The Basic Income Guarantee and Child Support

Politics and Economics

Here’s another advantages of the modest Basic Income Guarantee (BIG): child support could be electronically deducted from BIG directly, so less time and money would be spent chasing down fathers and at least some child support would be guaranteed. Automatic child support deductions would likely influence the dynamics of gender relations by making men a bit more cautious about casual sex. Put simply, sex carries greater risk for women than men, which the certainty of paternal child support would partly mitigate. That means more balanced power dynamics between the genders.

Sure a deadbeat dad with lots of kids could lose all his BIG to child support. So he’ll have to work. The BIG should not be conceived as a right. It is a benefit that is not means-tested but which may be reduced in special cases, such as for unpaid taxes, fines or child support. The BIG will still be a great improvement on the current system and would be a great help to single mothers, students, and low-wage earners.

 

Honey Bees, Pesticides, and Dose Effects

Scientific Encounters, The Environment

According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the EPA has found a clear level of concentration of the pesticide imidacloprid in which things start to go badly for the local honey bee population:

“If nectar brought back to the hive from worker bees had more than 25parts per billion of the chemical, ‘there’s a significant effect,’ namely fewer bees, less honey and ‘a less robust hive,’ said Jim Jones, EPA’s assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention. But if the nectar chemical level was below 25 parts per billion, it was as if there were no imidacloprid at all, with no ill effects, Jones said. It was a clear line of harm or no harm, he said.”

The level of chemical also interacted with type of crop. For instance, concentrations that     were harmful in cotton and citrus fruits were not harmful for corn. And treating seeds with the chemical didn’t seem to harm bees.

This is a wonderful example of dose effects: it’s not the substance but how much of the substance that counts. And the relation between dose and effects is not linear. The question is not: “is this toxic” but: “at what dose does this become toxic?” Often what is harmful at high doses is benign or even beneficial at low doses. Something to keep in mind whether we’re talking about pesticides or sweeteners in tea.

 

Variations of Power

Explorations Outside the Box

A few types of Power: Control over Resources, Control over Rewards, and Coercion/Punishment. Power is subject to the Law of Personal Exploitation – the person/entity who cares less has the power to exploit the person who cares more (applicable to government services to employer-employee relations to marriages, etc.). This Law is based on the Principle of Least Interest – the person/entity who cares less about continuing & maintaining the relationship has more power (e.g., the person who is less emotionally involved had more power – hence the appeal of “not caring” or coolness as a way to project power).

Powerful people tend to be more authentic (less prone to impression management; less socially anxious; more likely to speak their mind/heart) but also overly self-confident and  prone to excessive risk-taking. Think Donald Trump.

 

Observing Thoughts and Clouds Go By: A Metaphor that Misleads

Observing Mindfulness

A common metaphor in mindfulness discourse is that observing thoughts and emotions is like being on a hillside watching the clouds go by: if you observe long enough, you’ll notice that they just fade away, like puffy little clouds do.

Question: doesn’t the act of observation change the nature of the experience being observed? Thoughts and emotions attend to their own objects and attention is a limited resource. Thoughts and emotions cannot “carry on as usual” if the limited resource upon which they depend has been diverted to the cognitive process of observing them. Thoughts and emotions are weakened through observation so they eventually end up as insubstantial wisps of nothing. Nothing here, keep moving.

Awareness tracks attention, nothing more. Attentional capacity is the boundary condition of awareness. If you cannot attend to two things at the same time, you can’t be aware of more than one stream of attention at the same time. You can’t be aware of everything. You have to pick and choose and switch and go back and forth.

It is possible to become so adept at attention switching that it feels simultaneous, especially when the switching is happening on the order of milliseconds. To the extent that attention switching becomes automatized (through overlearning, as probably happens in some types of meditation practice), it may not require all that much mental effort. One just gets in the habit of switching from being deep in the forest to looking at the trees from the outside. Of course, the view within the forest is not the same as the view from beyond its boundary.

De-carbonizing our Economy: Driving Cars

The Environment

The last post included ideas on reducing emissions in freight transport. This and the next few posts will be about reducing the carbon footprint of personal vehicle travel. How much CO2 do cars actually emit? Here’s one formula, provided by http://www.firmgreen.com/faq_calculate.htm:

Emissions = (number of miles driven per week * weeks in a year) / average vehicle fuel efficiency * pounds of CO2 emitted per gallon, which is about 20 pounds.

How might this translate to actual emissions in one’s own household? For an idea, let’s assume our vehicle gets an average of 35 miles a gallon:

15,000 miles/35 = 429 x 20 = 8580 pounds of CO2 a year
20,000 miles/35 = 571 x 20 = 11,420 pounds of CO2 a year

Plug in your own car mileage and annual miles and you get the picture. We’re talking about a lot of CO2. Next up: exploring ways to reduce that footprint, starting with shopping behavior.

Thoughts and Thinking, Part IV: Recognize, Accept, Investigate with Non-Attachment (RAIN)

Observing Mindfulness

When we are advised to Recognize, Accept, Investigate emotions with Non-attachment (RAIN) I wonder what is being recognized, accepted and investigated through the observational lens of non-attachment. Emotions and their associated thoughts require attentional resources. Accepting, observing, and investigating require attentional resources. To direct attentional resources to one thing is to withdraw attentional resources from something else. A thing observed becomes a diminished version of itself insofar as the observed and the act of observing draw from the same well.

What does it mean to investigate with non-attachment? The dictionary sense of “investigate” denotes a serious and systematic examination into the particulars of something: a deep and persistent inquiry. In contrast, the sense of investigation in RAIN is a pretty lightweight endeavor. It’s about cultivating a sense of curiosity about our experiences.

Curiosity is not the same as interest; the difference between them is instructive. Curiosity requires little commitment on the part of the agent. Curiosity may or may not lead to interest. To be curious is to be a bit detached. To be interested is to be engaged. To be curious is to stand apart. To be interested is to jump in. To be curious is to be half-way to non-attachment, which is an attitude of being witnesses to our experiences but not getting caught up with them.

Observing Thoughts Changes Their Trajectory

Observing Mindfulness, Scientific Encounters

Our brains engage in two distinct cognitive modes: the attention-demanding “task-positive mode” and the go-with-the-flow task-negative mode, also known as the default mode. Observing thoughts is a cognitive task; the thoughts themselves arise while the brain is in default mode. Here’s the thing: these two modes reciprocally inhibit each other; that is, our brain can’t be in both modes at the same time. They alternate. Therefore, we can’t observe thoughts “as they unfold”, because their unfolding happens in the default mode and our observing happens in the task-positive mode. So observing thoughts is not simultaneous with their production but happens after they are produced: observing is remembering – even if a split-second later.

The converse of this is while we’re “observing” thoughts, we’re not producing them. We alternate modes. And if we’re doing a lot of observing, we’re also doing a lot of disrupting of what we’re observing. Hence, what we’re observing is not a natural unfolding of thoughts but a constantly disrupted stop-and-go of thoughts.

Ref: Neuroimage. 2013 Feb 1;66:385-401. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.10.061. Epub 2012 Oct 27. fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains. Jack AI1, Dawson AJ2, Begany KL2, Leckie RL2, Barry KP2, Ciccia AH3, Snyder AZ4.

A Modest Basic Income Guarantee should replace Student Financial Aid

Politics and Economics

Quick review: in previous posts, I did the calculations and made a case for a modest Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) of about $800 a month per adult. For the middle and above income quintiles, the BIG would essentially be paid back in taxes. On average, second quintile households would pay back about half the BIG in taxes. The federal budget’s net BIG expense would be paid for by eliminating various government benefits, including TANF, EITC, SSI, and unemployment insurance and reducing other benefits, such as housing assistance. Additional funds would become available through reduced utilization of remaining means-tested safety net programs, such as SNAP, because BIG income would be considered in determining benefit eligibility and amount.

The idea is that a modest BIG would eliminate severe poverty but not be so generous as to disincentivize work any more than the current safety net system does. Government programs would still be available to help in extreme cases, e.g., the suddenly or chronically homeless.

In the above scenario, Pell and SEOG grants would be eliminated, as the BIG (worth $9600 a year) could be used towards post-secondary school expenses. However, the reduction in grants would be partly offset by an increase in work-study funding (note that part-time work is not a risk factor for completing college, per What Matters to Postsecondary School Success). An important psychological advantage of BIG compared to Pell grants and tuition waivers is that the BIG is a limited resource with alternate uses – and for someone with a limited income, the alternate uses are likely related to current necessities and for things that have long-term benefit (e.g., car repair, savings cushion for moving). As a consequence, the BIG is more likely to be experienced as “my” money – and we’re much more responsible and budget-minded when spending our own money than someone else’s. This is especially the case when the latter isn’t fungible – that is, it doesn’t have alternate uses – like with student financial aid programs.

Less student aid would have the added benefit of reducing tuition inflation – many analysts have noted that increases in tuition rates track increases in aid amounts, especially in private schools. Increase the Pell grant and tuition goes up. A BIG instead of student aid would eliminate that dynamic.

Note I’m only talking about federal financial aid programs. Even with the BIG, there still would be financial aid for students from other sources, like states and private scholarships.

Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Freight Transportation

The Environment

Reducing emissions from transportation is mostly a matter of reducing demand for transported goods, improving fuel efficiency and improving transportation efficiency – that is, moving the same amount of cargo (e.g., people and things) with fewer trips and fewer vehicles.

We’re going to start with freight transportation. This includes shipping, rail, and road transport. Important parameters determining the exact value of the emission factor for each mode of transport include:

– The load factor (payload) i.e. CO2 emissions per transport unit.
– The energy efficiency of the vehicle, train or vessel.
– The carbon intensity of the energy source i.e. the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of energy consumed.

As a rule, transport by water is the most energy efficient mode of freight transport, followed by rail, then big rigs, then smaller vehicles.

Here are some recommendations to reduce CO2 emissions in freight transport:

1. Switch from road to rail transport when possible.
2. Switch from overland to water transport (e.g., ferries, barges and ships) when possible.
3. Manufacturers share deliveries to minimize transport distance to customers, e.g., manufacturers near each other share deliveries to customers near each other. The idea here is to minimize empty cargo space and maximize load factors.
4. Maximize direct deliveries from manufacturer to end user, minimizing transport to and from intermediaries in the supply chain.
5. Minimize empty running (trucks with no load) by better efficiency/logistics and shared use of fleets. You don’t want trucks going hundreds or thousands of miles and then making return trips with nothing.
6. Increase vehicle payloads. The more units of cargo a truck transports, the less CO2 emissions per unit.

That last recommendation means bigger trucks emit less CO2 per unit than smaller ones, other stuff being relatively equal. Sure, big trucks are less fuel efficient per mile – but that’s much less important than fuel efficiency per unit transported. This also means that local is not always better if local means more small trucks and more deliveries per truck (with smaller and smaller loads)and  a lot of empty running on the way home.

Aware-ing Follows the Lead of Unaware Processes

Observing Mindfulness

While they are observed, thoughts do not unfold as they would unobserved. As we observe thoughts, they occupy the cognitive space called working memory. They are like echoes of what just happened in our heads, often represented as word fragments that may or may not be decent proxies for their pre-observed form.

It’s possible to get really efficient at directing and re-directing attention. Meditation is a useful technique for acquiring this skill. It’s possible also to get really good at tracking our attention, otherwise known as “aware-ing”. Meditation is also useful here.

Being aware of an object is not the same thing as making sense of it. Awareness is not understanding. Understanding is a dynamic process, evolving as new information comes to light. Of course, understanding can be wrong.

Awareness is not understanding yet it does operate according to assumptions about how the world works. Awareness cannot follow a moving object without anticipating its next move. Otherwise, it would keep getting stranded, not knowing where to look next. This is true whether the moving object is attention or a stream of thoughts.

Anticipation is part of the default system, at least as it initially unfolds and before it is converted to symbolic form and becomes a decoupled object in working memory. Anticipation is a type of unsymbolized thinking (without words or images) that often characterizes the resting state (Hurlburt et al, 2015). Like wordless wondering, questioning, or realizing, anticipation draws attention to certain things, with awareness tagging along.

Awareness takes its orders from unseen forces. Awareness is not the all-seeing master. Awareness is a servant.

Reference:

What goes on in the resting-state? A qualitative glimpse into resting-state experience in the scanner Hurlburt, R. T., Alderson-Day, B., Fernyhough, C.s and Kühn, S. Frontiers in Psychology www.frontiersin.org October 2015 Volume6 Article1535 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01535