"Obama's Socialism" - A college professor's experiment

IS THIS MAN A GENIUS?

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had decided to distribute grades the way that wealth is distributed under the current Obama administration, which could as easily be considered “Obama’s Socialism” as it could be considered an unfettered free market, given that the current state of affairs in the U.S. is a quasi-hybrid blend of socialism and capitalism.  This professor, unlike his hypothetical and notably popular friend at another college, actually understands the difference between communism and socialism, as well as the fact that economic distribution policies under the current administration are, well, not much different from past administrations.  Whatever. 

Anyways, the professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on ‘Obama's plan.’” All grades will be a proxy for wealth, representative of the general population in America.

The class was made up of 100 students, and the grades A-F were representative of a diminishing scale from 1 to 0.2% of wealth in equal increments.  The top student in the class received 34 A’s that semester, which he touted was a reflection of his hard-work and intelligence, even though the odds are overwhelming that he inherited most of these grades from his family.  Still, I agree that it’s hard to argue that he should be punished for his grandparent’s success.  The teacher allowed him to continue to be first in line to accumulate even more A’s, so long as he paid a nominal tax on his returns designed to help the less fortunate students in the class, which even that he vehemently opposed as burdensome and found several loopholes around this.  While investing more of his grades into personal luxuries and investments that would yield even more A’s, he defended the system because his successful grades would somehow trickle down to the rest of the students, as they all wanted the American dream he was living.  He offered a few programs in which students could receive better and more grades, which were generally available only to the students closest to him in the class ranks, and were only available when he felt that he could benefit just as much, if not more.  Especially when not many tests were scheduled for the near future, and thus, there were few opportunities for more A’s, he hunkered down and refused to divest any grade resources to others.  When times get tough, his priorities trumped the priorities of others, and he saw himself get more A’s while most students saw depreciations in whatever grades they had. 

The next 4 students in the class had a combined 27 A’s, which they weren’t complaining about.  While 3 of these students came from similar inheritance backgrounds as the first student, one had risen from the bottom of the class and she was quite proud of her accomplishments.  Regardless, these students actually watched the teacher take a slightly higher percentage of their A’s away from them to invest back into the class, because these students did not have as much influence over the teacher as the first student did.  Still, they had quite a few A’s, although they all wished they had a few more.

The next 5 students had a combined 11 A’s, and next 10 students had a combined 12 A’s, the next 20 students had a B each, and the next 20 students had an F each.  Finally, the final 40 students in the class shared one F amongst themselves.  It’s possible a few of these students weren’t particularly hard-working, while a few others maybe were not particularly bright. One student had a severe disability due to a car accident caused by a drunk driver several years ago. However, the vast majority of these students had skills that weren’t as highly economically-valued in America, or they did indeed have such aforementioned skills but were hoping to enter professions that are not as highly valued in economic terms as professions like: Acting, professional sports, banking, law, medicine, or certain business position.  They hoped to be musicians and teachers, artists and social workers, local business owners and non-profit employees. 

It turns out that 33 of them were incredibly hard-working and contributed a great deal to the class.  The other 7 were so continually berated and denigrated by the class as “moochers who were looking for free D’s” that the teacher was unable to distinguish which ones even wanted to show up on test-day, assuming the top students in the class would even allow them the opportunity to take a test.  We have no idea how hard they’ve studied or what scores they’re even capable of, because our system at best gives them a dried up pen for their scan-tron tests at a remote testing site on the other side of the state. Meanwhile, the other students in the class spend several hours a week talking about how lazy these kids are, without ever making any sort of investment into helping them better themselves.  Most of the top students have never even talked to the students at the bottom of the class; they simply lament how offensive it is to see them talking on an iPhone or wearing nice shoes, since there is no way the worst students in the class should have such modest luxuries, never mind even considering the notion of how they came to acquire such things.  The few students at the bottom of the class should be humble and fortunate for the generosity of the more “successful” students, exhibit a quiet, docile humility, and exude at all times a silent obedience to whatever draconian double-standards are stipulated upon them. 

All 100 students continued to take classes together for the rest of their lives, and a few students managed to receive more A’s, while a few students actually lost some A’s, or an A, or a C, or whatever grade they started off with.  However, the overwhelming majority see no fluctuation, as social mobility in the U.S. is one of the lowest amongst developed countries in the world.   60% of the class continued to have, at best, an F they could call their own.  So much for the American Dream. 

To their great surprise, the professor told them that while socialism communism would ultimately fail because when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed, a purely unfettered free market will also ultimately fail, as social mobility becomes a pipe dream, monopolies grow rampant, and that eventually the discontents of the majority of the students who are not even invited to test day will revolt against the few students with all the A’s, even if the top students continue to argue this system is the most just.  He then showed them a video on the French Revolution, and then he noted that a free market system is just above a caste-system aristocracy in terms of equality. 

The top students, when asked to defend their unfettered free market views, fiscal austerity, and emphasis on deregulation, pointed to the conservative nation of Pakistan, in which social redistribution is minimal, and social programs like universal healthcare and education is scoffed at.  Instead, the rich need not rely on power grids because they purchase generators, they send their kids to private school because they can afford to educate them, and they travel to other countries with socialized or quasi-socialized medicine, because healthcare is a obviously a commodity, not a right.  For the 60 students that can’t afford such luxuries, well, sorry but that’s the price we pay for societal justice. 

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.  Actually, you can.  See Rawls, John.  Besides, no one is calling for Communism.  Not even close.  Most people on the left are slightly left of center, not an equidistant antithetical tea party. 

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.  This is a terribly myopic view, and is more applicable to the top student in the class than it is to the bottom 40.  If we are to perpetuate the war on welfare, it should have the same implications for the rich as the poor.  Handouts for the rich are a thievery of arguably even higher proportions. 

Also, by the same logic, childhood education should be for only those that can pay, cops only protect the rich neighborhood, firefighters only put out fires in the houses that sign up for the premium fire protection package, and our ER’s rearrange their wait-time priorities based on who has the best medical insurance plans.  If you don’t work, you don’t receive- education, national security, paved roads, an ambulance ride etc.  Sorry.  The constitution says nothing about letting your kids go to elementary school or receiving medical care in life-threatening situations.  And Hey! you can’t legislate morality!

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.  Also not true.  The government prints money out of thin-air all the time.  Probably not the best example.  And definitely a discussion for another day.  But a very simple refutation.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!  Actually, this is the basis for accruing more wealth, such as where I divide my wealth upon other people in exchange for services, and they in turn prosper, which in turn allows me to prosper, since my wealth is meaningless if there is no one around me doing well enough for me to buy their services.  It’s the basis for microlending, and loans in general.  My divided portfolio is actually accumulating large dividends right now. You see, I divide it up, give it to other people, and then it comes back to me as more money..usually.

A better statement reads, “You cannot multiply wealth by allowing one person to have all of it, so that he can have a 2^nd private jet to take to his private island.”  Or, in the spirit of our inequality-riddled classroom, “You cannot multiply wealth by allowing five students to have a monopoly on the scan-trons, number two pencils, books, laptops, labs, school-buses, keys to the classroom, and interests of the teacher.”

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.  Last I checked, unemployment in America was about 7%, which is not half.  It’s not even close to half.  In fact, it’s pretty close to 7%.  Number inflation this dramatic, while convenient, is simply erroneous and is dangerous, disingenuous polemic political rhetoric, substantially unrepresentative of reality.  Further, only one student in the entire class is actually on welfare, and it’s asinine to believe that even a majority of that one percent thinks that they don’t have to “work.” (Especially considering the five year limitations under the TANF program.. Hence the “T” for “temporary”).  When did having a job that pays a fraction of what your boss makes become synonymous with “I don’t like hard work?”  Because this is suggesting that 157 million American’s have the idea that they don’t have to work (135 million of which have jobs..I'm sure at least a few more have a will to work). 

Class Standings:

1 à 34 A’s

2- 5 à 7 A’s each

6 – 10 à 2 A’s each

11 – 20 à 1 A each

21 – 40 à 1 B each

41 – 60 à 1 F each

61 – 100 à 1/40^th of an F each.  

Can you think of a reason for not sharing this?

Neither could I.

What polled Americans thought the ideal and estimated wealth distribution in America is.  Top line shows the actual distribution of wealth. 

Why Invisible Children could change the world (and still can!), but only if we let them

On March 5, 2012, just one year ago, the now-controversial non-profit, Invisible Children, launched a short film online and campaign called, Kony 2012.   With an initial goal of 500,000 views by the end of the calendar year, it’s suffice to say the small grassroots organization was caught off-guard by what happened next.  With over 100 million views in just a week’s time, it became the focal subject of conversation, on our televisions, facebook feeds, and family dinners.  Whatever initial applause and approval it had received dissipated within a matter of days.  To the average person, Kony 2012 is now synonymous with the words, “scam,” “fraud,” and “wasn’t that dude jerki...”  But in fact, Invisible Children got it right, and we all got it wrong.  And one year later, most of us still haven’t caught on.

Armed with the old adage, “Don’t believe everything you read,” Kony 2012’s targeted audience, the outspoken youth, did indeed adhere to IC’s message that their voice could indeed make a difference.  However, rather than the unified support IC was hoping for, the internet rebutted with a seeping, pervasive cynicism, justified as an arduous quest for “truth” and “healthy discourse.” 

Unfortunately, most of those attacking the Kony film for its emotional “propaganda,” a film they claimed was devoid of substantial fact and dissenting opinions, inherently produced literary diatribes completely absent of any amount of intellectual reasoning or impartiality.  More often than not, these “anti-Kony 2012ers” arbitrarily selected the reasonable and justified criticisms of the film by experts and amateurs alike, and simply filled in the gaps with, at best, quasi-facts and anecdotal evidence masqueraded as expert opinion. 

If the film and campaign were indeed negligent misrepresentations, than most of the Op-Ed’s we shared were surely well-beyond the periphery of the bottom rung of the credibility ladder.  What is most unfortunate is that most qualified experts with reasonable discontent and uneasiness over the film and campaign surely did not intend for a vicious and scathing counter-movement against the organization, but instead a healthy discussion to promote growth in previously unforeseen directions.  For all of the hullabaloo that IC was deliberately creating a generation of arm-chair advocates, I was shocked at critics seemingly deliberate oversight towards the proselytized arm-chaired critics they inevitably empowered. 

It isn’t that fact that so many people disagree with the movement that bothers me so much; it’s the self-assured nature, the derisive mantra that many took after a modicum of research.  It’s the fact that so many people, who have never investigated the reliability and levels of empirical evidence, who have never thought to distinguish causation from correlation from coincidence, and who continue to be convinced that our largely qualitative world can not only be quantified, but be transcribed into veritable fact based on a couple of blog posts and a video of a girl who has a grandma from Uganda that really makes me tip-toe along the edge of losing faith in humanity. 

It’s not that we shouldn’t be entitled to our opinions; it’s that we too often formulate our opinions, and then gather the evidence, selectively and conveniently dismissing anything that does not neatly conform to our predetermined dispositions.  It’s that some of us are convinced the most worthy way to spend our time is to denigrate and demonize a non-profit we hadn’t even known about a week ago. 

You see, all too many people were convinced that buying an action kit would ultimately result in some sort of apocalyptic scenario in which IC staff showered in Benjamins and dined over Faberge eggs, while Ugandans sat destitute, feeling duped and taken advantage of.  And in doing so, they made it their personal affidavit to convince would-be fifteen-year-old supporters to save their twenty bucks, ignoring the fact that they will never follow up on how that money is actually spent, and further ignoring even 37% expenditure allocated for development sure beats the hell out of the 0% our money usually ends up towards when we buy a shirt or bracelet (and we haven’t even touched on why I believe the other 63% is soundly invested).

The outcome of their advocacy is obviously up to debate, and perhaps enough to warrant withholding a financial contribution; however, as filmmaker Jon Turteltaub said, “There is no such thing as just putting it out there.”  You see, if the critics are right, that sometimes well-intentions produce paradoxical results, then certainly withholding financial contributions would logically not solve the situation, but it would at least prevent it from slipping into a misguided quagmire.  And I could contend that would be a worthy effort.

However, this seemingly innocuous stance largely ignores the fact that, if indeed IC is on the right path, then critics and skeptics alike have actively worked against efforts to end senseless violence, as well as against sound education, microfinance, civilian protection, and rehabilitative programs, that, unlike advocacy speculation, have very real and very measurable results.  In fact, in all of my experiences, I have found a near universal paucity in criticism for their approaches and implementation of ground programs.  To me, I just can’t fathom how anyone could be sure enough in their convictions that they must convince others that not only is a donation not going to be as effective as perceived, but that it is resolutely detrimental. 

I am totally open to the fact that there are perceivable faults in the video, campaign, and organization.  In fact, I fully realize that no entity is any more perfect than the imperfect individuals that make it (fun fact: a study found a couple people at IC are actually perfect).  But I can’t help but think, with all of IC’s continued efforts to end a war, that many authors attacking the organization, in another generation, might have written articles entitled, “Why Jim Crow Laws are a complicated issue,” “Sure Apartheid is bad, but it’s not so simple,” “How much MLK actually spent on his march to Selma” and “The Slavery Dilemma: Why trying to change anything is dumb and we should never, ever try.”

Absent was the article we really needed to read, entitled, “Why Joseph Kony is quite actually the worst, but all we seem to care about is percent spending, paralyzing regional dynamics, and why IC's founder was detained on the streets of San Diego”  Our focus and energy was not on the kidnapper, pedophile, and mass murderer and how we could collaboratively find a better way to capture him, but instead on vilifying an organization with at most questionable spending habits and misguided advocacy (hint: they are neither). 

I know that, if anyone has actually even read this far, you might be clamoring that this was nothing more than a fluff piece devoid of substantial refutations, and well, I’d agree. But to defend even common criticisms in a concise way would’ve produced literature much too long to read in one sitting, which is, in part, why IC was defenseless to last spring’s fusillade of acrimonious accusations.  Discovery, it seems, is actually far more work than settling. 

As political commentator, Bill Maher, noted last spring, “We might look back on this week as the week where everything changed for bad guys around the world.”  That prediction depends solely on ourselves, and how we choose to act moving forwards.

The grandiosity of the LRA’s crimes and a multi-faceted approach to apprehend them was largely lost in translation.  I mean, surely, if we took a second to consider the barbaric nature of forcibly padlocking lips shut, amputating limbs, lips, and noses, ordering children to kill their parents, crushing skulls, lighting inhabited homes on fire, the displacement of hundreds of thousands and the absence of any retrospective justice for millions, then perhaps we could’ve started asking the questions that really mattered- namely, is there truly a better approach than the one this organization has taken?  And, after a year of debate, as well as clear benchmarks of unmistaken progress that have been made in the international community, I resolutely believe that no, there isn’t, and that the next time we have the opportunity to stand in solidarity against unspeakable violence, we should be ready to ask the right questions.  

http://invisiblechildren.com/kony-2012-one-year-later/