The Year Of The Disaster-Plex

America, we need to talk about how the multiple crises we're facing are interconnected. There are so many to choose from, and two that are probably foremost in the reader's thoughts recently, but I want to discuss five of them. (There are others. I’m not even including climate change.) Let's dub 2020 the Year of the Disaster-Plex, shall we? For many of us, the year the scales fell from our eyes.

This lousy year hit us with the Covid-19 crisis first. Viruses happen, and the worst ones are the plagues: when viruses jump from other species into ours⁽¹⁾. So long as we live in close proximity to animals and have less-than-perfect sanitary practices, this will keep happening from time to time. It's bound to be more common now that there are several billion of us, and we keep flying around the world in metal boxes. This one is unusually nasty because it's a stealth virus. When a plague can spread through multiple people who catch it and cough it along, without even knowing yet how sick they are, that's guaranteed to result in widespread infection.

Now we have dunderheads claiming the virus is a hoax, and refusing to wear masks on the basis that it's some kind of weird conspiracy to control them⁽²⁾. Let's come back to that.

Covid-19 has been bad for almost everyone, but it sure hasn't impacted all equally. If you're doing better financially, you can more easily afford to stay home. If you live in a community with more resources, you probably have access to better health care as well. Someone like me, who writes software for a living, is able to keep doing that while working remotely. By contrast, someone working in a warehouse -- and many such people work for Amazon, as I do -- can't do their job without coming into work. So they must either risk infection, or risk unemployment and lost income.

In many cases, this is a double or triple whammy. Warehouse work can be done by anyone able-bodied. Since there are many people who can do it, the law of supply and demand is not kind. The company can afford to let people go, whenever it's in the company's interest, knowing they'll be relatively easy to replace. It can afford to pay them a lower wage, and simultaneously to ask more of them in terms of taking personal risks. Contrast this with some of my fellow software developers who must physically come into the office because they work in a SCIF (roughly, a room with computers kept disconnected from primary networks for security reasons). They too are asked to face a higher health risk, but few people have the needed skills and security clearance. The law of supply and demand is on their side. They're well compensated. “Capitalism: Efficient, but callous.” You can have that one for free to put on a T-shirt.

So if Disaster #1 is Covid-19, Disaster #2 is the ever-widening income gap. When some people earn more, it pushes rent upward, out of the reach of everyone else. Seattle, home of Amazon, exemplifies this, but it’s an increasingly common pattern. Lots of people have already been squeezed to the point where rent makes up more than half their costs, which is unsustainable. Nobody should be forced to choose between buying food or medication. That was already happening before Covid-19. Now the choices are even worse: Risk getting sick by working? Risk losing income by not working? For some, the choice has been made for them: businesses have closed or downsized. They've been forced to skip rent payments, and most landlords will not hold back on evicting them⁽³⁾. Being kicked out onto the street is always a huge setback, but it's worse during an epidemic in which we're asking people to stay home.

Then of course, Disaster #3 is racism. God help us, there is always racism.

The very public, very excruciating, and very callous death of George Floyd served as a wake-up call for a bunch of white people. Any awakening is great, and we'll take it... though it's fair to ask why they weren't already woke after all the previous black deaths at the hands of police, many just as public, and all just as egregiously undeserved.

This leads us into the topic of white privilege, and its ever-present unwelcome ally, white fragility⁽⁴⁾. As a white dude, I must confess to my own 40+ years of blissful, perhaps blithe, basic ignorance of my own privilege. That ended some years back. Now I am reminded of my privilege regularly, and think of it almost daily. If I walk down the street (assuming a non-Covid world in which that happens) and see a black person walking the other way, I automatically imagine what they might think of me. Do they resent me? I'm the villain by default. I can only escape that role through dint of effort, and even then, “ally” is the best I can aim for, never “hero”. The privilege remains mine forever. And lest I come off as whiny (exactly what white fragility is about), I’m not asking for sympathy here, just stating facts.

The privilege is there even as I consider how an audience, you the reader, will judge what I have to say. I can only ask forgiveness if black people read all this and find fault with it. I can't say nothing, because silence is complicity. I do my best to pay attention to what black spokespeople are saying (and to fund causes they favor), and to amplify their voices, since some white people will only really listen to other white people. But I also can't only parrot the thoughts of others, as that puts the onus on black people to continually put forth the ideas on how to fix things. So I feel compelled to take a stab at it, because anything less feels cowardly.

I agree with almost everything in that article about white fragility. A lot of white people just don't want to hear how bad things really are, and they don’t want to accept the stigma and the responsibility that come with wearing white skin. Nobody wants to be uncomfortable if they can avoid it. That's just human nature. But a lot of things are human nature, including unconscious bias. It's also human nature to just kill the next tribe over and take their stuff if you fancy it, but we got over that, mostly. We learn to replace untamed human nature with societal values and culture. At this point, all white people need to be made painfully aware of their privilege, accept its reality, and deal.

I’ve accepted that my success, my nice house and comfortable paycheck, are due in large part to circumstances beyond my control, the vagaries of chance. I’ve made choices in my life, sure, but I didn’t choose my starting point: who my parents were, where I was born, my skin color. Admitting that those things helped does not erase my accomplishments, but it does mean I’d best retain a bit of modesty and humility about them. Otherwise I’d be a huge jerk. Those rich white guys who claim they did it all themselves, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps with no help from anybody? Huge jerks.

Admitting privilege may be the hardest for those people, as I mentioned earlier, who are facing eviction because they're flat broke during a pandemic. It's hard to imagine, when circumstances are so bad, that they could possibly have been any worse with a darker skin tone. But that's how it is. It would, indeed, have been worse without those privileges. Having white privilege does not mean you automatically end up rich. (That requires more select privileges, such as having rich parents. Like our president.) You can be both privileged and disadvantaged at the same time.

I did, though, also sympathize with the article's author when he raised one concern about the fragility training: We mustn't allow general, positive terms like "successful" or "rational and objective" to be defined as "owned" by whites. Hiring practices, for example, rightfully will include a desire to select candidates who are rational and skilled.

Being successful in life, being competent and confident, those are properties that should be viewed as universal, because they are the goals for everyone. To my mind, painting those attributes as "white" is itself a bit racist.

Shifting from racism to sexism for a moment, I remember reading about a persistent problem with sexist hiring practices among orchestras⁽⁵⁾: too many men being selected, not enough women. There was (presumably unconscious) bias in the selection process. The solution was an almost laughably simple one: Conceal the candidate behind a screen. The interviewers can hear the violin, but can't see the violinist. This small change resulted immediately in a higher percentage of women being selected.

Studies have shown that submitting exactly the same résumé, tagged with either a white-sounding name, or a black- or Latino-sounding name, by itself makes a significant difference in the outcome⁽⁶⁾. This suggests we should keep the names off the damn résumés.

The facts, the data, make it undeniable that systemic racism and unconscious bias are huge factors that we must overcome. Being objective and rational, i.e. scientific, is how we determine this to be true, how we measure the impact, and how we know whether we’re making progress. So we mustn't then declare that the qualities of being rational or objective are the sole province of whites, as that denies non-whites a chance to be the deciders and gatekeepers, to guide the process. It's disempowering.

Nor is it wise to frame any anti-racism movement in opposition to "capitalism". By all means, capitalism is flawed, particularly as it's practiced in the US: as an all-important golden idol, where making money is the only goal. The success of corporations is measured in dollars, and all too often we apply the same standard to people, and then to the entire society: success of the nation becomes all about the GDP. Efficiency is valuable, but there are much better qualities to measure, such as happiness, health, level of education, overall well-being.

This doesn't mean capitalism is bad. Capitalism, as an engine of problem solving and wealth creation, is darned successful. It means, instead, that the system is out of balance and needs correction. Corporations selling you commodities, offering you better technologies? Outstanding. Corporations selling you medical insurance? Nightmare -- give us single payer insurance run by the federal government, we'll all be better off (including the other corporations who currently have to buy that insurance for us employees).

And can we please simplify the tax code already? You can blame companies like Intuit for that⁽⁷⁾. If they didn’t block every government attempt to simplify how we do taxes, they wouldn’t have a product to sell us. Destroy those companies.

The corporations cannot be expected to clean up their own act, as they are the product of the system's rules. They respond to incentives, and the laws define the incentives. It's the government that corrects problems with the laws. And this leads us to Disaster #4, the fact that our country's government is well and truly in the crapper.

I’ve written about this before. Go and read “Why Competition In The Politics Industry Is Failing America”⁽⁸⁾. If you don’t have time to read it, at least read Part VI with the suggested fixes. We should all be fighting to change our states’ voting procedures to offer open primaries, ranked-choice voting, nonpartisan redistricting (end gerrymandering), and pass campaign finance reform. These changes would incentivize politicians to actually fight for legislation we favor, instead of what happens today: intentionally polarizing rhetoric, and hardly any real legislation that doesn’t further entrench the duopoly. We have to fix this, because until we do, we can’t fix anything else at the federal level.

Similarly, we have to stamp out voter disenfranchisement, often aimed squarely at minorities because they tend to vote Democrat. I believe it’s immoral to deny the vote to convicts. If the laws are unfairly structured or unevenly enforced, landing a disproportionate number of black people in jail (and that definitely happens), taking away their voting rights effectively prevents them from addressing the injustice that put them there. It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s no accident. We’ve had too many examples now of GOP politicians saying the quiet part out loud. They know exactly what they’re doing.

We also have to do something about Fox News. Not just them, mind you, but they’re the clearest example of the trend: the self-reinforcing “alternative facts” bubble, pioneered and perfected by the GOP. This is the final disaster I want to discuss, and perhaps the most pernicious: the war on truth.

Back in the 50’s, the two parties were adversaries, but not like they are today. There was a moral code, and both sides adhered. Bipartisan legislation was more common than it is now. Debates might hinge on values (is personal freedom more important than the common good?), or on predictions of the future (will a proposed strategy actually work or will it fail?). But the disagreements were more civil.

Ah, but no… it was never a panacea; there were no Good Old Days. The 1950’s were the home to McCarthyism, a campaign of fear mongering and witch-hunting in which many were accused of treason without hard evidence.

Still, we did have a generally common faith in the Fourth Estate, the newspapers and other major media. Somewhere along the way, the GOP went into a spiral of compulsive dishonesty. Reagan’s characterization of “welfare queens” was false, but not so trivial to disprove. By the time of Trump’s inauguration, we were treated to Sean Spicer claiming the crowds at that inauguration were bigger than at Obama’s. That could be easily, trivially disproved with pictures. Then Kellyanne Conway, in defending Spicer, invoked her infamous phrase “alternative facts”⁽⁹⁾.

Postmodernism was a mistake. Facts are not social constructs. Facts are what remains true regardless of whether you believe it or not. And if you believe you inhabit a reality entirely composed of your own personal bubble of experience, that does not share an objective reality with me or anyone else… then all I can do is recommend you stay home and not vote. After all, how could the outcome matter to you?

Reality is real. Facts are real. Science is an earnest attempt to determine which statements are facts, and which are wrong or just bunk. Scientists make mistakes, they’re human, but the scientific method is the best fact-filtering system we’ve so far devised. If you choose to reject it, you ought to hand over your cell phone, forego antibiotics, and walk away from every other amazing thing our modern society has managed to create for your comfort and long life.

I used to be a diehard supporter of free speech, but my thinking on this has evolved. (If one’s thinking cannot evolve, one cannot learn.) The success of Fox News, Infowars, and the whole right-wing bubble has produced a significant minority of the country whose minds cannot be changed by facts. They’ll just claim those facts were invented, or selectively promulgated, by the biased “fake news”. They’ll then respond with their own “alternative facts”, frequently themselves taken out of context or simply untrue, but reinforced by the right-wing media bubble.

What we’ve learned of human psychology is that people form beliefs too easily, and hold onto them too tightly. I’ve written about this before, with respect to superstitions, conspiracy theories, and the origins of religions. What the right-wing media complex has created has aspects of a political cult. Cult leaders set themselves up as the sole source of truth, seeking to discredit any other sources. Cries of “fake news” effectively insulate Fox News devotees from considering conflicting information reported by the mainstream media, or any person or organization outside the bubble. Those who agree with the accepted doctrine (e.g. that climate change is not human-caused) have legitimacy; those who dare to contradict such ideas are driven out of the group. This synergizes rather nastily with closed primaries and the winner-take-all nature of our elections, forcing the GOP to field more extreme candidates while the Dems field more bland ones⁽¹⁰⁾. Primary elections mainly attract the die-hard voters, who tend to be more extreme. A Republican who refuses to parrot the current popular right-wing conspiracy theory is unlikely to get the party’s nomination.

For people living in predominantly right-leaning areas, there is also the very human desire to conform. Some will claim to support the extreme views of those around them, when in truth they believe otherwise. It’s hard to know how many people are just pretending, sometimes performing even for each other.

During normal times, the newspapers would be a counterbalancing force against the cynical propaganda and the random nonsense. But the Internet has done us a disservice here, by making us think we can get all our news from social media. Journalism is a lot like science: it takes dedicated people whose full-time job is sifting through the noise, seeking corroborating evidence and multiple sources. Making up a story out of thin air is relatively easy, and these days, such garbage “news” can look startlingly legitimate⁽¹¹⁾. Then Facebook and Twitter exaggerate anything that catches the eye and earns clicks -- regardless of journalistic merit. Suddenly we’ve all been forced to learn the difference between a trustworthy source and a schlock tabloid website. Some folks have picked the wrong sites to trust.

In light of all this, I’m now open to some changes in our free speech protections. I continue to support protecting the freedom to express opinions, the freedom to endorse values, and the freedom to predict outcomes of a given choice or policy (as that is nearly impossible to know for sure). But I think we should draw the line at publishing demonstrably false statements as if they were true. Just as books must include disclaimers like “This is a work of fiction”, tabloids, TV shows, or websites that present unproven conspiracy theories as if they’re Definitely True should be required to put a similar disclaimer right there by the article -- or risk getting fined. It’s no use protesting that it’s the reader’s job to decide, or that the audience actually understands that it’s satire or a joke. Clearly, plenty of people cannot tell.

What’s more, if one is reporting on a statement of fact an authority figure uttered (like our conspiracy-propagating President), it should be required to fact-check the statement. It’s no longer good enough to say “The President said you could drink bleach to destroy viruses, although health experts insist this is unsafe to do”. This just creates a false equivalency, which is not even equivalent now that so many people have been convinced not to trust experts. News shows and websites should now be required to state what they believe to be supported by the evidence, and again, face fines if they knowingly lend support to false or unsubstantiated statements.

A society that can’t agree on basic truths is by nature dysfunctional. An authority figure, such as the CDC, states that wearing masks reduces the risk of transmitting Covid-19. A significant number of people reject this, on ideological grounds rather than honestly differing interpretations of the data. The obvious result is that the virus isn’t effectively contained, impacting everyone. Health issues place us all in the same boat. We can’t afford to have alternative truth bubbles any more.

Just as Trump got his spokesmen to claim that his inauguration crowd was bigger, when the photographs clearly show it was not, he is now trying to control the facts and figures about how widely Covid-19 has spread. It’s a trivial response to any problem, right? If you provide facts and figures showing that racism has a real impact, he and his bubble-buddies can just claim your facts and figures are false, and make up their own. With Disaster #5 hanging over us, nobody can make progress on anything.

Trump may be the current GOP ringleader, but he is the end result of the strategy, not its author. The entire party has been dipping deeper and deeper into this foul well for decades. There may be nothing that can be done now for all the devoted worshippers of the alternative news bubble. When someone is mired in the sway of a cult, you cannot force them to wake up to reality. At most, you can patiently wait, making the facts available, until they accumulate enough nagging doubts on their own to realize it’s time to break free.

But suppose for a moment that we were past all that. We had a citizenry that, mostly, agreed on what was true and what was false, could accept the careful measurements of experts, and therefore could admit to the sizable problems we face. And we could actually elect people to Congress that would do their jobs effectively (rather than spend 90% of their time fundraising and the other 10% making noise). We had a free hand to change the laws, correct the system, and end systemic racism. What concrete changes might we make?

I would suggest we should get more black people into Congress, where they can take further steps. Nobody knows more about what oppressed groups need than members of the group. How might we make this easier, given that currently the system is stacked against them? Stack it the other way.

This article⁽¹²⁾ is about the College Board attempting to "contextualize" SAT scores by considering a college applicant's background. Find a way to measure the obstacles that someone has faced, and adjust their score to compensate.

Naturally the privileged folks howled. "[A college admissions coach in New York] said he had received emails from parents asking whether their children’s hard work in preparing for the SAT 'would be completely negated just because we happen to have some means.'”

You mean, you find it upsetting that someone who's really had to struggle would get rewarded for that? And it might mean your privileged kid may not get his spot in college? I think the proper response to that is "too bad". We need to do more for those facing hardships. Put simply, poor neighborhoods need college graduates more than well-off neighborhoods do. Yes, that's sometimes going to mean the well-off folks have to wait their turn. And I know they're not used to that.

I noted the College Board decided not to incorporate race in their SAT calculations, perhaps thinking it would allow opponents to label it "affirmative action" and open them up to attacks in states that have laws against it.

The day I saw this article (actually before I saw it), a thought popped into my head as I woke: Weighted voting. Could we do for Congress what the College Board is trying to do for universities?

Years back I started wondering how to reverse the seemingly inevitable trend of self-reinforcing power centers. Systemic racism is an example. Another is how the rich get richer. Accumulated wealth allows one greater influence over who gets elected, through dangling promises of campaign donations. That should be illegal, we obviously need campaign finance reform (see above), but that's just the tip of the inequality iceberg. If the measure of a society is how well it treats its least advantaged members, we ought to give those people the loudest voices when it comes to electing our leaders.

"One person, one vote" seems intrinsically fair, at first glance. But it does nothing to counter injustice. What if everyone were scored on their level of privilege, and folks having a lower level of privilege were awarded greater voting power?

We could start with income. If you earn a lot, your vote counts for less. If you're scraping by on minimum wage or less, your vote counts more. There are many ways we could do this, but one might be to consider what percentile you're in. Are you a member of the top 1%? Your multiplier is 1. Top 10%, but not earning enough to be in the top 9%? Your multiplier is 10 -- your vote counts ten times as much. Anyone earning less than the median income has a multiplier of 50 or higher.

Of course, some people are so rich that they have no income -- not the way most of us measure it. They live off their investments. Let's factor in a person's wealth. If you have more than a million dollars to your name, you should get that same income multiplier of one. You don't need a louder voice at the voting booth; you're doing fine relative to most people.

The point being to counter injustice, we should pay attention to less-privileged groups of people. For example, women are paid something like 70% of what men are paid. So, give all women another multiplier of 10/7ths in the voting booth. In other words, it only takes seven women's votes to balance those of ten male voters with the same income. Don’t like it, guys? Pay the women more.

Women also face more difficulty in getting a job in the first place, and of getting higher paying positions. These forms of injustice are harder to measure, and it's critical that the system be backed by data that everyone can agree on -- if it's subjective, it's easier to argue against. But you could pick an indicator you'd like to see shift, like "women hold 5.0 percent of Fortune 500 CEO roles". I like this one as a forcing function, because it demonstrates that it's rare to find women in the most powerful paid positions, and having more women CEOs makes it more likely we'll see women in other high-placed positions. If the playing field were level, it should be 50%, but it's a tenth of where it should be. Invert that number -- give all women an additional vote multiplier of 10.

Unlike the College Board, I'd want to apply the same standards to race. Given that the median income for black Americans is 2/3 that of white Americans, they would get a 1.5 multiplier. There are three black CEOs in the Fortune 500, when there should be about 68 to be proportionate with the roughly 13.5% of Americans who are black. So that's another multiplier of 22.7.

I'm getting these figures from quick Google searches; they may be out of date. But it’s important that the figures are available to anybody, and the math isn’t difficult either. Making the system transparent means anybody who knows basic arithmetic can double-check the results. We can all agree it’s fair -- provided we can all agree on the facts, and on the value of ending all kinds of systemic unfairness.

Consider that black citizens face a host of obstacles that are arguably worse than income disparities, such as a higher incarceration rate. If African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites (per the NAACP's figures), they should get another vote multiplier of 5. Arguably, this should be higher; you can't really compare a smaller paycheck with losing one's freedom. You could square it (5 x 5) to 25.

Note, at this point, the vote of one black woman who's earning less than 80% of Americans (roughly $20K a year) would be worth that of 80 x (7/10) x 10 x 1.5 x 22.7 x 25 = 972,857 white male millionaires. And we haven't considered other factors that are still more important -- like the fact that black people are disproportionately more likely to be shot and killed by police.

What might happen if a neighborhood of mostly poor black people had many thousands of times the impact on an election of an equal-sized neighborhood of affluent white people, the very opposite of what happens today? I wager there would be several outcomes. First, the politicians would bend over backwards to offer policies those groups wanted. Second, a lot more black people and women, and other minority groups, would be elected. Third, it would suddenly become much easier to get progressive legislation passed, to actually address some of these disparities. Fourth, conditions would finally improve for these groups, and in future elections we'd start to see the numbers shift.

Do the same exercise for other persecuted or marginalized groups: people with alternative sexualities, transgender people, disabled people. Anyone who faces discrimination. Anyone who grew up in a poor neighborhood with inadequately funded public schools, anyone who lives in a place with polluted air or water. Anyone financially unable to pick up and leave those areas.

What appeals to me about this idea is that over longer periods of time, it's self-correcting. If we should reach the point where we've got equal pay for equal work, and equal treatment under the law, the multipliers would fall back towards unity. We can have “one person, one vote” once we’ve earned it.

One idea I've consciously left out is reparations, the idea that we should compensate black Americans for the slavery endured by their ancestors. I'm very much in favor of reparations, but I don't think it fits well with weighted voting, which is all about compensating for current injustices. Slavery is part of our past that, regrettably, will never be erased. I do, though, think that weighted voting would make it a lot easier to pass a reparations bill. That could be one of the mechanisms we use to achieve a truly level playing field.

So... what counter-argument to this idea should we expect? Based on the reaction to the SAT's Adversity Score, we can assume there'd be massive push-back to weighted voting, most of it from white people, men, and the rich. The impact of such a policy would be great, affecting all policy changes rather than just college admissions.

Doubtless some would argue that it's unconstitutional, but let's set such concerns aside. The question isn't whether we could institute the system, but whether we should. Put another way, what are the moral or practical arguments in favor of retaining one-person-one-vote?

One could argue with the particular measurements selected to calculate the score, or how much weight to give each. One could also argue that calculating all these numbers, and ensuring it's done accurately and fairly for everyone, would be a hard problem. But those, as an engineer would say, are implementation details. They don't invalidate the central idea.

One could argue that these disparities are not actually injustices. If someone earns less money, it must be because they aren't working as hard. If a black man is more likely to be imprisoned, it must be because he is intrinsically more likely to break the law. If someone makes that argument, send them to white fragility class until the lesson sinks in.

Setting that aside too, we may run up against a fundamental belief that each person's vote should count the same as any other's. This is equivalent to insisting that the majority must rule, that preserving this value is more important than these other injustices. But I take issue with that, too. It’s outcomes that matter. Our government is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around. Our principles and policies must operate to improve the lives of those who are worst off. In theory, we could have rectified all these injustices by now without weighted voting... and so far, we haven't. As they say, insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. It’s time to try some different approaches.

There's another potential pitfall, and it's a harder one to dismiss. If truly put into widespread use, the newly-empowered groups might be tempted to cement their power by dismantling the self-adjusting vote-weighting mechanisms that put them in charge, replacing them with something permanent, or at least much longer-lasting.

To this point, I’m reminded of the woman to whom John Oliver gave the final word, in his episode about defunding the police⁽¹³⁾:

“They are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality, and not revenge.”

I’d say we have to trust them on that.

(1) Americapox: the Missing Plague by CGP Grey (Well, Covid-19 didn’t originate in America, but I guess we’ve made it our own?)

(2) No mask, no entry. Is that clear enough? That seems pretty clear, right?

(3) What happens if you can't pay rent? by Hasan Minhaj, Patriot Act (Netflix) See also: https://www.dontgetkickedout.com/

(4) ‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work?

(5) How blind auditions help orchestras to eliminate gender bias

(6) Study: anti-black hiring discrimination is as prevalent today as it was in 1989

(7) Why doing taxes is so hard by Hasan Minhaj, Patriot Act (Netflix) See also: https://www.turbotaxsucksass.com/

(8) Why Competition In The Politics Industry Is Failing America

(9) An Alternative History of ‘Alternative Facts’: Postmodernism and the Center-Right Knowledge Ecology