Responsible Behavior

At the beginning of last week CBS (and several others) reported on a big cat attack at an Arizona zoo. “A jaguar attacked a woman who crossed a barrier to take a photo with the animal at an Arizona zoo Saturday evening, officials said. The woman sustained non-life-threatening injuries in the attack at the Wildlife World Zoo in Litchfield Park, about 20 miles outside of Phoenix.”

The woman, not identified at the time of the incident, had severe gashes on her arm and was taken to a local hospital. She had stepped over a barrier to lean against the cage to get a better picture with the jaguar. The 3-foot barrier was separated from the cage by approximately four feet and intended to keep visitors far enough away from the cage, but people could still get over it if they chose. The zoo officials, who apparently decided the cat was not at fault or particularly dangerous under normal circumstances, temporarily removed it from the exhibit.

Refreshingly surprising was the woman’s reaction in an interview the following day, also on CBS. How easy would it have been to blame the zoo and run out to fetch a lawyer to sue them for negligence? Things like that happen every day in America. Surely a sympathetic jury would have focused on her injuries and distress, ignoring the part she played in the incident and possibly granting her a substantial award. Otherwise, the zoo might have offered to settle for undisclosed damages just to avoid the hassle of litigation. News like this is commonplace.

Actually, she told the interviewer, “I was in the wrong for leaning over the barrier.” She did suggest that the zoo modify the design to make it less tempting and more difficult for others to make the same mistake. She is hoping to turn her frightening experience into an example for others. As a closing comment she added, “I never expected this. I feel like we're all human, we make mistakes and I learned my lesson.”

A good sign of responsibility is admitting your mistakes or your contribution to a problem. It’s refreshing, and all too rare, to see this kind of behavior in the news.

Parental Responsibility and Education

Relative to the behavior model with its five dimensions, the problem is that so many other books and articles touch only on one of the dimensions or even a subset of a single dimension. They all come to the same conclusion in a more limited way. They agree that American society is handicapped by poor individual choices and faulty decisions; but only here, at Real American Solutions, is right behavior in all five key dimensions seen as the only way to get out of the hole that Americans keep digging for themselves and their country.

One example comes from John Rosemond, a columnist, public speaker, and author on parenting. “His weekly parenting column is syndicated in approximately 225 newspapers, and he has authored 15 books on the subject.” A common theme of many of his columns is the problem of parental responsibility.

Here is a recent example about eroding discipline in the schools. A “steady stream of missives from teachers, ex-teachers, and other folks who have insider knowledge of America's schools” tells him that “classroom discipline is falling apart” and no one seems to have the answer.

One factor adding to the problem is lack of support from school administrators. When a disruptive student is sent to the principal's office, they often return to class having “received a cookie or some other treat while they talked about their 'feelings.'” On top of that “almost every teacher says that when they call a parent about a child's behavior, the parent makes excuses or blames the teacher." As the problem gets worse, teachers demand smaller class size, increasing overall cost to taxpayers.

Compound those behaviors with teacher unions that have been given legal power to game the system, federal aid to education with strings attached and administrators too timid to back up teachers, and he predicts “that by 2030 nearly every public-school student will have a diagnosis of one sort or another.” This will be a strategy to increase the number of special needs children to maintain funding as responsible parents, many of them teachers themselves, continue to pull their kids from the public schools to send them to available alternatives. 

Ultimately, it all comes back to the parents. They are the ones who side with the child. They are the ones who put the fear of legal action on the administrators. They are the ones who take too little interest in their children’s education in general, passing it off to the teachers and after-school programs. Parental responsibility is at the heart of the problem; it's the answer everyone is looking for.

Taking a Perspective Break

One of the least accurately used words in the English language is need. It is used as a substitute for want, in the sense of really wanting something. The logic of need is one thing, but the emotion kicks in to make that substitution of need for want so often that two very distinct terms become interchangeable. Losing the sense of that difference leads to unhappiness.

One of the core skills behind successful behavior in the dimension of perspective is the ability to clearly see the difference.

This idea was reinforced by a recent interview in the business section of The Atlantic, “Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy” with the author of a book by the same title. After basic needs are met, research shows that there are just three things needed for happiness: “having meaningful social relationships, being good at whatever it is one spends one’s days doing, and having the freedom to make life decisions independently.” These are not necessarily related to intelligence, level of education or wealth.

You may remember news from a 2017 Princeton University study presenting evidence that happiness increases with earnings only up to about $75,000 per year. "The lower a person's annual income falls below that benchmark, the unhappier he or she feels. But no matter how much more than $75,000 people make, they don't report any greater degree of happiness."

Additional intelligence, education or success does not keep people from making common mistakes like comparing themselves to others. Whenever there is a comparison, there will always be a winner and a loser. More ambitious people tend to compare themselves to others with higher levels of accomplishment and across more fields of interest. They end up the loser more often.

In terms of these faulty comparisons, having a grasp of economic understanding comes into play. With a scarcity mentality, people assume that any gain must be offset by a loss for another, and conversely they believe that someone else only comes out ahead (or gets rich) by taking from everyone else. This kind of thinking is demonstrably wrong, but it is convenient fodder for politicians and groups trying to stoke discontent against successful businesses or individuals. (This discontentment does not lead to happiness.)

Working for big rewards and recognition are not advisable. Not only do you put yourself at the mercy of other people’s opinions (and biases), the thrill of the award or pay raise soon wears off leaving you yearning for the next one.

All these false and unadvisable comparisons, this jealousy of someone doing better and this yearning for the next prize or reward, lead to mistaking wants for needs. Using a very Spartan definition, basic needs include air, water, food, basic shelter and adequate clothing. All else is a luxury.The new dress or bigger car is not a need. People lived for centuries without electricity, indoor plumbing and handheld entertainment. Not too many years ago, if you wanted to make a phone call while driving, it required a stop to find a pay phone. Little more than one hundred years ago a major problem in big cities was dead horses abandoned in the street!

Remembering facts like these from time to time gives the perspective to moderate the yearning, to identify, or at least prioritize, the wants.

An extreme example come from the news last week where “an 11-year-old northern Indiana boy shot and wounded his state-trooper father because he was upset that his parents took away his video games.” He got the gun from his father’s locked police vehicle. 

That shows poor perspective – even for a young boy; but how many older and more mature Americans have similar, if less violent reactions, when their wants are blocked or hampered? How many have trouble distinguishing wants from needs? A walk through the mall on a weekend afternoon (at a time when personal debt is at an all-time high) gives a pretty good picture.

The Robots are Coming!

Picking strawberries is hard work. Pickers spend a lot of time on their hands and knees peeking under leaves and straw to find and pick the ripe ones. I know first hand. A few years ago a small team of Master Gardeners at my local Demonstration Garden picked and donated over 500 pounds of strawberries to local food banks in a matter of about three weeks. We spent a couple of hours, three days a week, working our way down the rows. (The following year about half of the older rows were plowed under and not replaced with strawberries! It was too hard to find interested volunteers.)

Picking strawberries is also exacting work. Each picker must determine which strawberries are ready and which to wait on. Unlike bananas and many other fruits and vegetables, strawberries will not continue to ripen after harvesting. And if you don’t get them at the right time, they will rot on the plant. That’s why coming back day after day is necessary.

Besides being difficult and exacting, picking strawberries is delicate work. No one wants to eat a squished strawberry. People who buy them in the stores are usually even fussier than people getting them for free at a food bank.

Why all this discussion of strawberries? A robot is coming to do this difficult, exacting and delicate work and may be in limited operation on strawberry farms within three years. As the article points out “a robot that can pick strawberries may ease the industry’s labor problem and revolutionize the way crops are harvested.” It’s getting harder to find workers, and the ones that show up often move on to other crops before the job is complete.

Some machines are pictured in the article, but a search on “strawberry harvesting robot” yields a number of YouTube videos. Once in operation they will run for about 20 hours a day with the ability to pick up to 8.5 acres in that time. If there is an abundance of fruit, they automatically slow down to get them all. The robots will be able to do the job with more precision than humans; and will be able to pick at night, when cooler fruits are more resistant to bruising and when lower temperatures at picking time increase shelf life and reduce cooling costs. In addition, the “machine is going to know exactly where each plant is in the field” and “be able to have yield data at the plant level.”

Based on personal experience, I was fascinated by the idea of machines harvesting strawberries. Seeing pictures and videos of the huge robotic arms working in auto assembly where hard work and precision are so important is one thing, but having robots do the delicate work of harvesting fruit and vegetables adds another dimension. As one spokesperson for the robot designer says, “We’re not going to stop with strawberries.” 

Fewer jobs are safe anymore from automation. It’s something to keep in mind as the minimum wage debate rages on. As labor becomes more expensive, the option to substitute machines becomes more attractive – especially if they can do the job with more precision while simultaneously collecting meaningful data. Economic understanding reminds us that every day we are selling our skills in competition against others worldwide with those same skills, and more and more in competition against the threat of substitution by machines.

Kids can no longer bank on the idea of working the same low skill job as their parents and retiring after thirty years with a union pension and healthcare. More skilled robots are coming, and they are coming fast.

Stoking the Fear (Continued)

This is a brief follow-up to last Friday’s comments on how news and advertising use fear, especially the fear of death and illness, to sell products and capture viewers' attention. (When a study can point out that toasters and air purifiers cause indoor air pollution, eyebrows shoot up.)

Now comes another story highlighting how companies use the same tactics to sell products and services to fight aging.

“A company that charged patients thousands of dollars for infusions of blood plasma from younger donors said [recently] that it had stopped treating patients after the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers against such treatments, purported to prevent aging and memory loss.” That’s right, a company called Ambrosia, cleverly named after “the food or drink of the Greek gods, often depicted as conferring longevity or immortality upon whoever consumed it,” offered customers over the age of 35 an infusion of one liter of blood donated by 16- to 25-year-olds, all for only $8,000.

The FDA said that there was “no proof that plasma from young donors can be used as a treatment for dementia, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease or post-traumatic stress disorder, as some companies have claimed.” Plasma infusions are only approved for treating blood-clotting deficiencies in patients who are bleeding and in a few other very specialized cases. (Only one small study showed a slight benefit to Alzheimer's patients.)

Furthermore, the FDA warns that no matter how well screened they may be such treatments can result in: infections; serious allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, which can manifest as hives and airway obstruction; transfusion-related acute lung injury; overload of the circulatory system leading to swelling of the body and difficult breathing.

This company and others are operating outside of FDA guidelines and are charging big bucks for an unproven technology. These companies are capitalizing on that fear of aging and dying to prey on unwitting customers.

This one is just a single example. So many ads and news stories use the same tactics. Our only defense, as I wrote last time is to use critical thinking and perspective. If it seems too good to be true… 

It’s also odd that when people get outraged at corporations, they typically attack big companies such as banks, food conglomerates, Wal-Mart or McDonalds. At least these companies deliver a product that has some benefit. Companies like the ones above that offer products of zero or questionable value get little pushback, and it takes a government agency to warn everyone of potential dangers and about how they are wasting their money. Despite the lack of evidence and possible dangers, many still continue to patronize these and so many others like them. (See, for more evidence, all my previous blogs on dietary supplements.)

Stoking the Fear

Teenage boys are not afraid of dying – or at least don’t think about it very much. That’s evident by the number of stupid-trick videos that have been posted over the years. Everyone else though, seems to be thinking about it quite often – if not consciously, it lingers just below the surface making them a target for all the shocking news and advertising that comes our way. (Note that I often lump news and advertising together. The tactics of one is often to scare us into buying things; the tactics of the other is often to scare us into staying tuned in for the next story.)

One such scary story comes from a Duke University study. “Children living in homes with all vinyl flooring or flame-retardant chemicals in the sofa have significantly higher concentrations of potentially harmful semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) in their blood or urine.” This is a family of chemicals widely used in the manufacture of electronics, furniture and building materials. Exposure is widespread among adults and children.

Exposure to the chemical used as a flame retardant in sofas “has been linked in laboratory tests to neurodevelopmental delays, obesity, endocrine and thyroid disruption, cancer and other diseases” and that used in vinyl flooring “has been linked to respiratory disorders, skin irritations, multiple myeolma and reproductive disorders.” 

Remember, the term linked to does not mean causes and laboratory tests are usually a very early step. At Duke they studied only 203 children over 3 years to see if the presence of the kind of sofa and flooring led to increased levels in their blood and urine, not to find any link. They assumed the link already existed based on previous studies. 

It’s likely that most people never heard of SVOCs or those specific chemicals before. But the news agencies pass this along as if it poses an imminent danger and may require immediate action. What are the alternatives – non flame retardant sofas? Vinyl flooring replaced linoleum that contained asbestos. Clearly this has to wind its way through the scientific community to establish safe exposure levels before it can make sense to anyone. Yet the news is quick to report it without qualification.

But it gets even nuttier!

About the same time I found the headline: “Toasters may expose you to more pollution than a busy intersection.” That’s right, that seemingly innocent appliance that we put bread in and push down the handle is trying to kill you. “A new study from the University of Texas at Austin warns that toasters, candles, and other household smoke makers expose people to more air pollution than standing in a busy intersection does.” Included on the list of indoor polluters are house cleaners, air purifiers and sprays, but toasters are the worst offender unless we only lightly singe the bread.

The information from both sources that I linked to also appeared in several other places. Some reporting was more thorough than others – it probably depends on time and space available. The main point, however, seemed to be an attempt to capture attention by warning that our sofas and toasters are hidden dangers.

Think of all the universities in the US and all the professors and graduate students at these universities looking for things to study, competing for funding and attention. They get attention by coming to ominous-sounding conclusions. A study saying, “Don’t worry about your air purifier” wouldn’t fly. That behavior by the researchers makes it so easy for the news media to fill space with dire warnings any time they want to. Without critical thinking and perspective a person could easily worry himself to death about all those things that might kill him.

Treating Symptoms

Driving around in the car listening to the radio the other day, I heard back-to-back public service announcements. 

The first was the sad story of the kid sitting in the corner of the playground without enough energy to play because he was hungry. It told me that one out of six kids in America is hungry and there is no reason for it. Donations would presumably help get food to the kid and solve the problem.

Someone at the station may not have been paying attention because the second PSA had the same theme, except this time it said that one out of five kids in America is hungry. I didn’t pay close enough attention to tell if this was a solicitation from the same charitable organization. I was too busy thinking about the underlying messages.

These PSAs actually led me to wonder about two questions. First, where did those seemingly iffy statistics come from? With about 74 million children in America, the difference between one in five and one in six is about 2.5 million kids. Are they hungry or not? But that’s just nitpicking.

The more important question is why are we only treating the symptoms? Hungry kids on the playground are the result of kids not being fed at home. Why are around 30 million families not feeding their kids? This is not a question anyone seems interested in answering – not these organizations and not the government. We just hear lamentations about how unfair it is that the food is not distributed more justly.

It’s hard to believe, especially at a time of full employment and help-wanted signs up everywhere, that all those families have just fallen on hard times. There must be a sizable percentage where people just plain didn’t acknowledge that it was an important enough consideration to be able to feed their kids before having them. In some cases she may have thought about how cute babies are and how having one would make her happier. In other cases he may have thought how cute she was and how getting her into bed would make him happier. When the consequences of those behaviors come calling, he may or may not even stick around and she can always look to the government to help bail her out.

Meanwhile the government has programs to feed the family while those other programs from the PSAs try to find ways to move the food around so the kid gets a good breakfast or a sandwich for lunch. Such systems are treating the kids almost as hostages. They are hungry and need to eat, so no one addresses the underlying issue of parental responsibility! Over and over we treat the symptoms and never dig any deeper to solve the core problem.

What’s worse is that by treating the symptoms, nothing was being done to discourage the same behavior by this generation or to discourage the same in the next. Whenever society decides to shelter people from consequences of their actions, they have less motivation to change, and others that observe this dynamic are less inclined to view those same decisions as problematic.  Of course, society can't let the kids go hungry and to confront irresponsible parents is branded as lacking compassion. Later everyone sits around wringing hands and wondering why the War on Poverty has not reduced the poverty rate after 50+ years in operation; but few understand why we will probably be hearing the same statistics 50 years from now unless something changes.