Regruntled.com

The big tubs of Country Crock are now three ounces lighter. Raise the price 6%, people notice. Shrink the product 6%, maybe they don’t.

Country Crock is famous for having a lie-to-word ratio of one. It’s not from the country, and it’s not a crock. Two words, two lies. Now the container itself is misleading.

I eat butter occasionally, but I’m not a fan of margarine. So I took a good look at the margarine section of the supermarket, and it was not pretty. There is something called “Real Margarine”. As opposed to what, fake margarine? Margarine is fake butter to begin with. To paraphrase Woody Allen, fake margarine is a farce of a mockery of a sham.

It turns out that there really is a difference between real margarine and fake margarine, or “spread”. Butter is an emulsion of 80% fat, 20% water. Real margarine is an emulsion of 80% vegetable oil, 20% water. Country Crock, a fake margarine, is an emulsion of 39% vegetable oil and 61% water. Half the fat and three times as much water as real margarine.

I have a flyer from the grocery store offering “Earth Day Specials” and “Earth Day Savings”. I don’t recall seeing this before. Home Depot says “Go Green Think Orange & Save”. Maybe since Easter fell in March this year, Earth Day is the only marketing gimmick left for April.

All of which got me curious about green consumerism in general. At one end of the spectrum is the view that the quality of consumption matters, and green consumption is better than non-green consumption. At the other end is the view that it is the quantity of consumption that matters, and there is no way to consume our way out of our environmental problems. There is even an intermediate view that green consumption is a sort of “gateway drug” on the way to less consumption.

See:

• Greed in the Name of Green
• The Lazy Environmentalist

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them… And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The first problem with this sound bite is that Obama is psychologizing the voters in Pennsylvania. He’s saying that he understands their motivations better than they do themselves. Which may well be true, but it’s a hell of a thing to say out loud.

But let’s look deeper. What does the sound bite say about Obama? It says that Obama thinks that providing jobs is a legitimate function of government. Not so surprising, coming from a liberal Democrat. Obama thinks that cultural or religious or values issues are somehow less authentic, that they are secondary or substitute issues that people wouldn’t even bother with if they weren’t so bitter about the government not giving them jobs.

I don’t know about this. I suspect that there are a lot of people in Middle America with secure jobs that get just as worked up about values issues as unemployed people do. In any event, the voters decide which issues are important, not the candidates. The voters will decide whether arrogant psychologizing is worse than telling tall tales about dodging sniper fire.

It’s been interesting to watch the fuss over Rev. Jeremiah Wright after reading Shelby Steele’s book about Obama. On the one hand, we have the Obama who transcends race, (the “bargainer” in Steele’s terminology), a narrative pushed by the Obama campaign. On the other hand, we have Obama the black politician (Steele’s “challenger”), a narrative pushed by his opponents and supported by his own history.

I think the real Obama is a chameleon, who, as an ambitious young man, reinvented himself as a black politician in Chicago, and then, when he realized that he could step onto the national stage, reinvented himself again as the race-transcending Pope of Hope. The two narratives are mutually incompatible. If he repudiates the earlier narrative, he is an opportunist, a flip-flopper, just another politician. If his opponents can make the earlier narrative stick, he loses the white vote. If both narratives co-exist, the cognitive dissonance leads people to wonder whether there is any “there” there.

Dick Morris says:

Why did he stay in the church? Because he’s a black Chicago politician who comes from a mixed marriage and went to Columbia and Harvard. Suspected of not being black enough or sufficiently tied to the minority community, he needed the networking opportunities Wright afforded him in his church to get elected. If he had not risen to the top of Chicago black politics, we would never have heard of him.

Shelby Steele says:

The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to “be black” despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity.

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

By the way, I use “chameleon” as a term of admiration. Dubya, Hillary, Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain… weasels, all of them. And then there’s Barack Obama… he doesn’t even belong in the same category. He stands out like a normal person in the Special Olympics.

Tony Blankly says:

Make no mistake, this guy isn’t only good with inspirational rhetoric; when it comes to policy slipperiness, he makes Bill Clinton look slow-witted and honest.

It seems to me that Obama’s message is a peculiar combination of dissatisfaction, hope and helplessness. The dissatisfaction is no surprise; advertising runs on dissatisfaction, and politics is advertising for votes. If there is no dissatisfaction, there is no need for change. There is plenty to be dissatisfied about, but the Obamas point out dissatisfactions that people didn’t know they had. John Edwards talked about the “two Americas” and I always felt like he was talking about someone else. Michelle Obama talked about “raising the bar” and I felt like she was talking about me.

Let’s suppose that Obama is not just another weaselly politician… it will be almost a year before he is inaugurated. If he gets past Hillary. If he gets past McCain. If he gets his programs through Congress. Obama has to simultaneously convince people that their situation is urgent enough for them to vote in the primaries right now, or click the PayPal button right now, but not so urgent that it can’t wait a year or so for Obama to do something about it.

Helplessness is the flip side of hope. If “yes we can”, and if “we are the people we’ve been waiting for”, then why wait? Why not do something right now? The flip side of the message is “no we can’t”, not without Obama’s help a year from now.

Suppose an Amish farmer’s barn burns down. (I like to use the Amish as examples, because they embody, today, some of the values and technology of our ancestors 150 years ago.) Do the Amish talk about “change” and “the audacity of hope”? Do they gather before a charismatic leader and chant “yes we can”? Do they send him to Washington to create a Department of Barn Reconstruction in a year or so? No, they build a new barn. They don’t need change because they’re not dissatisfied, and they don’t need hope because they’re not helpless.

People driving trucks through mud puddles, literally destroying the landscape… and this is a hobby, a sport, a fun thing to on a Sunday afternoon. What is wrong with us? When are we going to stop destroying the Earth with gas-guzzling monster trucks, and start destroying it with biodiesel-guzzling monster trucks?

A new study shows that people spend more when they’re sad.

In the experiment, participants viewed either a sad video clip or one devoid of human emotion. Afterward, participants could purchase an ordinary commodity, such as a water bottle, at various prices. Participants randomly assigned to the sad condition offered almost 300% more money to buy the product than “neutral” participants. Notably, participants in the sadness condition typically insist, incorrectly, that the emotional content of the film clip did not carry over to affect their spending.

This is not too surprising, given that the basic message of advertising is that there is something wrong with us, something that can be fixed by buying a product. The question is, does advertising work because people spend more when they’re sad, or do people spend more when they’re sad because they’ve been bombarded with advertising all their lives?

This could be tested by repeating the experiment with subjects who have deliberately isolated themselves from modern consumerism. The Amish, for example.

11-month-old Kyson Stowell was found alive after being carried 100 meters by the tornado that killed his mother. Kyson’s grandfather gave the credit for Kyson’s survival to God:

“It’s a miracle they ain’t both gone. We’ve had some divine intervention.”

There’s no mention of the divine indifference while Kyson’s mother died.

The miracle story is so common that it must be taught in journalism schools. I look for a miracle story after every natural disaster. The pattern is the same: nature strikes at random, resulting in a lot of deaths and a few near misses. God gets all the credit for the survivors and none of the blame for the dead.

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” - Epicurus

Barack Obama is very, very good. So is Michelle. Their message of hope and possibility has inspired a lot of people. When I hear the crowds chanting “Yes we can!”, I want to drink the Kool-Aid too. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my congenital cynicism breaks the spell. The Obamas have no power over me.

But, seriously, what are the possible endings to a story that repeats “Yes we can!” over and over again? I see two possible endings:

1. “Yes we could!” Obama wins the Presidency.
2. “No we couldn’t!” Obama loses out to Hillary or McCain.

Intrade gives a 29% chance of “Yes we could!” and a 71% chance of “No we couldn’t!”. Is it irresponsible to set up a crowd for a 71% chance of disappointment? Or is there some magical thinking going on here? Does pumping up the crowds with “Yes we can” affect the odds? Well, if Obama replaces the chant with “Maybe we can!”, his odds of winning the Presidency go down. On the other hand, the odds of the chant being true go from 29% to 100%.

And of course anyone who wants to monetize his hope and magical thinking has an opportunity for a 150% return over the next 7 months.

In an earlier post, I cited a study of the complexity of political speeches that suggested that politicians simplify their messages when campaigning. If we look at campaigning as a form of advertising, psychology provides an explanation of how simple messages affect the subconscious mind.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging provides another way of looking at this. By measuring blood flow in the brain, fMRI tells us which parts of the brain are active. A 2004 study at Emory University examined confirmation bias:

The Emory staff subjected a group of opinionated men, half Republican and half Democrat, to fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, to see what was going on in their brains while conflicting evidence was presented about presidential candidates. The men emerged with their opinions confirmed.

The study indicates that when exposed to new information, we filter it through our emotional brain systems, ending in our pleasure center. The area of our brain responsible for reasoning is virtually dormant. In other words, we tend to filter out new information that doesn’t fit our opinions and perceptions. We believe anything that confirms our preconceptions because it literally feels good.

The quote is from an article that concludes that people go to church because if feels good to have their beliefs reinforced. An article in Scientific American looks more at the political implications.

I personally think simplicity is generally a good thing. Of all the Presidential candidates, I like Ron Paul the best. He has a simple message, and it confirms my libertarian beliefs. Speaking of which, libertarians like to think of themselves as rational egoists (a complicated message), but in psychoanalytic terms, libertarianism is also a rejection of the superego and an appeal to the unbridled id (a simple message). Which suggests an experiment: wire up a libertarian to an fMRI machine, and play both a Ron Paul campaign video and a reading of John Galt’s speech from Atlas Shrugged. See which part of the brain, the rational part, or the pleasure center, lights up for which stimulus.