(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)
Raising Minimum Wage Is Not The [Simple] Answer [Which the Poorly Informed Often Assume]
Try explaining this to those who haven't thought about system dynamics ... and you'll often find some VERY IRATE simpletons prone to insulting anyone attempting careful reasoning.
When reading economic policy discussions I'm constantly reminded of a comment from a physician a decade ago. We were discussing interactions between Maryland state health policy and the local county Medical Association - from the point of view of system dynamics. My MD friend, head of the Medical Association, admitted that all the many little things wrong with clinical practices were trivial, compared with the dominant issues that affected public health. Rather, he admitted, the far bigger issue was that our various clinical services were grossly over-utilized today, compared to 60 years ago.
He was referring to the overwhelming rise of self-induced illnesses, due to obesity & lifestyle, which were themselves byproducts of dietary & lifestyle product advertising run amok. If you haven't worked in a clinical setting, you may not appreciate the sheer volume of US citizens who return daily, weekly or yearly, complaining about adult-onset diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, declining lung capacity, sleeplessness, muscle weakness .... while totally ignoring the common sense issues of eating better and less, smoking & drinking less, less drugs, more exercise, and other lifestyle choices. A common clinician's complaint is that they have near zero ability to enforce compliance. In other words, patients don't listen to common sense, and instead listen primarily to advertising.
The inverse of that point immediately came to mind when reading John Harvey's warning about expecting too much from raising minimum wages, and especially from the expected comments by people who ARE poorly informed, and don't WANT to be informed ... at least not yet.
It seems that our problem in political economics is a LACK of utilization? Underutilization of our capacity for careful reasoning and inquiry.
Worse, the extent of that resistance to rational thought often seems to have an almost religious tone. Perhaps it's a variant of St. Augustine's old prayer.
"Lord, let me be something other than ignorant .... but NOT YET!"
Why not now? And why all the anger? The resentment is too common to be caused by surprise & denial alone. We seem to have cultivated a hostility to learning. What's wrong with learning? Why the aversion to considering emerging details and subtly tuning ongoing perspectives and responses to a world that is constantly made more subtly complicated ... by our own flood of new insights and inventions? So what is so wrong with being wrong? Most of us feel quite happy to note that we no longer think and act the way we did at age 5, or at some prior state of learning, and easily excuse our prior selves ... since we've moved on. So why don't we extend the same generosity to each other that we do to ourselves? One clue is that criticism always triggers a defense mechanism, and hence resentment follows excessive criticism.
Have we created a culture that is too critical of people who have not yet learned enough, so that too many are deathly afraid of being wrong? Does being wrong HAVE to invoke a fight-or-flight panic response? And inversely, are we REALLY more secure if we seek the comfort and protection of the uninformed?
This is not a new topic. People have discussed this very issue for centuries.
"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it." Henry Ford
"People will do anything in their power to avoid thinking." [Unnamed, 18th Naturalist, quoted by Louis Agassiz]
"The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it." Voltaire
And of course we still face the question of what to do about our current predicament. Something simplistic and faith-based ... or some subtle, unpredictable cultural tuning, based on careful reasoning?
Everything is connected to everything, so for our Adaptive Rate to stay the same ... everything beneath the surface has to change. That means we have to LET everything ... and everybody ... change. Learning is easy, and amazingly fast ... IF we let ourselves and others learn, and don't generate a citizenry which is overly resentful of anything that does smack of learning.
No need to get angry, but perhaps an unadapted, unchanged citizen ... and citizenry ... is the most terrible thing of all to waste.
