2017
October
09
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

October 09, 2017
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

Observing Columbus Day? That’s not a given.

Amid all of the high-stakes political infighting and renewed battles around such issues as reproductive rights, the skirmish over an 80-year-old US federal holiday – which began to heat up in the early ’90s and is at fever pitch now – arguably pales.

Yet here it is, the second Monday in October (it was fixed there, rather than on Oct. 12, in a 1970 adjustment). A few states don’t recognize the day as a holiday. For plenty of people in places that do, it’s just another long weekend.

But some see it as a legitimate cultural marker, a celebration of heritage – a bulwark against “political correctness.” And for others it’s an extremely off-key hat-tip toward a colonial flag-planting marked by notorious brutality  – one that needs at least symbolic redressing, if not the removal of Columbus statues.

Many in that second crowd favor calling it Indigenous Peoples Day.  

Last week, Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors passed a motion to make that name switch, as several other cities have done. Notably, it also designated Oct. 12 as Italian-American Heritage Day (Columbus was Italian, obviously, though he sailed at the behest of a Spanish king).

In Massachusetts, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe – which greeted the Pilgrims in 1620 – just altered its official calendar similarly. Said the tribal council’s chairman: “There’s enough social space in this country to recognize the proud heritage of our Italian American brothers and sisters, while never forgetting America's First People.”

Can that kind of accommodation begin to shift thought? 

Now to our five stories for your Monday, highlighting reconciliation, adaptability, and self-determination at work.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

In an era of a slim Republican majority, there’s real power in the party’s middle, where pragmatism and compromise live. What happens when the middle gets squeezed out?

Thierry Gouegnon/Reuters
Supporters of Alexander Cummings, candidate of the Alternative National Congress (ANC), packed a presidential campaign rally at the Antoinette Tubman Stadium in Monrovia, Liberia, Oct. 7. The race includes some 20 candidates.

The West African country has held two peaceful elections (same victor) since the end of its civil wars a decade ago. It now appears set to deliver a third, this time with a transfer of power. Why? Liberians are demanding stability.

The economy, the nature of work, and expectations of what a “work life” should be all are changing fast – and all at once. That’s testing adaptability in what has become a stutter-step dance. 

Prime Minister Office/AP
Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, right, shakes hands with Hamas security officers in Gaza City Oct. 5, the last day of his visit to Gaza before leaving for the West Bank. The Hamas movement and President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction are holding reconciliation talks this week in Cairo.

The innermost ring of reconciliation – between Hamas and Fatah – will ripple out to Israel, Egypt, and the United States. And all five players have their own motivations for a deal to succeed or fail.

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor
Josselyn Silva (l.) and instructor Terese Bravo go over the credits Ms. Silva needs to complete her high school certification. They’re aboard a bus-turned-classroom, the latest project to be launched by Five Keys Charter School, a nationally recognized nonprofit in San Francisco. The mobile school, called the Self-Determination Bus Project, is meant to cater to students who – because of gang violence or disability – can't make it to stationary Five Keys sites across the city.

Fear of harm was keeping adults in a divided San Francisco neighborhood from earning their high school diplomas. A mobile school brought them self-determination. 


The Monitor's View

AP Photo
University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler talks with the media after winning the Nobel economics prize Oct. 9.

For more than two centuries, many people have tried to shake that peculiar branch of the tree of knowledge called economics. Perhaps no one has done it better recently than Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago professor who has challenged the traditional idea that free markets reflect the self-interests of rational individuals.

On Oct. 9 he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for recognizing, as the Nobel committee put it, that “human behavior is very complex.” Economic models cannot be easily simplified and must be “more human” by admitting that theories based on self-interest are not always correct.

Indeed, the field of economics has long been overdue for a humility check. Mr. Thaler showed his own lack of hubris in his response to the question of how he would spend the $1.1 million that comes with the Nobel Prize: “I will try to spend it as irrationally as possible.”

In other fields of knowledge, the fact that people do not always act in their own self-interest is pretty obvious. Yet most economists still rely on Adam Smith’s 18th-century notion of markets being guided by “the invisible hand” of forces driven by people seeking their own well-being. What is often overlooked is that Smith himself was more complex. He also took a noble view of human behavior. In 1759 he wrote: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Thaler’s work largely focuses on why humans often do things contrary to their own good, such as not saving money for retirement. His theories have created a whole new field called behavioral economics, which looks for ways that either governments or companies can, by using suggestions and positive reinforcement, “nudge” people to take action in their long-term interests. One popular result of “nudge economics”: Many companies enroll new employees in a 401(k) plan without asking, giving them only the choice to opt out.

Even this new field is subject to a similar critique. Can bureaucrats and corporate officials operate any more rationally in trying to “nudge” people whom they deem too irrational? Perhaps behavioral economics is still too young to answer that question. 

In a paper from the Brookings Institution in Washington, scholars Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias argue that trying to influence people’s actions is the wrong approach. They suggest that society and its economy are best developed through “self-efficacious” attributes of character, not paternalistic nudges to change behavior. A humane society, they write, “is one in which men and women possess the discipline, self-command and personal autonomy needed to live with a sense of purpose and direction.”

Other scholars even question the whole concept of modeling. “The very ways that economic models represent the world, the ways that they relate one individual to another, and the resulting changes in human nature that ensue are such that humans are depersonalized; transformed into individuals who are turned inward toward themselves and thus unable to grow into the image of God,” writes D. Glenn Butner Jr. of Sterling University in the Journal of Markets & Morality.

Unlike other Nobel Prizes, the one for economics has been given only since 1969. The field remains fluid in its theories. Perhaps a future prize can go to an economist who can take Thaler’s ideas even further and show how prosperity relies on traits of character in a society. Models of economics are best built on models of thought.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Overheated! That seems to describe the temperature of today’s mental climate. The political atmosphere worldwide fairly sizzles with inflaming rhetoric, accusations, and polarized stands. But we are all capable of feeling and expressing calm rather than agitation. Mary Baker Eddy writes, “Meekness and temperance are jewels of Love, set in wisdom” (“Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 79). Temperance, or a mental calmness, is inherent in us because we are the creation of God, divine Love. As we acknowledge this, we are able to more consistently experience and express the peace that is innately ours.


A message of love

Robert Pratta/Reuters
French farmers walk in Lyon Oct. 9 with hundreds of sheep as part of a protest against the French government's 'Plan loup' (wolf project), which protects wolves in an effort to promote biodiversity. As in other places in which wolves have been given protected status or been reintroduced, the farmers are concerned about livestock deaths and financial losses.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us today. We'll be following the Catalonian independence bid in the coming days. Tomorrow, watch for a story from deep in the Puerto Rican countryside for a look at rebuilding efforts there. 

Also, here’s a timely supplemental read: The widespread fires in California’s Napa Valley and also near Los Angeles make Jess Mendoza’s recent piece on cooperative efforts to fight wildfires in the US West worth revisiting.

More issues

2017
October
09
Monday
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