“The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain.”
--Adam Smith.
The Drive Home
“One of the nice things about driving home for the holidays is that you don’t have to worry too much about packing…just throw everything in but the kitchen sink,” I said to Robin, while getting ready for the long drive back to Indiana. Robin, an ex-girlfriend, was going to be taking care of Tripod and the fish while I was gone.
“And, you can leave when you’re ready and don’t have to mess with lines at airports,” she volunteered perkily. The harsh reality was that this trip is always truly a pain in the butt, more accurately the back, something our light banter tried to obscure.
Robin didn’t bother to say anything about the additional disadvantage of trying to fly with a bunch of Christmas gifts, especially after the introductions of all the restrictions after 9/11 a few years ago. She knew I had “unilaterally withdrawn” from Christmas many years earlier. I had offered a Secret Santa name drawing option as an alternative to the obscenely extravagant upward creep in lavish gifting that had occurred in our family over the years. My sister Michelle was adamantly opposed to my solution, thinking it curmudgeonly, so I dropped out of Christmas giving. Oh sure, the first year nobody believed I would really do it…I came out way ahead that year!
“Yeah,” I continued, “and it is easy to throw in a couple of cases of wine to lubricate the already frisky family conversations—they have sort of come to expect that from me. Might need more than usual this year, too!”
“What do you mean, Dave?” Robin asked.
“Charles says he has an announcement to make that he is saving until the family is all together, and it seemed a little ominous, not likely to be pleasant,” I replied. Robin had met most of my family and knew Charles, my older brother.
“Any idea what it is about?”
“No, but Charles hasn’t seemed quite as happy with his job at the University during the past couple of years as he used to seem…I’ve always thought he had it made, though.” I am referring to his Tuesday-Thursday teaching schedule at SUNY, Binghamton that always seemed pretty cushy to me. As a pharmacist, I work long and irregular hours to keep the creditors at bay. Of course, Charles always maintains, not too convincingly, that his research eats up all his spare time…but he always seems to do pretty much whatever he wants!
“And,” I continued, “as I’m sure you remember, Charles had a series of psychoses a few years ago that had us all really worried. He always was sort of a health nut and had gotten into anti-aging medicine, taking a bunch of so-called “smart drugs” like deprenyl, hydergine, piracetam, ghb, and centrophenoxine along with his usual handfuls of vitamin pills. As a pharmacist, I could have told him it was likely that he was going to screw up his neurotransmitters, getting his serotonin and dopamine levels way out of whack!
I hope his mysterious announcement doesn’t have anything to do with that,” I fretted to Robin, “While Charles claims to know he had real psychoses, he also thinks they were part of a bigger theological experience. He now claims to believe in God, after having been an atheist for practically as long as I can remember. I was eight years old when, at age fourteen, he suddenly decided there was no God, though he may have been agnostic for a while. I sure hope he hasn’t gone off the deep end, planning to give away his worldly possessions and enter a monastery or something.”
“Would he do that?” asked Robin, adding “Hasn’t he been back to normal for quite some time?”
“I think he’s back to normal, but I’m not sure,” I replied. “But, if he is willing to talk about it, I do want to find out what it felt like to be crazy and to be locked up with a bunch of other crazy people. And, I’m curious what the contrast was like the next day, when he was more-or-less normal after being pumped full of intravenous Haldol, an anti-psychotic, all night. I guess that’s just the pharmacist in me, though.”
“Well, you’ll find out soon enough,” said Robin. “Are you planning on driving straight through again?” I usually did just that, starting early in the morning, cruise-controlling at 10 or 15 miles over the posted speed limits, with quick pit stops for fueling the Subaru and me. Sure, sometimes I would be somewhat slower, if drivers—I called ‘em “cop filters”—were not passing me, and faster if enough cars were passing me.
I knew I’d be feeling pretty wretched when I arrived, as usual. However, as Charles would have said, it is all about expected benefits and costs—I could fly, if I really thought that was the better overall alternative. The drive gave me lots of time to reflect on things in solitude. Plus, I didn’t have to worry about packing lightly and I could take plenty of wine for the family gathering. And, I would have my car back in Indiana, avoiding having to borrow or rent one.
“I’m not sure…it depends on how I feel when I get to Columbia, Missouri—I have a friend who was a fellow pharmacy major at Butler who works there…did you ever meet Chris?” I asked, more or less rhetorically, “He’ll be out of town for the holidays, but left a key out in his shed for me, if I want to stay there.”
I could tell that Robin was beginning to get bored, and she had watched the house so many times in the past that I knew she had no questions and everything would be fine. The great fish massacre of ’93 was but a distant memory for both of us now…finally. It had been traumatic to lose so many fish, including my pricey African tigerfish, a pet freshwater fire eel, and a large arowana. But, the fish were not going to be overfed anymore, and everybody loves Tripod, a three-legged part yellow lab that I picked up at the pound a couple of years ago. So he will have lots of company, in addition to Robin. I had thought about naming him “Fester” after the infection that had claimed his leg, prior to my picking him up at the pound. But I ended up opting for Tripod, which is more descriptive of his current condition. People like to take Tripod for walks because he’s a lot more manageable to walk than the typical lab, operating on all fours. I sometimes refer to him as the “zero price Rent-a-Dog.”
“Well, have a good trip, and be careful driving…see you when you get back!” and, with a hug, Robin disappeared into the Colorado night. After the usual early male immaturity, in which guilt about breaking up—from either side—caused me to try to avoid all ex-girlfriends, I had nearly always remained a friend with each. After all, there was a reason why we liked each other and there is no reason that should disappear if it didn’t work out for other reasons…which seemed to always be the case. Perhaps I was too picky.
Or, maybe Angela, an ex, was right that I “usurp the knowledge” of the women I date and then lose interest in them. I hope she isn’t right about that, as that would be pretty awful, and not leave much hope of ever achieving a long-term relationship. Oh well…never terribly introspective at best, I quit worrying about it.
I finished piling up everything I planned to take with me in the kitchen…I hoped to smuggle it out to the car while Tripod hobbled around on the roof tomorrow morning. I always try to trick Tripod, hoping he won’t know I am leaving. I hate the look in his face whenever he sees my luggage…a peculiar sort of sadness that pulls at the heart.
The next morning everything went according to plan. Tripod inhaled his dogfood (usually about 38 seconds, independent of quantity) and went up the stairs to the back deck, hopping gingerly over onto the roof where he liked to hang out. He seemed to enjoy looking at people and, I think, soaking up the high-altitude Colorado sun—sometimes he would come down from the roof and his hide would feel warm to the touch. Occasionally when I was upset with him, and even when I wasn’t, I would tell people about what a beautiful “pelt” he would make. It wasn’t a particularly humorous thing to say, but I liked to watch their reactions when I referred to Tripod, beloved by all, as a potential “pelt.”
Too, some local passersby refer to him as “roof-dog,” unaware of his much cooler real name.
Having backed the car into a non-Tripod-visible position the night before, I quickly tossed my stuff in and yelled, “See ya later, Tri!” For all he knew, I was just going to the store…or so I hoped anyway...he seemed to be really intuitive about such things. He was a “good boy” in more ways than could be known.
Fifteen hours, plus two time zones, later I pulled up in front of my Mom and Dad’s house. I didn’t stop in Missouri…probably would have if Chris had been in town, but it wasn’t all that much farther down the pike to go ahead and get “home.” Funny how we refer to home as the place we grew up or where we experienced certain things. I have lived in Colorado longer than I ever lived in Indiana, but still often think of Indiana as “home.” Maybe it has to do with where you spend certain stages of your life more than just experiences. Oh well…thoughts for another time.
It was very late, or really early, depending on how you count such things…I knew my parents would be getting up pretty soon. Beginning at about age 40 they had started getting up about an hour earlier every decade. Now, well into their 70s, they are often up at 5 a.m. I don’t get it, but maybe it’s just a matter of time before the “see the sunrise” contagion spreads to me.
I quickly let myself into my parent’s house with the easy-to-remember code on the garage door opener. 484953, the last two digits of the birth years of each of the three kids, Charles being the oldest, Michele the middle child, and me, the youngest…and almost certainly an “accident.” Born just fifteen months after Michelle, it had suddenly occurred to me at the ripe old age of thirty that I was unlikely to have been “planned,” in the modern terminology. When I confronted Mom with my “accident hypothesis,” she smiled and said, “Oh David, I still remember that night…we knew it might not be safe, but you were a love-child!” How bad could I feel?
Sneaking quietly into my old room, I thought a little about the long trip. Without audiobooks on tape, I doubt I could have kept awake. Usually I listened to several short mystery novels, like the latest Tony Hillerman and Mary Higgins Clark books…fluffy stuff…but this time I was actually able to keep myself awake with some heavy-duty philosophy material, narrated by Charleton Heston. I made a mental note to discuss some of the deeper theological stuff with Charles, who has almost certainly thought more about such things, especially since he had those psychoses, than I had…and I drifted off to sleep.
Charles’ Announcement at the Family Lunch
My brother and I had, for many years, prepared for our family gatherings by finding a joke about the other’s profession to tell over lunch. He went first.
“A pharmacist looks out the front of the store and sees a woman holding a bottle jumping up and down in the parking lot. The pharmacist walks out to the parking lot and asks the woman what’s the matter. She replies ‘I saw that it said 'Shake Well' only after I had already taken it.’”
“Hmmm,” I said, “not very funny, Charles. Well beneath your usual quality…but perhaps pharmacist jokes just aren’t as inherently funny as economist jokes.” I liked to rub in how funny economist jokes were, partly because economics never really turned me on. Drug stuff was always interesting…odd that Charles would get in trouble with drugs, but they were not the sort of drugs that I had tried and enjoyed.
“Let me try again…a customer gets a topical cream. The directions say: apply locally two times a day. The customer complains to the pharmacist: ‘I can't apply locally, I'm going overseas.’”
“Sheesh…is that all you’ve got!” But, I was pretty sure mine wasn’t going to be much better.
“You know why astrology was invented?…to make economics look like an accurate science!”
Charles chuckled politely, then said, “I thought you were going to tell the one about the economist who returns to visit his old school. He's interested in the current exam questions and asks his old professor to show him some. To his surprise they are exactly the same ones he had to answer 10 years ago! When he asks about this, the professor answers: ‘the questions are always the same - only the answers change!’”
Portentously, it was right after that old joke, halfway through lunch, when Charles made his big announcement. The collective munching on the ham sandwiches and sour-cream flavored potato chips came to an abrupt halt.
“You’re what?!” I blurted out, almost spewing a mouthful of beer on my sister, Michelle, when Charles said he is planning to quit teaching economics at the university.
“Well, I’ve been a professor for thirty some years, which is a long time,” Charles replied, continuing, “and I’m pretty sick of it…the teaching mostly.”
“But it is only six hours a week, with maybe some office hours thrown in,” I protested. I couldn’t conceive of getting burnt out under the circumstances. Burnout is fairly common among pharmacists and of course among doctors and nurses…but we work long hours, often 12-hour shifts, mostly on our feet. And there are the missed lunches, the demanding customers, and the non-pharmacist chain-store owners. Probably the worst part of it right now is the incessant paperwork for the ever-present insurance companies. No wonder Charles has a full head of dark hair while I am already quite gray, despite being almost six years younger. Of course, I was single during the sexual revolution of the ‘70s, while Charles was married, and that might have put a little gray on my noggin, too. But I had always had a lot of fun.
What keeps me going, at least so far, is the feeling that I often make a difference in people being healthy or at least getting better if they get sick. Plus, I like the people I work with—great camaraderie, lots of dirty jokes told…very politically incorrect, but none of the men or women working there would want to change a thing, especially Kim who I have a smallish, probably temporary, crush on. People would probably say she was too young for me, were we to go out, but I had heard that before and it wouldn’t bother me.
Intrigued that Charles might retire, I asked, “But Charles, don’t you get satisfaction out of molding young minds?” I always liked to say “molding young minds” when talking to Charles because of the image of shower mold that I knew it conjured up in his mind. Yeah, I can be a real card at times…increasingly, I’m finding as I get older, I try to come up with bold, funny statements—despite the fact that I steal most of them from more clever people.
“I might if I really thought I could have any lingering impact on their minds,” he said rather seriously, ignoring my attempt at humor, “and I don’t even know for sure that I should even be trying to have an impact on them.”
“What do you mean?” Michelle asked, joining the conversation, “I’m sure that you teach very well and that the students in your classes learn gobs of things!” Michelle was always very supportive. As an accountant with a CPA, she usually saw things as being pretty black-and-white. On the other hand, it might be that she saw things that way all along, and that is why she became an accountant. Charles would probably call that some kind of “selectivity bias” or something, using his economic jargon that we seldom understood.
“Oh, I try,” said Charles, “but there are a lot of reasons why I can’t get through to them and some of those reasons are my fault, I think.”
“What do you mean?” asked Michelle, leaning forward. I notice that she looked quite good “for her age,” as people always irritatingly add. In fact, the whole family is holding up pretty well, apart from my gray hair. The Peterson family curse, a potbelly, had already hit me, but it only looked like I was trying to hide half a cantaloupe under my shirt. Dad is working on a basketball, while inexplicably, Charles seems unaffected by the curse…hmmm, it occurred to me that Charles does a lot more exercise than Dad does or I ever do. Charles’s response to Michelle pulled me back into the conversation—just before I reached to point of vowing to do something about the gut.
“Well, there are the usual problems you hear about. Short attention spans, probably due to the impact of advertisements breaking up TV shows. And, all of that ‘self-esteem’ nonsense—it used to be when a student didn’t understand something right away, they thought it might be at least partly their fault. Now, if they don’t pick something up fast, or at all, they think it must be something I’m doing wrong!
But what has been bothering me the most of late,” Charles continued, “is that students seem to think they know a lot of things. I’m not talking about 2 + 2 = 4 sorts of things, either. Take, say, social issues like capital punishment, abortion, and gun control or any of a huge variety of general public policy issues, like trade, war, or policies affecting the environment. They have very strong beliefs, often thinking the proper position is completely obvious. Yet, about half believe one position is completely obvious, while the other half finds a directly opposing position to be equally obvious! It has gotten to where when somebody says ‘It’s my opinion that…’ this is intended to finish the argument rather than being the beginning of a discussion, as might seem appropriate to us old Socratic types.”
“Well, why can’t you just present the evidence and convert the half that is wrong?” Michelle persisted.
“It isn’t that simple…first of all, each student has a ‘world view’ that their specific beliefs fit into. They really don’t want to have those specific beliefs questioned, because that threatens their more basic worldview. If they’re “liberal” they take a liberal position and if they’re “conservative” they take a conservative position—either way they really don’t want to seriously entertain alternative viewpoints. Besides, and this is what has been bothering me the most lately, I’m increasingly convinced that the best answer to any interesting question is ‘I don’t know.’”
“Huh…would you elaborate on that?” from Michelle.
“I used to think I knew a lot of things, too, just like the students…maybe most people are that way. It was just a matter of teaching them what I knew, or so I thought. This would usually work just fine, regardless of what I said. If I took a conservative position, the conservative students would lap it up, and for the liberal students it would be an ‘in one ear and out the other’ sort of thing, and conversely. Not having any strong ideological biases, I generally said enough things that fit into each groups’ world views that they could focus on what they agreed with and ignore the rest. This enabled them to perpetuate their specific beliefs, as necessary to maintain their world views unscathed,” said Charles with a chortle, warming to his topic.
I interrupted, with an off-tune rendition of part of Simon and Garfinkel’s The Boxer, “…a man hears what they want to hear and disregards the rest…”
“And,” Charles continued, ignoring my interruption, though I saw Michelle smile, “when a student asked me a question, I always had an answer, a position that I took to be pretty much obvious and true. So whether the students agreed or disagreed with my answer, at least they didn’t think I was stupid. Now, since I think the best answer to any interesting question is ‘I don’t know,’ many of them think I’m not qualified to be a professor anymore…I’m too stupid!”
Charles laughing uncomfortably, though we could tell he was bothered, and continued, “Increasingly, I’m thinking that the easy decisions have already been made, and that it is almost a ‘coin-flip’ as to which position to take on nearly every issue that we care, often passionately, about. Maybe Socrates was right when he said ‘I know nothing but the fact of my own ignorance’”
Dad jumped into the fray, “Is what you are saying sort of akin to the diet comments David made last winter when we were all together?”
“Perhaps,” said Charles, “Dave thought he ‘knew’ that a high carbohydrate diet was a healthy diet, if I recall correctly. Dave, would it be fair to say that you would now say ‘I don’t know’ if somebody asked you what the best diet would be like?”
“Oh, I guess I would say ‘I don’t know’ to pretty narrow questions of what percentage carbohydrates, protein, and fat should be in a diet.” I felt cocky, with the conversation turning to something that I had investigated a bit. I give a lot of diet advice to my customers, and it used to be that I was confident about that advice. “Originally I was convinced of the heart-healthiness of Dr. Ornish’s approach of very high carbohydrates and very low fat. But, the resurgence of support for Dr. Atkins diet, along with that for the Zone approach of Dr. Sears, and the recommendations of Dr. Reaven have really created a lot of uncertainty.”
Having taken the floor, I plowed ahead, hamming it up. “I think most people in the developed world, and increasingly in the developing world, just eat way too many calories, especially given our decreasing activity levels. It now seems to me that it may not matter too much whether you give up fat or carbs. It does seem pretty clear that we should eat more fruits and vegetables and less highly processed and sugary or transfat things, but beyond that it may just be calories, calories, calories.” I am smug…but I have also taken the conversation in a direction away from Charles’ reasons for giving up teaching. Returning to the topic, I said,
“But surely, Charles, most of what you teach must be of the 2 + 2 = 4 variety, without much controversy, unlike the controversy over carbohydrate, fat and protein percentages in diets. I mean, didn’t Adam Smith write The Wealth of Nations way over two hundred years ago? Surely you economists have at least figured out the basic stuff by now!”
“You’d be surprised, a lot of what we think we know is probably delusion, and not just in economics, but in lots of fields,” said Charles. “And the real problem is that believing that we know something interferes with our ability to effectively think about that something—students get trapped in the boxes of what they believe they know and as a result find it much harder to think originally or to accept important revisions to what they ‘know.’ And, unfortunately, almost everybody else, including me, is also stuck in his or her own box, just a different sort of box and it hurts our ability to think originally, too! It’s all very depressing, and I’ve been luckier than most at coming up with some reasonably novel ideas.”
“Would you be able to give an example of what you’re talking about that we could actually understand?” I challenged. I had heard him, on too many occasions, spout those weasel words that academics use to sound intelligent without actually saying anything understandable.
Charles said that he would take a shot at that later, over dinner. He had to do some last minute Christmas shopping most of the afternoon. I didn’t envy him…one of the nice things about having dropped out of Christmas is that I never get that holiday depression that lots of people get, partly because of all the extra crap that they do in an effort to be “festive.” Plus, I was never a good gift wrapper, and didn’t even care whether I got better at it or not.
Wine, a Fire, and Market Economics
It had been a relaxing sort of day for me, though Charles and the others had been busy with the last-minute bustle of activity before Christmas. To simplify things, we had decided to order in pizza in the late afternoon, and were munching on it during what would normally be the pre-dinner cocktail hour.
“If Dave is serious about getting an understandable example, you had better not pour me any more wine…I tend to lapse into jargon when inebriated,” Charles said to his wife, Elizabeth, who went by “E,” who was refreshing his glass. Elizabeth has a sister, Georgia, who goes by “G,” too. I sometimes have a little fun with that, introducing us at bars and restaurants, with “Hi--This is Elizabeth, but call her E, Charles but call him C, and I’m Dave, but call me D.” I would, of course, throw in the name and initial of any unlucky soul who happened to be my date for the evening.
As a general rule, we always drank too much when we got together over the holidays. Michelle and E drank white wine, and usually much less of it than Charles and I who liked to compare reds, with good-hearted one-upmanship the order of the day. He was always hunting for bargain-priced wines that we would both like better than my expensive reds. Sometimes he could do it, too. He claimed that wine was an “inefficient market,” with almost three hundred thousand wineries in the world, each with different wines and with vintage variation. Charles was fairly sure that there had to be undiscovered bargains out there, and he sometimes did find a really good wine for not much money.
Michelle was drinking more than usual, probably because she missed Gary, her husband—a great guy—who was away on a business trip and would not get back until right before Christmas, a few days away. Dad and Mom (Jack and Diane, just like in the John Mellencamp song) nearly always had exactly one martini before dinner during the week and two on Sundays (“stirred, not shaken”). They drank milk, of all things, with dinner. Barbaric, I thought, though my thoughts were usually ignored. Our parent’s routine hadn’t varied for decades, apart from the dramatic switch from gin to vodka in the martini about ten years ago. And, before that, they had switched from whole milk, first to two percent, then finally to skim. To the extent that I drank any milk—a rare occurrence—it was always skim.
But, when the family got together, all of that orderly parental imbibing discipline went out the window. The pre-pizza martini was now a distant memory, with Dad helping Charles and I out with our second (or was it third?) bottle of red wine. Mom was sharing Michelle and E’s first (or was it the second?) white…not being used to drinking very much, both parents were starting to slur their words a tad. I always liked that, believing very much in moderation in all things…including moderation. As usual, I had stolen that thought, but liked it no less for that.
“Ok, give us an example, and make it clear,” Michelle said, more aggressively than was typical for her, “of how our knowing hurts our thinking.”
“I’ll try,” said Charles, “but any example that is going to stay very clear, will have to involve some simplifications, some ‘assumptions’ as scientists say. Suppose we have a so-called ‘competitive economy,’ one in which there are so many buyers and so many sellers than no one person, or small group, can affect price…”
“Whoa…hold on there,” I protested, “don’t suppliers set price and we just buy or don’t buy?” I don’t remember much from the one course in economics I took in college, but I was not planning on getting duped into anything, especially in my intellectually weakened state of partial inebriation.
“Hey, as I say, it is a simplification, but a very useful one—and besides there are some goods for which it is a pretty accurate assumption…agricultural goods like wheat, soybeans, and lots of financial assets, like stocks in the stock market, for example. It’s just a useful assumption, like the ‘frictionless fluid’ models of physics…”
“The what?” from Michelle, who had had her difficulties with physics before turning to accounting.
“You probably heard of it as the assumption of a vacuum…maybe saw some experiments in high school. If there is no air resistance, you can drop any two things from the same height and they will hit the ground at the same time.”
“Well, they pretty much will, won’t they?” interjected E, who has been listening quietly while watching the fire, wiggling her foot in time to the Christmas carols on the stereo. Charles had always liked to talk and that was probably part of his appeal to the quieter E.
“A rock and a marble will, but a rock and a feather won’t,” Charles continued, “so for some pairings the real-world fact of air resistance matters a lot. However, thinking about what happens without air resistance is still very useful for a general understanding of how the physical world works. Simple, unrealistic models are actually good—if a model is very ‘realistic,’ it will be just as complicated as the real world, hence can’t help us understand the real world.”
Charles went on, “So, for the time being, let’s assume that individual buyers can buy all they want and individual sellers can sell all they want at the going price…Ok? Trust me, it is a useful assumption, and not too many things change in important ways if you make more complicated assumptions.”
My bullshit sensor always beeps frantically when people say “trust me,” because you are nearly always about to be victimized by a con artist. But I figured my brother was being genuine, or at least trying to, within the limits imposed by being an economist!
“When would buyers stop buying?” Charles asked, trying to involve people.