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Explorations Outside
As it is, most US employees do not find their jobs engaging - just 36% according to a recent Gallup poll. But that turns out to be over twice as high as the global average. And US employee engagement has been rising steadily over the past decade, in contrast to what’s happening in the rest of the world, including Europe. Even in Germany employee engagement has been flat since 2001 and is now a dismal 17%, according to Gallup's 2020 survey.
Wellbeing is often described as a combination of happiness and life satisfaction, although some criticize the focus on feeling good as rather shallow , favoring instead a concept of wellbeing that recognizes the value of living a meaningful life. However, it may be too much to expect people to live both feel-good and meaningful lives. Sure, a good number do manage that trick (at least if you read their posts and obituaries) but many don’t - largely because what makes people happy or satisfied tends not to be what makes their lives meaningful. Here’s a summary of some relevant research…
Those who dismiss the concept of scarcity often embrace an attitude of “if there’s a will, there’s a way”. Americans are steeped in this way of thinking: You can do it! Don’t let the doubters hold you back!
The first chart is based on annual surveys of violent crime victims, covering the period of 2008-2019 and collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Unfortunately, the BJS did not provide separate data for Asian victims, who are included in the ‘Other’ category... The next chart is hate crime data from thousands of law enforcement agencies, covering the period of 2015-2019 and compiled by the FBI... The last chart summarizes 2015-2019 survey data on the rate of violent victimization by race or ethnicity. This time the BJS did provide specific information on the victimization of Asians.
Root cause attributions are often part of an ideological argument that highlights the opposition between Us and Them. Some common themes:
Their explanations of human suffering are false.
The dominant view is wrong.
The so-called experts are wrong.
Old ways of thinking must be discarded.
We know the true source of human suffering
We know how to think the right way.
If word get around, posts on social media may eventually impact one’s employability. A 2017 Harris Poll of more than 2,300 US human resource professionals found that 70% of employers used social media to screen job candidates and 37% specifically looked for what other people were posting about them. And employers weren't just looking at social media – 69% used online search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to research candidates as well.
The timeline of online punishment is inherently uncertain. When does an individual have the right for the shaming to stop, and how is this even possible when the shaming is recorded on the internet? If the shaming does not stop, how can the shamed ever repair their reputations and relationships? Convicted criminals do their time and pay their dues - but there are no parallel concepts in the world of online shaming. Even if the online chatter subsides for a while, there’s no telling when it might come roaring back.
“…Humility, so that each of society’s competing factions might comprehend that it will not always hold power. Tolerance, so that the habitual reaction to a difference of opinion is the shrug rather than the bayonet. And forbearance, so that the immediate rush of victory can be subordinated to longer-term ambition. Little by little, we are losing all three…”
But bounded rationality fails spectacularly when untethered to something real, - that is, unless it is grounded in the real world…
The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: sounds good to me. These rights pretty much cover the purview of government, not counting the obligation to protect other species - but that’s a subject for another day. For now we’re dealing with what governments owe their humans. First, some clarification according to my sense of these three basic rights.
The US murder rate was 5.0 per 100,000 inhabitants, and the robbery rate was 81.6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019. Here’s what the five-year trend looks like: …
…Which got me thinking: if human experience and behavior is the product of gene-environment interactions, what does liberty even mean? The dictionary says liberty is “the condition of being free from control or restrictions”, but being a “product” of genes+environment doesn’t leave any room for being free from control.
“The impact of missed education could be lasting. “If a child is not reading at grade level by the third grade, they are four times less likely to graduate high school,” says Christakis. “And low-income children are six times less likely.” - Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children’s Research Institute, quoted in The New Scientist September 2, 2020
People often change their political minds as they get older. Adolescents and young adults tend to form political opinions that reflect those of their peers or are more extreme versions of their parents’ politics (as befits the intensity of youth). Then something happens: the intrepid fledglings leave home and school, enter the greater world of work and responsibility, and begin to doubt their old certainties about how the world is and should be. Or at least some do.
Just a few years ago talk of robots taking over was all the rage. Thanks to robots, humans would no longer have to work unless they wanted to. Some typical headlines:
When Robots Take All the Work, What'll Be Left for Us to Do? (Wired/2015)
Robots will take over most jobs within 30 years, experts warn (The Telegraph/2016)
Robots will eliminate 6% of all US jobs by 2021, report says (The Guardian, 2016)
In the real world, we talk more of causes than rules, but the process of establishing a causal relation is similar to that of validating a rule: seek cases that disconfirm the proposition that x causes y. In other words, find cases of x without y and y without x (the equivalent of turning over the D and 7 cards in the Wason task).
Mmmmm…I had naively thought Americans were more criminally-inclined than Europeans, or at least more violent. We’re actually middle-of-the-road, crime-wise. And we’re not more violent, just more homicidal, at least when compared with the larger European countries like France and the United Kingdom.
Not everyone needs a four-year college degree to get into the middle class (although it certainty helps). There are plenty of occupations that don’t require a degree, in which a good portion of the workers earn enough to be classified as “middle-class”. I’m not saying these occupations pay well right off the bat, but they do have the potential to pay experienced workers at least $40,000 a year - which was the median annual wage in 2019.
So what should be the point of comparison for questions of race, ethnicity and arrest-related deaths? The answer matters, because it sheds light on the nature of the problem…which in turn leads to better ideas on how to fix it.
Jonathan Haidt defined moral emotions as “those emotions that are linked to the interests or welfare either of society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent.” Moral emotions motivate people to do good and to avoid doing bad. Let’s grant that moral emotions are a good thing. But is more of a good thing even better? And does feeling a moral emotion less intensely mean…