The Knee Jerks

knee jerk: n. striking the patellar tendon with a hammer just below the patella stretches the quadriceps muscles in the thigh, stimulating muscle spindles that trigger an impulse in a sensory fiber of the femoral nerve leading to the L4 lumbar region of the spinal cord. There, the sensory neurons trigger contraction. This contraction, coordinated with the relaxation of the hamstring muscle, causes the leg to kick. -- Grey’s Anatomy

When I look around and listen these days, I can’t get past the feeling that something’s very different. That something is the growing number of knee jerks amongst us.

The knee jerk shouldn’t be confused with his first cousin, the know-it-all. The know-it-all recognizes that he’s forced to have some facts at his disposal to support the charade. The knee jerk hasn’t gotten that far. Rather, he depends on instinct.

A knee jerk cherry picks his facts loosely, shall we say. A knee jerk just assumes he already knows. A knee jerk has miraculously figured things out that the president, academia and the experts whose lives are devoted to the topic amazingly have not yet thought of. Because they aren’t as smart, seasoned or as perceptive as he. But the knee jerk has no idea that’s implicit in his argument. A knee jerk seems to have the same color to every one of his opinions, yet not out of any deep conviction or underlying philosophy, but because he does or doesn’t like somebody or something. A knee jerk’s reaction can be accurately anticipated 9 out of 10 times because you’ve already read it in his newspaper, or heard it on his favorite TV station. You suspect that if you pull on a loose thread of a knee jerk’s argument, the whole thing will fall apart. A knee jerk has no clue what the other side of the argument is, and he really doesn’t care. A knee jerk thinks about his comment while you’re finishing your thought. A knee jerk can be from any party, gender or persuasion, but there’s an unwavering certainty: he’s about as shallow as an above ground pool -- just deep enough to dive in, but nobody really wants to.

The exchange of opinions has always served as the well-oiled machinery that is our marketplace of ideas, and hence, our highly-functioning democracy. We’re free to express ourselves as we please and encouraged from childhood to speak our minds, challenge authority and assemble peaceably. These are the conversations over dinner parties, at coffee shops and gas stations across the nation, times a million daily, whereby we share our thoughts, debate and argue, and use those exchanges as the guide to our beliefs and ultimately our votes. This is the way the founders intended and it’s worked very nicely.

What’s going on today increasingly doesn’t quite rise to the standard. Instead, the knee jerks are surrounding us and growing in number, making their arguments based on hot/cold reactions, black/white interpretations, tidbits of juicy information, website headlines, Facebook feeds and TV crawls. It’s a soundbite culture, and we’re becoming more okay with someone making an argument with snippets as their core, yet no real basis, and worse, no ability to back it up. We let ‘em slide cause why pick the fight? Democrats have ruined the economy….okay, pal. Obama is a socialist….whatever you say. We need lower taxes and less regulation….sure we do. It’s easier to smile and nod, or give a half-hearted rebuttal and get out of there.

Obviously this notion isn’t entirely new, that people are running around giving their opinions based loosely in fact. But how do we begin to prove it? And if it is indeed happening, what is the implication of it? And most importantly, what is driving this cultural shift?

Knee jerks and polls: Kismet

As it so happens, knee jerks rear their ugly heads most obviously in my neck of the woods—polling. Most survey responses are knee jerk reactions. How do you feel about this on a 1-10 scale? 5. Which one of these do you like the most? The blue one. Is it true or false that this has happened? True.

One thing we have to step back and accept is that not every question has a right and wrong answer. Is Obama doing a good job? Depends on what you mean by good. Does the healthcare legislation promote death panels? Define death panel.

Yet, for the purposes of this discussion, we have to accept that there are some “right” answers to some questions, even complicated ones. We must have a set of common facts that we can share and base discussion upon. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Every man is entitled to his own opinion. But not his own facts.”

Assuming we’re asking a factual question with a correct response, when we poll, there are three general outcomes we typically see: 1) the respondent doesn’t know the answer and says “I don’t know” 2) the respondent thinks he or she knows the answer and immediately gives a response 3) the respondent isn’t sure, pauses to think, and then responds when he or she is sure, or as sure as they’re going to get.

We know from thousands of surveys that people rarely say “don’t know” because they want to give their opinion and figure, after all, it is an opinion survey. Depending on the survey, a general knowledge question will usually get around 5% don’t know responses. On the other hand, a thoughtful pause anywhere beyond about two seconds gets incredibly awkward for both the respondent and the interviewer—neither one of them can take it, somebody cracks. After it happens once or twice the respondent gives up and gives immediate responses from there on out, regardless of the complexity of the questions. All of which leaves us with immediate responses as the overwhelming proportion of survey data. Which is important, because we have to remember that we’re getting judgments on complicated subjects rendered in a split second. Here’s an example:

It’s the job of the Congressional Budget Office to independently assess government’s performance on a variety of metrics. Following the American Reinvestment & Recovery Act, also known as the stimulus, CBO has done several analyses to determine whether it did in fact do any good for the economy. Their conclusion has consistently been that it created between 2 to 4 million jobs, kept the unemployment rate from rising to 12%, and boosted GDP by 1-2% per quarter. Mark Zandi, the chief Economist at Moody’s and one of John McCain’s ’08 economics advisors estimates 2-3 million jobs. The administration estimates 3.5 million. Everyone from The Economist, to Brookings, to Heritage, to the Council on Foreign Relations estimates between 1-4 million jobs. When we consider that we lost 8 million jobs in the recession, if we take the low estimate of jobs saved or created, call it 2 million, we can say in a ballpark fashion that the stimulus added 25% to the total jobs figure that would not have been there otherwise.

But when CBS News and The New York Times polled Americans to see what they thought about the stimulus, only 6% said they think it created jobs, a stunningly low figure.

Why is that? Some in the media say it is because of the number of people who are out of work, or who are immediately touched by someone out of work. Yet, if we break down the numbers, only 1 in 10 Americans are out of work with the unemployment rate at 9.5%. And since only half of American adults work, the real number is only 1 in 20. So it’s not that the vast majority themselves are living it, it’s what they believe.

The point is simply that they’re wrong. Mark Twain said, “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.” And here he’s right on the money. The logic lover in me really wants to believe that 94% of the nation couldn't possibly think that spending $862 billion on a job creation program didn't create any jobs, but there it is in black and white. I don’t buy the semantics argument either, that they know it created some jobs but they don’t think it was that many—2 million, or 25%, isn’t a nuance nor is it semantically forgettable.

This is repeated many times over across many issues, sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes the question really is opinion-based and not factual. For instance, the President’s approval rating, which other than views on the economy, must be the singular most important polling number we’re seeing right now. A few months after Obama came into office, his approval rating was around 70%. Today, it is about 45%, an epic downshift. Why? Now we get into the gray area. Is it because of the economy? That’s the conventional wisdom. Most pundits now say he is getting blamed because the unemployment rate hasn’t dropped precipitously. Yet anyone who has ever read the first thing on world-class, bubble-inspired recessions can tell you that unemployment typically goes up for years afterwards, and the fact that it's only 9.5% two years in is an absolute miracle. Did anyone see the stock market go straight up last year after he came into office?

Moreover, Obama has pursued his campaign policies doggedly. In a little over a year Obama has passed healthcare and financial regulation (he could quit right there and it’s a legendary presidency), kept us out of a Depression (not bad), saved the American auto industry (ancillary, but iconic and far-reaching), regulated credit card and tobacco companies (third rails for decades), essentially ended the Iraq War (another campaign pledge, right on schedule), and mended relations with the rest of the world (after an unprecedented meltdown in diplomacy). And won a Nobel Prize. Point being, it ain’t bad for one year, much less having been handed the keys to a meltdown. Those accomplishments aren’t everything we’d hoped for and of course we’d love for the economy to be better. But it’s usually the same people complaining about government not saving the economy that don’t think government has any place in the economy. For his poll numbers to plummet suggest to me that people probably don’t know what they’re talking about. It hurts to say it.

And yet, to make the argument that our views aren’t well-founded overlooks two equally important points. The first is the wisdom of crowds. If you ask three people what they think of the healthcare legislation and two don’t like it, the sample size is obviously suspect. But if you ask the whole country what they think, or at least a representative sample, and you get large majorities against something, then it’s disingenuous to say they don’t know what they’re talking about. When you take 300 million people, scattered across the country, reading and talking and thinking and listening and seeing how things affect their daily lives, debating and arguing at those dinner parties and coffee shops and gas stations, what results is the wisdom of the crowd. That’s the way it was designed. If that doesn’t work, then the whole system unravels.

The second part is personal collective instinct. Our instant reactions are shaped not only by what facts we think we know and are immediately able to summon, but by all the experiences and knowledge that has passed through us to shape our minds. Just because I can’t give you the 10 things I like or don’t like about the healthcare legislation off the top of my head doesn’t mean I don’t have a well-reasoned position after having read umpteen articles, formed my opinion of the key players, evaluated the historical context, our economic outlook, and so on. So does that mean my immediate reaction to a survey question is valid? The short answer has to be that some people deserve the benefit of the doubt because they’ve done the legwork required to have a knowledgeable opinion and some clearly don’t because they haven’t. Those are the knee jerks.

My wife and I were watching the news the other day and the topic was the administration’s moratorium imposed on off-shore, deep-water drilling in the wake of the BP disaster. I had previously written about the miniscule probability of another such catastrophe. The one fact I glommed onto was that 50,000 wells had been dug over thirty years in the Gulf of Mexico, and only this one had been disastrous, or a rate of 0.00002%. My knee jerk reaction was that such an improbability, when compared to the absolute certainty of putting thousands of Gulf residents out of work in an already nasty recession, was the wrong calculation by the administration.

And yet, come to find out, of the hundred or so rigs currently operating in the Gulf, only 3% of them are deep-water, which means there is only a handful of similar rigs. So now, one out of only a handful has caused a catastrophe. And since that’s such a small proportion of all rigs, the administration agreed to pay the workers until we find out whether there’s a big, systemic problem or whether this was a one-off. Since those rigs are such a small proportion of the total oil being produced, we can immediately assuage the impact on the deep-drill workers’ way of life, and yet those rigs pose a disproportionate danger to the environment should they proceed, it’s just common sense to impose the moratorium until we figure out what’s going on. But until I sat down to figure it out, I was a knee jerk, and I was part of the problem. I can remember myself saying, “Oh the administration really blew this one.” I was being ludicrous. And I support them, so imagine what some Tea Partier thinks.

What is the impact of knee jerking? Nothing less than the future of the world.

The most important question in our understanding the implication of uninformed polling data is whether policy makers are using polls to shape their decisions more aggressively than in generations past. That is unknowable because politicians wouldn’t ever come outright and tell the truth (especially not in a survey we can surmise), so we have to use our context clues. It does seem like we’re now more consumed with polling data than we used to be. Everything is polled. And then all the polls are aggregated. They’re always running across the crawl at the bottom of the page or with bar charts flashing on the screen of the morning and evening news. Polling information is omnipresent online, and aggregated and easily accessible on sites like fivethirtyeight.com and realclearpolls.com. I spend my entire day in polls, then go home and spend half the night in them with the mainstream media. Congressmen point to poll charts on the floor of the House. The press secretary cites polling stats ad nauseum from the podium. Polls are driving politics like they never have before, there’s no doubt in my mind.

Peggy Noonan put it very nicely this week in her Wall Street Journal column:

"People in politics in America are too impressed by polls, of course, and talk about them too much. In this we're like a neurotic patient who constantly, compulsively takes his own temperature. We are political hypochondriacs."

This would all be well and good if it weren’t for small two things: 1) this was not the way our democracy was intended to function and 2) if we listen to the polls right now the world might fall apart.

Think that’s an overreach? We live in a representative democracy. Republics such as ours elect representatives to represent, based largely on elections and candidate’s platforms, because we have to go about our daily lives and don’t have the time nor wherewithal to understand the underpinnings of healthcare entitlement spending, financial regulation, the global economy, global warming and so forth. Our job is to understand the issues well enough to make an informed decision on whose platform we most agree with, and then they carry out the business of the people, we judge the outcome, and then re-elect or throw the bums out. But in no way was it intended for us to know enough about every issue to give the appropriate answer to a polling question such that the results would be used to determine policy and thus our fate.

And determine it does. Because now that everybody knows what the consensus wants, if a politician bucks the tide there’s an inevitable populist backlash that the public’s will isn’t being heeded, and indeed it isn’t. That’s an easy argument for an opponent to make: “75% of Americans want X and you chose Y.” So elected officials are no longer free to pursue their platform freely nor cast votes based on what they think is best, presumably based on the experts they assemble to guide them. Instead, they have to follow public sentiment or get thrown out. If you’re not in office you can’t govern, and it’s inevitable that self-preservation will rule the day.

Right now, there is a policy debate going on about where another round of stimulus will be needed to keep the economy from double dipping, or perhaps going into a depressionary deflation. I’m reading two books on the topic. The first is called The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics by Richard Koo, the chief economist at Nomura, Japan’s leading securities firm and a former Federal Reserve member. The second is This Time Is Different by Ken Rogoff, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and now a Harvard economics professor. These two seminal works are emblematic of the debate going on in Washington: spend now to save the economy (Koo’s argument because our current predicament so closely mirrors the Japanese lost decade), or cut deficits because we are moving dangerously close to the level of debt that has typically cratered economies (Rogoff’s argument based on 800 years of financial collapses).

So what do we do? Increasingly, the party lines in Washington are saying that there is no appetite, among Congress or the public, for another stimulus. How do they decide this? Polls. We already know that only 6% (absurdly) think the last stimulus created jobs, and in poll after poll the deficit is more concerning to Americans than creating growth. In all likelihood, this means the death knell for Stimulus Pt 2. Which may very well mean the death knell for the American economy for another decade. And since the American economy is 25% of the world economy, it probably means the world falls back into recession. So the fate of the world lies in the hands of a single polling question.

The key data point (thanks to another poll) that helps explain all this is that only 17% of Americans trust the government to do the right thing most of the time. So it makes perfect sense that they wouldn’t want to give them another trillion dollars to spend. Even though my bet is 99 out of 100 people would tell you they don’t have a firm enough grasp on the underpinnings of global macroeconomics to influence the outcome, they’re willing to cast their opinion in a poll, and their opinion casts the dye. My friend Ron Brownstein says:

“Since 2008, the most disruptive force in American politics has been the collapse of confidence in business and government. Both parties continue to stumble in its wake.”

This week, the Senate Democrats chose not to pursue the Cap-and-Trade bill, effectively ending any Congressional prospect of lifting a finger to deal with climate change. Notably, China's market-based carbon trading system went into effect the same week. It just so happens that global warming's poll numbers are down over the past two years.

So why have we become a knee jerk nation? It’s the internet, stupid.

What could be responsible for a systemic force so powerful that it fundamentally alters our trust in our leaders and the opinions we form? It has to be something involving information and something we spend a lot of time with. I bet a dollar to a nickel the same thing happened with the introduction of the printing press when people started to read widely, as well as the advent of the television. And now the same has happened again with the proliferation of media outlets through cable television and the internet. The key is how these new mediums change our behavior.

Nicholas Carr has written a fascinating book called The Shallows, which explores this very topic. I can’t write it better than Carr, so I won’t try:

“Every information technology carries with it an intellectual ethic — a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge. The printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is the ethic of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption. And now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but we are losing our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.”

I’m a bit torn, because we know for a fact through various studies that the amount of information that we are consuming daily has grown quickly with the pervasiveness of electronic content and time spent online. Surely the more information one consumes the more learning happens, and learning is exponential henceforth. But Carr’s point is that it isn’t necessarily learning so much as it really is just reading, or skimming. We're more informed, but are we smarter?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve tried to monitor the way I interact with the screen versus the page and it’s true, it’s very different. When I read an article on my favorite website I absorb and retain less than if I print it out and read it. It’s slower, yes, but I learn more. It’s not that we couldn’t slow down and read the same way on-screen; it’s that we don’t. We also get easily annoyed when whatever we're reading online extends beyond an easily digestible nugget. See, you're annoyed right now. 20 minutes spent reading an article online feels like an eternity. But with a book, that's a walk in the park. Which would be fine if we weren't substituting so much more time online. The other problem is the nature of the content—is there any doubt that spending an hour reading the internet is more superficial than the same hour with a non-fiction book?

My friend David Brooks cites two recent academic studies in his latest column to support such a conclusion, specifically among children. The first, from the University of Tennessee, shows that children who are given a dozen books to take home for the summer wind up with significantly higher reading scores than those who don’t. They even score higher than those who attend summer school. The anthropologist in the study concludes that it’s not just the reading, it’s that they now fancy themselves readers, building a library, and the reading then takes on a life of its own.

The second study is from Duke’s School of Public Policy, which finds that 5th to 8th graders with home computers and internet access score significantly worse in math and reading than those without. Now extrapolate that dynamic out a decade or two, sitting in front of a computer for 10 hours a day, and you have the American white collar work force. It’s paradoxical that computers are making us dumber, but that’s not really the point—they’re just not making us as smart as we would otherwise be reading books or talking to each other, our former pastimes.

Take a less informed and thoughtful populace and slam dunk a dose of shrill cable television and the blogosphere on top. Once news moved from newspapers and broadcast networks where the veracity had to be authenticated, consistently and intellectually, to places where entertainment was the primary criteria because the end goal was ratings and clicks, the content changed. We, by nature, love a good story. And good stories typically are not mundane, they’re extreme. They almost always pit one side versus another. That is exactly what we now have, whether it’s Fox News, MSNBC, The Huffington Post or any one of a million conservative blogs, it’s a he said she said world, where we villainize the boogeyman and play the blame game til our hearts’ content. The loudest and most extreme opinion gets the headline, not the smartest. If it bleeds, it leads.

It’s easier to read twenty headlines than one whole story. It’s more fun to get riled up at the bad guy than it is to hear both sides and assume equally meritorious motives. One of my favorite statistics is that once we back out the time we spend sleeping (8 hrs) and working (8 hrs) and commuting/bathing/eating (2 hrs), we’re left with about 6 hrs in the day. The average American spends 5 hrs watching television and 2 hrs online. Which amounts to basically the entirety of our disposable free time. If we’re looking for the places that systematically shape our behavior, that has to be the place to start.

The Knee Jerks: A Case Study

As luck would have it, before I could even get this posted, some knee jerks stumbled onto the national scene. Last week, the NAACP passed a resolution at their annual convention condemning certain elements of the Tea Party they deemed to be racist. Almost in lock step, the spokesman for the Tea Party Express posted an open letter from "Colored People" to Abe Lincoln, resulting in his ouster from the group.

Presumably in response, a Tea Party provocateur released an incendiary video of an NAACP meeting whereby an Agriculture employee was talking about how she discriminated against a white farmer. Fox News proceeded to run the minute-long video on a loop all day long, screaming reverse racism, dissecting each cheer and Amen, in the way only Fox can do. By the day's end, the Agriculture Department had asked for and received the employee's resignation, forecasting "the fallout on Glenn Beck tonight." The White House concurred with the decision. Newt Gingrich appeared on Sean Hannity and condemned her “viciously racist attitude.” The NAACP piled on with their own letter of condemnation.

Apparently, somebody finally got around to watching the actual 30-minute video last night. As it turns out, the lady was describing an event that had happened 25 years ago, while she was working for a non-profit, whereby she realized how wrong her thinking was and how it wasn't about black/white as much as helping those in need, went on to help save the white farmer's farm, and was actually telling a nice fable. She was also telling it on the anniversary of her father's lynching in the same neck of the woods when she was a small child, as a reminder of why she stayed in the South to try and make a difference.

Today, the Tea Partier who spliced and diced the video into a lie was torn apart, the Agriculture Committee apologized and offered her job back, the NAACP retracted its condemnation, and Robert Gibbs had to come out and give The White House's deepest apologies from the Press room. While that was happening, the worker was actually on CNN being interviewed, and the interviewer turns to her and asked whether she accepted the apology, which she did.

Tell me that kind of knee jerking isn't something new. Everybody involved had to move at the speed of light to catch the story, add their take and prevent the fallout because the video was immediately up on YouTube, Twitter feeds were blowing up, website headlines were updating, and on and on and on. Nobody ever thought to actually watch the video.

The charge of the light brigade: See some knee jerking, engage!

So where does that leave us? The legion of knee jerks is growing, and for the sake of the republic, they must be stopped. For my part, I have long had a personal rule that I don’t engage them. Unfortunately, multiply my cowardice several million times over and this is why the knee jerks are allowed to run rampant. The gloves must come off. It’s not polite, but some things are more important than being ambassadorial. It’s not comfortable, but neither is that awkward nodding. I'm ready to listen. I plan to fight with a grin. But the free pass is over.

For our leadership’s part, Democracy must continue to pursue the will of the people, yet balance it with a healthy dose of realism towards our often shallow understanding of complex issues, our short attention spans and soundbite consumption patterns driving knee jerk opinions, our selective application of logic versus the allure of story seeking, and an understanding that the solutions to our long-term problems won't be at the top of any short-term popularity polling. We must now go back in time to find our best future. We must admit our failure to succeed again.

Source: http://jasebumgardner.blogspot.com/2010/07/knee-jerks-engage.html