William K. Black — Howard Dean Wants to Continue Austerity’s Assault on the Working Class

The Democrats are never ever going to figure this out because they are fixated on the Clinton surplus.

And even if they do figure it out, in order to be effective politically, persuasion has to be based on a moral argument rather than reasoning in terms of economic theory and providing facts and figures.

The fundamental problem is that a majority of Americans of all classes view indebtedness as immoral and irresponsible, especially growing indebtedness . 

This is going to be a tough nut to crack. 

While reasoning may be part of the argument, it is unlikely to carry the day with enough people to reverse course in the polls that politicians look at.

The framing must be based on morality rather than reason to work politically, and the argument must be based chiefly on rhetoric (persuasion) rather than logic (reasoning from evidence).

Conservatives figured this out long ago. Liberals are still clueless about it for the most part and when they attempt to use it they are clumsy with it because it doesn't fit their thinking style.

This does not imply countering the indebtedness is immoral view with arguments against that view, which will only reinforce it in the minds of those holding it. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff observes that most people  "moderates" comprising the political "center." They are biconceptual and hold aspects of the conservative and liberal world views characterized by the strict father world view and nurturing partner world view respectively. Even those whose view is dominated by the strict father are susceptible to appeal to the nurturing parent view. Moreover, dominance can shift through persuasion. The "Reagan Democrats" are a good example.

Rather than argue against the strict father-conservative point of view, liberals should instead appeal to the nurturing parent world view that they hold. Polling shows that most Americans are more inclined to the nutting parent world view and can be persuaded by arguments based on the morality of this point of view.

New Economic Perspectives
Howard Dean Wants to Continue Austerity’s Assault on the Working Class
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Scott Adams — The Thinking Filters

Logic versus rhetoric, reason versus persuasion.

Scott Adams's Blog
The Thinking Filters

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert

Our Biggest Problem Is Lack of Utilization ... of Reason & Careful Consideration

   (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.

Chris Mooney — Surprise: Liberals Are Just as Morally Righteous as Conservatives

Like George Lakoff has been saying. Liberals need to lead with moral arguments as conservative do, instead of leading with reasoned argument. The heart trumps the head in persuasion. Save reasoning for justification of moral argument.

...much research has suggested that the basic moral systems of the left and the right are very different. If you follow George Lakoff, liberals have a "nurturant parent" morality, centered on caring and empathy, as opposed to conservatives' "strict father" morality, centered on rules and obedience. If you follow Jonathan Haidt, meanwhile, then liberals feel strong moral convictions about issues involving harm and fairness, whereas conservatives root their morality in authority, tribalism, and even emotions of disgust.

There's no reason to doubt that these differences are real. But the new study suggests that in spite of them, both the left and the right can get very fired up about politics. And when they let their deep-seated moral emotions drive their political views, they may do so with equal zeal.

Mother Jones
Surprise: Liberals Are Just as Morally Righteous as Conservatives
Chris Mooney

George Lakoff — The New York Times Uncovers Conservative Attacks and Then Prints One; Both Are on the Front Page

As the great linguist Charles Fillmore discovered in 1975, all words are cognitively defined relative to conceptual "frames" -- structures we all use to think all the time. Frames don't float in the air; they are neural circuits in our brains. Frames in politics are not neutral; they reflect an underlying value system. That means that language in politics is not neutral. Political words do not just pick out something in the world. They reflect value-based frames. If you successfully frame public discourse, you win the debate. 

A common neuroscience estimate is that about 98 percent of thought is unconscious and automatic, carried out by the neural system. Daniel Kahneman has since brought frame-based unconscious thought into the public arena in what he has called "System 1 thinking." Since frames carry value-based inferences with them, successfully framing public discourse means getting the public to adopt your values, and hence winning over the public by unconscious brain change, not by open discussion of the values inherent in the frames and the values that undergird the frames....

The reason that those of us in the cognitive and brain sciences write so passionately about framing issues is that unconscious thought and framing are not generally understood -- especially in progressive circles. Most progressives who went to college studied what is called Enlightenment reason, a theory of reason coming from Descartes around 1650 -- and which was historically important in 1650. The Cartesian theory of how reason works has since been largely disproved in the cognitive and brain sciences.

The Cartesian theory assumes that all thought is conscious, that it is literal (that is, it fits the world directly and uses no frame-based or metaphorical thought), that reason uses a form of mathematical logic (not frame-based logic or metaphorical logic), and that words are neutral and fit the world directly. Many liberal economists have been trained in this mode of thought and assume that the language used in economic theory is neutral and just fits the world as it is. They are usually not trained in frame semantics, cognitive linguistics, and related fields. The same is often true of liberal journalists as well. Both often miss the fact that conservatives have successfully reframed economic terms to fit their values, and that the economic terms in public discourse no longer mean what they do in economics classes.

Part of what the Cartesian theory of reason misses is the real brain mechanism that allows the conservative communication theory to be effective. By framing language to fit conservative values and by getting their framing of the language to dominate public debate, conservatives change the public's brains by the following mechanism. When a frame circuit is activated in the brain, its synapses are strengthened. This means that the probability of future activation is raised and probability of the frame becoming permanent in the brain is raised. Whenever a word defined by that frame is used, the frame is activated and strengthened. When conservatives successfully reframe a word in public discourse, that word activates conservative frames and with those frames, the conservative value system on which the frames are based. When progressives naively use conservatively reframed words, they help the conservative cause by strengthening the conservative value system in the brains of the public.

Liberals, in adhering to the old Cartesian theory of reason, will not be aware of their own unconscious values, will take then for granted, and will think that all they have to do is state the facts and the public will be convinced rationally. The facts are crucial, but they need to framed in moral terms to make moral sense and a moral impact....

The word at issue is "redistribution." The subject matter is the flow of wealth in the society and what it should be. This is a fundamentally moral issue, and the major political framings reflect two different moral views of democracy itself....

The Huffington Post
The New York Times Uncovers Conservative Attacks and Then Prints One; Both Are on the Front Page
George Lakoff | Goldman Distinguished Professor Of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC Berkeley

It used to be called "brainwashing" in the Fifties. Now it is called public relations and marketing & advertising.

Drew Vogel — Atheism and MMT

Ok, what the hell do these two hobby horses of mine have to do with one another? What bearing does the non-existence of God have on economics generally and monetary theory in particular? When you put it like that, basically none. And yet, I think the are reasons to expect that the online atheist community could be more receptive than others to MMT's central message, and might even be well-positioned to help spread the message around. The case for MMT can easily be tailored to appeal to atheists (especially progressive atheists already dismayed and embarrassed by the prevalence of lazy libertarian cant within the community). Atheists can be co-opted into the MMT cause by pointing out how MMT can be an enormous help in achieving important goals of the atheist community, especially in terms of expanding public funding for scientific research projects....

The Daily Drew
Atheism and MMT
Drew Vogel

(h/t Andy Blatchford on FB)

Paul Bloom — The Baby In The Well: The case against empathy

The case is against empathy as the sole explanation for morality, although it does figure prominently in a comprehensive moral theory.

The New Yorker
The Baby In The Well: The case against empathy
Paul Bloom
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

See also Book Talk: Of apes and atheists - is empathy evolution? by Ed Stoddard at Reuters.

Daniel Little — Hirschman on the passions

Albert Hirschman is an important social theorist, generally classified as an economist, who often placed the varieties and sources of action at the center of his writings. (Here is an appreciation of Hirschman by Cass Sunstein in the New York Review of Books; link.) This interest in the actor is particularly evident in Hirschman's book, The Passions and the Interests (1977) -- with an interesting twist. The book is a contribution to the history of ideas rather than contemporary social theory. Hirschman wants to know how the pursuit of personal gain came to be viewed as the central human virtue, the foundational assumption of much of the social sciences, and the foundation of the liberal ideal of society. And implicitly, he wants to know if we can arrive at a more adequate theory of the good society by reconsidering some of those assumptions....

One way of characterizing Hirschman's leading intuition in this book is the question of whether different kinds of society reflect different mentalities at the level of the ordinary actors within them. Is there a "spirit" of capitalism, a characteristic set of motives and ways of thinking that its denizens possess? Is this spirit different from those associated with feudalism or the socioeconomic system of the ancient world? And how would various passions be linked to various features of the social order?

Understanding Society
Hirschman on the passions
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand, and Thomas Aquinas = Exploding Heads

Following up on Paul Ryan's recent repudiation of Ayn Rand and embrace of Thomas Aquinas, Mike Kimel point us to a couple of arguments Aquinas mounts in the Summa Theologica — one against interest, which is also prohibited in Islam, and the other to the effect that the purpose of wealth is to provide aid to the poor. Aquinas also asserts that it is no sin to appropriate the private property of others for survival, if society doesn't provide the means of subsistence.

Interestingly, both Ayn Rand and Thomas Aquinas professed to be followers  of Aristotle in asserting the reason is the defining characteristic of human nature. The assumption that humans are "rational animals" also underlies REH. However, Ayn Rand and those subscribing to REH hold that rationality   equates with individual pursuit of maximum utility economically. Aquinas could not disagree more. He holds that rationality and faith are compatible rather than mutually exclusive, as Rand thought.

The views of Aquinas that Kimel mentions stand in stark contrast to the foundational assumptions of modern capitalism, especially neoliberal economics. However, in the mind of Aquinas he was just providing a solid rational basis for the teaching of the gospels, which is a matter of faith, showing the compatibility of faith and reason.

Jesus was much more direct,however, and cut to the chase:

"...but seek ye first the reign of God and His righteousness, and all these shall be added to you." Matthew 6:33 (Young's Literal Translation)

"...Verily I say to you, inasmuch as ye did it to one of these my brethren — the least — to me ye did it." Matthew 25:40 (Young's Literal Translation)

"Treasure not up to yourselves treasures on the earth, where moth and rust disfigure, and where thieves break through and steal, but treasure up to yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth disfigure, and where thieves do not break through nor steal, for where your treasure is, there will be also your heart." Matthew 6:19-21 (Young's Literal Translation)

"... 'If thou dost will to be perfect, go away, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me.'" Matthew 19:21 (Young's Literal Translation)

These are called "hard sayings." Many either ignore them or else reinterpret them to suit themselves. But the meaning is abundantly clear, and the message is incompatible with what Paul Ryan represents.

The entire Sermon on the Mount, including the Beatitudes (Matthew, chapters 5-7) are considered by most Christians to be the formula for discipleship, and scholars, who often argue over the authenticity of sayings attributed to Jesus, are in general agreement that the Sermon on the Mount represents authentic sayings of Jesus, probably very close to the words he uttered on the occasion. So there should be no dispute over this.

Read it at Angry Bear
Ayn Rand v. Thomas Aquinas in Paul Ryan's Mind

by Mike Kimel