Followups: Maladjusted Republicans, Tax & Spend for Prosperity, and Antarctic Icebergs

Last week I ventured that voters who cling to simple answers to hugely complex questions are mentally ill.  It would be more proper to say mentally maladapted, according to former American Psychological Association executive director Bryant Welch. Welch’s new book State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind notes that the world was once simpler, and we are still adapted to that world – not to this one.  Moreover (and this is the main point of his book), we are ready, nay eager, to allow self-interested parties to manufacture false but simple explanations that we can buy into.  Of course he really means only one Party, and its name starts with R.

The book is reviewed in Miller-McCune Magazine.  (I recently discovered this free, non-profit journal of public issues, and like it a lot.  You can subscribe here.) The reviewer punches a bunch of holes in Welch’s thesis – and to be sure, a psychotherapist can’t make a living curing mental pathologies unless there are plenty of pathologies out there, and some therapists are not above inventing new ones from thin air. But Welch’s main argument survives the review, holes and all.

In my last entry I also recommended former U. of Wisconsin president John D. Wiley’s editorial attributing Wisconsin’s dismal economy to its business leaders’ knee-jerk “reduce taxes” answer (no matter what question is asked).  Maybe Wiley should send them to Welch for therapy.  Anyway, now here comes John E. Schwarz, Professor Emeritus at University of Arizona, whose Washington Post op-ed reasonably asks “Why is tax-and-spend worse than borrow-and-spend?”  His reasonable answer: It’s not worse, it's better. It’s not only more moral (because it doesn’t take food out of our children’s mouths) but it’s also better economically.  Schwarz shows that job creation has been far greater under Democratic administrations for the past 50 years.  No, they were not all government jobs!  They happened because government invested in expensive and risky new technologies, entailing R&D costs that no single company would pay for. The results were commercialized, creating high-paying private-sector jobs. Without increasing the National Debt.

Schwarz’ column generated a lot of comments on the Post’s web site.  One cited all the innovations that came out of RCA and other companies.  Yeah, buddy, that was then and this is now.  Private companies wanted global capital liberalization, around the turn of the century, and they got it.  The FTAs have bitten them in the ass. Now they’re in a hypercompetitive environment that won’t allow them to spend on R&D.  Another commentator claimed AT&T would still be churning out innovations if the government hadn’t busted it up.  Hoo ha!

In this month’s AARP magazine, Shirley Streshinsky writes about the 2007 wreck of the cruise ship Explorer on an Antarctic iceberg.  As it happens, my faculty colleague Dr. Bob Flood was on the Explorer. 

A business professor, Bob studies Antarctic wildlife as a hobby.  He was moonlighting as a guide on the Explorer.  Bob told his harrowing survival-at-sea story to Radio Scilly (“one of the UK's smallest radio stations”).  The MP3 file of his radio interview is fascinating.  And scary. Find it by clicking through this site.

“Just like a third-world country”

In 1985, the Australian Prime Minister used this phrase to suggest what his country would be if it didn’t get its economic development act together.  Australians were insulted by the notion, but they did heed the Minister’s call.  In 2008 Australia is a prosperous nation.

In 2000, I used the same phrase to try to spur Oregon’s ED efforts.  I use the two letters to mean economic development, but those of you who read it as erectile dysfunction aren’t far wrong.  Oregon’s economy is still limp.

This month, the former president of University of Wisconsin at Madison, John D. Wiley, uses the phrase’s shock value to jolt the cheeseheads.  His important editorial is in Madison Magazine.

Wiley attacks the staff of his state’s biggest industry association for insisting that the answer to every question is “cut taxes,” even as the association (and everyone else) watches Wisconsin’s education system deteriorate.  Wiley compares Wisconsin to other states, including neighboring Minnesota, and shows clearly that the most prosperous states do not have the lowest per-capita tax burden.

This reinforces the more international analysis I did for Review of Technology & Economic Development in ’05: “The U.S., under its current small-government ideology, is seeing its sick go without costly drugs, and its K-12 education system decline. The Scandinavian countries – the most highly taxed and regulated on Earth, and the bane of small-government dogmatists – are highly innovative and entrepreneurial. That Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway are innovative, congenial places to live illustrates what this journal has long noted: Economic development is served by having a healthy, educated populace.” (This paragraph also appeared in Social Culture and  High-Tech Economic Development: The Technopolis Columns.)

I spent today with management guru Ian Mitroff, a colleague at Alliant International University and at Technological Forecasting & Social Change. We discussed the Obama and McCain conversations at Rick Warren’s church.  Obama thoughtfully described complexities, while McCain told simplistic stories.  McCain walked away with the day.  Having evolved in simpler times, we are hard-wired to love linear narrative – even when it’s wrong. Inter-connected complexities leave us behind.

I advanced the notion that insisting on simple answers in the face of overwhelming evidence of a problem’s complexity can only be viewed as a mental illness. Our Dean at Alliant, Jim Goodrich, voiced a counterpoint, that it’s a common cop-out for academics to hide in complexities.  Both are true - and all three of us agreed that it is the job of the thoughtful person to make a complex story understandable (as Wiley does very well in his editorial) if we want large numbers of people to act. 

If we don’t, then only a handful of people will be willing to take action. The remainder will fall asleep, and it will be our fault.

So, shock phrases like “third-world country” are not enough; what’s needed is a compelling narrative of a complex situation. I did eventually provide one for Oregon’s ED sticky wicket, in an appendix of the City Club of Portland’s report on the Portland Development Commission.  Still not enough! Though the report got significant press coverage, the appendix was lost in the noise.  We have to keep telling the important stories. (Another thing academics are not good at.)

So far, Obama has conveyed only that he’s an admirably thoughtful guy.  He hasn’t yet shocked us (though his wife did, briefly), he hasn’t yet rhetorically cut to the heart of his complex ideas, and if he can find a way to tell the important stories, he has less than three months to tell them.

But Obama needs to be liked, and John D. Wiley doesn’t.  This gives Wiley more latitude in storytelling.  Maybe Wisconsin has a better chance than the country at large, come November.