and entrepreneurship is in decline. I could add a laundry list of problems including our truly wretched and unnecessarily expensive healthcare system.  I might be tempted to mention, in passing, that we lose out in relation to longevity. On average, we die three years sooner than the citizens of other developed nations. That is a pretty miserable performance for the richest nation in the world.

And we are not even trying hard to change things. We have turned our electoral system into a spectator sport.

Instead, we seem to have opted for a form of oligopolistic crony corporatism—with a bloated financial sector leading the pack.

Greed has become our one and only god. We worship it zealously.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

VOR words c.115.

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(#191-1) April 12 2015. I can think of no more fulfilling life.

I HAVE NEVER THOUGHT OF MY RESOLVE TO DEVOTE MY LIFE TO THINKING AND WRITING AS “FOLLOWING MY BLISS”—BUT THAT IS HOW JOSEPH CAMPBELL DESCRIBES IT.

THE MAN PUTS IT WELL.

MIND YOU, I DOUBT MANY WOULD DESCRIBE MY LIFE AS BLISSFUL—IT IS DIFFICULT IN THE EXTREME (AT TIMES)—BUT IT IS A GREAT AND WONDERFUL THING TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE DOING EXACTLY WHAT YOU SHOULD BE DOING

‘BLISS’ MAY WELL BE THE RIGHT WORD

The following Joseph Campbell quotes are by way of Maria Popova and her consistently excellent website www.brainpickings.com

Popova understands creativity like few others do—and excels at explaining it.

But, do any—who are not creative themselves—understand? I sometimes wonder. Some do, of course, but my general feeling is that they are rare exceptions.

It is a great pity that we don’t rate creativity more highly. It is a force of astonishing power that almost always enhances the human condition —yet it is suppressed in almost every way from the moment we are born. Its great crime is that, virtually by definition, it questions the status quo—and a great many people are vested in just that, and fearful of change. Those in power—the true beneficiaries of the status quo—manipulate and exploit them accordingly. The fearful are disturbingly easy to manipulate—which is why the current U.S way of life always features a bogeyman and has been structured to be, as far as most of us are concerned, economically insecure.

Some of us fight on regardless—and discover that the game is worth the candle and how truly extraordinary and enriching the creative life can be.

Joseph Campbell explains it well. He did this, according to Popova, during a lengthy conversation with broadcaster, Bill Moyers which ended up as six one episodes for PBS. They were broadcast in 1988. Campbell actually died in 1987.

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

“Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.

“It’s characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.

[…]

“The majority’s function in relation to the spirit is to try to listen and to open up to someone who’s had an experience beyond that of food, shelter, progeny, and wealth.

“We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.

“Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. They get themselves involved in economic and political activities, or get drafted into a war that isn’t the one they’re interested in, and it may be difficult to hold to this umbilical under those circumstances. That is a technique each one has to work out for himself somehow.

“But most people living in that realm of what might be called occasional concerns have the capacity that is waiting to be awakened to move to this other field. I know it, I have seen it happen in students.

“The religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.

[…]

“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

VOR words 229

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(#190-1 ) April 11 2015. The issue isn’t capitalism—it is the U.S. version of it that is the problem.

THE DEEPLY CORRUPT, PREDATORY, AMERICAN BUSINESS MODEL—BASED UPON PAYING MOST EMPLOYEES BADLY—AND FOCUSING SOLELY ON THE INTERESTS OF SHAREHOLDERS--IS A DISASTER FOR MOST AMERICANS

DO WE REALLY UNDERSTAND QUITE HOW DISASTROUS? I SUSPECT NOT

PRODUCTIVITY UP BY 80.4% SINCE 1973. MEDIAN MALE COMPENSATION HAS SCARCELY MOVED—IN OVER 40 YEARS!

THAT IS A DISGRACE

There are some signs now that people are beginning to wake up to the scale and significance of both income and wealth inequality—but I still see no clear evidence of the kind of mass outrage that will be required to change things for the better. Also, the system is now so tilted at every level to favor power and money that it seems likely that it would take decades to rebalance things—assuming Congress wanted to carry out reforms in the first place (which it clearly doesn’t).

Currently, Islamic fundamentalism seem to be have replaced communism as our most serious perceived threat—and we always seem to have a bogeyman. In my opinion, the current American Business Model is a much more real and serious threat to the quality of life of most Americans. Beyond that, as the impact of the recent Great Recession showed, it has an unhealthy degree of global influence.

I find all of this both fascinating (given my interest in economics, current affairs, and history) and horrific. A pretty evil force is at work and it seems to be facing no serious opposition. In fact, a great many Americans still don’t seem to be aware of what is going on.

Given the sophistication of the propaganda that saturates us every waking day—combined with who owns the media and who funds our political system—I guess that situation should scarcely be a surprise.

So what does the future hold?

More of the same, I suspect.

The American tragedy continues.

Senator Elizabeth Warren does seem to understand the realities. The following is from www.Vox.com

Elizabeth Warren explains the real way corruption in Washington works

It's not primarily about quid pro quo cash for favors. It's about whose voices get heard and what issues end up on the agenda. "The wind only blows from one direction," Warren said. "It only blows from the direction of those who have money." Yes, campaign contributions matter. But big interests have "invested in other ways," too. They've invested in paying attention to what happens and to having their agents show up constantly and make noise. Consequently, the concerns of the rich and powerful are present in "every rule that's written, in every conversation, in every discussion."

Warren's perspective on this is supported by my favorite book about influence peddling —Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why.

The authors show two things. One is that it's not true that the richest interest group always wins. Better-financed groups lose to less-financed groups all the time in DC. One big reason for that is that the American system is simply set up to make change very difficult. What normally happens is that the status quo wins, not necessarily the richer side.

But money does matter. Money matters because you have absolutely no chance of winning unless you can get on the agenda, and you can't get on the agenda unless you have money to spend. An ultra-rich interest group can be defeated by a merely rich interest group, but unless you can show up on Capitol Hill with some kind of sack of cash you can't get your voice heard at all.

(#189-1) April 10 2015. I happen to think the environment matters. Others think that short-term profit matters more. We differ.

‘CAN-DO’ AMERICA—IN THE SENSE OF A NATION THAT HAS AN EXTROARDINARY ABILITY TO SOLVE EVEN THE MOST SERIOUS PROBLEMS—SEEMS  TO HAVE BEEN REPLACED BY GRIDLOCK

BUT NOT ENTIRELY

I AM MUCH CHEERED!

A DRAMATIC EXAMPLE OF CLEARING UP U.S. AIR POLLUTION—NITROGEN DIOXIDE IN THIS CASE

Most of us don’t seem to realize how damaging air pollution is to our health. It kills more of us than car accidents and reduces the quality of life for millions of us in a very immediate sense (breathing difficulties) and longer-term sense (what we are breathing can cause cancer).

The following is from a www.vox.com story.

Nitrogen dioxide is produced when gasoline gets burned in cars or coal gets burned in power plants. It's been linked to a variety of respiratory problems, and can combine with other pollutants to form smog. It's also a good proxy for pollution more generally.

The EPA first began cracking down on nitrogen dioxide in 1971, and concentrations have fallen sharply over time. Power plant operators have installed scrubbers to remove pollutants from their smokestacks, and car manufacturers have adopted catalytic converters to curtail nitrogen oxides and other emissions. More recently, since 2005, many electric utilities have been switching from coal to natural gas in order to generate electricity.

VOR words 58.

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(#188-1) April 9 2015. The answers are out there—if you care to look. Reading helps (a lot).

A REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IN NAME

A PLUTOCRACY IN PRACTICE

The following is an interview between the estimable Sam Pizzigati—who covers income inequality  at www.toomuchonline.org and Northwestern political scientist Benjamin Page.

Sam—who I don’t know, by the way—seems to be neither a fanatic nor an extremist. He just feels, as I do, that the current American Business Model is tilted to favor the rich, deeply flawed, and needs to be re-thought. He supports his beliefs with a great deal of data.

The issue here is not capitalism, but our particular form of it. As matters stand, American capitalism is deeply corrupt—and clearly isn’t delivering for most Americans. It has also subverted our democracy.

And all this is happening in plain sight. It is both tragic and unnecessary.

This interview is really too long to publish in this way, but it is too important to be missed. It answers a question of fundamental import.

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY POLITICAL SCIENTIST BENJAMIN PAGE: “A democracy ought to have a government that responds to the wishes of its citizens.”

What happens — to democracy — when income and wealth concentrate?

A half-century ago, that question hardly seemed worth asking. In the decades right after World War II, Americans were living in a nation — and a world, for that matter — growing ever more equal.

But that America no longer exists. Robber barons once again walk among us. Grand fortunes once again tower over America’s social landscape.

Political scientists have noticed. They’ve begun generating a wealth of scholarship on wealth’s impact on our politics, and no researcher may be more central to that scholarship than Northwestern University’s Benjamin Page.

Six years ago, Page and the University of Minnesota’s Lawrence Jacobs co-authored Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality, an in-depth look at 70 years of public opinion polling on wealth and opportunity in America.

Last year, Page and Princeton’s Martin Gilens released what one commentator has called the “first-ever scientific study” of whether our contemporary United States still ranks as a democracy.

And what did that study conclude? Too Much editor Sam Pizzigati explored that question and more with Page last month in an interview conducted just off the Northwestern campus in Evanston, Illinois.

Too Much: A good many pundits these days are wondering why Americans aren’t doing more to protest inequality. Most Americans aren’t protesting, one school of thought holds, because they admire the rich and want to become rich themselves. You’ve spent a great deal of time studying poll data. What have you learned?

We have all sorts of evidence that people are really quite unhappy with the present extent of inequality.

Ben Page: That conventional wisdom is about half right. Average Americans really do like the idea of social mobility, of having a chance to get ahead. In fact, people have exaggerated ideas about how well they or their kids might do.

But we also have all sorts of evidence that people are really quite unhappy with the present high level of inequality and unequal opportunity.

The more complicated question: What do they want to do about it?

If you ask abstract questions about whether the government should take money from the wealthy and redistribute it, there is not a lot of support for that.

But if you ask about concrete policies — like taxing the wealthy at higher levels or getting rid of loopholes that favor hedge fund managers — average Americans turn out to favor many policies that would have strong redistributive effects.

On the spending side, we see lots of support for things like jobs programs, the earned income tax credit, and Social Security. Most people want to increase these programs — at the very time when many political figures and pundits are telling us you have to cut, cut, cut.

Too Much: So do we have, in effect, a silent egalitarian majority?

Average American turn out to favor many policies that would have strong redistributive effects.

Ben Page: Larry Jacobs came up with a phrase for our Class War book, “conservative egalitarianism.” Not so much egalitarianism in the abstract, but a great deal of desire for the government to make it easier for people to get ahead and to help those left behind.

Too Much: You’ve observed in the past that most Americans don’t really realize how unequal we’ve become as a nation. How wide has the gap grown between inequality’s reality and public recognition?

Ben Page: There is a gap, but it’s not as big as it once was. People have figured out what’s happening. If you ask what proportion of the wealth is owned by the top 1 percent, the average person now comes fairly close, saying 40 or 50 percent.

But if you ask people what a CEO of a major corporation earns, they’re way low in their estimates. And likewise for hedge fund managers and even surgeons and other top professionals.

But what’s remarkable: Even with these income misperceptions, people still feel that individuals in high-paying positions should be paid less than they’re paid now.

Too Much: Your recent work with Princeton’s Marty Gilens looked at the question whether the United States can rightfully claim to be a democracy. How do you go about scientifically answering a subjective question like that?

Ben Page: The subjectivity has a lot to do with what you think a democracy is. Marty and I start from the premise that democracy means a government that responds to the wishes of the average citizen. If you take that premise, it’s quite feasible to investigate this question objectively.

Affluent people want some significantly different things from what the average person wants.

But it takes a lot of work. Marty Gilens spent about ten years gathering and analyzing data on 1,779 different policy issues that faced the federal government over a 20-year period.

Marty basically compared what comes out of the political system with what different groups of people want. Affluent people, roughly the top 20 percent, turn out to want some significantly different things from what the average person wants.

Marty also gathered data on organized interest groups, and he separated business corporations and business groups from mass-based groups.

You can do two things with all these data. You can simply compare how often these groups get what they want, and that tells you something descriptive about democracy, if you want to call it that.

By that measure, average citizens get what they want roughly two-thirds of the time. On the other hand, if you look at affluent people, they get what they want almost all the time. And organized interest groups also tend to get what they want more often than the average person.

So that’s the descriptive part of this. But the tricky thing is figuring out who’s exerting the influence. These descriptive results really don’t tell you how much influence the average citizen has.

For that you have to use multiple regression analysis. You have to look at what happens when you consider all these groups at the same time. Which ones get their way when they disagree with the others?

If you look at affluent people, they get what they want almost all the time.

When you analyze the data that way, it becomes clear that affluent people exert a lot of influence. Interest groups also have very substantial influence. That’s especially true for corporations and business-oriented groups.

The so-called mass-based groups, on the average, don’t represent the average citizen very well at all — and don’t have much impact anyhow.

Too Much: What would be an example of a mass-based group?

Ben Page: Anything with a large membership, including the NRA, American Legion, ethnic and religious groups, and so forth. Most of these groups take positions that are somewhat out of touch with the average citizen, except for labor unions and AARP, which tend to be very close to what the average person wants but have much less influence than the Beltway wisdom says they have.

The bottom line we’re getting to here: If you take into account all these interest groups and affluent individuals, average citizens have no detectable influence at all upon federal policy. Rather amazing.

Too Much: You’re currently coordinating a project that’s collecting data on the political machinations of America’s billionaires. Any surprises in what you’re finding?

Ben Page: It’s hard to study billionaires, because you can’t just knock on Bill Gates’s door and expect to get half an hour to talk with him. So what we’re doing is looking at all the public statements and recorded actions of billionaires, with “Web-scraping” techniques my colleague Jay Seawright developed. Anything that’s been reported and shows up on the Web, we’re organizing to develop systematic data.

Average citizens have no detectable influence on federal policy.

We started out looking at the 100 wealthiest U.S. billionaires. Based on a Chicago-area pilot survey of multi-millionaires that the National Opinion Research Center did for me and Larry Bartels and other political scientists, we suspected that our billionaires would not be enthusiastic about things like taxes, social spending, or government regulation.

But we discovered that many of these billionaires, who could get quoted any time they want, actually go out of their way not to say anything in public about issues like these.

So we pursued this a little further. Are these billionaires apolitical? Is that why they’re not saying anything?

It turns out that’s not the case at all. A number of the billionaires who say nothing do a lot. They contribute large amounts of money to candidates and ideological PACs with definite policy positions, like cut taxes on the wealthy, privatize Social Security, or abolish the estate tax.

We call this “stealth politics.” Billionaires can influence what happens in politics without any accountability. They don’t even have to answer questions from journalists about why they favor what they favor. And that’s a serious problem for democracy.

Too Much: The new book you’re working on carries the title Democracy in America. At what point does a democracy cease to be a democracy?

Ben Page: I would say there are degrees of democratic responsiveness. You can imagine perfect democracy, or a situation without any democracy at all, or anywhere in between. Drawing a line to say precisely when democracy begins would be arbitrary.

Billionaires can influence what happens in politics without any accountability.

But if you observe the United States right now, you discover that the average citizen has no detectable influence on policy. That’s not much of a democracy.

Too Much: Back in the mid 20th century, a period of much greater equality in America, the political science mainstream seemed to revolve around the notion of “pluralism,” the idea that we had many different actors — like business and labor — vying for political influence. Where does the political science mainstream flow today? How close to your perspective?

Ben Page: There’s been a big change since the pluralist days in the 1950s. That was during the Cold War, and you could be considered unpatriotic if you said anything about the United States that wasn’t wholeheartedly enthusiastic. In that era, David Truman and other political scientists made an argument that to some degree goes back to James Madison.

Madison worried about tyranny. He didn’t like democracy particularly, but he believed that popular control could help prevent government tyranny over what he considered natural rights.

And so Madison liked the idea of diverse interest groups, all contending for power. If you had a diverse large republic with many different interests, Madison felt that everyone would come out reasonably okay because different interests would offset each other.

The pluralists in the 1950s took that a step further, a step too far I think. You could read David Truman and think, gosh, the average American citizen really is doing great. Everybody’s interests are getting represented and everything’s coming out fine.

Almost no one today would openly make that argument.

Average people can do something positive about inequality.

Too Much: We all understand that labels tend to oversimplify. But if you had to pick one label for the political system we have in the United States today, what label would use? Democracy? Oligarchy? Plutocracy?

Ben Page: To me there are two different ways to put it, and I’m not really positive where I come out. One would be “biased pluralism.” That is, you believe that politics works more or less in the way David Truman said, but you see big biases in representation. The average citizen has little or no voice, and business comes out way ahead.

But the bigger that bias is, of course, the closer we come to the concept of “oligarchy” or “plutocracy.”

My colleague Jeff Winters is really marvelous at analyzing oligarchy, but it’s not a term I use. Perhaps that’s because I’m a wishy washy liberal and it seems too alarming. But also because I want to stick close to the data that I have actually analyzed.

When Marty and I wrote our article for Perspectives on Politics, a big fuss on the Internet got going when somebody used the word oligarchy in a subject heading. A Princeton study, the bloggers were saying, showed that we have an oligarchy in the United States. Nice juxtaposition.

Now we don’t really show that with our study. We do show that the average citizen has no influence or almost none. But our study doesn’t show exactly who within the affluent has the most influence.

Logically, you would think that the more wealth people have, the more influence they would also have. So our findings are consistent with the possibility that a very small number of very wealthy people are exerting an awful lot of influence. That’s consistent, but we didn’t really demonstrate it with that study.

Not every nation has as messed-up a response to inequality as the United States.

Too Much: The creator of Downton Abbey, the wildly popular TV series on the British aristocracy in the early 20th century, is going to be doing a new series on America’s original Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Imagine that you served as the historical adviser for this series. If you had the role, what would you want Americans today to learn from the series?

Ben Page: You could have a lot of fun, of course, showing the lifestyles of the Gilded Age rich and famous. But I would hope that this new series also gives some picture of what was happening to the average person.

The original Gilded Age was not a good time for American workers. They were getting pushed around and shot at. They were paid low wages and faced terrible working conditions. There was little regulation of business practices, working hours, or even child labor.

But I also would want the series to hold out some hope that average people can do something positive about inequality. I’d like people to see that things can change — because, in fact, things did change in the United States, in two big waves of political action, the first during the Populist and Progressive period that started in the late 19th century, the second in the New Deal era.

The Populists and Progressives made really big changes. They won a progressive income tax, regulations on railroads and other monopolistic enterprises, the beginnings of federal regulation of the economy. Then the New Deal came in the 1930s and much more thoroughly did the same kinds of things.

It’s very easy today to get cynical and despairing about inequality. But I think that’s the wrong response, particularly if you look around the world. Not every nation has as messed-up a response to inequality as the United States.

The Social Democracies and Christian Democracies of Western Europe have suffered stresses, but their social welfare systems remain largely intact. These nations just don’t have the extreme inequality and the misery at the bottom that the United States does.

Too Much: We beat back the original Gilded Age. What will it take to beat back our second Gilded Age?

Ben Page: It will definitely take mass mobilization. And that’s what the Populists were so terrific at. Starting in the South and the West with farmers’ cooperatives, they developed grassroots organizations that got people involved in politics and aware of what the big banks and railroads were doing to them.

But a lot of the ideas for economic and political reforms that originally came from the Populists weren’t enacted until the Progressives gained power.

The Progressive movement had two characteristics essential to making things happen. The Progressives operated in both major parties. The bipartisan symbols of that would be Theodore Roosevelt the Republican and Woodrow Wilson the Democrat.

The second characteristic: The Progressive movement operated as a cross-class alliance, across income and wealth categories.

You can’t do anything in the United States without having support from economically successful people. And the Populists learned that lesson. They resented even small-town bankers and many of the same people who later became leaders in the Progressive movement — and helped make things happen.

Now to have a cross-class alliance, you have to make compromises. Historically, some of the Progressive-era compromises weren’t great. A lot of working people actually became disenfranchised at the same time that women were getting the vote and senators were being elected directly. The nation saw changes that made urban politics in particular less democratic.

So creating a cross-class alliance can be tricky and difficult, but I think it’s essential. Nothing good is going to happen without an alliance that includes some wealthy people.

Too Much: Is this an exciting time to be a political scientist?

Ben Page: I’m excited about the work I’m doing, but I think it’s a discouraging time to be an American. And that’s really the bigger concern for me. We have a lot of work to do to make things better.

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the Institute for Policy Studies online monthly on excess and inequality. His latest book: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class (Seven Stories Press).

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(#187-1) April 8 2015. Full circle.

MORE THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING, MEMORY, WRITING,

AND KANBAN

I think a great deal about thinking—primarily because I have long been conscious of my cognitive deficiencies and have spent my life searching for workarounds.

I wasn’t diagnosed with my particular form of dyslexia until my early fifties. When a child, I became accustomed to concealing my inadequacies—mental and otherwise—because I was ashamed, and it seemed to me that both my mother, and life in general, would pounce on any weaknesses—and I came across generally as pretty intelligent.

I was—and I remain so—but being intelligent doesn’t mean you don’t have cognitive weaknesses. It does help you to conceal them rather better—and to appreciate that other people have their inadequacies too.

On top of that, my mother was doctor averse. She didn’t trust the profession, loathed what they cost, and her own experiences with them hadn’t worked out too well.

She had tried sending me to shrinks when I was four and five to make me more biddable—I was always a fiercely independent child—and when that, and sustained violence, had failed (and had nearly resulted in my death), packed me off to boarding school to sink or swim (and to my grandmother or aunts for most of my vacations). The first nine years of my life were pretty tough. The situation eased greatly when I was about nine.

• My mother married my much-loved step-father, Alfred Lyons—a man about a decade younger than her—who succeeded in calming her down (for a while). Eventually,  predictably, and tragically, she would destroy him. I knew from my early teens that this would happen—and that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. When I heard that Alfred had died prematurely—under decidedly grim circumstances—part of me died too.
• I was removed from my first boarding school, St.Gerard’s, in Ireland—where I had been younger and smaller than my peers—so bullied unmercifully—and sent to a boarding school in England, where I was the same age as my peers.
• I grew, taught myself unarmed combat from books, discovered I could defend myself more than effectively—and bullying ceased to be a problem.
• I started to thrive academically—and ended up academic top of my prep school.

All I knew, prior to that diagnosis of dyslexia, was that although my brain worked extraordinarily well in some ways, it couldn’t cope in others. For instance, I can’t remember telephone or car tag numbers, seize up when faced with forms, and couldn’t remember my character’s names when I started to write.

Hard to believe, but true. A character might start as Mary and evolve into Julia because I wanted to keep writing and was too impatient to check back. Eventually, I learned to keep a list of their names pinned up. Over time, my cognitive abilities—where writing is concerned—have improved dramatically. Where other matters are concerned, the less said the better.

If you think that doesn’t sound too bad, reflect that I’m only giving you a sample. Overall, my life would be vastly easier if I was decidedly less cognitively gifted—and flawed.

It truly amazes me that I can write at all—and I don’t mean a short school essay. Short, relatively simple essays don’t put too much of a strain upon the memory—and originality, style, humor,and technique can distract from other deficiencies.

Books—particularly the kind of long books I am partial to writing—are another matter entirely. They typically run to over 400 pages, and though my writing style is relatively clear (or so I hope) are packed full of plot surprises, twists, turns and characters to the point where it must seem to the reader that I must have an extraordinary memory to keep track of it all.

The truth is, of course, that I don’t have to keep track of it all—all the time—except in a broad sense. I merely have to anchor myself to a broad outline—and I am pretty good at thinking holistically—and then focus on the 2,000 words I intend to do that day.

We writers tend to think in words whereas readers think in pages. 2,000 words is roughly six pages (depending on typeface, paper size etc.).

I also rely heavily on memory joggers of one sort or another which capitalize on the fact that I am very responsive to either visual or auditory stimulus. Give me the title of a book and I may well not be able to recall too much about it—except in a general sense. Show me the physical book and my recall rockets. Similarly, if I have interviewed someone, my recall based upon my notes alone, will be modest. On the other hand, if I hear the sound of their voice—typically by starting to replay the recording—the content of the whole interview will come flooding back.

It would appear that my problem is less with my memory, as such, than with my searching mechanism—which, all too often, requires prompting. It searches well enough, but has a tendency to forget what to search for—and when. Some ideas are hard to classify and go into my brain without a tag attached. Trying to find a nameless idea is a squirrely pastime. We are back to memory joggers.

Over the years I have tried a wide variety of techniques to cope with this need, but have never found a complete answer—and doubt I ever will. Working in a book-lined study helps because all those spines are a constant source of inspiration. I also use ring-binders with labeled spines for much the same reason. Out of sight has a disconcerting tendency to be out of mind where I am concerned.

I am not averse to other techniques. I have long relied heavily on notes and databases—though I am an indifferent note taker. I tend to focus too much on the subject if I am interviewing someone—and, unfortunately, do not know shorthand. Recording solves that problem.

As for databases, they mostly work well enough in their different ways, but they function more as a memory extension than as part of the planned structure. In short, having the necessary data buried deep in my memory or database isn’t enough. I need to be reminded—frequently and thoroughly—to retrieve it and use it in a timely manner.

Checklists are an obvious solution—and I use them with some degree of success. However, unlike a Gannt Chart, for instance, they don’t visualize time—except as a series of dates—and they don’t lend themselves naturally to being viewed from different perspectives, and aren’t particularly easy to modify. True, you can cut and paste to change priorities, but the structure is essentially linear and connected.

So is there a better way—or a more complementary way? I say ‘complementary’ because I have no intention of giving up check-lists. They don’t do the whole job, but they do what they do exceedingly well.

I am increasingly beginning to think that the Kanban approach may be the solution. It displays tasks as if on a matrix of index cards. It can be used in a wide variety of ways, but the way I have in mind—for a story, for instance--the vertical would be characters and the horizontal would be time. Each card would represent an action and include a sense of place and any other relevant information. Where computerized index cards are concerned, you are not limited by space. You can drill down for all associated detail—including graphics, and multimedia.

For a publishing project, the vertical might be an action that needed to be done, the horizontal would be the time, and the card might indicate the specifics of the action and the status. 

Kanban started off as a simple system used to help with Japanese lean production, but has proved to be so flexible and effective that there are now numerous variations (both physical and computerized).

Ironically, back when I was in business in the early Seventies running an operating selling adding  machines and calculators, I controlled our entire marketing operation with the equivalent of a Kanban board without knowing the name at the time. I worked out the approach from first principles and implemented it using physical T-Cards (see below). T-cards display only the header, but extra information can be displayed on the concealed part.

I seem to be going full circle except that this time I will be using the computer equivalent. That said, I may be tempted to try the physical.

It is simple, powerful—and it works.

I regard the fact that I can and do write—and deal with considerable complexity—as something of a miracle and a triumph of the human spirit.

I never cease to wonder at it. From my perspective, being acutely and painfully aware of my cognitive limitations, I’m doing the impossible.

It is a truly exhilarating feeling.

But, I’ll get used to it—and take it for granted.

No, I won’t. I’ll continue to give thanks every waking day. It’s a wonderful thing to overcome one’s deficiencies (some of them) to achieve one’s goal.

To be able to write is really all I have ever wanted to do in life.

But, don’t be fooled. Writing may sound like a modest ambition. It probably doesn’t encompass either fame or fortune, for instance.

Maybe not—but writing is a license to explore every facet of our existence. It is the key to high adventure—and that is what I dreamed of—more than anything--when I was a prisoner in boarding school.

What do I seek when on my adventures?

Gold for the mind—insight. And I’m finding it.

Is it everything I hoped for?

It is way, way, better. It is a rich, deep, profound feeling that I have never been able to explain adequately—or describe in words.

I never will.

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