The Tangible Costs of Criminalization; A Case for Drug Policy Reform

In this paper I analyze the alarming trend of militarization and media silencing in the international drug trade and the implications of complete legalization of prolific banned substances on human lives saved and the world economy.

Background

The drug trade has always been considered a taboo issue, even in light of how pronounced it has been in the lives of Americans since the nation gained its independence. There has always been a substance in demand, whether it be tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, or any number of illicit substances in the contemporary market. Moreover, the growth of the industry for illicit substances over the last 50 years has been exponential.

As the 2005 World Drug Report elucidates, “[T]he value of the global illicit drug market for the year 2003 was estimated at $13 billion at the production level, at $94 billion at the wholesale level (taking seizures into account), and at 322 billion based on retail prices and taking seizures and other losses into account.”

When added up, the production, wholesale, and retail sale levels adjusted for losses account for $429 billion dollars or roughly 1% of the worlds $45 trillion GDP in 2005. Now in 2012, it wouldn't be surprising if the trade has grown to account for 3% or greater of world GDP.

Since the demise of the Cali and Medellin Colombian drug cartels in the early 1990s, Mexican drug cartels have stepped into the fold and monopolized the industry. It is now estimated that 90% of the drugs that enter the United States pass through Mexico. One study, noted by Global Envision, reported that “the loss of the drug business would shrink Mexico’s economy by 63 percent.” Others attribute as much as 20% of Mexico’s GDP to this industry. Mexican journalist Carlos Loret de Mola claims that cartels make three times as many profits as Mexico’s 500 largest companies combined and employ nearly 500,000 people.

In 2006 Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent 6500 troops to the state of Michoacan, in the first of several tactical military strikes against cartels. Instead of quelling the violence, this policy had an adverse effect. In order to regain control, cartels began targeting officials and civilians in broad daylight. Moreover, the military strikes fragmented cartels and lead to bloody turf wars between new entrants. It is estimated that 86,000 people have been killed from violence associated with the drug war since 2006, nearly twice the number of casualties of the Iraq War.

Why the Mexican Drug War Should Be, and Isn't Being Discussed

The externalities of the Mexican Drug War are absolutely immense. However, Americans barely know anything about the conflict. Cartels intimidate journalists, so it is nearly impossible to understand their intentions and further plans for growth.  Between 2000 and the beginning of 2012, 55 journalists have been murdered in Mexico and, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, eight journalists were killed in Mexico last year, with 10 killed in 2012. And this year more murders and threats have been reported.

As for the effects on Americans and the world at large:

 (1) Cartels are incredibly sophisticated and maintain the capacity to fundamentally alter world trade and growth. For example, the Los Zeta cartel was formed by former Mexican special forces commandos who deserted and joined the ranks of the Gulf Cartel before breaking off and becoming a separate organization. These guys are capable of gathering intel like the CIA, via wiretaps on government officials and a careful network of paid spies and lookouts. Also, they have an arsenal of weapons including tanks, armored trucks, rocket propelled grenade launchers, and special forces helicopters. Cartels like Los Zetas are so powerful that the local police and judicial system have literally no capacity to arrest or prosecute them. This allows them to infiltrate other aspects of criminal organization such as racketeering and control entire cities via fear and intimidation. Because cartels feed off poverty for membership, growing organizations can pass recruitment downstream and further interrupt the growth of Central and Latin America as well, and play a hand in weakening world markets by having a hand in all aspects of the local economy. Note the picture below to see a fraction of a cartels earnings, and why they can essentially do whatever they want via bribe.

This picture shows $22 B of cash confiscated from a Sinaloa Cartel boss' home

 
(2) The drug war has escalated war time human rights violations such as civilian murders and torture. As the cartels war with one another and the government, they have made it of utmost importance to keep people under the banner of fear. The Sinaloa Cartel infamously undertook a mass hysteria campaign by posting videos on youtube of gruesome murders of its enemies in both the criminal and public sectors such as the beheading of two informants using a chainsaw. Without intervention, these tactics are becoming more and more commonplace.

(3) Cartels are reinvesting profits from drug sales into even more messed up exploits such as human trafficking.  Conservative estimates conclude that over 100,000 women, a number predicted to increase by the end of 2010, are trafficked out of Latin America annually for the purpose of prostitution. This number is estimated to have grown by a factor of 2 or 3 by the end of this year, making human trafficking the highest growth criminal activity in the world.

(4) Cartel violence is of particular risk to Americans given its proximity. Cartels are most involved in cities that precede immigration into the US such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. These cities are among the most violent in the world, though they are only an hour from the US border (Baja, CA and El Paso, TX respectively). Additionally, as long as the cartels keep growing, the local chain of American gang affiliated sellers will grow as well. These local organizations, though not nearly as powerful as the cartels themselves, are still extremely violent and responsible for a large number of homicides yearly.

A Case For Legalization

The most interesting aspect about the cartel violence and its development is the root cause underlying the industry; American demand for drugs.  Though cartels deal in a variety of illicit substances, marijuana is by far and away the largest export encompassing nearly 50% of American demand. When politicians bring up the debate about legalization, it is largely focused on the moral issue of allowing people to consume substances which may harm them rather than the very real tangible harm that comes from the shadow industry of suppliers. The conclusion here is very clear. Full scale legalization of banned substances would have very tangible impacts, primarily it would remove the need for a shadow industry by allowing corporations to publicly and transparently distribute goods to consumers under regulation by the US government. Furthermore, the US would essentially free itself to 90% (Mexico's share) of an industry that makes up 3% of world GDP, effectively creating a large number of jobs both in the public and private sphere domestically. Though some people would choose to abuse the system, its unlikely that use of dangerous "hard" drugs would proliferate beyond current numbers.  

The only qualms I have with legalization is that destroying the drug trade would effectively displace half a million people in Mexico without taking away their arsenals or desire to cause harm, which could incense crime and violence in the short run. The best way to solve this problem in my opinion would be for Mexico to enforce anti-trust legislation to break up legal monopolies (such as TelMex) which keep overhead costs of business amongst the highest in the world. In any case, corruption and money talk and it would be unlikely that anything would change in the short run. Perhaps the US would step in and try to live up to the promises it made when it signed NAFTA and try to outsource jobs to Mexico instead of China and India. Luckily for Mexico, at least they have some shale gas.

The Paradise of the 2nd World 3rd World

The following paper discusses a commonality I have found between the two Caribbean countries I have visited in the last years (Jamaica and Dominican Republic); the idea that a state can be autonomous and self-content despite the third world living conditions of its citizens.  


How do we rank countries in terms of development?

Economists generally classify countries into pools of "worlds" based on the development of their economies, life expectancy of citizens, and educational attainment levels. A country does not necessarily have to have an extremely high standard of living in aggregate to be considered "first world". For example, the United States is most often considered the paragon of the term despite having wealth stratification comparable to many economically weaker Latin American countries. The one central characteristic of the first world that is undisputed is that the term refers to capitalist countries with highly developed economic infrastructure and access to capital markets. On the other hand, Third world countries have underdeveloped to non-existent economies and are ridden with problems such as Kleptocracy, civil war, malnutrition, and lack of medical care.

The interesting outlier to this case has historically been the Second world, which traditionally referred to Communist nations during the 1900s hey day of the Soviet bloc. Though Communist countries once sustained a middle level of human development and societal infrastructure, much of this was predicated on the exportation of various natural resources such as LNG, precious and base metals, and manufactured goods. Communist countries that lacked these resources quickly became Third world hell holes such as North Korea or the former Yugoslavia. Additionally, even Communist countries with resources had difficultly getting much value because of their preordained commitment to keeping markets closed and noncompetitive  So in turn, I think its wrong to assume that Communism alone is enough to make a nation Second world.

The New Second World

Today, I contend that the term should be used to describe nations with middle level economic growth with the highest gross national happiness (GNH) index scores. Interestingly enough, there is only a slight correlation between development and GNH index scores which seems to imply that a high GDP per capita and nominal health and education are not significant drivers of national happiness. Gallup recently conducted a poll to find the countries with the highest national happiness  According to Gallup’s findings, the happiest people in the world live in Panama and Paraguay, followed by El Salvador and Venezuela, then Trinidad and Tobago, Thailand, Guatemala, the Philippines, Ecuador and Costa Rica.

The OECD recently constructed a HPI (Happy Planet Index). Once again as you can see from the below data, there is only a spurious relationship between "well being" and "happiness".
 

Notice that footprint and well being are only slightly positively correlated and that countries such as Israel are outliers.

Notice the inverse correlation between satisfaction and HPI

Whats the Point?

In the Dominican and Jamaica I noticed I could hardly go ten minutes without having a smile on my face. Maybe it was the warm weather or the people I surrounded myself with, but I noticed this change not only with my friends but also with my family in Jamaica. Even the locals who by all accounts are Third world economically showed a profound desire to prioritize happiness over material pursuits. Now I'm sure there could be bias factoring into play here. Does the lack of a developed economy denote a lower utility weightage to material possession versus carefree living?

My initial thoughts are both yes as well as no. Its equally strange that these countries, excluding Brazil and Chile, have lower levels of satisfaction than traditional first world nations. I think this detail only suggests that wealth brings with it satisfaction though it may bring additional stress factors and unhappiness.  Out of the top 20 HPI countries, only 3 have a GDP footprint sufficient to designate as near first world. Only Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Vietnam are thoroughly Third world. The implication is that in aggregate Second World Third World isn't a warzone like Somalia or Iraq or endemically poor like Chad or Zambia. Instead most of the nations on this list are developing countries with one or more natural resources coupling with tourism as economic drivers. The only universal characteristic of all these nations is warm weather and plenty of sunlight. In the top 20 OECD countries only one (Albania) has a moderate to colder climate.

So in the end, whats the point of growth? A higher GDP has classically denoted lower wealth stratification and consequently a "better" lifestyle, yet these studies come directly at odds with classical conservative euphemism. Moreover, the OECD recently rated the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland as the highest standard of living of any country in the world. Should the United States continue to be the role model for the world when it sees an increasing wealth gap and unhappier people than Thailand?

Why Strict Separation of "Spirituality" and State May Have Caused More Harm Than We Are Willing to Believe.

Recently a terrible tragedy occurred in my hometown. As such,I will not discuss any of the specifics of the tragedy or gun laws, given the sensitive nature of the issue. Instead, this paper focuses on comments made by  former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in the aftermath.

From the Huffington Post:

“I think it’s important that we quit apologizing for having a spiritual conversation,” Huckabee continued. “Quit being ashamed that we believe in God.”

During his own Fox News program over the weekend, Huckabee also spoke about the massacre, tying the supposed removal of God from society to the increased instances of violence. "We’ve escorted [God] right out of our culture and marched him off the public square," Huckabee said, according to Inquisitr. "And then we express our surprise that a culture without him actually reflects what it has become.” 

Huckabee asked for and received an ass whooping from the liberal media primarily because he focused on the issue of God as (a) a call to bring back "God" in the Christian sense and removal of a culture of strict separation of church and state and (b) he suggested that the removal of God from schools was the fundamental cause of the tragedy. However, upon further analysis, there is a good point made here.

The issue at hand that was and is never discussed in detail is the relationship between a society structured from spiritual mores (morals drawn from the general fear of God/ understanding of its role as the hand guiding the universe) and the values carried by its own constituents. I say spiritual mores primarily because the stock response to such a claim would be that religious morality can be bad; ie strict application of Sharia law, the violence caused by the Crusades etc. Instead I will discuss these mores in terms of a general spirituality not subject to conditional responses. 

At my university I can say with utmost confidence that almost every student is borderline atheist. This does not mean that he or she does not identify with a religion culturally or even abstain from participation in religious ceremony, rather it merely suggests that he or she does not think of God and religion as a concrete rule. That is, none of my friends who are Jewish, Hindu, Christian, or Muslim could care less what the other believes; they are all in essence "spiritual" without a God. This does not apply to only the Penn population, but the vast majority of the millennial generation. I would contend there are a few specific reasons for this:

1) Since the 1980s the amount of diversity in the United States had exploded dramatically. Throughout those years the numbers of Indian and other South Asian, Oriental Asian, and Latin American and Mexican immigrants overtook previously Euro and Chinese by the numbers. Cultural acceptance tends to be a lagged process, hence the sudden rise in the number of Indian and Chinese American celebrities and demographic segments in marketing. With the rise in the number of distinct groups with different religious morals and "God[s]", it became hard to discuss God as a specific entity or moral code.

2) The rise of mass exposure technology such as the internet and further developments such as social media has allowed the primarily liberal media and sentiment to flood the airwaves. Not only are liberal ideas more exposed to the youth (people who can actually use evolving technology tools), with technology these ideas are allowed to proliferate at exponential levels. I think to believe this all you have to do is go to reddit and see the kind of threads that get the most upvotes, and question whether people were in fact that indoctrinated just a year ago. Again, religion as a concrete concept became easy to beat up. 

3) The United States has always been a country that has celebrated its freedom, but now we are reaching a new pinnacle for groups who previously lacked a voice. The recent election affirmed a couple instances of gay marriage and legal weed. Again, the strict sense of "God" is easy to argue against here because no one, including myself, believes that we should restrict rights based on spotty and unverifiable claims. 

So basically younger generations have accepted an at-best purely spiritual viewpoint of religion today. I already discussed in my previous post on social media why I think society is becoming increasingly narcissistic and motivated by a "keeping up with the Jones" kind of happiness. This makes people more susceptible to unhappiness and ultimately hurts the productivity of society. The concept of spirituality can alter this notion of social interaction.

In the past when we still believed in religion, it served as a guide for action of two fronts. It provided people with a guide by which to live their lives because by not following the guide they faced the wrath of their maker. This meant that people who didnt follow the rules went to hell and those who did went to heaven. Second, religion provided people with hope for the future by suggesting that their inherent problems were ordered rather the product of pure free will as society dictates today. For example, the Hindu concepts of karma and reincarnation would argue that a person who had done good actions to others despite unfortunate circumstances to him or herself would be reincarnated in a higher social order. This kept social order despite the broad socioeconomic disparities between castes. 

My Advocacy.

Obviously we cant teach kids the Bible in class, or the Torah, or any particular religion. What I'm suggesting is that we incorporate an idea of greater morality into society stemming from spirituality. At best this would again take the good characteristics of earlier time periods and transition those values into the context of our freer and more advanced society today. At worst, we would become exposed to an unscientific (but simultaneously unverifiable concept) of something greater than ourselves. 

The problem with this argument is obviously implementation, but I suggest the following.

1. Exposure to all major forms of religion within social studies classes at a young age, not purely as a cultural argument but also as a dialogue on different beliefs and why people hold them. This would help us maintain an accepting breed of diversity while still making arguments explaining why people believe in greater powers.

2. Discussion of evolution but consequently also the alternative/mutual concept of deism as a spark for the start of the universe. I'm not saying to argue in favor of God, but to merely explain what deism is along with the scientific and verifiable argument for evolution.

3. Families should try to instill morals from both logical and fundamental concepts of what is acceptable. I think people too often tell each other that something is either fundamentally wrong because it is wrong or only tell them that it is wrong because x -> y. Both means should be discussed.

4. We should actually teach ethics as a class in high school. What are the rational theories for ethics, religious theories so on and so forth. Simply assuming a culturally relativist viewpoint is just as bad as an indoctrinated religious viewpoint because it creates a relationship which is all other nothing. By this I mean that the culturally relativist allows anything to be justifiable based on the morals of society while the indoctrinated religious viewpoint makes anything other than the religion wrong. Instead we might as well teach ethical theories from the rationalists and intangible sides.  

In conclusion, I think we are in a strong transition stage as far as our freedoms are concerned. We have more rights than ever, but sometimes I wonder if rights at a loss of order is tradeoff that we will agree with in the long run. However, I do think that technology has the yet to be seen potential to completely render all of these arguments moot by presenting new ways to earn happiness and self satisfaction. Until that point in time, I believe we need to search beyond what we are willing to accept on face to be true in the pursuit of  real truth.

Its Time to Rethink Social Media: A Case For Reform.

I hate social media as a forum, company, and outlet.  Explained:

The Dichotomy 

Social media has completely changed the dynamics of social interaction and how people view themselves within the scope of the universe. Its common knowledge today that many parents in America (in particular) raise their children with the mentality that they are special, and by special I mean abstracted from the notion of purely being valuable and loved in and of themselves. Everyone is a winner, everyone deserves a trophy, hell in most high schools majority of students make the high honor role. Tough love is not something practiced by most families; you work as hard as you can but its fine simply because you tried your best. Some people either have it by nature of existing (many pro athletes, actors, models, scientists, etc.), or they have the talent but also put in thousands of hours to rise to where they sit today (entrepreneurs, politicians, other athletes). So clearly there is an asymmetric relationship between success and "effort". Some people simply start on a flatter curve and need a smaller marginal return in order to reach a conventional definition of success, such is life.

In the past, people didn't internalize this asymmetric relationship. Besides movements to provide fundamental rights, people were told for the most part that effort, and lots of it, could carry even the simplest of men to success. Some of those men realized they were special, others realized they weren't .. and the asymmetric relationship became an afterthought. Today people ultimately come to the same conclusion, but social media compounds the nature of human beings to feel a strong emotional connection to that desire to remain special, different. Teenage girls today have the highest reported rates of depression of any point in history. In total 20% of teenagers experience depression prior to turning 21 and only 30% of these cases are even diagnosed. (http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/04/why-are-so-many-teens-depressed/)Teenagers are mentally unstable by nature of wide oscillation in hormone output. Moreover, teenage years are plagued by a carryover of the optimism that is instilled in youth. The world is in fact your oyster and everything you ever dreamed of should be yours for the taking, and that makes failure all the more stressful. 

So where does social media fall into this equation?

(1) Social media builds off the desire of every person to be that special talent that their parents and society once told them they could be. The ego becomes the primary subject of all interaction through media.

(2) Building off (1), social media exposes people to elements of success and failure in others lives that they wouldn't have access to naturally. This comes directly at odds with the desire prefaced in (1). If so and so is doing x and is happy, why am I not doing x as well? 

(3) Because social media exists forever, (2) is continuously compounded over time. As time passes and so and so continues to love life because of x,y,z achievements, the same person who still has nothing continuously reaffirms (2) while still desiring (1). The end result is major depression. 

(4) On the inverse, the person who has achieved x,y,z either begins to think of him or herself as superior which consequently stunts normal functional relationships, and only furthers the narcissist ego trip that initially existed, or they are actually (3) as well because they compare to another person who has done x,y,z,a,b,c. 

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms play into our inherent desires to be somebody but then consequently provide us with a quantification of how much of somebody we are. You are measured by your number of friends, followers, your pictures, how many people "like" your posts etc, etc. The end result of this process is inherently self destructive, and I contend that in many cases it can lead to violence against others as well. 

The Company.

As a company social media is also extremely exploitative. 

(1) As you may recall, Facebook recently announced unilaterally that it had the right to sell knowledge of your actions to outside vendors. Instagram similarly announced that it could give two shits about your privacy and would sell and display pictures of your or your friends without their consent.

(2) After their IPO Facebook plummeted from a high of $42 to $17 by the time earnings season rolled around. While many average citizens bought into FB thinking they were supporting the company of the new generation, its founder and many other principal investors took advantage of the opportunity to cash out millions of shares totaling in billions of dollars. They then let the ship sink. Smart investors who jumped the gun were in large part unable to short FB because brokers set extremely large margins on the positions (I believe FB would have had to drop by 70% of principal to make money on a $1mm short position). 

The Future.

So what can be done about this problem? I suggest that everyone completely cut off from Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media after moving on from situations in which it aids in communication. I would argue that FB serves a purpose in college because it allows for easy communication between people who may not have each others phone numbers, and does so in a prompter fashion than email. After graduation, I plan to either completely delete my FB or cut down my friends list to the 100 or fewer people I care most about staying in touch with. 

How can social media improve as an outlet?

(1) Separate photos, status updates, and communication services. The interconnection of these services makes social media extremely intimate -- but in the undesirable sense highlighted above.

(2) Make limits on the number of characters that can be written in any given status update. Also make posts visible by group rather than by "friend" or "follower". This will make sure only certain people have access to any given information at any point in time.

The Disclaimer.

This may seem like an extremely hypocritical statement to many readers, especially when a social media mechanism (Facebook) is my primary means of sharing my writing. That being said, if more people read actual print media (books, newspapers, journals), perhaps the proliferation of blogs and other forms would be kept moot. I do think that FB could serve a great purpose to society if it wasn't (a) a corporation and (b) people approached it as a means of sharing ideas rather than sharing their lives. In such a case, people could definitely learn a lot about the world and generate valuable discourse. I mean when was the last time in history billions of people were all connected so closely despite geographic and socioeconomic disparity. 

"With great power comes great responsibility"  -- Spider Man's uncle referring to Mark Zuckerberg 

Lebron James Should Be Your Role Model Too

If you know me at all, you know that my favorite athlete hands down is Lebron James. Before I get into a diatribe about why he should be in your favorites too, let me explain some general aspects underlying his very  human struggle (something everyone reading should empathize with).

Happiness as a theory, to me, is predicated upon finding the reasonable ground between expectations and actuality. People who generally find actuality better than expectations are very happy (they are the minority). People who find expectations better than actuality are generally rather sad (again a minority). Most people find themselves in the middle, they generally live life to their expectations save for a few circumstances where they over or under perform. Moreover, society ascribes expectations to people based on its view of actuality. E.g. I would expect a Wharton student with a 4.0 GPA to work at a +$100,000 job merely because he ranked at the top of the class. Expectations would have to be modified to fit reality.

The rarest scenario that can be imagined is twofold; a individual who's actuality is so high or low that expectations set by himself and society prevent him from achieving happiness because they either suggest that he would merely be average (at which pt he would only be like everyone else) or godlike (achieving standards that are beyond human comprehension) in order to meet them. This is the story of Lebron James, an athlete of such incredible physical tools that nothing less than 7 championships would satisfy the moniker of "King James" I know a lot of people who use Lebron's talent against him. "Fuck that guy he is arrogant and didnt earn his skills", "he lacks the clutch gene", "he had to join with two superstars to win a ring", "he is robin to wade's batman". The problem with these statements is that they all rely on expectations which have been misapplied over time. Let me counter with the human perspective:

Lebron was built up by the same people who took him down when it was convenient. They labeled him the next big thing starting at age 14 and placed him on the cover of SI with the title "Chosen One". They gave him marketing deals and made him all the craze on 24 hour pointless sports radio/television. When he failed they talked about his failures to generate viewership. When he failed in 2011, they decided to spend an entire summer laughing at him and questioning if he ever deserved any of there original praise to begin with.

This isn't too different from humanity in general, and we each see it in our day to day lives. People are inherently self-interested and will do what it takes to satisfy themselves prior to ever helping another. The sports media rode his bandwagon when it would make them cool, and jumped off as soon as he fell off. What separates Lebron from the rest of the superstar athlete community is that he asks to be called out and berated by society because he genuinely cares about the expectations laid out for him. Unlike Kobe or MJ, Lebron will never blame a teammate for costing his team a win, he will instead put the burden on himself to make the team that much better and put the teammate in a position to win. Lebron will never take a last minute shot if he see that a proven shooter is left open on the floor. And no matter the circumstances, Lebron will always back his coaches decisions without trade drama etc. It took years of disrespect from the organization and coaches to get Lebron to leave the sports city he built to go to Miami. Even after arriving in Miami, Lebron refused to be labeled as a player of higher importance than his good friend Dwyane Wade despite the obvious spread in ability.

Lebron is the nice guy of the sports world; he makes himself a "doormat" because he cares about his fans, his family, and his reputation. Actions speak louder than words. After inking his first Nike deal, Lebron chose to hire his former high school basketball friends to act as his management team (remember the commercial... "should I stop listening to my friends, but they're my friends"). Despite the accusations laid out against his mom of an affair with a teammate on the Cavaliers, Lebron only blamed himself for the 08 playoff defeat and never pushed his mom out of his life. Lastly, Lebron married his high school sweetheart and decided to stay active in his children's lives, something his own father never did.

We tend to admire superstar athletes who are in actuality assholes because they don't give a shit. Guys like Kobe Bryant,Tom Brady, and Michael Jordan don't care about the people in their lives, or what anyone thinks of them. These guys have never faced failure even when they should have (recall Kobe's putrid 4-24 shooting in game 7 of the '09 final, which was saved by Pau Gasol and Ron Artest). In Jordan's case he was a gambling addict who many people who knew him said was heavily into alcohol and drugs and constantly having extra-marital affairs. Many people have noted that the only thing that drove Michael was the will to be better than everyone else on an intrinsic level, not to live up to any extant standard. But at the end of the day, people like winners, and these aspects are largely forgotten.

Now Lebron is a winner. Its refreshing to see an athlete of high character as well as talent claim what he has worked hard for his entire life. The difference here is that because Lebron cares and set up exaggerated standards for himself, we cant even use his talent as an excuse to say that he lacks work ethic. Actuality finally matches expectations(as unrealistic as they seem), and its nice to know that a person can place pressure on himself and rise from the darkest of places to win back the throne. As a fan, rest assured there is no other player in sports today who cares as much about the expectations laid out for him. Everyone has faced a similar fire whether you believe it or not. Now we can all standby and see if he can conquer MJ's shadow in a similar light.

Different Values Lead to Different Truths; An Election Commentary

So its been a couple of day's since the Presidential/Senate/Congressional election and both sides seem to be in an uproar. The left (AKA at least 60% of my classmates) are enthusiastic and grateful that the nation cares to embrace an evolving notion of rights; be it for women, gays, or even the casual weed smoker. The right, has for the most part accepted defeat graciously, I say "most part" because even Fox News couldn't stop Karl Rove from questioning the actual tally on air. Both sides have plenty to say about their peers, be it that the right is racist and challenges the fundamental rights of people based on a pro-corporate tier one bias or that the left is composed of foolish simpletons who like rights and getting handouts at the expense of those who actually work. Now both arguments are predicated upon vast over generalizations of very complex institutional arguments, despite what either group may retort. I think that at heart most people know this to be true i.e. social institutions and long standing debates regarding policy have led to a chicken and egg sort of chase to find truth.

That being said, my problem with this election was that it conclusively proved to me, as an American, that Americans in vast majority view politics as a clash of values rather than as a clash of ideas. The concept of objectively seeking meaning has been lost in a frenzy of facebook posts, tweets, and TV shows. Objectively seeking meaning is not easy. You do not simply wake up one day and decide that welfare is bad because it discourages work, or that Roe vs. Wade was an incorrect decision because a fetus is equivalent of a child. Rather, meaning requires a careful analysis of the facts, of the related externalities, and consequently the impact of actually holding the belief on society. Majority of people understand the first two, but the third condition serves as the litmus test for meaning. We can consider on the basis of a few questions:

1. What do you believe and are you comfortable holding those beliefs when surrounded by the opposition (e.g. would you hold the same beliefs if you were richer, or poorer, or the other sex etc.?)
2. If put under pressure, would you still hold the same beliefs (e.g. killing one innocent person to save the lives of many innocent people, or evaluating each person as inherently valuable).
3. How did you come up with your belief (who and what influenced you)?

Now, this is where truth is squandered. People tend to conflate what they believe to be true with what is actually true. I'm not going to go through the minutia, but there exist a variety of statistically significant biases pertaining to how people attribute their beliefs. These biases range widely, but I think the two most appropriate election related biases are:

1. The halo bias - physical appearance denotes positive or negative attributes. E.g. this pretty girl is so sweet.
2. fundamental attribution error - overvaluing dispositional qualities as explanations for behavior in others while taking a situational approach with yourself. E.g. Sally fell over a rock and is she is clumsy. I fell on the same rock and it only happened because of the rock.

So what we have left over is a variety of  extremely socially influenced and contextual beliefs (values) mixed with inherent flaws in human nature (I'll call this the jumble). The end result is an election that does not appeal to truth seeking, but rather tries to empathize with values as closely as possible with as many people as possible. So now we have two caricatures that have built up a reputation and story to appeal to people despite what their policies would actually mean for the electorate.

Barack Obama: a sincere and charismatic leader from humble origins who champions the rights of the underprivileged in a hope to move America forward. He is a community organizer at heart who empathizes with the people and makes it his personal objective to better this country.

Mitt Romney: a self-made business man from your stereotypical American family. Has the CEO look and plans to manage the country as he would a PE portfolio; via cuts on spending and taxes for the upper class who are the backbone of the economy. Believes most importantly in the ideal of freedom and as such has plans to expand the military budget.

Both of these individuals appeal to different people with different jumbles. However, it is worth noting that nothing about either description elucidates an outcome of any variety, nor does it gauge intent. What the hell does being sincere have to do with policy making? Why should America be run like a corporation? And lastly are these guys really what we think they are?

An election based on ideas would force candidates to answer such questions -- and to some extent I do think that this election was an improvement. Yet, the disagreement I see between my peers, the left and the right, is not based on the same questions. Party alignment, wealth alignment, alignment with one or two personal issues (at exclusion of the general electorate) etc. is a recipe for a continuation of lost discourse and political failures. Though pure separation is all but impossible, it is important we consider these factors before stepping into the booth and pressing buttons which impact the future of the world. Truth testing seems to be an art lost in the ruse of "values".