Category Archive

Troubled?  Verbalize – or,

Learning from 3-year-olds

By Shlomo Maital   

     Sometimes, we seniors can learn from Gen X and Y parents. 

     What do you do when a three-year-old has a nuclear meltown/tantrum?  And you don’t know what the cause is, or what to do?  

      Verbalize.  “Use your words,” our grandson’s mom tells him.  “Say it in words.”

       Three-year-olds can talk.  And sometimes, they can say what is bothering them, clearly enough so we can find a remedy. 

        Now, what about us adults?  Maybe we don’t have such melt-down H-bomb tantrums – but we do get the sulks, the blues, the downs and the ‘leave-me-alones’.

         Verbalize.  Ask yourself, as you would ask the 3-year-old:  Hey, verbalize.  Say it in words.  What is your problem?  What is troubling you?   Sometimes, stating the cause can help find the cure.  Often, verbalizing is tough…. Takes some deep soul-searching.  That’s a good exercise.

        I looked up some research on tantrum suppression.  Mostly, it stated: Ignore it. If you don’t reward a tantrum, it won’t recur.

        Oh, yeah?   That scholar probably doesn’t know many three-year-olds.  And wow, can they ever sustain a tantrum…seems to last forever.

         For kids:  Verbalize.  Tell us in words.  At worst, it can stop the 150-decibel screams.  And at best, we can find an answer.  Verbalize — For ourselves, for our own tantrums, as well.

Dementia:  It is NOT Inevitable

By Shlomo Maital  

     As an old guy, I am naturally keenly interested in the causes of dementia – especially, pro-active ways to forestall it.  This article * that has just been published is very helpful.  It contains a kind of scorecard, to show the antecedents (forerunners) of dementia, with a very large simple of senior British citizens taken over a fairly long period of time. 

   Here, summarized, are the results, showing statistically the main antecedents:

 *  Parental history – pretty big.  Not much you can do to change your parents.

 *  Diabetes.  You can do much to prevent or mitigate it, with proper diet.

*  Depression.  A tough one.  Seniors have loads of reasons to be unhappy.  We can find little ways to find daily happiness – especially when it is therapeutic.

  *  Stroke:  This one has the biggest ‘beta’ coefficient (magnitude).  You can lower the odds of stroke, by treating high blood pressure, for instance. 

 *  There are other factors: cholesterol (treatable with statins), hypertension (treatable with medication). 

    The bottom-line message:  A healthy person in body and mind is less likely to incur dementia.  Exercise for the brain and the body, purpose in life, having a loving community – all can help.  The study shows – we CAN lower the odds of dementia.  And it is worth the try.  

 * Anatürk, M., Patel, R., Ebmeier, K. P., Georgiopoulos, G., Newby, D., Topiwala, A., … & Suri, S. (2023). Development and validation of a dementia risk score in the UK Biobank and Whitehall II cohorts. BMJ Ment Health, 26(1).

Japan: Proof Economics Is Wrong

By Shlomo Maital   

     At university, we are taught to challenge everything – basic premises and assumptions.  Yet there is one premise Economics embraces, chiseled in stone – more is better than less.  Growth is the goal.  More GDP beats less.  

      Really?  On a hot flat planet, where large parts are burning up daily?

      As a young Ph.D., I read with passion E.F. Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973).   As If People Mattered!   Because, when people matter, and when the planet they live on matter, things look different.  Maybe, Schumacher pleads, small is indeed beautiful – and better?

       Consider Japan.  NYT columnist Paul Krugman points out that contrary to common economists’ views, Japan has done well, despite shrinking population and dwindling work force: 

     “Adjusted for demography, Japan has achieved significant growth: It has seen a 45 percent rise in real income per relevant capita. The United States has done even better, but this hardly fits the narrative of Japanese stagnation. 

     “Wait, there’s more. Managing an economy with a declining working-age population is difficult, because low population growth tends to lead to weak investment. This observation is at the heart of the secular stagnation hypothesis, which says that nations with weak population growth tend to have persistent difficulty in maintaining full employment.  Yet Japan has, in fact, managed to avoid mass unemployment, or indeed mass suffering of any kind.”

   But wait.  The narrative above is still about growth (in per capita real income).  What about ‘less’?  A Japanese philosopher named Kohei Saito has published a best-selling book, Capital in the Anthropocene”, which has sold over 500,000 copies, advocating “degrowth capitalism”. (See NYT, Best seller makes for a shrinking Japan, Thursday August 24, p. 7).  Small is beautiful.  Less is more. 

    Note:  Anthropocene means  “the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.”

       Has having more stuff truly made humanity happier?  At the cost of a burning hot planet?  When a handful are billionaires and billions are hungry?  Is the economic gospel of growth flawed or false?  If we distributed wealth better, maybe less is indeed more?

       Maybe it is time to examine basic assumptions.  What if less is more and better?  What if less growth is needed, Japanese style, than more?  What if 95 % of us economists are misguided? 

        Many countries, especially in Europe, are experiencing population decline, as female fertility plummets.  This requires a rethinking of policy.  Japan has done this.  Other countries are still trying to persuade couples to have babies, e.g. with monetary incentives. It isn’t working too well.

      Hello Kitty (see the illustration above) was invented in 1974 by Yuko Shimizu, a Japanese designer.  It will celebrate its 50^th birthday next year.  Japanese design is innovative, clean, sparse, minimal – and lovely.  Like Hello Kitty.  Perhaps Japan’s economic policy is similar.

      It’s worth a close look – as Paul Krugman advises.  People matter. And they find happiness in general beyond having more stuff. Maybe one day economists will see the light.

Focus on the How and Why, Not What

By Shlomo Maital  

    My friend Bilahari Kausikan is a seasoned Singaporean diplomat, and the wisest of persons.  His perspectives are based on decades of service in Russia, US and elsewhere. And from time to time, he now has time to share his wisdom in speeches and articles.

     Here is a nugget I captured, from a recent talk he gave at a conference honoring the 100^th birthday of Singapore’s founding President Lee Kwan Yew:

    “It is crucial that we face uncertainties with the psychological poise that comes from putting events in perspective, neither down-playing nor exaggerating their significance, seeing them in context – we generally pay too much attention to events and not enough attention to the processes of which they are part — understanding and responding to events on their own terms rather than projecting our hopes or fears onto them.”

   Indeed, I myself do this all the time – focus on what is happening, and not on the underlying ‘why’ and ‘how’.  This partly explains political polarization —  how we divide into two polar camps, at each extreme, with the ‘middle’ sane moderate and empathic center emptying almost totally.  Why is the other side acting this way?  How is this motivated?  Where are the underlying causes?  How can I understand the process?

   Great leaders and statespersons do this all the time.  They grasp the ‘why’, the process, and take action accordingly – often in ways that are unpopular.  This is what Israel’s leader David Ben Gurion did, in choosing to declare independence in  1948, when everyone told him it was folly.  And similarly  Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew.

    And, as an aside —  take R&D.  It is expensive.  And very risky.  But – when you invest in improving processes,  you get a far higher return, and suffer ar less risk, than when you try to invent a totally new product.

     The world is driven by the ‘why’.  Let’s try to understand the ‘why’ far better.  Perhaps it might bring us closer together?  Maybe….

Get to Know Your Future Self

By Shlomo Maital

     Is the future not what it used to be?  This blog is about why this is.

     In the early ‘70s, my wife Dr. Sharone Maital, an educational psychologist, and I, an economist, wrote articles and books on the interface between psychology and economics.  One of our focus topics was “inability to defer gratification”, a technical term for how we degrade and discount the future, and overemphasize current ‘now’ gratification. 

       In a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts,  Shankar Vedante’s Hidden Brain,  this is the topic, based on a new book by UCLA psychologist Hal Hirschfield  Your future self:  How to make tomorrow better today.   

        There are interesting insights that I believe we all can employ.  Here is the essence of Hirshfield’s idea:

     “…it’s easier to choose what feels gratifying now than to choose what’s more beneficial in the years to come. Hal believes this is because we feel disconnected to our future selves. Hal shows us the mental mistakes we commit when thinking about the future —   he shares with us how to visualize who we want to become so we can make choices that are better for us now.

      A key finding of Hirshfield is this:  Based on functional MRI, mapping brain activity, when we think about our future choices, involving present sacrifice, the area of the brain most active is one involving how we view OTHER PEOPLE.  In other words, when we make present-future choices, the person involved in the future is not US, but some other person (whom we don’t know that well).  And if we don’t know the future person we are to become, very well,   our choices will strongly bias towards ourselves, in the present, the self we know so well. 

    What can be done?  Break present sacrifice down into small pieces ($5 a day saving rather than $150 a month, for example.  Visualize.  Picture ourselves in the future.  Think about 11,000 days from now, not 30 years. (A day is a smaller unit easier to comprehend).

      As an economist, I find it interesting that America and China have obverse problems. America, the consumer society, is built solely on getting people to spend, and enjoy the ‘now’.  Result:  Horrible infrastructure, aging airports, crowded roads, terrible public transportation.  China is build largely around investment and saving, and the Chinese people save huge amounts. Result:  Terrific infrastructure, but, when you run out of fast trains and airports and roads, and buildings to build – and you need people to consume – how to get them to do it.  America needs to save. China needs to spend.  Together, a perfect match. But alas – they are now in a Cold War….and the system in which China saved and bought US bonds so America could go into debt, is degrading.

I guess we should try to get to know our future self a little better. If we do, we are less likely to cheat it, and set aside good stuff for our future wellbeing.

The US Fed Got It Wrong —  Thanks!

By Shlomo Maital

    Paul Krugman, in his NYT op-ed, notes that the FED got it wrong – thank goodness. 

    The Federal Reserve Board, led by Chair Jerome Powell, radically boosted interest rates, creating a windfall of profits for the banks, who used our money to profit while refraining from paying us higher interest rates on our deposits. 

     The FED clearly sought to extinguish inflation, to reach its 2% target (unreasonable, unlikely),  at the cost of creating a recession.  A hard landing.  This was the plan.

      It failed.  Inflation has declined, in the US and mostly elsewhere.  Soft landing!  No recession. The FED was wrong.  Thank heavens.

       Inflation hawks now control the US Federal Reserve.  In the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment (Krugman notes the FED thought unemployment would soar and was OK with this),  the FED today opts for slashing inflation, virtually at any cost.  This is wrong-headed.  Inflation is the change in the price of goods and services.  At high levels, it has bad consequences. But at moderate levels, like today’s, it really doesn’t.  Unemployment, in contrast, is pure suffering – for those out of  a job, who watch their unemployment benefits disappear.

      Well done, Fed. You got it wrong. No recession. Keep up the good work…

US Economy:  Why Biden Gets a Bad Rap?

By Shlomo Maital  

     President Biden continues to get a bad rap.  Polls show high percentages rate his performance as unfavorable,  especially regarding management of the economy.  Nemesis Trump screams that America is a disaster.

       So what is the truth?  A strong article in americanprogress.org reveals it.  The US economy is stronger than any other of the G7 large economies, in seven measures.

* US has the lowest inflation rate, 2.7%, lower than e.g. UK, 8.7%.  * US energy prices are down by 11.7% compared to last year. * US has had the strongest GDP recovery.  4. US has among the lowest unemployment rates. * US long-term unemployment is low and falling, lowest of G7 except for Canada. * The IMF reports the US has the strongest economic outlook for 2023.  * The unemployment forecast for 2023 is lowest, except for Germany and Japan.

      Perception and reality often diverge.  It is hard to find a bigger, less justified gap than that between how people perceive Biden’s achievements for the economy (especially, legislation, like the big infrastructure bill) and what people seem to perceive, perhaps driven by the rantings of demented opponents.

       Perhaps most important —  Biden seems to have engineered a soft landing —  a reduction in inflation, without causing a recession.  Together with the Fed. 

        If people vote their pockets, perhaps this bodes well for Biden in 2024.

All You Need to Know in Life – You Learned in Kindergarten

By Shlomo Maital  

       “ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten.”   This is an old book by Robert Fulghum.  Rabbi Elisha Wolfin, rabbi of our Conservative (Masorti) congregation Ve’ahavta, referred to it in his weekly drasha (sermon).    Here is the list.

Share everything.

Play fair.

Don’t hit people.

Put things back where you found them.

Clean up your own mess.

Don’t take things that aren’t yours.

Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

Live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

Take a nap every afternoon.

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup—they all die. So do we.”

  Hey – do we really need to know more than this?   Fulghum adds:  “Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all—the whole world—had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.”

     We have four kids.  They are all grown, with their own kids.  I remember bringing them to kindergarten – and wishing, truly, that I could stay and play.  Cookies and milk at 3 pm each afternoon.  Wow…

       What could be better?

Class, Not Race, Is the Issue

By Shlomo Maital  

   Is class discrimination, rather than race, the core problem in our society?  Is there a class ceiling, not just a glass ceiling?

   Richard Kahlenberg, non-resident scholar at Georgetown University, makes the case, specifically on Megna Chakrabarti’s On Point NPR show. He was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in affirmative action cases heard before the Supreme Court  and 2023 and made the case against it, even though he is a liberal!  Why?   Because affirmative action largely led to upper-class Black students being admitted.  Feel-good policy, not effective.  

    His latest book is:  “Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See.”

      Consider this.  “Studies by the Urban Institute and the US Treasury have both found that about half of the families who start in either the top or the bottom quintile of the income distribution are still there after a decade, and that only 3 to 6% rise from bottom to top or fall from top to bottom.“

    The American dream?  Rags to riches?  Horatio Alger?    Repeat:  3-6% rise from bottom to top, or fall from top to bottom. One in 30, to one in 16.  Poor odds.  So much for class mobility.

     There is widespread racial discrimination in the US, still.  But it does not appear that affirmative action significantly improved the lot of middle- and lower-income-class Black people.  Far more effective would be a kind of affirmative action to invest proportionately more on schools in poor areas – and Kahlenburg notes, some counties do this.  And, Kahlenburg notes, what about de facto segregation, when rich areas ban multi-family dwellings and keep out lower income people.

Resilience Among Kids:

How Deaf Nicaraguan Kids Invented a New Sign Language

By Shlomo Maital

     We adults can learn a lot from children.  Especially, about resilience.  This is a story of deaf Nicaraguan kids – who came together and invented a language,  now known as Nicaraguan sign language.  It is recounted in a BBC broadcast:

    “In the 1980s deaf children in Nicaragua invented a completely new sign language of their own. This remarkable achievement allowed experts a unique insight into how human communication develops.  

    “US linguist Judy Shepard-Kegl documented the emergence of what is now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language. Teachers were brought from Europe who tried to teach Spanish using fingerspelling, which the children couldn’t grasp because they’d never learned Spanish. But they all had their own signs that they used at home. And in the classroom, the playground and the school bus, they began to share them, eventually turning impromptu communication into a common language.  

     “Until the 1970s, there were no facilities or learning programs for deaf children in Nicaragua, but with the Sandinista revolution came a new impetus to provide education for kids with special needs. Four hundred deaf children were identified in Managua, and two schools created for them. ISN is now an internationally recognised sign language.

     “Judy Kegl  established in 1986 that a structured language had emerged. ‘A language has been born before our eyes,’ Steven Pinker wrote in The Language Instinct.  The first ISN dictionary was published in 1996, helping the language to become more widespread, though there isn’t the money for every deaf child to have their own copy.  And it wasn’t until 2004 that interpreters were available, though in the last few years they’ve become more numerous and are seen on TV news channels and at official occasions, notably presidential speeches.”

    The children were given visual images, cartoons, and asked to use their sign language to recount what was happening in them.  Linguists like Kegl puzzled out the grammar – which turned out to be rich and complex.  Deaf kids at home during the brutal Somosa dictatorship used gestures, and their parents understood.

       But when they came together in large groups, the language emerged, because both the need and the value of communicating were born.  And the resilient kids responded.