Category Archives: Politics

The Success Equation

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If we wish to have success, I think it is helpful to define the components of success, what I call the success equation.  As far as I know, this specific equation is my concept, but the ideas behind it do not require any particular genius so I would not be surprised at all if it has been proposed many times before.

Success = Talent x Choices x Opportunities

Here I define talent as your inborn abilities.  Choices are the sum of all of your decision.  Opportunities are what is available to you in the outside world.

By definition, talent is maximized at birth and is generally a constant.  A disability may decrease it, such as an artist going blind.  Refining and improving talent is a choice one makes.  Also by definition, a person can not create his or her own opportunities.  He or she can only recognize opportunities and then make the choice to take or not take advantage of the opportunity.

Since talent is fixed, any political policies that increase success has to do one of two things:  increase the probability that people will make good choices or increase opportunities.  Conversely, any policy that decreases the probability of good choices or opportunities will be harmful.

To some extent, all three are essential.  For example, in a medieval feudal society a peasant was destined to be a peasant, regardless of his or her talent or choices.  At this point, I would like to postulate that 21st century America is not a medieval society.  There is a multitude of opportunities, even for people who live under the worst conditions.  If there were no opportunities, as the peasant faced in medieval Europe, then nobody would be successful. However, some people are successful, so ergo there are opportunities.  I would also postulate that for a child growing up in a middle class family with a supportive, stable two-parent family, the opportunities are much easier to find and the child is more likely to make good choices.  A child growing up in a slum in an unstable single-parent household will most likely find fewer opportunities, they will be farther from home, and the child will be less likely to make good choices to take advantage of them.

The inherent unfairness of life, however, does not change the equation.  Regardless of the background, increasing the opportunities and increasing the probability of good choices will lead to more success.

In Malcom Gladwell’s book “Outliers” Gladwell demonstrates fairly convincingly that the most successful people such as the Bill Gates’s and Steve Jobs’s of the world would not be successful if they did not have amazing opportunities.  If they were born a few years earlier or later or if they did not have computer access unavailable to most kids their age, they most likely would not have had the same level of achievement.  This premise is entirely consistent with the success equation.  To achieve maximum success, all three elements of the equation,  talent, choices, and opportunities, must all be at a maximal level.   For most of us, however, we do not need to achieve billionaire status to be successful.   We just need to use whatever talent we have with reasonable choices to take advantage of reasonable opportunities and we can achieve enough success to have a fulfilling middle class lifestyle.

So how can a third party, such as the government, increase people’s probability of success?   It can promote policies that provide opportunities and provide incentives for people to make good choices.   The best way to provide opportunities for the most people is to promote a healthy growing economy.   I will discuss this at a later time.  For now, I would like to propose the idea that promoting good choices is much more important.  Even when there are limited opportunities, if a person makes very good choices he or she will find and take advantage of these opportunities.  On the other hand, even if there are fantastic opportunities, a person who makes poor choices will never take advantage of them.  Therefore, the key to promoting success is by helping people make good choices.  How do we do that?  That will be the subject of my next blog.

The First Assumption: Success is Good.

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In my last post I talked about the importance of assumptions.  My first assumption is that success is good.  We want to be successful in our lives and we favor policies that promote success, for ourselves, for those we care most about, and for the population as a whole.  The term “success”, however is a very vague term.  Success can be valued in terms of money, fame, professional achievement, impact on the lives of others, personal happiness,  etc.  

Moreover, the perception of success is highly relative, depending on our own expectations and the expectations of others.  For example, most people would say that a baseball player who makes the major leagues and plays at that level for many years is highly successful.  However, if this player was touted as the next Willie Mays and he spends his career as a bench player batting .250, many would consider him a disappointment.

When I speak of success in these blogs in terms of political policies, I am primarily referring to economic success.  Political decisions in economics help determine the overall wealth of the nation and how this wealth is distributed.  Economic success in terms of income and/or net worth is the only practical way to measure the results of economic policies.  While some may say that even though a policy is making people poorer, it is also making them happier, I think most people would be happier with a bit more money.

When I speak of success in terms of personal life, I mostly think of self actualization.  Self actualization is best described by the marine corps slogan “Be all that you can be!”.  This is extremely subjective, but here we are talking about personal decisions.  When we talk about improving the lives of others, we need to be more objective so we can measure results.  When we talk about our own life, we can use our own definitions.

In my personal opinion, success derives from setting and achieving goals.  I will talk about this more next time.

 

Assumptions are Everything

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America is becoming increasingly polarized between liberal and conservative, blue states and red states.  Each side accuses the other of evil intentions.  Liberals call conservatives mean-spirited people who hate the poor.  Conservatives  accuse liberals of being unpatriotic, of hating America.

While there are clearly people at the fringe of both sides who do hate, I believe that most people on sides are basically good people.  We all want the same things.  We want peace and prosperity.  We want to reduce poverty, educate our kids, have a clean environment, and have a multitude of jobs and opportunities.  We differ, however, in what methods will achieve these goals.

The big problem with demonizing your adversary is that if your adversary is evil, you don’t have to listen to their arguments, to their logic, to their facts.  If their goal is evil, then their arguments are meaningless.  You have nothing to learn from them.  Even if you do try to listen to their arguments, they often make no sense or may even seem repellent, reinforcing your concept that the other person is either a villain or a moron.

The core problem is that people have different assumptions.  If you start a discussion with differing assumptions, there can be no progress.  If my assumption is that 2+2=5, I can prove with brilliant logic that 4+4=10.  Two Catholic priests can have a discussion on morality building their arguments on the common assumption that the teachings of Jesus as expressed in the New Testament is a definitive authority.  No matter how brilliant their arguments, however, they will have no effect on a Jew, a Muslim, or an Atheist.

What kind of assumptions do we have?  A liberal might have the assumption that the best path to peace is by being kind to everyone so they will like you and not want to hurt you.  A conservative might have the assumption that the best path to peace is by being strong enough that nobody will want to mess with you.  A liberal might assume that their is a fixed amount of wealth in the world and if a person is wealthy, they are taking the fair share from someone who is poor.  A conservative might assume that people create wealth and a person becomes wealthy by creating more wealth.

So if we read an editorial and the editor relies on assumptions we don’t share, we don’t give any weight to the arguments in the editorial.  They make no sense.  They might as well be speaking a different language.

My belief is that communication can only begin when we strip issues down to the core level where both sides agree on any underlying assumptions.  At that point we can have a meaningful debate.  We can’t really debate the size of the defense budget until we first debate whether strengthening our military leads to peace or leads to war.

And the biggest, most important assumption for any good debate is that we are both basically good but not perfect human beings who share the same overall goals and just differ in how to get there.

When I discuss politics or philosophy, my goal is to strip the arguments down to their core assumptions.  When we get there, we can talk.

Authors Who Have Greatly Influenced Me

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As I am still at the stage of this blog where absolutely nobody is reading it, I am laying a foundation before I actually say anything interesting (assuming I ever say anything interesting).

There are three authors who have profoundly influenced my thinking.  In future blogs I may not adequately give them credit.  Sometimes I am not sure where their thoughts stop and my thoughts begin.

The first author is Dale Carnegie.  Dale Carnegie wrote the most insightful book ever on human relations, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.  There is not a  day where my interactions with others are not affected by what I read in this book, although sometimes I will confess they are not affected enough.  Right after college when I moved to St. Louis I was pleased to drive by a Dale Carnegie Institute.  I took the base course and then I was a graduate assistant for another instance.  I had been incredibly shy.  This course brought me out of my shell and gave me the confidence to talk to people.  I will forever be grateful to Dale Carnegie.

The second author is Thomas Sowell.  Dr. Sowell is an economist and a columnist.  His book “Basic Economics” is a masterpiece in defining economics in plain text without supply and demand charts, etc., so the lay person can understand the key principles.  He then looks at different issues using these basic principles of economics to show the hidden as well as the obvious consequences of different policies.  He then uses these principles as the basis for analyzing issues in his other books.  In short, he trains you on how to think about issues.

The third author is Ayn Rand.  Rand, in both in her non-fiction books on philosophy and her fiction such as “Atlas Shrugged”, starts from the very beginning and logically builds the philosophy she calls Objectivism.  I can’t count the number of times I have heard her name trashed by people saying how horrible she is, but I have yet to ever see anybody rebut her logic.  I would actually welcome an attack on her logic, and I have searched for one, but have yet to find it.  I have always been pro-capitalist but I thought that while socialism just didn’t work in real life, it was morally superior.  Rand taught me that capitalism is morally superior as well as pragmatically superior.

Additionally, I’d like to give an honorable mention to Malcolm Gladwell.  At the suggestion of my cousin Bob Kaiser, I have just started reading his books.  Gladwell gets you to think about issues as you have never thought of them before.

My Politics

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I would consider myself a libertarian Republican.  My father used to say that Democrats want the government in the boardroom and out of the bedroom and Republicans want the government out of the boardroom and in the bedroom.  I tend to want the government out of both.

That does not mean I am an anarchist.  Government does have a very important role to play.  More on this later.