Archive for December 2010
When will state pensions bankrupt your state?
There seems to be a high likelihood that future generations will have to bear the substantial burden of making up pension benefits for previous generations of state employees. While citizens of states that are particularly hard-hit by the pension crisis may be able to escape to other states, an acceleration of this demographic phenomenon would leave a dwindling taxpayer base behind in the states facing the largest liabilities.
This would increase the likelihood of a federal taxpayer bailout in which taxpayers in all states would bear the burden of the states in default. The problem of state and local pension liabilities is therefore a problem for all US taxpayers, not just those in the states with the largest deficits.
Perp Walk
What happened in Bell City 14 miles south of Los Angeles would be entertaining if it was not so, well – “revealing”. You can read more about what happended at Bell at the ABC News link given at the end of this posting.
But, the essence of the thing is that Bell City Manager, Robert Rizzo, was being paid a salary of $770,000 per year. Bell City is primarily a blue-collar town of about 40,000 people. A typical salary of a Bell City resident is about $28,000 per year. About 17% of the town lives in poverty.
The Bell City Council worked it out so that Rizzo would get a near 12% raise each year and they themselves – the City Council – paid themselves about $100,000 per year for part-time work.
Rizzo got fired. But that does not mean he will lose his pension of $709,607 per year. Depending on how long Rizzo lives, the total payout of pension benefits could be close to $30 million dollars. And that $30 million dollar pension for one person is on the backs of the taxpayers.
The Ruthless among us
There are a couple of interesting things going on here. First, we may have spotted a high density of what Dr. Martha Stout calls “The Ruthless among us – those without a conscious” (read). According to Dr. Stout, one in twenty-five people lack a sense of what is right and wrong as judged by the standards of the “rest of us”. So, it looks like we found a cluster of “the ruthless” on the Bell City Council along with the City Manager.
Does a red flag go up in the minds of these City Council people when they pay themselves $100,000 per year and the City Manager $770,000 per year knowing that this City Manager salary also presents a $30 million dollar pension liability for the city for a single person? Do you (as part of the “rest of us”) see something wrong with this? Residents of the city average only $29,000 per year. It seems that this is the new standard of moral and ethical behavior by the City Council and the City Manager as “city servant” – at least in Bell. How many other places is this going on? Is Bell unique or just the tip of the iceberg?
Trajectory of financial collapse
Second, how many other cities (and states) are on the trajectory of financial collapse under the burden of pensions in general? Cities and states have taxing authority so the folks managing these budgets never have to earn money in the same sense as a private sector business. What they need they simply take from the taxpayers – if they dare to do so. The fox is guarding the financial hen-house.
Check out the report below and see where your state ranks in the pension runout. Some brief statistics below, Read the full report at the link in the resources section at the end of this posting.
What Technology Wants for the Future of Broadcast Radio
Grundig S450DLX Field Radio
I read a review of a new AM/FM/SW radio that will soon be on the market. The person writing the review questioned why “anyone” would want a radio with Shortwave. Perhaps that is a legitimate question. For that matter, why would anyone want AM? Or even a more extreme view, why would anyone want a “radio” at all? By “radio” I mean a dedicated device to receive an RF signal in the traditional frequency spectrum assigned to the AM/FM/SW broadcast bands.
What technology wants
I have heard this term, “What technology wants”. As if technology has a “mind” or “intention” (Hegel/Geist). Perhaps people think that they are in charge. Technology is created in the service of man. But, the creation (or discovery) of a new technology has many unintended consequences as well as a few surprises waiting. The surprises are “what technology wants” and these may be unexpected and disruptive.
Can you get your 35mm film developed anymore? Running low on chemicals for the home film developing lab? Do you need some more photographic paper? Did you check the catalogs lately to see what new enlargers or lenses are on the market for your darkroom in the spare bedroom? At some point, if you talk about any of the above the number of people who know what you are talking about will diminish as time goes on. Does a teenager know what “dialing” a telephone number means and the origin of the term? Do you shoot “footage” with your digital video camera? What is “footage”? (Read related: Kodachrome)
Did Eastman Kodak want their film business disrupted by digital photography? No. But it happened. Technology wanted something that Eastman Kodak could not anticipate. Eastman Kodak was late to the game and was not a leader when technology first made its intentions clear. What technology wanted in digital photography was “inevitable” and no power on earth, let alone Eastman Kodak, could stop it.
Once technology is unleashed who or what sets the path of all the events to follow? Who is in charge?
What is “Radio”?
Perhaps it will be the same with “radio”. What technology wants, and what is inevitable and unstoppable, will lead to a challenge and clarification of what “radio” is. International broadcasters such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and others picked up on this opportunity more than a decade ago to clarify the definition of radio and their mission as international broadcasters. With alternate delivery mechanisms one could finally see in “radio” the distinction between content (programming) and delivery (RF) and how these could be separated. What opportunities await? What does technology want?
LIFE Magazine is for people who can not read
A School Teacher Speaks
I was listening to a broadcast radio talk show a few days ago and a former school teacher called up and said, “LIFE magazine is for people who can’t read.”
So, is that what she taught generations of grammar school or high school students? Are paintings and sculpture also for people who can not read? What about architecture? Does architecture have anything to communicate?
Why the primacy of the text? Photography, painting – no matter what the genre, sculpture, architecture and other forms of non-verbal or non-textual expression have much to communicate. “LIFE magazine is for people who can not read”. Is this the product of a limited education? Or the source of future generations of limited education? Or, perhaps both?
Inside a Nazi Christmas Party, 1941
Of course the real topic under discussion on this talk radio show was a set of color photographs that LIFE magazine published showing Hitler celebrating Christmas in Nazi Germany in 1941. Was it really a religious celebration by the Nazi’s?
So, take a look for yourself -
http://www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery/51341/inside-a-nazi-christmas-party-1941#index/0
Check out thousands of LIFE photographs -
http://www.life.com/
And then wonder about the state of education and if photography is somehow a diminished or impoverished form of expression in comparison to written text. Perhaps photographs say what can not be said in speech or writing. Perhaps photography and visual perception is a form of communication that skips the intermediary of verbal or textual translation. Perhaps visual communication is a primary link to an emotional communication and the verbal or textual translation of that emotional connection is impoverished and secondary. Isn’t part of what makes great literature the ability of the writer to evoke images in your mind to tell the story? Writing is in the service of imagery. “LIFE magazine is for people who can’t read.” Think again.
From the text accompanying the photograph
“We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem. It is inconceivable for us that Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental religion.” These were words of Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm in 1937, in pre-war attempts to take religion out of the holiday by harking back to the pagan Julfest, a Germanic festival of the winter solstice that was later absorbed into Christmas. (An eye-opening 2009 exhibit at Cologne’s National Socialism Documentation Centre displayed early Nazi propaganda employed to make over the holidays: swastika-shaped cookie-cutters; sunburst tree-toppers, to replace the traditional ornament Nazis feared looked too much like the Star of David; and rewritten lyrics to carols that excised all references to Christ.) But by the time of the 1941 Christmas party featured here, with World War II at its height — America had officially entered the fray just weeks earlier — the focus shifted to more practical matters. Rather than trying to dissuade millions of Germans from celebrating Christmas the way they always had, the Reich instead encouraged them to send cards and care packages to the troops.
Review of the TI-84 Calculator – Part II
Read part 1 – Review of the TI-84 Calculator – Part I
This is my last posting on the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition Calculator. This thing is being wrapped up and given as a Xmas present. The last calculator I bought of any significance was the Casio FX-7000G. I find now that this calculator is of 1980′s vintage and of some note regarding innovation for the time. I am going to stay with this older calculator for now for the reasons stated at the end of this posting.
There are lots of reference information about the TI family of graphing calculators in my original posting. You can refer to that in conjunction with this last posting.
One piece of software that I did not mention in the original posting, and it took me a long time to find this, is a Microsoft Windows-based program for editing TI Basic Programs.
Programming TI BASIC using MS Windows
A strong point of this family of TI calculators is the ability to write programs in TI-BASIC. Great. The downside is that you have to type these programs in at the keyboard on the calculator. This is a giant pain. Do you think that TI would provide a PC Windows-based editor to make the job easier and provide that on the companion CD-ROM with the product? No. That, from a customer and usability perspective, is an oversight and omission on the part of the TI Product Manager who owns this family of calculators. But, never fear, there is one and it dates back to 2004 but it still works.
The TI BASIC Editor will make your life easier
This Windows-based editor dating back to 2004 will run on a Win7 machine without any problem. In the left pane are all the possible TI-BASIC command. On the right pane is the text editing window. You can double-click on a command on the left and it appears on the right. Edit as you see fit.
A great feature of this program is that you import any text. So, if you get a program off the internet or other source you can simply paste in text or use the Open file dialog to import the text. When you are done editing and syntax checking, click an icon to send the file to the calculator and its ready to run. Very nice.
The Take
The take on this one is that this calculator will be packaged up and given as a Xmas present. Who would use this calculator? I think this calculator is most appropriate for kids in high school and perhaps for first year college students taking analytic geometry, pre-calculus, or a first course in calculus or statistics. Beyond this, there are better tools.
For an adult doing anything related to finance (home budgets, investments, or planning) then Microsoft EXCEL would be the tool of choice – or Open Office if you prefer a free open source solution. In this day and age the use of a simple $10 calculator can take care of most of your immediate ‘arithmetic” needs. A calculator in the class of the Graphing TI family such as the TI 83/84 is way overkill for “arithmetic” and falls way short when compared to Microsoft EXCEL. The TI Graphing calculators has a very definite niche of maximum utility and value. Outside this niche, the value is questionable.
For kids “mesmerized by technology” the TI-84 can not only be a calculator but also a platform for Z-80 assembler development. There does exist a home-grown open source operating system for the TI family based on Z-80 assembler. Why does an home-grown alternate operating system with free source code exist? Because it can, and because some young kids have the curiosity and spirit of innovation to commit their time and resources to writing such a thing. Good for them. These kids could be the next generation of those engineers that develop the next great product. So, a Z-80 development platform for $100? Maybe, and a calculator to boot.
The Age of $100K per year tax-free pensions
While you are calculating your retirement benefits you might want to do a little benchmarking. The great thing about public pensions of city and state workers is that there is a near infinite amount of money to fund these pensions. That infinite amount of money is the state, city, and local taxing authority. Whatever is needed to fund these pensions it can get from the citizens. Good deal.
Check out this excerpt from the New York Times… And then check out the actual annual pensions amounts of 3,726 individuals collecting public pensions from the state of New York
In Yonkers, more than 100 retired police officers and firefighters are collecting pensions greater than their pay when they were working. One of the youngest, Hugo Tassone, retired at 44 with a base pay of about $74,000 a year. His pension is now $101,333 a year…
It’s what the system promised, said Mr. Tassone, now 47, adding that he did nothing wrong by adding lots of overtime to his base pay shortly before retiring. “I don’t understand how the working guy that held up their end of the bargain became the problem,” he said…
According to pension data collected by The New York Times from the city and state, about 3,700 retired public workers in New York are now getting pensions of more than $100,000 a year, exempt from state and local taxes. The data belie official reports that the average state pension is a modest $18,000, or $38,000 for retired police officers and firefighters. (The average is low, in part, because it includes people who worked in government only part time, or just a few years, as well as surviving spouses getting partial benefits.) …
Roughly one of every 250 retired public workers in New York is collecting a six-figure pension, and that group is expected to grow rapidly in coming years, based on the number of highly paid people in the pipeline…
Yonkers still offers full pensions to police after 20 years, but just in theory. For the moment, the city is too broke to send any new cadets to the police academy, and retirees are not being replaced…
Resources:
Check out the Top Recipients of Public Pensions in New York
Records for 3,726 individuals
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/15/business/pension.html
Read the whole story
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/business/economy/21pension.html
Read about the scandal in Bell California
The city manager of a blue-collar town makes $700,000/yr and will draw a pension valued at $30 million over his lifetime
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/pressure-calif-city-mulls-firing-overpaid-manager/story?id=11230145
What Is Your “Fair Share” of the Federal Tax Burden?
It’s getting close to that time of the year again when individuals will prepare their tax returns and pay their “fair share” of the Federal tax burden. But what is a “fair share”? In the United States we have a progressive tax meaning, essentially, that the more you make the more you pay. Is that fair? Why?
Perhaps one can think of money as a sort of “certificate of societal contribution”. Society rewards, in the form of monetary compensation, what it needs and what it values. So, in a sense, and maybe a stretch, the higher the value of an individuals societal contribution the more the monetary compensation paid to them. So why a progressive penalty (tax) on those people who provide to society the most value or benefit as measured by compensation?
Perhaps it should be the other way around. If you don’t contribute to society as some expected level (your “fair share of the work”) then you pay a penalty. How about a reverse progressive tax? The lower your contribution to society the higher the penalty (tax).
A Sense of Obligation to Society & Human Dignity
When the first pioneers came to America could you be part of a community or settlement and expect to eat but not work? Back then the expectation was the everyone contributes and that this act of contributing to the work or productivity was part of the lifeblood of community survival.
But today, is this still true? Does anyone feel they have an obligation to contribute? In the Steinbeck novel Grapes of Wrath which is set in the Great Depression of America the Joad family, a poor family of sharecroppers nearly without hope trapped in the Dust Bowl, refused to take “relief” (welfare) – they wanted a job. To take “relief” , in their eyes, was an insult to human dignity. Still true today? (“Suppose your only real ambition is not to have to exert yourself to get by... read more )
Today, some people’s highest aspiration is to get on the welfare system. They spend more time and effort trying to “work the system” than they would spend trying to find an opportunity to contribute to society. How times have changed.
Your Fair Share
So who pays what and what is your “fair share” of the federal tax burden?
Your retirement with Social Security cutbacks – Do the Math
For those of you expecting that payout from Social Security in 5 years from now, a decade from now, or a few decades from now – what if the Social Security benefit is not what you think it will be? The best laid plans of mice and men… A lot can happen between now and then. Be prepared, plan ahead.
Social Security will probably still be there when you retire – in some form. But, likely, the Federal Government will react to any “near insolvency” by severely cutting back on how much you get and/or moving forward the age at which you will get the full benefit.
In the first case, the payout to you would be less saving the fund money. In the latter case, they are looking at the actuarial tables of how long you are likely to live and starting payments closer to the date of your statistical demise. That saves the fund money too. Good for the Social Security Program – bad for you.
So, you better be ready to paddle your own canoe.
Suppose you calculated your monthly expected benefit from Social Security and one day, quite unexpectedly, the “breaking news” is that: a) you will not receive the benefit at the age you planned (they pushed it ahead) and b: that the monthly payout will be less than you expected.
Suppose you had to augment the planned Social Security payout with your own funds.
How much in lump sum cash would you need to invest today to pay yourself a monthly amount for the rest of your life? Or, how much in lump sum cash today would you have to invest in order to make up for the shortfall between the amount of money you expected to get from Social Security and what you will actually receive?
Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal and do the math.
Also, check out the URL’s for on-line calculators to help you calculate what investment it would take in todays dollars to provide you a monthly payout (similar to Social Security) for the rest of your life
From the Wall Street Journal…
Last week’s landmark tax deal sharply changes the financial outlook for Social Security. That has huge implications for your retirement. And most people don’t have a clue what’s coming.
Nuclear Detonation Preparedness: Communicating in the Immediate Aftermath
Is that thing in North Korea heating up? Or, maybe Iran?
From your friends at The Department of Homeland Security with publication date September 2010
Amidst the calamity ensuing from a nuclear detonation, a crucial task for federal, state, and local authorities will be communicating clear and consistent messages to the public. All levels of government have responsibility for coordinating and communicating information regarding the incident to the public. State, local and tribal authorities retain the primary responsibility for communicating health and safety instructions for their population. Effective communications will be a critical factor in building trust, comforting a nation in distress, and, ultimately, saving lives and minimizing injury.
This document was developed as a resource for emergency responders and federal, state, and local officials communicating with the public and media during the immediate aftermath following a nuclear detonation in the United States. This document has been approved for INTERIM USE while it undergoes public message testing and review by state, local and tribal emergency communicators, planners, public health officials and responders.
September 1, 2010
Members of the Domestic Resilience Group
IND Response Sub-IPC
Nuclear Detonation Response Communications Working Group
Read the entire guide -
http://frrl.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/nucleardetonationpreparedness-communicatingintheimmediateaftermath.pdf
And, the greatest of all – “Duck and Cover” Civil Defense film from about 1951 during the Cold War
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ2A1tDD5HE
We’ll set off a nuclear blast and you soldiers run towards the explosion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h1iSsqSXUo
(longer version) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94ZWE8qxiAg
How it all works in technical detail -
Operation Tumbler Snapper 1952 Vintage Atomic Bomb Film
Courtesy National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0r_4v2hA5c
Profiles in Career Derailment of High-Flying Executives
Learning from one’s own mistakes is a sign of some intelligence. Wisdom – born of intellect and experience – is about learning from the mistakes of others. For the countless mistakes I have been privileged to witness, enabling me to learn without the requirements of duplication (and to those that made them), I express my gratitude — Arthur Rosenberg
Intelligence is learning from your own mistakes – Wisdom is learning from someone else’s mistakes – Idiocy is not learning from either… — Unknown
A nice sentiment from Rosenberg, “Thanks for demonstrating a catastrophic failure in your career, business, or project. Now I can learn from it - I express my gratitude.” Nice. Your mistake to my benefit. Make more, I want to learn more.
If more people would study failure as much as they study success then perhaps (preventable) mistakes would not be repeated over and over again. Yet, some people never learn. The value of “not learning” from the mistakes of others is simply to produce yet another validation of a well-documented personal behavior, inability to plan, or failure of execution that leads to failure. How many times do we need to repeat the same experiment, get the same outcome, and not codify and internalize the basic principles of what can be learned from these opportunities?
Will companies make the same mistake as Motorola did with the Iridium project? Is it at the point yet where this effort of Motorola is taught as a case in just about every Business School in the world? Why is it taught as a case? To embarrass people? No. To learn from it. Will bloggers ever stop writing about this mistake – made 20+ years ago – that cost Motorola shareholders 5.2 billion dollars? No, they won’t stop writing about it; and yes, companies will repeat the Motorola Iridium mistake, in one form or another, again and again not learning from the past. Here’s the warning as recently as November 2010 about repeating Motorola’s mistakes ( read ). Eighty percent of new small businesses fail within the first five years. Why? They fail for the same reasons, decade after decade. Many reasons that small businesses fail are avoidable – if only these small business owners took the time to learn from the small business owners that failed before them.
So Tim Irwin is going to help you out by profiling and describing catastrophic career failures of some high-flying corporate executives. The purpose of these profiles is in line with Rosenberg’s quote above – why follow the path of known career derailment? Is yet another demonstration of a known principle necessary? Will you provide that demonstration? If so, we owe you our gratitude for the validation… and condolences. But what’s the point of demonstrating a well-known principle at the cost of your career and potential for advancement?
Do you need to be a high-flying executive to take this advice from Irwin? No. It’s amazing these folks got as far as they did. But, you have a lifetime to develop career-derailing behaviors. For some people it happens earlier rather than later. For those who develop these career-derailing personal behaviors early then surely career advancement is limited – struck down in the prime of their life before they reach the limits of their intellectual or domain-specific competency.
Who are the high-profile executives in Irwin’s study?
Bob Nardelli
Carly Fiorina
Durk Jager
Steven Heyer
Frank Raines
Dick Fuld
What are the lessons learned?
From the “Profiles in Failure” (read an alternative), here are five behaviors that will likely derail your career:
1. CHARACTER TRUMPS COMPETENCE
The six leaders profiled earlier in the book are all exceptionally competent. They are impressive in numerous respects, and all have track records of exceptional accomplishment. If we aspire to leadership, we should seek to be as smart, as disciplined, as focused on achieving difficult goals, as strategic, as insistent on the creation of processes that ensure quality, and as committed to finding great people to man our organization, department, or team as they were. Great leadership includes all these and many other qualities.
However, the glaring truth is that a leader is only as good as the character of the leader. While competence is absolutely essential, our character ultimately makes a greater impact on what we accomplish in our work and in our lives. Character as expressed in authenticity, wisdom, humility, and courage must ultimately form the substance of who we are if we want to have great impact.
2. ARROGANCE IS THE MOTHER OF ALL DERAILERS
While a failure of character can manifest itself in many ways, the most foundational and most self-destructive is arrogance. Just as humility seems to be at the epicenter of leadership effectiveness, arrogance is commonly at the root of a leader’s undoing . . . and ours. The specific derailers that rendered the profiled leaders incapable of continuing in their positions varied, but there is an underlayment of arrogance in every one of their derailments.
Arrogance takes many forms. The most rudimentary is the self-centered focus that fosters a belief that I am central to the viability of the organization, the department, or the team. The resulting dismissiveness of others’ contributions is inevitable.
When arrogance blossoms into hubris, a sense of entitlement results. “This place can’t function without me, and I deserve special perks.” I’ve seen this attitude in CEOs of huge companies, and I’ve seen it in secretaries of mom-and-pop companies. It’s not a function of the size of the organization or the level of the person in that organization.
Aloofness, being critical, self-promotion, and not listening to others all tie to arrogance. Even when our achievements are modest, arrogance can exist. We need to be ruthlessly intolerant of this toxic character compromiser when we see it in ourselves.
3. LACK OF SELF-/OTHER-AWARENESS IS A COMMON DENOMINATOR OF ALL DERAILMENTS
Querying the Global Zeitgeist in 2010
Sometimes you have to live with something for a while to discover all that it can tell you.
When Twitter first came on the scene back in about 2006 the first use of it was to broadcast short messages among a handful of people. Now with 190 million global users of Twitter, the ability to tweet from almost any mobile device, and the fact that people do tweet important events - or just what is on their mind – Twitter has become much more than simple message passing at a point in time. The more of it is that by collecting, aggregating, inspecting, slicing, dicing, and categorizing these tweets one can get an idea of the “global mind”.
That is, Twitter messages taken together over some period of time and analyzed can provide insight as to what is important and what matters to the citizens on this planet at that particular time in history. It’s the Zeitgeist of the thing – “the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambience, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era.”
The same is true of Goggle searches. What people search for is indicative of what is important to them. To the extent that Google is global just like Twitter, it too can provide a keyhole view into the Global Zeitgeist.
So, what did people search for in 2010 and what does it reveal about what was important to the global citizens of planet earth? Check out this Google video
Find out more -
Get the details from Google – http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2010/
See the Tweets from the Congress of the United States - http://tweetcongress.org/
Twitter Spy – A mashup of real-time tweets from the public timeline – http://twitspy.com/
Real-time Twitter pictures mapped globally – http://twitpic.com/
Twitter-ing in real-time around the world – http://twittervision.com/
Twitter search – http://tweetscan.com/
Still don’t know what Twitter is good for. Then check out this Google Talks video on Twitter for Business 101
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRgS-Kmtr20
Or maybe you don’t know what Twitter is. Then let Marina Orlova ”splain” it to you
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_PbFDsyKQU
When Nudge comes to Push and Shove…
Cass Sunstein, an academic and Law Professor at Harvard is now the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This is within the Office of Management and Budget. The stated charter of the OIRA is:
The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is located within the Office of Management and Budget and was created by Congress with the enactment of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 (PRA). OIRA carries out several important functions, including reviewing Federal regulations, reducing paperwork burdens, and overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.
If you watched the Barbara Walters Thanksgiving Special interview with Michelle and Barack Obama I am pretty sure that, when Michelle answered the question on who has responsibility for controlling childhood obesity, I could see the influence of Cass Sunstein in the background (read). Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have some pretty definite ideas that average people need a little help in making good decisions across many aspects of their life. If you want to find out how all this works you are going to have to read their book: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth,and Happiness.
To give you some idea of what these “nudges” are here are 12 nudges that they suggest in the book:
- Give More Tomorrow. Nudge people to increase charitable contributions
- The Charity Debit Card and tax deduction. Issued by a bank, a debit card that would keep track of your charitable contributions and send you an itemized and totaled statement at the end of the year to use for your tax return.
- The Automatic Tax Return. Those who do not itemized deductions and have no income such as tips gets a tax return already filled out. All the taxpayer would need to do is sign it and send it in. Or, go to a web site and “sign it” and you are done.
- Stickk.com. A way to set goals and aspirations and put up some money. If you don’t achieve these goals you lose your money and it goes to charity. If you reach your goals you get your money back.
- Quit smoking without a patch. Another charity give away. Open up a bank account and deposit the money you would have otherwise spent on smoking. If you really do stop smoking as determined by a biological test then you get your money back; if not, your money goes to charity.
- Motorcycle Helmets. In states that do not have helmet laws require a special licenses for those riders who want to ride without a helmet. They would need to take driving courses and show proof of health insurance.
- Gambling self-bans. For those who can’t control themselves, you put your name on a list that gambling establishments honor and they don’t let you enter and/or don’t pay off on any winnings.
- Destiny Health Plan. A Health plan would offer you “vanity bucks” to work out in health clubs and otherwise be healthy. Use “vanity bucks’ to buy airline tickets, hotel rooms, magazines, electronics, and other items.
- Dollar a Day. Pay teenage girls not to get pregnant. A City would give a teenage girl a dollar each day that she does not get pregnant.
- Filters for air conditioners; the helpful red light. If you don’t change a filter when its dirty, a red light goes on reminding you to change it.
- No-bite nail polish and Disulfram. Bitter nail polish to stop you from biting your nails and Disulfiram to make alcoholics throw up.
- Civility Check for e-mail. A program that would scan your e-mail to check of its “civil” (polite). Three levels of increasing warnings – “Warning: this appears to be an uncivil email. Do you really and truly want to send it?”; “Warning: this appears to be an uncivil email. This will not be sent unless you ask to resend in twenty-four hours.” And finally… (from Nudge) With the stronger version, you might be able to bypass the delay with some work (by inputting, say, your Social Security number and your grandfather’s birth date, or maybe by solving some irritating math problem!)
When Nudge comes to Push and Shove
Some of these things sound downright silly. For example, paying teenage girls a dollar a day to NOT get pregnant. I wonder if this level of simplicity of seemingly benign nudges is just to get his foot in the door for something bigger? A Harvard law professor who has written extensively for other audiences (see) certainly has more serious nudges in mind other than the ones found in a mass-consumable book like Nudge.
The 12 nudges above, are benign. What could possibly go wrong? Especially, when the nudger is no longer just an academic at Harvard but is now a White House regulatory Czar that can make nudges have the backing and the force of law.
From the Economist:
From the point of view of liberty, there is a serious danger of overreach, and therefore grounds for caution. Politicians, after all, are hardly strangers to the art of framing the public’s choices and rigging its decisions for partisan ends. And what is to stop lobbyists, axe-grinders and busybodies of all kinds hijacking the whole effort?
Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin at the Food Court: the Concept of Libertarian Paternalism
Last Friday, on a Thanksgiving special, Barbara Walters did an hour-long interview at the White House with President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama to discuss a wide range of issues.
I watched this with some interest – they are the President and First Lady. So knowing what they think on various issues might give some clue what’s coming down the pike in America.
The Art of Listening Deeply
When someone speaks, listen carefully. There are many levels of listening. You can listen to what someone says in a very literal way. You can listen to what people are saying in a political correct way – but smoldering under that politically correct language may be a baser discourse which remains unsaid and would not be acceptable speech in a particular venue. And, you can listen to the unspoken language of taken-for-granted assumptions that define the fabric or framework of thought.
This last way of listening is by far the most interesting because it often discloses the very important paradigm by which one conceives the world, the people in it, and a system of values. Sometimes people who are speaking are not aware of the unstated and unquestioned assumptions and paradigms that color their thought. If they are aware of them it might not be polite to disclose them in public. That is, what you really think. Best to clothe them in politically correct language and surface-speak to avoid any impropriety.
When Barbara Walters asked Michelle Obama the question about childhood obesity I thought this would be a good opportunity to practice listening at these various levels. Here is how it went down.
