So why wouldn’t Christians vote in favor of policies that aid the poor?

A few years ago, I learned of a cognitive bias known as the Just World Hypothesis, and the more I learn about it, the more it explains the odd partnership of Christians and the rich. The Just World Hypothesis can be summarized with those common trite remarks:

• What goes around comes around.
• You reap what you sow.
• He got what was coming to him.

It’s the fallacy that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. It’s the ideal result of the Golden Rule that we all naively wish was always the case.

How does this hypothesis help to solve our conservatism conundrum? Well, logically it follows directly that, if you grant that there is an omnipotent deity that is looking out for our best interests, then everyone deserves exactly what they get. The poor are poor for a reason; the rich are rich for a reason; you deserve that membership to the country club, and that other guy deserves to have cancer. Pat Robertson gets press every so often for proclaiming that Haiti or Japan deserves its natural disaster for not obeying the Lord, and he gets written off by moderate Christians as a whacky radical, but to me, the Problem of Evil really is one of the strongest nails in the coffin of theism. If God is omnipotent and just, then we all deserve what we get.

Once you’ve bought into the Just World worldview, the conservative “don’t tax the rich” and “don’t help the poor” is an obvious corollary. Even if you’re poor. Another thing that has vexed me for years is how the poor could vote Republican, when it’s obviously not in their best economic interests. If you think that you deserve to be poor, for a reason not comprehendible by a mere mortal such as yourself, and the wealthy 1% deserve what they enjoy, then it makes perfect – yet twisted and fallacious – sense to vote for the party who will institute conservative policies.

I want to stress that the arrow of causation is not clearly defined here. I suspect that both the religious and political viewpoints stem from an underlying tendency to prefer the idea that the universe is ordered fairly. Personally, understanding this makes me feel better about people that vote conservative. They aren’t total jerks lacking any sense of empathy; they’re just reasoning sensibly from a different, albeit fallacious, starting premise.

The irony is that believing the the world is just only makes it less so.

For one, I was in a country in which everyone over the age of five spoke perfect English, but they chose to speak a different language to each other. You mean my mother tongue isn’t the inherently superior human language? It sounds stupid in retrospect, but I remember thinking that.

Look again at those two ideas. They are both inherently Liberal ideas.

Over the years, I have noticed that I am almost always in political agreement with other expatriates that I meet. We generally hold similar values on the left-right political spectrum, both in financial and social issues. I always attributed this to the unavoidable epiphany brought on by immersion in a foreign culture. It necessarily shakes any conservative patriotism you have to the core.

Just recently, in the past couple years, I’ve been reading about the psychology of decision making and politics, and I think I may be mistaken about why expats tend to be more liberal. The positive correlation between voluntary emigration and Liberal values is still very strong, but I think I may have the causation backwards. It’s not that living abroad makes you liberal; it’s that having a liberal mindset makes you want to live abroad. People on the left end of the political and moral spectrum are much more open to having new experiences and hearing new, possibly conflicting, points of view. Conservatives are much happier with what they know. It’s even right there in the meaning of the two words: Liberals are for change and rocking the boat, and Conservatives are for maintaining the status quo.

Here’s a TED Talk on the subject:

I just sent off an absentee ballot today for a state primary. Just as it’s in the Conservatives’ interest to make same-day voter registration difficult, which tends to disenfranchise poor and minority voters (who will always vote Liberal), it would also be in their interest to stymy the ballots from non-military expats, although I suspect there aren’t enough of us for them to care…yet.

By complete chance, April 17, 2012 was also Equal Pay Day, which sounds like a glorious day of liberal celebration, but is actually very sad indeed. Equal Pay Day is the day upon which a working woman has earned enough to fill the wage gap between her and her male colleagues for the previous year. Let me state that more concretely. The income American woman earned, on average, from January 1, 2011 to April 17, 2012 is equivalent to how much an American man in her same position made from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011. From the Equal Pay Day website:

The next Equal Pay Day is Tuesday, April 17, 2012. This date symbolizes how far into 2012 women must work to earn what men earned in 2011.

Wow! I knew that women’s salaries were lower across the board, but I didn’t realize it was quite so much.

I love the coincidence that both these methods of representing a percentage of income by calendar dates fell on the same day. The fact that a man’s tax burden is equivalent to a woman’s inequality gender burden is quite striking. To my male readers, imagine working side by side with equals in your organization, but that you were the only one that had to pay taxes, and your coworkers kept all their gross salary. How would that make you feel?

There aren’t a lot of options on the What You Can Do page if you’re not an employer, other than raise awareness and complain to legislators. Perhaps all we can hope to do is instill a value of fairness and gender financial equality in our kids and hope some of them grow up to be CEOs.

If you’re going to talk to someone about this topic – and I hope you are – there’s one arithmetical error you should be aware of that is very easy to fall victim to. This coincidence of Equal Pay Day falling on Tax Freedom Day does not mean that the tax rate and the female salary deficit are the same percentage! If a man earns 4 apples a year, and a woman earns 3 apples, she is earning 75% of the man’s salary, or 25% less. But to make it to Equal Pay Day the next year, she needs to work 33% of the year (not 25%!), since the 1 apple she needs to make it to the male annual income is 33% of her annual 3 apples. If Equal Pay Day were to fall on Tax Freedom Day in this fruity hypothetical example, the average tax rate would be 33% and the female pay deficit would be 25%.

The real numbers are that, on average, American women make 77.5% (22.5% less) of an equivalent male salary, and the average American pays 29% of their income in taxes.

It’s Leslie Nielsen!

With their eyes aligned, Romney’s mouth is much, much lower than Newt’s, leaving very little chin on one image…

…and a Jay Leno-esque chin on the other.

As I said…they’re just so different!

It is becoming more and more popular for marriages in Spain to be “civil”, done at the town hall, rather than religious, done in the church. Starting in 2009, the majority of Spanish weddings have been non-religious town hall ceremonies.

When you add these two things together, the fact that people are accustomed to and love to have parties to celebrate the birth of a child, and the fact that many people don’t see what a celibate man in robes who actually thinks he can, and should, turn wine into blood by uttering magic words has to do with celebrating family events…you get somebody suggesting that a government official should say some inspiring words to a crowd of a newborn’s family members.

I wonder if they use official government water? No I’m kidding. I looked it up. Apparently a civil baptism is a ceremony to celebrate a new Spaniard getting citizenship. The ceremony usually includes a reading of several articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the UN in November 1989:

Article 6 – 1: States Parties recognize that every child has the inherent right to life.

Article 6 – 2: States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child.

Article 12 – 1: States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

Article 12 – 2: For this purpose, the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law.

Article 27 – 1: States Parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.

Article 27 – 2: The parent(s) or others responsible for the child have the primary responsibility to secure, within their abilities and financial capacities, the conditions of living necessary for the child’s development.

Article 27 – 3: States Parties, in accordance with national conditions and within their means, shall take appropriate measures to assist parents and others responsible for the child to implement this right and shall in case of need provide material assistance and support programmes, particularly with regard to nutrition, clothing and housing.

Article 27 – 4: States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to secure the recovery of maintenance for the child from the parents or other persons having financial responsibility for the child, both within the State Party and from abroad. In particular, where the person having financial responsibility for the child lives in a State different from that of the child, States Parties shall promote the accession to international agreements or the conclusion of such agreements, as well as the making of other appropriate arrangements.

I remember the mountain of paperwork I had to fill out and drive to various government offices around my province after my daughter was born to get her “into the system” so she could suckle the socialist teat. It’s a big hassle, one worthy of a glass of champagne upon completion.

To me, a civil baptism deciding what country a human has allegiance to, before he is able to think for himself, based solely on the geography where he escaped the womb and allegiances of his parents is just as immoral as deciding what religious beliefs he should hold based on the same criteria. But most people don’t really put that much meaning into it. It’s really just a party for a happy reason, which is something I can get behind.

It might be nice to have a president, for once, that can crawl up walls.

Photo of the politician by Gage Skidmore. Photo of amphibian by Eric Highfield. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

I also found this news report, which is in Spanish, of course.

Apparently there are recycling companies who have some interest in receiving these plastic caps. They have offered to donate 200€ for each metric ton (1,000 kg = 2,204 lb) of caps collected. The little eleven-year-old girl, Aitana, requires an operation in Boston (“which is very expensive since medicine is private over there”, the reporter mentioned) that costs 200,000€.

Let’s do some math, shall we? For every kilogram of bottle caps I save, the company will give 0.20€. I asked the internet how much a bottle cap weighs, and the general consensus is that it’s between 2-3 grams. That means that I need 333-500 bottle caps to complete my kilogram, which comes out to 17-25 bottle caps for one euro cent going to Aitana’s 200,000€ operation.

Further research has uncovered the recycling companies’ motivation behind such an effort.

Plastic bottle caps are often made from a different type of plastic from the bottles they’re attached to. Soda bottles are generally made from Type 1 Plastic (Polyethylene Terephthalate) while bottle caps are made from Type 5 Plastic (Polypropylene). These different types of plastic have to be recycled separately. If the bottle and the cap were recycled in the same batch of plastic, the two different plastics would melt unevenly and the whole batch would be ruined.

Whoever came up with this idea is an absolute genius. Ignoring any marketing philanthropic “corporate image” benefits for the recycling companies – of which there aren’t many since I can’t seem to find the name of any participating companies – it seems pretty obvious that it would cost considerably more than 200€ to remove the caps from 500,000 bottles, even if it could be mechanized. The task of getting the general public to properly separate items for recycling must be one of the hardest issues for recycling companies to tackle.

The media, of course, absolutely loves tearjerking stories of little dying girls, so there’s no problem getting the message out. Local governments are also suckers for positive press, and are willing to set up bottle cap collection centers at the town halls. Schools can use it as an easy way to teach simple philanthropy to the nation’s children.

Your average citizen that decides to participate in this scheme by saving bottle caps isn’t going to do the math and see that, if it takes five seconds to save each bottle cap, then it requires three and a half hours of work to produce a single euro to help the little girl. But, what it steals from you in paying ridiculously low wage is made up for by the positive feelings of wellbeing that philanthropy brings. I’m certain that, psychologically, someone saving bottle caps is going to be happier than a cynic who has done the math and refuses to based on the triviality of it.

It’s nice to find a scenario in which all parties involved come out winning.

• The people saving the caps get to feel good about themselves.

• The schools get to teach philanthropy give children the experience of happiness through helping the less fortunate.
• Local governments and organizations get to put on a positive philanthropic face.
• The recycling companies save money, which, in turn, results in lower government contract bids and tax money saved.
• The environment is ultimately less contaminated.
• A little girl gets a life saving operation. (I’d be skeptical of them reaching their goal, but this isn’t the first iteration, so they’ve done it before.)

It’s a win-win-win-win-win-win-win situation. Like I said, pure genius.

Think, People!

Here are two particular offenders that I’ve seen in the last week posted by more than one of my Facebook friends. If you have posted this, I’m not directly calling you an idiot, just pointing out that, either you and I have very different ideologies, or you did something without thinking, which is something I do all the time. If you still believe your support of the statement to be valid, then by all means explain yourself in a comment.

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered, “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

He’s saying, in terribly fragmented sentences, that what most surprises him about Humanity is that we plan and worry about the future and strive for wealth. Seriously?

My friend, Lance, who re-posted this in order to mock it, nailed his comment. I’m paraphrasing, since I can’t find the exact comment:

The Dalai Lama is a doofus. That’s what we do! That’s like “our thing”. Saying that’s what most surprises you about humanity, is like saying that what most surprises you about cows is that they go moo.

I get the whole romantic Carpe Diem, “dance like nobody’s watching”, vibe, which is great, but no one actually does that. The very reason our species has become so dominant is that we, unlike all our furry planet-mates, developed the capacity to not live solely in the present.

There are people who have suffered brain damage and specifically lost their ability to form memories and plan for the future, and no one would call that state the pinnacle of human existence. In fact they require constant care and attention (which requires wealth that the Dalai Lama would prefer that we not have saved up for a rainy day). The Dalai Lama himself is so concerned about the future that he’s discarded the millennia-old tenet of his religion about how the Dalai Lama is reincarnated throughout history, and wants to appoint a successor before his death. The irony of his power play is that by discarding the reincarnation doctrine, he’s also discarding his entire claim to authority. That’s the problem with Religion’s trick of setting the standards just out of human reach and claiming that past dead leaders really did attain those standards (e.g sinlessness, enlightenment, etc.). Present day leaders can’t possibly live up to them, and are destined to appear as hypocrites. I could say that what most surprises me about the Dalai Lama is that, as a leader, he’s such an egotistical control freak, but I won’t…because that’s so incredibly human of him.

I always say to people, “No one earns $100 million. You steal $100 million.” People earn $10 an hour. People earn $40,000 a year. “Earn” means work. Okay? It doesn’t mean steal, which with these vast amounts of money, of course you steal them.

Fran Lebowitz

This sounds very clever and empowering at first glance, particularly in the midst of the present Occupy Wall Street movement against bankers. Believe me, I’m very much in favor of Wall Street reform and taxing the billionaires at a much higher rate than the rest of us, but this statement, after a little thought, is absolutely ridiculous. It’s logical conclusion is not a place I want to live.

Bob is working hard at his sweat-inducing factory job earning a $40k salary. One day, Bob realizes that the weather hasn’t been very good this year, and, having grown up on an apple orchard, knows what that means. So he goes down to his local farmers market and, at the opportunity cost of foregoing some of the pleasures his $40k-earning colleagues enjoy, buys up as many barrels of apples as he can afford. Sure enough, when harvest season comes along, there aren’t many apples on the store shelves, and the price shoots up. Bob then backs his pick-up into the farmer’s market and starts selling his apples that he bought at the original price at this new elevated price. According to Fran Lebowitz, any profit he has made merely by foresight and thought has been stolen! She doesn’t specify from whom, but I assume she means that Bob should apologize and give that money back to society.

John works with Bob at the factory and also earns $40k sweating away his 40-hour week. One particular part of the manufacturing process at his plant has always struck John as particularly laborious, and he’s certain there’s another way. While his coworkers are out at the pub most nights, John stays in his garage at home tinkering with his workshop. After years of refining his design, he patents it and starts up a company to market it. What he’s designed is a piece that can be fit onto one of the machines at his factory to make the process much more efficient so they can produce twice as many units per day. His device, which costs only $50 to manufacture, will save his ex-employer, and thousands of similar factories around the country, at least $5,000 per day. How much should he charge them for the device? Fran Lebowitz would suggest that charging any more than what it costs him to pay his $40k/year employees to manufacture the device would be stealing. WTF, Franny?

The worst thing about this Lebowitz quotation is that it leads logically to exactly to the “no incentive for innovation or hard work” communist hell hole that the Conservatives think all Liberals are trying to take us to with “class warfare”. Passing this stuff around only hurts the Liberal cause.

I totally stole this idea from Dustin Timbrook, the artist that did this masterpiece.

To conclude, I’d like to state that I enjoy these little quotes as much as the next social network addict, and some of them are really good, thought-provoking and important to spread. And the social networks have done an excellent job in facilitating the spread, haven’t they? Zuckerberg’s term is “frictionless sharing”. I just wish that people would put some more thought into whether or not they really want to support a statement before hitting “Share”.

Recently I read an article by Washington Post columnist, Ezra Klein, about some research into the forces acting on this political pendulum. He cites a paper written by Larry M. Bartels, of Vanderbilt University, entitled Ideology and Retrospection in Electoral Responses to the Great Recession. Here’s a bit of the abstract, although the entire paper is worth reading:

My analyses suggest that voters consistently punished incumbent governments for bad economic conditions, with little apparent regard for the ideology of the government or global economic conditions at the time of the election. I find no evidence of consistent ideological shifts in response to the crisis, either to the left or to the right, but some evidence of electoral responses to specific fiscal policy choices—most notably, a boost in incumbent governments’ electoral support associated with spending on economic stimulus programs.

I have long since been irked that voters don’t vote based on issues, and now this paper has made me even more cynical about the knee-jerk thoughtlessness of the electorate. Apparently, when we are all averaged out, we tend to vote with the simplest of algorithms:

And what is the best indicator of whether or not the average voter’s life sucks? That’s right! The Economy! Check out these depressing charts from Bartels’ paper…

You can think of the x-axis as being how well the economy is doing, and the y-axis is how well the incumbent governing party did in the election.

What the incumbent government does during the crisis can have some effect, however. For instance, if there is some stimulus spending, they can soften their inevitable decline a little bit. But the absolute worst thing a government that wants to stay in power can do during an economic crisis is to cut spending. Behold:

Surprise, surprise! What do the Republicans in the US Congress – who have, on more than one occasion, mentioned that their primary goal is not to better the nation, but to defeat Obama in 2012 – want more than anything? To cut discretionary stimulus spending! Republicans are such political geniuses. Of course, they have to be, since their ideology tends to screw the majority.

I really wish, more than anything, that, as I get older and incrementally wiser, I could find reasons to be less cynical about politics, but that just isn’t happening. Can anyone see anything to be optimistic about in this data? This strong correlation between the economy and government turnover is, of course, terrible news for Obama. If such a charismatic leader can’t buck this trend, then it really is a law of human governance.

Nora: [cry] Daddy! Daddy! Give me your hand, Daddy! [cry]

Daddy: Nora, do you want me to sit down [in this comfortable chair near the crib]?

Nora: [cry] No! Give me your hand, Daddy! [cry]

Daddy: Okay, if you don’t want me to sit down, then I’m going to leave.

Nora: [wail] Your hand! Daddy!! [cry]

Daddy: Okay, I’m leaving. Let me know when you want me to sit down. [leaves the room]

Nora: [screams]

[30 seconds of suffered punishment]

Daddy: [opens door] Nora, would you like me to sit down?

Nora: [sob] Daddy, sit down! [sniffle]

Daddy: Okay, I’ll sit down, but only if you sit down [in your crib] too.

Nora: Daddy, sit down.

Daddy: If you won’t sit down, then I’m going to leave.

Nora: [sits down fast] Daddy, sit down.

Daddy: Okay. [sits down]

[30 seconds of enjoyed reward]

Daddy: Nora, you need to lie down.

Nora: No.

Daddy: [starts to get up] If you won’t lie down, I’m leaving.

Nora: Sit down! [lies down]

Daddy: [sits back in chair] Good girl.

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: What?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: What?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: What do you want?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: [silence]

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: Nora, you need to be quiet, okay?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: If you won’t be quiet, I’m going to leave.

Nora: Sit down. [shuts up]

Once I can get her to lie down, be still and quiet, getting her to fall asleep is usually just a matter of 3-4 minutes of sitting in a comfortable chair in the dark. I could keep going, successively moving myself further out the door, but I don’t mind a nice contemplative sit at the end of the day.

Of course this isn’t a new and innovative parenting technique. Behavioral psychologists call it successive approximations, in rhetoric it’s called moving the goalposts, and when the mafia does it, it’s called extortion. It’s a common method used by the powerful to get the weak to do what they want them to do.

I’m sorry, but due to budget concerns, we’re going to have to cancel your pension program…although…the accountants say we could afford it if you could work on Saturdays.

Like all manipulation, it can be unethical, but it doesn’t have to be. Whether your raising rent, freeing hostages or haggling on cheap flights to Larnaca, it’s a good negotiation technique to have in your toolkit.