The Good, the Bad, and the Positive

Enron collapsed when it did for a reason. The business had the unfortunate luck of rising to power during the bull market of the 90’s. The company subsequently hid its ever mounting debt behind a rising stock price. So long as it looked legit on the outside, and investors continued to invest, it could smooth over massive losses – a strategy that was uniquely tailored to a bull market, but which threatened to crumble should the market falter. The company finally fell when after the internet bubble popped. Underlying its falling stock price was the fact that investors’ heads were no longer in the clouds. The public finally saw the company for what it really was - a sham. During bear markets, investors are more scrupulous and exacting - their minds are screwed on tighter.

Bad times are categorically different from good times. Negative news is more informative than positive news. Positive psychology doesn’t make sense. And this all needs to be taken with stride, as it’s easy to criticize without offering any solutions. In sum, we have more to learn from when things go wrong than when things go right.

This principle can teach us a lot. It’s obvious in some regards, but not in others. The best place to start is positive psychology, a field hell-bent on violating this principle.

Positive psychology is not so much a field as it's a movement. It’s the sort of movement that, in a funny way, could only happen in modern America. In the words of some of the movement's biggest supporters:

The science of psychology has made great strides in understanding what goes wrong in individuals, families, groups, and institutions, but these advances have come at the cost of understanding what is right with people. (Gable & Haidt, 2005)

…at the subjective level [positive psychology] is about valued subjective experiences: well-being, contentment, and satisfaction (in the past); hope and optimism (for the future); and flow and happiness (in the present). At the individual level, it is about positive individual traits: the capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future mindedness, spirituality, high talent, and wisdom. At the group level, it is about the civic virtues and the institutions that move individuals toward better citizenship: responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance and work ethic. (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000)

That should give you a sense of positive psychology, it’s a feel-good science. Hopefully just reading that made you feel a little good.

The impetus for positive psychology is that we live in such a negative world: We’re surrounded by negative news. All too often people focus on others’ bad qualities, particularly psychologists. So they’re hoping to turn that trend around, and show the world – through scientific study – about the sunny side of humanity.

I can sympathize. We define ourselves by our positive qualities, not our negative ones. We accomplish more when we focus on the positive skills of ourselves and those around us. There’s something to be said for making a point of holding back unnecessary negativity and truly enjoying your time on this earth.

But inevitably positive psychology begs the question why are we so focused on the negative?. There’s actually good reason.

It teaches us more. It’s more urgent. At the very least, you have to admit that in life, the negative and positive are categorically different: The negative is not just the polar opposite of the positive, as it is in mathematics.

Examples abound, perhaps the most telling is that of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who suffered a spike blown through his brain (in the frontal lobes) in 1848. His survival – how he was functional, but newly irritable, forgetful, and obstinate for the rest of his life – is often credited with kick-starting modern brain science, a field that has benefited more from such brain lesions than from any other modern experimental manipulation.

We’re quicker to notice when things are wrong than when they’re right. This lesson was painfully drilled into me during summers when I waited tables. When you’re waiting tables, many things can go wrong, and patrons are quick to verbally (or nonverbally) point them out to you. Indeed, a good job waiting an individual table is not so much defined by an outright acknowledgment of such but rather by the lack of any complaint.

But there’s something else that annoys me about positive psychology. It’s not merely a flawed scientific approach, it’s the assumption that the positive side of life is worth spending so much time on, that it needs to be understood - indeed, that it can be understood - and that such a science can truly improve people's lives.

In this world, there are infinite different ways to succeed. But there’s a limited number of ways to fail. People don’t just randomly fail to thrive; they generally fail in some sort of systematic way. They fall into categorizes of sickness or mental disorders – categories that, granted, are man-made, but which still, I’d argue, genuinely represent the state of nature. Just like waiting tables, the best way to improve others’ lives is to prevent things from going wrong. Under those circumstances, mankind can thrive – we have for over 100,000 years.

The positive psychologist might retort that focusing on positive areas such as happiness is the best buffer against negative consequences like say depression or anxiety. Yet this is still interpreting the import of happiness from the perspective of the negative. Nonetheless, buffer has become a buzzword in positive psychology, with studies concluding that various positive traits “buffer” people from negative consequences. The word protect is used in a similar manner.

Take a study on emotional intelligence - an interesting construct in itself, which, unnecessarily, is for some reason tied up in positive psychology. The 2004 study found that male participants' emotional intelligence predicted negative behaviors such as drug use and social deviance. Concluded the authors, “Our findings suggest that emotional intelligence may protect males from engaging in potentially harmful behaviors.” The causal implication in the wording is high emotional intelligence prevents these behaviors, not low emotional intelligence leads to those behaviors. But once again, the positive side of something – in this case, high emotional intelligence – is often qualitatively different from its negative side – which here is low emotional intelligence. For instance, say you run a longitudinal study showing that depression at time one predicted suicide at time two. Would you suggest that a lack of depression buffered participants from suicide? Does a lack of depression prevent suicide? No, it would be more reasonable to interpret your results along the lines of depression causing suicide. Once again, there are many ways to be not depressed, and there are many ways to not commit suicide, but there are only a few ways to be depressed and to kill yourself. Another parallel can be found in cognitive psychology under Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, it holds that the construct of intelligence is empirically more sound for people who are less intelligent than for people who are more intelligent. In other words, there are a few tangible and quantifiable ways to be dumb, but there are many more ways to be smart.

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The increased role of negative things in life is manifested in all sorts of ways, and in a sense it’s in who we are. We have more to lose from negative things than we have to gain from positive things. No one would ever publish a medical case study of an exceptionally healthy person. Sad music is almost always the more beautiful. Dante’s Inferno is incredibly stirring and moving. His Paradisio is a bore-fest.

This disconnect between the positive and negative in life is manifest on the national level as well. Socialists often take the role of the positive psychologist, with the goal of determining what’s best for people. It seems simple enough, but it fails by oversimplifying man's happiness. Just as case studies of things gone wrong are integral in medicine, examples of disastrous policy decisions can teach us much about economics. Sowell writes about Lenin’s early transformations in his approach towards implementing communism. At first, Lenin oversimplified human prosperity, not unlike positive psychologists. The result was an overwhelming lack of prosperity, which even Lenin was able to attribute towards his initial shortcomings.

On the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, V. I. Lenin declared that “accounting and control” were the key factors in running an enterprise and that capitalism had already “reduced” the administration of business to “extraordinarily simple operations” that “any literate person can perform” – that is, “supervision and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts.” Such “exceedingly simple operations of registrations, filing, and checking” could, according to Lenin, “easily be performed” by people receiving ordinary workmen wages.

After just a few years in power, however, Lenin confronted a very different – and very bitter – reality. He himself wrote of a “fuel crisis” which “threatens to disrupt all Soviet work”, of economic “ruin, starvation, and devastation” in the country, and even admitted that peasant uprisings had become “a common occurrence” under Communist rule. In short, the economic functions which had seemed so easy and simple before having to perform them now loomed menacingly difficult.

Belatedly, Lenin saw a need for people “who are versed in the art of administration”…Lenin warned his comrades: “Opinions on corporate management are all too frequently imbued with a spirit of sheer ignorance, an anti-expert bias.” (Sowell, Basic Economics, 2006, p. 164-166).

The fatal flaw of socialism is equivalent to that of positive psychology: That we can correct the wrong by simply actively pursuing the good. The flaw is in the assumption that man’s pursuits are as tangible, predictable, and manipulable as his shortcomings.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) P1030672.JPG, 06/30/2008, by Stanandlou; (2) 200811 bull market, 10/10/2008, by superciliousness; (3) Frankfurt Stock Exchange-Bear, 04/30/2007, by Leonieke; (4) Girasoles para los amigos/Sunflowers for the Friends, 12/31/2007, by Claudio.Ar-Hermes; (5) soledad, 12/02/2005, by Robotson; (6) Mike Butcher being judgmental, 10/21/2008, by Adam Tinworth; (7) Representation of Phineas Gages' leison, 2004, by Antonio Damasio; (8) sadness under a big sky, 05/04/2006, by goatopolis; Grosse tete-Big Head, 12/21/2005, by Gentil Garçon [sombres présages].

Video: (1) Music video of the song Fake Plastic Trees, by Radiohead, released on the album The Bends, which was put out in 04/05/1995. Sphere: Related Content

"Epidemic of Civic Illiteracy", Arrogance

I didn’t make up those words, they come from a Josiah Bunting III: "There is an epidemic of economic, political, and historical ignorance in our country.” According to his institution’s new study: Only half of American adults know what all of the branches in US government are. Almost four tenths of them falsely think that the president has the right to declare war. And a whopping %43 percent don’t even know what the electoral college is for. Incredible news - not in terms of its content, but in terms of its broad coverage, its blatant superficiality, and its downright arrogance.

What is civic literacy? If you're asking, clearly you don’t have any.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducts annual surveys to gauge our citizens' basic knowledge about America. They’ve been doing this for the past 3 years, and after every survey they emit a minor public outcry about our nation’s growing ignorance.

Before discussing the outcry, a word on the research techniques: The latest survey was a telephone interview with 139 multiple choice questions covering civic knowledge, public philosophy, and household demographics. Even at this point, the logistics of answering factual multiple choice questions over the phone are beyond me: Audible presentation of the multiple choices is a tax on short-term memory, while you’re being asked to retrieve facts from long-term memory, while under the duress of talking to a stranger on the phone, most likely after returning home from work.

2,508 adults were called. Responses were averaged across relatively small demographic groups: Those who’d earned a Ph.D, for instance, scored a C in civic literacy, while baby boomers with a college degree earned a D, and most everyone else failed. Despite reporting group averages, the institute reported no statistical tests for group differences, and we’re given averages which are relatively useless without standard deviations (for instance, it’s possible that a few people who scored extremely low brought down the whole average). But these are minor qualms relative to the overarching message, which is that most people got an F. Shame on us.

The conclusion: We have another cause to be taken up by the American people. After all, isn’t education priceless? And how can you be an American citizen without any civic literacy? There’s poverty, world starvation and warfare, AIDS, plain old illiteracy, and now we can add civic illiteracy.

I'm reminded of my old high school civics teacher. Every week we had to memorize 10 new facts about the government. We would then be quizzed with multiple choice questions that were randomly selected from our accumulated bag o' facts. By the end of the end of year, we worked up to some 500 facts. I wince upon the memory of all the time I spent sweating over those useless inane facts, especially as there are so many richer ways to learn about government. Increasing civic literacy is not only a stupid cause, it’s a harmful one.

The face of American education is changing and it’s wonderful. Teachers at both the high school and college level are downplaying rote factual memorization in place for better educational techniques. Each new generation of kids are exponentially smarter than the last. What new generations lack in their ability to recite random facts they gain in fluid thinking, particularly when it comes to technological wizardry. Thanks to society’s plethora of scientific advances, my old high school science classes would be too rudimentary for the kids of today, just as my professors’ old classes would have been too rudimentary for me. These are points for celebration, not scorn.

Society’s ability to respond to causes is limited, and focusing on civic literacy is as arbitrary as lending federal money to banks, bailing out GM, improving health care, fighting drugs, sending a man to the moon, or focusing on any other knowledge base, be it chemistry or grammar. If more teachers were physicists than policymakers, then they'd decry physics illiteracy instead. And with good reason, as our present existence is tied just as much to physics - or maybe even moreso - than it is to civility. If the bulk of teachers happened to be grammar gurus, we might have more attempts to keep the English language pure like French.

Like most proposed causes, focusing on civil literacy is arrogant in its narrowed perspective. Being able to name our government's 3 branches might be basic for your average news-addict, but not everyone follows politics daily; and the truth is unless you're directly tied to the government the number of federal branches is not important in most people's day-to-day preoccupations - an inference that is supported by the result (questionable in and of itself) that not many people know about these facts. Indeed, from a democratic perspective, the importance of such knowledge is measured by how widespread it is rather than by some scholars at an institution.

Arrogance is truly one of America’s greatest problems. I’m not referring selfishness or the like, but to blinding arrogance. It underlies the argument of authority. It’s a core piece of racial tensions when manifested as the inability to tolerate the different. It holds back science, manifested as the inability to question one own’s measurement and line of thought. It’s wasteful, manifested as the inability to consider alternative problem-solutions. And its petty, manifested in the cause of civic literacy.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Getting it done, 07/12/2005, by jamacdonald; grandmother's report card, 02/24/2008, by Victoria Bernal; "6 weeks of dedication" or "why I could never be a doctor", 10/08/2008, by Ben Golub; img_6154, 03/02/2008, by C.M.; (5) kids & computers, 01/13/2007, by shapeshift.

Upcoming ideas:

• it's too easy to just be critical & point out what's wrong with the world
  
• but still, it's easier to see when things go wrong than when things go right, & there's a good reason for that, b/c we have more to learn from when things go wrong than when they go right
  
• "negative" news is more useful than "positive" news
• specific implications for positive psychology, preventative medicine (if ain't broken...)
  
• broader connections to the economy, evolution by means of natural selection

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Cross Traffic Does Not Stop

Browse through reviews of self-help books and you’ll find two tones: Praise garnished with revelation, and criticism along the lines of simplistic, obvious, common-sense. There’s no secret to happiness – how many times have you heard that – but it’s easy to forget. In the meanwhile, there are other things to remember: Whenever you greet and part with the day you're asked to brush your teeth. Official recommendations for weekly physical activity are two and a half hours a week (an hour above older standards), but watch out for excessive exercise as well. Fast and calorie-rich food is unhealthy, so take some additional time in picking out groceries. We’re fortunate to live in a society where we have two food pyramids – an old one and a new one – between them there’s really no excuse for unhealthy eating.



The human mind is a scarce resource, and all sorts of people are battling for it. Like any great scarce resource, it has tons of invaluable alternative usages, some of which are deciding on which usages are best.

Everything that is vying for your mind is competing with its alternative usages. TV commercials are the most obvious case, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. The new-age self-help guru who wants you to meditate every night is competing with your dentist who wants you to brush your teeth. And the CDC who ask for two and a half hours of exercise each week are competing with your therapist who wants you to spend more family time. Rest assured, all these parties have the best of intentions, but the problem is that no one sees it from an economic perspective.

The government is in the same situation: The future of our country, some people say, is education. So education has to be mandatory. But at the same time, if the auto industry falls apart, then the whole economy is going to shreds. Automobiles and banks, we need to save them both. That and health care. How can you put a price on something so important as health care?

The truth is that everything has a price, and in a free market, all of these seemingly intangibles are already factored into that price. Implicit in any price is not only the resources necessary for any product, but also those resources’ alternative usages. A limited amount of capital cannot pay for everything – you’re reminded about this fact of life whenever you check your bank statement.

Our modern time is filled with so many causes – so many months and days are tied to a cause, that we may have to extend the calendar. And it comes to the point where each of these causes is not battling ignorance and non-recognition, but they’re battling both each other and for your personal time.

An unfortunate fact about democracy: It’s easier to add to the clutter than to take away. How else, I ask you, did our government get so big?

Misallocation of scarce resources, as any economist will tell you, has innumerable unintended consequences. This holds for the mind’s resources as well. Exercise is all well and good, but no doubt other things come first: A job, food on the table, and maybe even a social life. Exercise enthusiasts who work in public health are not waging a war against a nation of couch potatoes and ignorance, they’re waging a war for your free time. That war maybe worth fighting for, but their victory will come at a cost: The alternative usages of your time.

I personally enjoy some types of exercise, and I’ve read many accounts of how good it is for you. But I haven’t read any accounts of how exercise is better than other things that you can do in those two and half hours of your week. Nor have I seen any arguments comparing the effects of brushing your teeth with a few minutes of meditation. Nor have I seen arguments that spending more money on health food beats spending that money on higher education. Such studies might seem silly - what does meditating have to do with brushing teeth - but they get at the underlying point that they these activities tap our personal time, which is perhaps the most important scarce resource we have.

There are real consequences at stake. Just as rent control increases homelessness, dedicating your personal time and attention to the wrong thing has drastic consequences.

American roads provide an excellent example. A well-written Atlantic article by John Stadden attributes America’s higher rate of traffic accidents to our sign-cluttered streets. The article drives home the dangers of misallocating resources: It’s easier to put up another sign on a street than to consider which signs need to be taken down. No one considers when does too many signs begin to take a toll?. This point becomes painfully obvious if you browse some of the worst street signs people have seen here. As Stadden points out, American roads are unique from other countries' in their sheer number of both traffic signs and accident rates, which remain a factor even after all sorts of other differences are taken into account. The result is a misallocation of attention, which is our most needed resource when we drive. This likely causes more accidents, fuels stress and road rage, and it’s probably why drunk driving is such a big issue, as it compounds the effects of blunted executive decisions.

The positive side of things is that the economy is never static. Julian Simon argued that the ultimate natural resource is not found in the earth, it's our mind. Without our mind, current and future natural resources would be useless. Apocalyptic predictions of overpopulation and world starvation proved to be false because they assumed that human ingenuity was static.

All the more reason to be on the lookout for things that missallocate the mind's resources, be it restraints of free speech, dictating centrally to people what's important, or having leaders determine our nation's distribution of goods. The American government is just like our road sides: paved with good intentions but ultimately consisting of too many road signs - confusing ones, unnecessary ones, silly ones, and downright dangerous ones. Keep this in mind whenever you pass any sort of cause, be it one for the public, or one for your time and attention. Imagine the sign-littered road that represents both this country and your mind: Does it really need another sign?


-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Happiness Now, 05/21/2007, by wrestlingtropy; (2) Too Much Exercise?, 01/26/2008, by assortedstuff; (3) Businessman brushing his teeth while driving his car, Imagine Digital Stock Photography (4) Cross traffic does not stop, 01/08/2008, by Pat Rice; (5) Cluttered Corner, 03/19/2008, by Alan Stanton; (6) Um, Which Way Do I Go?, 09/26/2008, by US71

Video: (1) Music video uploaded by henrikak47 of the song Rockit, by The Gorillaz, released on their album D-Sides, released 11/20/2007. Sphere: Related Content