All posts by Deborah Binder

Wallowing in the Muck – Part II

Explorations Outside the Box

We replay moments of accomplishment in our heads to feel something – a sense of pride, confidence, or optimism. That feeling is expansive and diffuse. We also replay bad experiences but even if the motivation if partly to re-experience the emotion, there seems to be something else driving the impulse to go over and over the bad thing that happened. Something is wrong and we’re dwelling on the problem, sometimes just staring at it with a sense of helplessness but not yet willing to move on. Some of us finally get tired of it and shift into problem-solving mode. Others stay stuck.

We may not want to forget because we think remembering the bad stuff prepares us emotionally for the shit that is yet to come. You don’t fall far when you’re already on the ground. Hope can be dangerous, especially when it encourages exploratory approach behavior in a hostile or rejecting world. This may or may not be a valid concern, depending.

Wallowing in the Muck: Pros and Cons

Explorations Outside the Box

“Relishing” triumphs is another way of saying replaying them in our minds. It feels good and we replay these moments over and over to have that feeling again. Our relation to negative experiences is different. Positive emotions are often an end in themselves (the ol’ dopamine high) but negative emotions are rarely sought out for their own sake. Don’t get me wrong – we may want to relive unpleasant experiences and we may obsess about them, but the point isn’t so much to feel bad as to achieve something else. The bad feeling is a means to an end – even when we’re not sure what that end is. Like wallowing in the muck may help us get to the root of some problem. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Inner Speech as Motivation

Explorations Outside the Box

Just like with speech, thoughts aren’t only about their literal content but also their function. Morin et al (2011) found that one function of inner speech was self-motivation. Some inner outbursts do serve to boost confidence by self-praise (“that was brilliant”!) or motivate corrective behavior by self-chastisement (“that was stupid”!). Sometimes we replay moments of triumph; other times we replay moments of failure. The former motivates approach behavior – confidence to keep going; the latter motivates avoidance behavior – let’s not do that again, along with consideration of counterfactuals and alternative, potentially more successful, behaviors.

Reference:

Morin A., Uttl B., Hamper B. (2011). Self-reported frequency, content, and functions of inner speech. Proc. Soc. Behav. J. 30, 1714–1718

Success: Pursuing, Persisting, and Shrugging Off

Explorations Outside the Box, Scientific Encounters

Factors important to success in school/work domains: 1). Self-control—the capacity to regulate attention, emotion, & behavior in the presence of temptation; the ability to manage emotions being especially important; 2) Grit—the tenacious pursuit of a dominant super-ordinate goal despite setbacks; 3) Intelligence – a “very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly & learn from experience”; 4) Emotional Intelligence – another general ability that encompasses interpersonal competence, self-awareness & social awareness; 5) Conscientiousness – a super-ordinate personality trait that includes the facets of Competence,  Order, Dutifulness. Achievement-striving, Self-discipline & Deliberation (the facets co-vary to a degree). All are moderate to strong predictors of success, grit being the weakest predictor (but a common quality of exceptional individuals).

Then there’s temporal discounting – the tendency to devalue delayed/far-off rewards. Temporal discounting undermines persistence in the pursuit of difficult long-term goals.  It’s too bad that the period of life associated with temporal discounting – aka youth – is also the time of greatest potential for skill/expertise building, which, unfortunately, also requires self-control, grit, emotion management, and conscientiousness.

References:

Duckworth, A. and Gross, J.  Self-Control and Grit: Related but Separable Determinants of Success. Current Directions in Psychological Science 2014, Vol. 23(5) 319–325

Ducksworth et al Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007, Vol. 92, No. 6, 1087–1101

Gottfredson, Linda S. Mainstream science on intelligence: An editorial with 52 signatories, history, and bibliography. Intelligence Volume 24, Issue 1, January–February 1997, Pages 13–23

Green, Leonard; Myerson, Joel (2004). “A Discounting Framework for Choice With Delayed and Probabilistic Rewards.”. Psychological Bulletin 130 (5): 769–792.

Ivcevic, Z.  and Brackett, M. Predicting school success: Comparing Conscientiousness, Grit, and Emotion Regulation Ability Journal of Research in Personality 52 (2014) 29–36

Sternberg, Robert J., Grigorenko, Elena. and Bundy, Donald A. The Predictive Value of IQ Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, v47 n1 p1-41 Jan 2001

Climate Change and Possible Futures – Part IV

The Environment

This post is part of a continuing series on the “Representative Concentration Pathways” (RCPs), presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as possible trajectories of atmospheric concentrations of green house gases (GHGs) over the next century. The RCPs start with a target GHG concentration, on the basis of which they estimate global temperature over various time periods. The scariest is RCP8.5, which projects a mean global temperature rise of 3.7°C by 2100.

Each RCP is associated with development paths that could plausibly lead to the projected GHG concentrations. For instance, RCP8.5 assumes fairly robust human population growth rate this century, culminating in a global population of 12 billion by 2100.  The current UN estimate for 2100 is a global population of 11.2 billion.

That extra 800 million matters, because other projected developments are based in part on assumptions about population trends. For instance, according to RCP8.5, cultivated land is expected to expand 16% above 2000 levels by 2080, largely in response to global population pressures. If the population estimate is off-base, so is the projected global increase in cultivated land (a net contributor to emissions). But, then the global expansion in cultivated land envisioned by RCP8.5 makes little sense anyway, given that global land use for agriculture peaked in 1998 and has slowly declined since – despite continued population growth of almost 1.5 billion people since then.

In terms of predicting climate change and its effects, it’s essential to get population projections right.  And in terms of climate change mitigation, the fewer humans the better. Per O’Neill et al, every 1% decrease in global population would mean a 1% decrease in emissions. And the best way to reduce our numbers is continued development throughout the world. Unfortunately, some climate activists see development as the problem and not part of the solution. As Dean Spears puts it:

“…many of the present-day high-emissions populations have comparatively lower fertility. Human development—such as improving health, education, and women’s social status—could encourage parents to freely choose to reduce population size while improving average well-being, and could therefore be an exception to the standard claim that development is in conflict with climate policy.”

References:

Spears, D. (2015) Smaller human population in 2100 could importantly reduce the risk of climate catastrophe. PNAS vol. 112 no. 18 E2270, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1501763112

O’Neill BC, et al. (2012) Demographic change and carbon dioxide emissions. Lancet 380(9837):157–164

Climate Change and Possible Futures – Part III

The Environment

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has presented various “Representative Concentration Pathways” (RCPs) to represent possible trajectories of atmospheric concentrations of green house gases (GHGs) over the next century. The scariest one is RCP8.5, which projects a mean temperature rise of 3.7°C, with a likely increase range of 2.6 to 4.8°C by 2100. RCP8.5 has been called the “business as usual” RCP, which means it’s considered a likely development path if current trends continue. According to the scientists who proposed RCP8.5 in 2011, its trajectory is plausible based on assumptions of “….low income, high population and high energy demand due to only modest improvements in energy intensity.”   Are these assumptions reasonable based on current trends – that is, do they represent a plausible  “business-as-usual” scenario?

Let’s look at income first.  Per RCP8.5, global GDP will reach around $250 trillion in 2100.  That does reflect a fairly low rate of economic growth, given a current (2014) global GDP of  about $78 trillion. How does that figure jive with current predictions of global economic growth?

The IMF expects a global GDP growth rate of 3.6% in 2017. A comparable growth rate (around 3.6 give or take) is predicted to continue for the next several decades for the G20 economies*, which represent about 84% of global GDP. Since the G20 economies are such a large part of the global GDP pie, I’m going to use projections about the G20 to anchor the discussion of whether the RCP8.5 projection of global GDP in 2100 is a reasonable approximation of “business as usual”.

The PWC World in 2050 report expects GDP for the G20 economies to double by 2037 and triple by 2050. The Carnegie International Economics Program estimates that GDP for the G20 economies will reach $161.5 trillion by 2050. Taking the Carnegie projection, if the G20 still represented 84% of the global economy in 2050, that means the global GDP in 2050 would be about $192 trillion in 2050 (161/.84) – an admittedly very rough estimate; for one thing, it is more likely that the G20 would represent a smaller percentage of the world economy by then, because smaller, less developed countries tend to grow at a faster rate than large developed countries. But I’m trying to be very modest in my projections here.

If we accept $192 trillion as a low-ball proxy for global GDP in 2050, what growth rate would be necessary for global GDP to reach $250 trillion by 2100, as per RCP8.5? Less than 1%. Given that current and expected annual global GDP growth is roughly 3.6%, RCP8.5 hardly represents a “business as usual” scenario.

Next, population growth.

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*The G20 consists of: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union.

Helping College Students While Slowing Tuition Inflation: A Proposal

Politics and Economics

The problem with providing grants, low-interest loans, tuition waivers, and free tuition is that they exert no pressure on educational institutions to increase efficiencies, productivity, or otherwise keep costs down. They appear to be an important factor in the much-greater-than-inflation rise in college costs over the last several decades.  I’m warming to the idea of giving adults 18 and over up to 6 years of a basic income while enrolled in post-secondary education/training – and then eliminate federal tuition assistance altogether. That way, students become discerning shoppers and institutions have to respond with offering good deals, exerting pressure both on quality and price, i.e., known as the wonders of the marketplace. Not a cure-all, but nothing is a cure-all.

Science and Its Discontents

Scientific Encounters

One thing I love about the scientific mindset is its humility. Scientific proposals about the nature of reality are tentative, provisional, and mindful of their limitations. That very humility feeds the wonderful feeling of awe and adventure that accompanies the scientific quest to understand something better.

People who are wary of science often stress its role as a source of power and authority – therefore to be resisted by free thinkers everywhere. Some people look askance at scientific insistence on measure and quantity (an insistence that springs from an appreciation of the limitations of human intuition and sense of certainty), which they see as at odds with a more spiritual, philosophical, or poetic experiencing of the world. As if an agronomist couldn’t be swept away by a thing of beauty.

As Vladimir Nabokov  once observed,  “a writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

Supporting the Basic Income Guarantee While Acknowledging It Could Lead to a World of Pain

Politics and Economics

I’ve written a lot about the Basic Income Guarantee, aka BIG, which is a proposal that all adults get some non-means-tested check from the federal government every month. Arguments for the BIG come from both the left and the right. Progressives consider it a compassionate way to eliminate poverty. Libertarians see it as an efficient way to provide a safety net. Of course, the left’s version of a BIG would be more generous than the right’s and would require hefty tax increases to fund. The right’s version would not increase taxes, being paid for by funds previously allotted to safety net programs being replaced. I’m in favor of a modest BIG that wouldn’t increase taxes much. Check out the prior BIG posts for details.

My support notwithstanding, a BIG is fraught with peril. If not done right, a BIG could do irreparable harm to the economy and social fabric, resulting in greater poverty and civil discord than we’ve seen in a long time. A serious BIG proposal would consider all the things that could go wrong and address them one by one. A serious proposal would also acknowledge that we just can’t know all the things that could go wrong, because the BIG is an experiment that hasn’t been done on a large scale before.

In the next several posts, I’m going to address a bunch of things that could go wrong with a BIG – starting with the possible  impact on labor market participation.

 

Climate Change and Possible Futures – Part II

The Environment

The last post introduced the concept of Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), which are used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to represent possible trajectories of atmospheric concentrations of green house gases (GHGs) over the next century. These Pathways were designed to model a set of conditions that would lead to various upper limits of climate forcing by 2100 – climate forcing being the heating effect caused by GHGs in the atmosphere. Heating effects are calculated in watts per square meter. The RCPs are named after their targeted heating effects. For instance, RCP8.5 represents a trajectory that could result in atmospheric heating of 8.5 watts per meter squared by 2100.

RCP8.5 is the most extreme of the four RCPs considered by the IPCC.  It projects a mean temperature rise of 3.7°C and a likely increase range of 2.6 to 4.8°C by 2100, wreaking all sorts of havoc along the way.

Starting with a target heating effect by 2100, the RCPs work backwards to create a plausible  “story line” that would result in the target effect. The story line of RCP8.5 has been described as “conservative business as usual”.  Here are some its key plot points:

  • Delayed development of renewable energy technologies
  • Rebound of human population to 15 billion by 2100
  • Wide and increasing international disparities in productivity, energy efficiency, and GDP
  • Delayed improvements in agricultural land use
  • 10-fold increase in the use of coal as a power source
  • Move away from natural gas as an energy source
  • Little change in environmental and economic policies across the world

In brief, RCP8.5 paints a picture of “… low income, high population and high energy demand due to only modest improvements in energy intensity” throughout the 21st century. Is this truly a “business as usual” scenario?