Tag Archives: equality

Musings from an annoying commute

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On the Max ride home today, I heard to late 40-50ish guys having a chat about the down fall of the current generation of kids. I was trying to read my book, but the conversation ranged from the casually uninformed, family first thoughts, to the down right ignorant. According to these gentlemen our society is in the shitter because of the decline of the nuclear family, kids think video games are real, and therefore the kids in Columbine thought that they could take 8 bullets and come back to life. I had to restrain myself from commenting on this bucket of ignorance.

First of all, the nuclear family is essentially a myth. we’ve had modified family structures for as long as there have been families. A ton of people I know have had parents that have divorced, one spouse cheating on the other, or some sort of death in the family. Almost all of these people have turned out reasonably well. Everyone has their problems, but I don’t think that it’s solely due to family structure problems. If anything, the family structure problems that these guys are talking about are related to problems more closely associated with inequality and the fact that these families have someone in prison, work 2 or 3 jobs to support their family. These folks have to work so much because they can’t afford rent and our economy is structured around the car, which most of these people are being priced out of.

Second of all, violence and confusion over video games and reality don’t really exist. According to a recent study, if people are aggressive during or after a game it’s NOT because of the violence or lack thereof, but because of a lack of skill or fairness in the game. Apparently, people are more aggressive if Tetris is more difficult than if it’s easier. I think that Candy Crush Saga is a perfect example of this. The most difficult levels are frustrating because it has nothing to do with your skill, solely if you get the right combination of candies to effect a board clearing combination. Even if you do everything perfectly, you can still lose – which keeps pulling you back in. Dark Souls is another case in point. The game is so frustratingly difficult that many people rage quit, but they keep coming back because of the sense of accomplishment upon completing these difficult monsters/bosses. Essentially, the reward of accomplishment and skill accrual is worth the frustration.

Finally, because of this clear separation between reality and game the boys in Columbine didn’t think they could take a ton of bullets. This is obvious due to the fact that they committed suicide with one bullet. The problem with those boys is the fact that we don’t really speak to each other well about our problems. Marilyn Manson had the best response to that back shortly after the horrific events happened.

The conversation between these two men really just struck me as two guys looking for someone to listen to them and parrot it back. Honestly thought, it really just reminded me of two stoners talking about things.

Campaign finance laws and its limits

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Today, marked the second time the Supreme Court ruled against setting maximum campaign contributions. First, it was a limit on corporations, now it’s the limit an individual can contribute in a given year. The first ruling is called Citizens United and I was initially very against this ruling because I felt that it would give undo influence to corporations. However, based on the argument Lawrence Lessig provides in “Republic Lost” – that at what point does an arbitrary limit on spending make sense? For example, if I decide to spend a lot of money on ads for a specific candidate through multiple different channels. The problem isn’t that I, as an extremely wealthy person or organization, can spend as much as I want, it’s that there’s an inequality between what You, as a poor pleb, are able to spend. This creates an inequity in the free-ness of speech.

We know that the amount of money a person can raise heavily influences their success rate in the election. This isn’t a surprise as the candidate is able to run more ads and reach a broader audience than the candidate with less money. There’s nothing new to this. Furthermore, the current structure of our media makes it amenable to rich people that spend a lot of money. The limit of $123,000/year/candidate didn’t really impact how much money a wealthy individual actually spent on the elections. Based on this biased news source, the Koch brothers spent over $2 million in more than one state. So, the campaign limits didn’t really work as designed regardless of the limits set. The Supreme Court Ruling basically just aligned the law with reality and didn’t change a whole lot.

Campaign Finance reform is just a band aid over a much greater systemic problem. This is something that Lessig was trying to address in his book, other writers have tried to address through different books, and tech leaders through cruise ships off the coast of San Francisco.

However, I think that this Atlantic image really shows the problem:

The Atlantic: Top .01% income growth

We live in a highly unequal society and the finance rules for campaigns was an attempt to set arbitrary limits to control the influence of the wealthiest Americans. It wasn’t working. The Supreme Court admitted it. Now we need to figure out how to actually fix this extremely difficult problem – that some portions of the population refuse to see as a problem.

I don’t have a solution to this problem. Lessig proposes we use laws to encourage accepting public funds and the creation of that fund through taxes. This would eliminate the influence on donations – which directly or indirectly impact the vote from a person in Congress. Creating something that more effectively through the right incentives and behavior modification is a good start to address the inequality we have in our country.

I think that the growing inequality is hurting our country. When we were much more equal in terms of economic status, we were innovating, for real innovation, not applications. We were developing things to send people to the moon. The greater the separation the top percentages has from the bulk of the population the more risk adverse they’ve become. They aren’t helping push us towards bigger and better things. We need the equality to help drive innovation. That’s the root cause of the problem. Campaign Finance reform was attempting to address a symptom and not even well. Let’s figure out how to address the root cause.