The Strangers Among Us

I recently read Stranger in a Strange Land.  A stunning piece of literature, a book everyone should read, probably twice.

More than anything else, what I take from this book is that we need change.  Radical change.  We have been complacent in every part of the world for far too long.  There are leaders among us (perhaps I am one, perhaps I am not) who are literal strangers in this land.  Strangers because the way things could work, the way they play out in the minds of these people, and how things are do not match.

In America we have created an interesting system of ambivalence.  We have created a generation of dreamers who hope that the dream they make will be handed to them.  We have created a world of freedom which we use primarily to hate those who attempt to be free.  We are the paragon of democracy and support that system around the world, so long as those abroad vote who we wish and policies we demand.  We are the land of opportunity for modern indentured workers abroad.  We are the shining jewel of industrial wealth being poured into a hole we can not seem to dig fast enough.

We are potential squandered.

We are a country of two political parties that fight tooth and nail to tear down the people they represent.  And we the people sit by and watch it happen.  We complain about it, hell we complain about everything.  Apathy is as far as we get, and even that effort may become to great for those who are bringing up the rear.

All one would have to do in Stranger in a Strange Land to make it a renewed picture of our time is update some of the dialog and a few cultural references.  The almost dystopic world imagined by Heinlein is the world of today and the impending future of tomorrow.  His world certainly contains all the comforts we need.  It is not a harsh world.  And that may be the point.

We have become empty.  In the revival of fundamentalism we are even more empty.  We seek goals with no understanding. 

We seek only to sustain our comfort, when we need a sustainable society that brings hope and purpose back to humanity.

A Predictable Paradox

My recent comments on Nudge are supplemented by two other books I have recently read.

• The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Both of these bring up many of the points discussed in Nudge but do so from a much more scientific point of view.  I attribute this mostly to the fact that social scientists are, by that title, scientists and look at things from a viewpoint I find much more favorable to that of economists.

Where Nudge often misses some key elements to human behavior and actual understanding of social processes, The Paradox of Choice & Predictably Irrational go forward with great understanding and years of research experience and studies to back them up.

The conclusions of these two great books come together for some powerful thoughts.

Absolute freedom of choice does not make us happy.  In fact, having too much choice may actually hurt us much more than it helps.  We become less happy with decisions, less able to make any choices, and suffer from a great deal of regret.  This seems to indicate the extreme benefit that rational default choices for many of the complicated choices we need to make in investments, insurance, and some other areas can have.

We make lots of errors in our daily lives.  While economists tend to think of us as hyper rational, we actually exist as highly flawed machines.  This is great in that it is what makes us human, but rather bad in that we generally make decisions that have little to do with how we imagine people should make choices.

We live in an irrational paradox.  We desire unlimited choice, and suffer for it.  We pride our systems of capital and business on the fact that we consistently make well informed and rational decisions, which in reality we frequently do not make.  As a matter of point we seem to create systems based on an ideal of mankind that does not exist and them puzzle over why they fail.

In all of this, social scientists have been willing to nudge us into working systems.  It seems that the world wants to learn more about how the human mind works, but we gleefully ignore any opportunity to apply the science of psychology to anything but therapy.  The occasional I/O Psychologist will make some headway, but the MBA’s of the world keep hoping that the force of their business ideas will overcome the frailties of our body.  We are an amazing specimen of logic and intelligence, but without systems that account for our very real limitations and tendencies we are running on a treadmill and hoping to gather enough lift to fly.

We can create a world of systems that function for us rather than against us.  All we need to do is listen.

Reading – Nudge

Not a lot has happened here recently.  Part of the reason is that the general state of politics, the economy, the world, and news of it was rather depressing.  So, for the most part I simply withdrew from it.

In that time I have done quite a bit of reading which has left me with a plethora of thought and ideas. 

Nudge (Thaler & Sunstein) was an interesting commentary on the power of choice architecture and the possible uses thereof in business and politics.  Certainly our government and our corporate masters could do a great deal more to encourage us to make better life choices without imposing on us any loss of freedom.  The general theory of Libertarian Paternalism they put forward is an interesting one.  In many ways Sustainable Democracy has always been about this.  How can we make better choices that reinforce democratic principles while creating better systems of management, governance, and social motivation. 

The general response I have heard from media about this book has been one that sounds much like “I don’t want no stinkin’ gov’ment official decidin’ how to run my life!”  Which is about as far from an accurate opinion as one could render…  Which should serve to remind us that the media does little more than entertain and provide an outlet for industry commercials rather than make much of a serious attempt at dispersing information.  While the authors do encourage government involvement in ways that might worry some, it mostly advises creating systems where default choices make saving, retiring, getting healthcare, etc. much more simple for those with little to no expertise while still allowing for a full freedom of choice by any who wish to exercise such.  The other major agenda they put forward would be to force industries to give customers yearend statements that summarize all costs/fees/spending/and in appropriate cases usage of services so that people are fully informed of true costs and may make better informed decisions for future choices in services acquired.

Yes, the great evil of this book is that it would provide meaningful default choices that are in the best interest of the most people and make the general population better informed consumers.  Which really is what industry fears, isn’t it?

An informed consumer causes all sorts of problems when comparisons between costs of services are made apparent.  They can suddenly decipher if what they are charged and what they receive have a proper relation.

It might go so far as to create a more sustainable society!  While no corporation wants to see society collapse, they generally think in extremely shortsighted terms that relate directly to profit rather than consumer or societal benefit.  However, it is the responsibility of government to look toward this long term growth and development of our society.  The idea of giving nudges to improve the health and wealth of our nation is an excellent idea.  When we can create choices that will, in general, create a much greater likelihood of positive outcomes without resorting to mandates (as both parties so often do) we must listen and jump at the chance.  Certainly it seems to put politicians in more parts of our lives, but they already are in all those parts.  They regulate and use heavy handed methods to move us in all sorts of directions.  Reducing what our legislators do to nudging us in better directions will be far more productive than their shoving us heedlessly in any direction.

Have you read Nudge?  Let me know what you thought and give some feedback.  Follow-up comments and articles will address valid points from any side of the argument for or against any part of nudge.