Introspection and Contemplation

Life carries on in pandemic isolation. Last weekend I spontaneously decided to borrow a pair of hair clippers and give myself a buzz. It's now probably the shortest it's ever been (the only doubt being one time in high school when I joined the football team in getting flat tops). Since I figured they couldn't really do any harm, I let my kids do the initial work and only cleaned it up at the end myself. My hair wasn't really all the long, but I was ready for a trim. There's something a bit freeing about the circumstances. One of my sons let me return the favor (his hair pictured above) and my wife gave herself a cut (with scissors) at the same time.

For work, I grabbed a couple of books from my tall to-read pile and spun them into a booklist for patrons.

Deep Thoughts for Staying at Home

Intriguing ideas and distracting rabbit holes related in various ways to the pause from life as normal during stay at home and shelter in place orders for the Covid-19 pandemic. Intentionally eclectic. All are available remotely as eBooks or downloadable audiobooks.

The three titles that inspired the list follow.

Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
by Maryanne Wolf
5 (of 5) stars

Socrates famously worried that the development of writing would atrophy the ability to store and remember information, that dependence on external memory would negatively change the brain. And he was right, reading and writing have changed the way human brains work--though whether for better or worse is still up for debate. Similarly, Nicholas G. Carr famously asked Is Google Making Us Stupid? in an article in The Atlantic a dozen years ago. He examined how the act of reading is changing in a digital age and worried it is negatively impacting the way our brains process information. Wolf takes up similar thoughts in this book.

She offers a wonderful examination of both how reading works in the brain and how it shapes the brain, along with our thought processes and interactions with others, and what might be gained and lost in the development of a contrasting digital literacy. Like Carr, her starting point is alarmist, but she opens herself widely to the possibilities of beneficial alternatives to traditional literacies. What she finds most important to preserve, regardless of medium, is the ability of people to think deeply--one of contemplative reading's core benefits that appears most at risk in our current transition to a largely digital world. She offers no definitive conclusions, as the transition is still underway and not fully understood, but a worthy, deep exploration of the myriad impacts of reading on who we are as humans.

Wolf is able make this exploration equally dense and accessible, packed with thoughtful information--and knowledge and wisdom--and eloquent writing without ever being difficult to engage or understand. There is such a depth and breadth of ideas on display, though, that it is hard to fully digest in a single reading (even with the copious notes I've taken below). It is a treasure trove, worth visiting multiple times to enhance the experience and takeaways. I recommend it to everyone interested in reading and hope to revisit it myself soon.

Will the increasing reliance of our youth on the servers of knowledge prove the greatest threat to the young brain's building of its own foundation of knowledge, as well as to a child's desire to think and imagine for him- or herself? Or will these new technologies provide the best, most complete bridge yet to ever more sophisticated forms of cognition and imagination that will enable our children to leap into new worlds of knowledge that we can't even conceive of in this moment of time? Will they develop a range of very different brain circuits? If so, what will be the implications of those different circuits for our society? Will the very diversity of such circuits benefit everyone? Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?

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You won't agree with me all the time, and that is as it should be. Like St. Thomas Aquinas, I look at disagreement as the place where "iron sharpens iron." That is my first goal for these letters: that they become a place where my best thoughts and yours will meet, sometimes clash, and in the process sharpen each other. My second goal is for you to have the evidence and information necessary to understand the choices you possess in building a future for your progeny. My third goal is simply what Proust hoped for each of his readers:

"It seemed to me that they would not be 'my readers' but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass. . . . I would further them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves."

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It is easy to be confused by our reading habits over the last years of transition from a literacy-based to a more digitally influenced culture. Whether based on the reports by the NEA or more recently updated ones, the reality at this point is that we have become so inundated with information that the average person in the United States now reads daily the same number of words as is found in many a novel. Unfortunately, this form of reading is rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated; rather, the average 34 gigabytes consumed by most of us represent one spasmodic burst of activity after another. Little wonder that American novelists such as Jane Smiley worry that the novel, which requires and rewards a special form of sustained reading, will be "sidelined" by the ever-increasing barrage of words we feel compelled to consume daily. Writing in the 1930s, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin summarized the more universal dimension within this preoccupation with new information in a way that is equally, in not more, true today. We doggedly "pursue a present," he wrote, that consists of "information that does not survive the moment in which it is new."

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When you speak to your children, you expose them to words that are all around them. A wonderful thing. When you read to your children, you expose them to words they never hear in other places and to sentences no one around them uses. This is not simply the vocabulary of books, it is the grammar of stories and books and the rhythm and alliteration of rhymes and limericks and lyrics that are not to be found anywhere else quite so delightfully.

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Most disturbing altogether, close to half of our children who are African-American or Latino do not read in grade four at even a "basic" reading level, much less a proficient one. This means they do not decode well enough to understand what they are reading, which will impact almost everything they are supposed to learn from then on, including math and other subjects. I refer to this period as the "vanishing hole in American education" because if children do not learn to read fluently before this time is over, for all educational purposes, they disappear. Indeed, along the way many of these children become dropouts with little hope of reaching anyone's dream when they grow up.

The Bureaus of Prisons in states across America know this well; many of them project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics. As the former CEO and philanthropist Cinthia Coletti has written, the relationship between grade-four reading levels and dropping out of school is a bitter, overwhelmingly significant finding. She contends that if this many children are seriously underperforming in the schools, our country cannot maintain its leading economic position in the world. Buttressing Coletti's conclusions, the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report in which it stated with no ambiguity, "Large undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy."

Only a proficient reading level will ensure that an individual can go on to develop and apply the sophisticated reading skills that will maintain the intellectual, social, physical, and economic health of our country. Two-thirds or more of future US citizens are not even close.

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The most important contribution of the invention of written language to the species is a democratic foundation for critical, inferential reasoning and reflective capacities. This is the basis of a collective conscience. If we in the twenty-first century are to preserve a vital collective conscience, we must ensure that all members of our society are able to read and think both deeply and well. We will fail as a society if we do not educate our children and reeducate all of our citizenry to the responsibility of each citizen to process information vigilantly, critically, and wisely across media. And we will fail as a society as surely as societies of the twentieth century if we do not recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those who disagree with us.

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From the first letter to the last, these pages celebrate the human-driven achievement that is the reading brain. In between its pages, my hope was to engage in dialogue with you the reader about my concerns. First, will the very plasticity of a reading brain that reflects the characteristics of digital media precipitate the atrophy of our most essential thought processes--critical analysis, empathy, and reflection--to the detriment of our democratic society? Second, will the formation of these same processes be threatened in our young? . . .

My third concern . . . is the digital dilemma that is being acted out this moment in the cognitive, affective, and ethical processes now connected in the present reading circuitry and now threatened. . . . to pause for a moment and examine with all our intelligence who we want to be next and what will be the best combinatoria of faculties in the reading brains or our future generations.

In Praise of Wasting Time
by Alan Lightman
4 (of 5) Stars

A slim book of short meditations on slowing down and disconnecting from our wired world of billable hours and time as money packed full of thoughtful insights. Lightman is a pleasant writer whose words never feel heavy even when his ideas are. This offers a valuable perspective on mental and spiritual health (and more).

In the business world, the technology world, and the computer world, "downtime" is a dirty word. It means a period when the system is not working, when the computers have crashed, when the machines have temporarily ground to a halt. In these contexts, downtime is considered useless time, empty time. But for the lush and mysterious terrain of our minds, downtime is a chance to explore. It is a time to renew. It is also a chance to restore and maintain our equilibrium. . . .

Downtime enables not only our creativity and our need for rest. It also enables the formation and maintenance of our deep sense of being and identity. . . .

Without downtime, we might not physically die, but we will die psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. In downtime, not only are we making sense of the events of the day, we are making sense of our lives. We are combing through the thousands of hours and days of our lives to find those experiences and thoughts that have personal meaning to us, that speak to us, sometimes in that quiet, whispering voice.

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In various ways, the escape from structure and schedule, the indulgence in space without time, the development of one's inner world, and the full release of the imagination are all interconnected. . . .

In play, we live in a private world of our own creation. In play, rules are questioned, revised, or dispensed with altogether. . . . When we play, we are free. We are free of authority. We are free of the grid. We are free of time. And we are left to roam through the halls of our minds. . . .

Play, in animals as well as humans, allows individuals to focus on means rather than ends. In play, an individual can try out new things, revise, modify, explore. Pass time pleasantly and, in subtle ways, develop the inner self. . . . Researchers argue that the non-goal-oriented activities we call play have been a critical part of the development of problem-solving skills and emotional awareness in animals with more advanced cognitive abilities.

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I suggest that we should think of the time spent in creative thought, in quiet reflection and contemplation, in mental replenishment, in consolidation of our identity and values in positive terms--not as what it is not, but what it is. It is time to restore our psychological well-being. It is time to promote growth as human beings. It is time to unleash our imaginations. It is time to protect our sanity. It is time to understand who we are and who we are becoming. "Wasting time" engaged in the activities I've described is far from immoral uselessness. It may be the most important occupation of our minds.

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Somehow, we need to create a new "habit of mind," as individuals and as a society. We need a mental attitude that values and protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner life; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.

Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life
by Kathleen Norris
4 (of 5 Stars)

Though the term acedia is not a familiar one, it's experience most likely is. Acedia is the name early Christian monks gave to the deep spiritual apathy they would feel facing a life of simple, sheltered sameness. It is related to, though not quite the same as, depression. Acedia contains within itself so many concepts, Norris writes: weariness, despair, ennui, boredom, restlessness, impasse, futility. Consider this description she quotes from fourth-century monk Evagrius of a listless monk who:

when he reads . . . yawns plenty and easily falls into sleep. He rubs his eyes and stretches his arms. His eyes wander from the book. He stares at the wall and then goes back to reading for a little. He then wastes his time hanging on to the end of words, counts the pages, ascertains how the book is made, finds fault with the writing and the design. Finally he just shuts his eyes and uses it as a pillow. Then he falls into a sleep not too deep, because hunger wakes his soul up and he begins to concern himself with that.

Familiar? That is acedia at its mildest. A more powerful experience is from an eight-century monk:

Once when I was sitting silently in my cell, that accursed demon of acedia rose up against me and refused to let me celebrate the office both night and day. I lay on the ground for a week under the massive weight pressing down upon me, in such a way that the remembrance of God could no longer well up within my heart. . . . Being stuck all this time in this distressing situation, I began to despair of my life, saying to myself: "It would be better for me to leave for the world rather than to wear the monastic habit; I am doing nothing at all, save being lazy and thinking vain things."

Norris quotes from these monks because she sees herself in their descriptions. In studying acedia extensively she has found understanding for her lifelong struggle against it. In this book she ponders it at length. Its history and many complex dimensions, its repeated appearances in her life and marriage, and the forms she sees it taking in contemporary society. The book is part memoir, history, philosophy, religious meditation, and more. It is fascinating, moving, eye-opening, and provoking. And most worthy of lengthy rumination.

Some passages that grabbed me:

"Why bother [making the bed]?" I would ask my mother in a witheringly superior tone. "I'll just have to unmake it again at night." To me, the act was stupid repetition; to my mother, it was a meaningful expression of hospitality to oneself, and a humble acknowledgment of our creaturely need to make and remake our daily environments. "You will feel better," she said, "if you come home to an orderly room." She was far wiser than I, but I didn't comprehend that for many years. Neither of us could see that I was on my way to becoming a cerebral disaster zone. Reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, I identified uncomfortably with her protagonist, Esther, and cringed at her rationale for not washing her hair for three weeks: "The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes. . . . I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed so silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired to just think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it."

One of the first symptoms of both acedia and depression is the inability to address the body's basic daily needs. It is also a refusal of repetition. Showering, shampooing, brushing the teeth, taking a multi-vitamin, going for a daily walk, as unremarkable as they seem, are acts of self-respect. They enhance the ability to take pleasure in oneself, and in the world. But the notion of pleasure is alien to acedia, and one becomes weary thinking about doing anything at all. It is too much to ask, one decides, sinking back on the sofa. This indolence exacts a high price. Esther's desire to "do everything once and for all and be through with it" has all the distorted reasoning of insanity. It is a call to suicide.

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I [came] to believe, at an early age, that I could have no expectation of either marriage or childbearing. I regarded this not so much a matter of choice as a sensible accommodation to my peculiarities.

For years I saw my stance as one of precocious self-awareness. Only lately, as I have come to better comprehend acedia's grip on me, do I understand my adolescent self more truly. Beneath the facade of a free and creative spirit I was fearful. I was afraid to make my bed because it would sadden me to have to do it again tomorrow. I was afraid to risk relationships, because they might demand too much of me. And I was especially afraid to consider pregnancy and childbirth. . . . I assumed I could avoid postpartum depression by not bringing another mortal life into the world in the first place. I now know that what I had considered a realistic assessment of myself as someone who was not cut out for motherhood was, at least in part, a surrender to acedia.

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It is by means of repeating ordinary rituals and routines that we enhance the relationships that nourish and sustain us. A recent study that monitored the daily habits of couples in order to determine what produced good and stable marriages revealed that only one activity made a consistent difference, and that was the embracing of one's spouse at the beginning and end of each day. Most surprising to Paul Bosch, who wrote an article about the study, was that "it didn't seem to matter whether or not in the moment the partners were fully engaged or sincere! Just a perfunctory peck on the cheek was enough to make a difference in the quality of the relationship."

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I have found therapy to be of limited usefulness, constrained in ways that religion is not, because it consistently falls short of mystery, by which I mean a profound simplicity that allows for paradox and poetry. In therapy I am likely to be searching for explanations, causes, and definitions, information that will help me change my behavior in healthful ways. But wisdom is the goal of spiritual seeking, and it is religion's true home.

Here are the titles of the complete list:

• In Praise of Wasting Time
• Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life
• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
• Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing
• Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games
• The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living
• Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in A Digital World
• Wanderlust: A History of Walking
• The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere
• The Animals Among Us: How Pets Make Us Human
• This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music
• The Art of the Wasted Day
• Play These Games: 101 Delightful Diversions Using Everyday Items
• Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV
• The Good News About Bad Behavior: Why Kids Are Less Disciplined Than Ever--and What to Do About It
• My Dead Parents : A Memoir
• Together, Closer: The Art and Science of Intimacy in Friendship, Love, and Family
• Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in A Digital Age
• How to Catch A Frog: And Other Stories of Family, Love, Dysfunction, Survival, and DIY
• The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
• White
• Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting
• The Read-aloud Handbook
• Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
• Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude
• Highly Illogical Behavior
• When Things Fall Apart
• Books for Living
• Dying: A Memoir
• God Makes the Rivers to Flow: An Anthology of the World's Sacred Poetry and Prose
• Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation
• Less Doing, More Living: Make Everything in Life Easier
• Un-Agoraphobic: Overcome Anxiety, Panic Attacks, and Agoraphobia for Good : A Step-by-step Plan
• Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock your Most Productive and Creative Self
• The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to A Good Person
• Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-reliant, and Better Students for Life
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made
• Chasing Secrets
• Do Dice Play God?: The Mathematics of Uncertainty
• Ignore It!: How Selectively Looking the Other Way Can Decrease Behavioral Problems and Increase Parenting Satisfaction
• Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship With Cats and Dogs
• Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss
• Mindful Games: Sharing Mindfulness and Meditation With Children, Teens, and Families

I tried to think of various themes and experiences related to the topic. My choices were limited by what was available in eBook and downloadable audiobook format from my library.

And here are some other things I've read recently and found worth preserving.

What Is Good in the Position of the Other

An interview with Frances Kissling at "On Being"

And while I certainly think there is a twin absolutism between those who think there is only one value at stake, the value of women’s identity and rights, or on the opposite side of the spectrum, the value of the fetus, that for most people, including me, both of those values exist and the abortion issue is one in which one mediates those values and others. . . .

What is it about the political context that makes that — it removes the possibility of context, doesn’t it? It turns everything into a vote.

That’s right. Something that’s either legal or illegal. It’s either legal or illegal. And that’s a very difficult way of dealing with — it’s the same thing with end-of-life issues or many other issues that we deal with that are moral and ethical issues, health care issues in our society. It’s very difficult to reduce them to yes or no. In that sense, both movements, the choice movement and the life movement — and I’ll use life for the purpose of graciousness — have so focused on an absolute yes or no perspective to this that the context gets very, very, very lost. . . .

I’m not a big believer in common ground. . . .

But I do think that when people who disagree with each other come together with a goal of gaining a better understanding of why the other believes what they do, good things come of that. But the pressure of coming to agreement works against really understanding each other, and we don’t understand each other.

And the polarization that exists on the abortion issue, in which people have called each other names and demonized each other, definitely speaks against any level of trust that enables people to come to some commonality. So that you really have to start with this first idea that there are some people — not all — who see some benefit in learning why the other thinks the way that they do. And some of it’s the simplistic stuff of humanization that the person becomes a real person, not an extremist, not a lawyer, not evilly motivated — that perhaps for some people you can overcome the epithets that we have charged each other with. And that, I’m a very strong believer in.

I have learned — I have changed my views on some aspects of abortion based upon having a deeper understanding of the values and concerns of people who disagree with me. And as a result, I have an interest in trying to find a way that I can honor some of their values without giving up mine. That’s, for me, what has happened. . . .

A willingness to admit that is very, very difficult. What is it in your own position that gives you trouble? What is it in the position of the other that you are attracted to? Where do you have doubts? Because it is only, I think, if we are interested in understanding each other and if we are ultimately interested — and it’s not a question of common ground — but if we are ultimately interested in an abortion policy that reflects what is good in the concerns of those who disagree, the only way we’re going to get any sense of what that is, is if we can acknowledge what is good in the position of the other, acknowledge what troubles us about our own position. I’ve said this to somebody recently. I said, “I don’t understand how you can work on an issue for 35 years as complicated as this and never change your mind at all about anything.” . . .

I learned a great deal there about how we learn and how we communicate with each other. It was really a remarkable experience, and that, the need to approach others positively and with enthusiasm for difference is absolutely critical to any change. . . .

But that more importantly, you have got to approach differences, as I said, with this notion that there is good in the other. That’s it. And that if we can’t figure out how to do that and if there isn’t the crack in the middle, where there are some people on both sides who absolutely refuse to see the other as evil, this is going to continue.

Are We All in This Together?

The pandemic has helpfully scrambled how we value everyone’s economic and social roles.

But beyond the issue of health care, we need to think more broadly about the way we contend with inequality. We need to better reward the social and economic contributions of work done by the majority of Americans, who don’t have college degrees. And we need to reckon with the morally corrosive downsides of meritocracy. . . .

Even a perfect meritocracy, in which opportunities for advancement were truly equal, would corrode solidarity. Focusing on helping the talented clamber up the ladder of success can keep us from noticing that the rungs on the ladder are growing further and further apart.

Meritocracies also produce morally unattractive attitudes among those who make it to the top. The more we believe that our success is our own doing, the less likely we are to feel indebted to, and therefore obligated to, our fellow citizens. The relentless emphasis on rising and striving encourages the winners to inhale too deeply of their success, and to look down on those who lack meritocratic credentials.

These attitudes accompanied the market-driven globalization of the last 40 years. Those who reaped the bounty of outsourcing, free-trade agreements, new technologies and the deregulation of finance came to believe that they had done it all on their own, that their winnings were therefore their due. . . .

In recent decades, governing elites have done little to make life better for the nearly two-thirds of Americans who do not have a college degree. And they have failed to confront what should be one of the central questions of our politics: How can we ensure that Americans who do not inhabit the privileged ranks of the professional classes find dignified work that enables them to support a family, contribute to their community and win social esteem? . . .

Many who labor in the real economy, producing useful goods and services, have not only endured stagnant wages and uncertain job prospects; they have also come to feel that society accords less respect to the kind of work they do. . . .

Beyond thanking them for their service, we should reconfigure our economy and society to accord such workers the compensation and recognition that reflects the true value of their contributions — not only in an emergency but in our everyday lives. . . .

We need to ask whether reopening the economy means going back to a system that, over the past four decades, pulled us apart, or whether we can emerge from this crisis with an economy that enables us to say, and to believe, that we are all in this together.

A Gloomy Prediction on How Much Poverty Could Rise

Researchers suggest the poverty rate may reach the highest levels in half a century, hitting African-Americans and children hardest.

The pandemic crippling the American economy portends a sharp increase in poverty, to a level that could exceed that of the Great Recession and that may even reach a high for the half-century in which there is comparable data, according to researchers at Columbia University.

The coming wave of hardship is likely to widen racial disparities, with poverty projected to rise twice as much among blacks as among whites. Poverty is also likely to rise disproportionately among children, a special concern because brain science shows that early deprivation can leave lifelong scars. Children raised in poverty on average have worse adult health, lower earnings and higher incarceration rates. . . .

However imprecise, the model suggests a coming poverty epoch, rather than an episode. So far, economic forecasts have focused mostly on unemployment, which affects Americans at many income levels, rather than on poverty, a measure of acute distress.

“This exercise is useful, and the results are worrisome,” said Ron Haskins, a conservative poverty expert at the Brookings Institution who helped write the landmark 1990s law reducing access to welfare. “Even if we can’t look at the numbers precisely, they show us we’re going to have a big increase in poverty.” . . .

“It’s unlikely we’ll see poverty numbers as bad as these” in the Columbia model, said Scott Winship, who as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress works for Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican. “This a baseline for how bad things could get if policy didn’t respond. But it’s certainly the case that there will be a lot of hardship experienced — probably more, if I had to guess, than we saw in the Great Recession.” . . .

The Columbia data does underscore the extent to which the safety net reduces poverty. At the start of the pandemic, the poverty rate would have been 25 percent without programs like food stamps and tax credits. That aid lifted 41 million people from poverty and halved the rate, to 12.4 percent.

American billionaires have gotten $280 billion richer since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic

In the same month that 22 million Americans lost their jobs, the American billionaire class’s total wealth increased about 10%—or $282 billion more than it was at the beginning of March. They now have a combined net worth of $3.229 trillion. . . .

In the background is the fact that since 1980, the taxes paid by billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, dropped 79%. . . .

“Their story was, ‘Hey, the pandemic is really affecting even the billionaires; their wealth is down from last year globally and in terms of the U.S.’ What we found was, wait three weeks and they’ve now surpassed last year’s collective wealth and now they’re surging to new heights.” . . .

Another key finding of the report is that after the 2008 financial crisis, it took less than 30 months for billionaire wealth to return to its pre-meltdown levels. That wealth then quickly exceeded pre-2008 levels. But as of 2019, the middle class in America has not even yet recovered to the level of its 2007 net worth. “People went into the pandemic with the economic hangover from the Great Recession,” he says. . . .

“Philanthropy is really not a substitute for a fair tax system and an adequately funded public safety net,” he says.

Economic Recovery Will Require 'Lessening Of The Wealth Gap,' Says Hedge Fund Titan

Ray Dalio is known for making lucrative predictions. His hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, is the largest in the world. But Dalio, a billionaire himself and one of the world's most successful investors, says capitalism is broken. . . .

What do you think about a universal basic income to address some of the structural inequalities that have you so worried that capitalism is not working the way it should?
We are now in an era of universal basic income.

Oh, you mean now with the pandemic, people getting checks in the mail?
Right, and it won't be adequate. And the only question is how long that lasts.

How long should it last?

It has to last long enough so that there's subsistence. It's the quick and easy way for getting a certain amount of purchasing power in the hands of those people. And of course, it's a transfer of wealth and that should exist. And I think there's a wonderful opportunity here if we can operate well to restructure the way the system is working in a way to increase the size of the pie and divide it well.

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How dystopian narratives can incite real-world radicalism

A growing body of research shows that there is no ‘strong toggle’ in the brain between fiction and nonfiction. People often incorporate lessons from fictional stories into their beliefs, attitudes and value judgments, sometimes without even being aware that they are doing so. . . .

What we found was striking. Even though they were fictional, the dystopian narratives affected subjects in a profound way, recalibrating their moral compasses. Compared with the no-media control group, subjects exposed to the fiction were 8 percentage points more likely to say that radical acts such as violent protest and armed rebellion could be justifiable. They also agreed more readily that violence is sometimes necessary to achieve justice (a similar increase of about 8 percentage points). . . .

Violent imagery alone could not explain our findings. . . .

Despite being real, these images had little effect on subjects. Those in the third group were no more willing to justify political violence than the no-media controls. But those exposed to the Hunger Games dystopian-fiction narrative were significantly more willing to see radical and violent political acts as legitimate, compared with those exposed to the real-world news story. (The difference was about 7-8 percentage points, comparable with the two previous experiments.) Overall, then, it appears that people might be more inclined to draw ‘political life lessons’ from a narrative about an imaginary political world than from fact-based reporting about the real world.

Does this mean that dystopian fiction is a threat to democracy and political stability?