Psychological Distance From a Question

At Ask a Manager, I encountered a simple, memorable example (Item 3) of someone -- simply by asking a question of another -- becoming aware of a good option he was blinding himself to.

The writer had an unexpected business opportunity with a firm whose board included someone from his long-ago romantic past, and with whom he had parted ways acrimoniously, albeit drama-free.

Out of courtesy, the writer wanted to reconnect with his ex and offer to bow out altogether, but he dreaded the prospect:

I don't want to show up and ambush my ex, and it would be disingenuous for me to pretend I don't have a connection to this company. The respectful and professional thing to do is to reach out to the ex directly and ... reconnect somehow, right? The problem is the thought of even getting coffee with this person fills me with dread and anxiety. I am quite content to never see them again. At the same time, the idea that we could be on speaking terms if we run into each other again would ultimately be a relief...

The beginning of Alison Green's reply was This doesn't require coffee!

Wait. What? I thought. The answer, to use email, was so obvious to me that the bit about coffee hadn't registered. I was a little bit nonplussed until I reread the question.

I bet this guy heaved a sigh of relief before laughing at how fixated he'd been on an awkward meeting over coffee.

The lesson here is that it's often helpful to ask someone else a question, no matter how simple it might look to others, when one is stuck. The answer won't always be so simple, of course, but it can be.

The good news is that people simply needing the aid of another person's perspective will often get a pleasant surprise upon hearing the answer.

-- CAV

Calluses Alone Do Not a Man Make

By now you may be aware that some Trumpists are touting his brain-dead and destructive tariff regime as "manly."

This is ridiculous on many levels, but it isn't surprising. There is a strain within the alt-right that pushes antiquated and wrong ideas about masculinity, and, while I am not overfly familiar with it, the below sounds par for the course:

The author believes his use of this image to be protected as Fair Use under U.S. copyright law.

Two Fox Network hosts have bizarrely praised Donald Trump's trade tariffs as the thing needed to bring the masculinity of America's workforce. According to the hosts, masculinity will rise due to the fact that "jobs and factories will come roaring back" to the U.S. as a result of these tariffs.

Jesse Watters, one of the co-hosts of The Five, endorsed the argument during the show on Monday. "When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this," Watters, who is known for giving his unasked opinions on what it means to be a man, said.

"And if you're out working, building robots like [co-host] Harold Ford Jr., you are around other guys," Watters insisted without providing any sort of data. "You're not around HR ladies and lawyers -- and that gives you estrogen."

"We shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living, and rely on brawn and physicality, off to other countries to build up their middle class," she added. "We imported millions and millions of illegals to work in construction, manufacturing, landscaping, janitorial services -- jobs that used to give men access to the American dream." [bold added]

I had no idea incels were mainstream now.

But to the point, there is so much wrong here it is hard to know where to begin, but Aristotle's seminal identification of man as the rational animal would be a good place to start.

The spectacle of people I'd hesitate to hire to clean my toilet preening like stereotypical housewives about the need to steer clear of women and their own non-manual labor type of work on air -- when they could be cleaning a sewer somewhere -- just about takes the cake.

For anyone who might be curious about the actual nature of work for an animal possessing a mind, I commend a couple of quotes by Ayn Rand, a woman who immigrated from Soviet Russia and became a successful novelist in America, and who, alas, knows more about masculinity and America than the entire modern Republican Party put together.

First, regarding production:

Every type of productive work involves a combination of mental and physical effort: of thought and of physical action to translate that thought into a material form. The proportion of these two elements varies in different types of work. At the lowest end of the scale, the mental effort required to perform unskilled manual labor is minimal. At the other end, what the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values.

It is too bad that, along with the millions of grateful people around the world who are alive at all, not to mention living in clover today -- thanks to the inventiveness and thinking of intelligent men -- that ninnies like those on Fox News avoid toil long enough to spout their drivel to the effect that the only good jobs are physically taxing.

Rand elaborates a bit when she discusses businessmen, whom they'd presumably admire, (although, to be fair, Donald Trump is a poor example):

The professional businessman is the field agent of the army whose lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the scientist. The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men's physical needs and expand the comfort of men's existence. By creating a mass market, he makes these products available to every income level of society. By using machines, he increases the productivity of human labor, thus raising labor's economic rewards. By organizing human effort into productive enterprises, he creates employment for men of countless professions. He is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries -- and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.

Do note that Trump's tariffs and unpredictable yanking-around of their rates are making the work of businessmen almost impossible, and take note of whom he put in charge of as many scientists as he could: If this continues for long, the idiots at Fox News may get their wish in the form of finding that what little work is left is back-breaking, menial, and very unproductive.

Before I got wind of those remarks, I was inclined to pooh-pooh the idea that there is a crisis of masculinity in America.

I was wrong to do so, except that crisis isn't that too many men are free of toil, or that they might get the cooties if they are in the same room as a woman for too long. The crisis is that too many men, exemplified by those at Fox News have no idea what it takes to be a mans, and never will because they scorn their own minds.

-- CAV

Cue the Trump Brain Drain

Even if DOGE weren't laying off government officials in the careless, haphazard way it has been, Bobby Kennedy's mandate to "go wild" with HHS would probably result in scientists losing their jobs sooner or later.

Granted: The government shouldn't be regulating the economy. It also shouldn't fund science outside of a few very limited areas directly related to its proper scope, such as weapons research or medical research related to dealing with infectious disease, and even those on a very limited basis.

This isn't the case now, but backing the government out of so many areas should be done carefully, so that the private sector can adjust to take up the slack in areas that would and should be funded in a free economy. Until that is done, the government should keep good people in charge.

The Trump Administration has shown, starting with its appointment of Bobby Kennedy, that it is indifferent at best to basic competence. With its "go wild" mandate in particular and as shown by the haphazard, gimmicky approach of DOGE in general, it is also clear that this administration has no real goal of bringing government closer to its proper scope or strategy for doing so.

Policies have consequences. If you were a scientist previously employed by the government that just appointed an anti-science kook to head your former employer, and his boss was busy destroying the private sector with tariffs, what would you do?

Canadians have an idea, and they're getting ready to lap up the world-class talent that has just been told it is unwanted here:

Cuts to U.S. research funding will also create gaps in evidence because there'll be less research being funded and conducted overall, says Kirsten Patrick, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). That's why it's all the more important for Canada to step up its research funding, she says.

"If we have a situation where, down south, research is not being as well funded as it should be and some research isn't even being done, then we need to have a strong research system in Canada," she said.

The CBC piece further elaborates on province- and university-level recruitment efforts.

It is still too early to see how Trump's random cuts and Kennedy's rampage through our health and agriculture agencies play out, but if I were a scientist working in any of these affected fields, I would be paying close attention:

Let's take a look at two topics that illustrate two different ways that science and public health are being damaged by the Trump administration. One of them is not subtle at all: the ax. That's what has happened to 77 scientific staffers at the CDC who (among their other duties) had been in charge of collecting samples and analyzing data on US-wide sexually transmitted diseases, specifically looking for drug-resistant gonorrhea.

...

A second way that things are being undermined is at the regulatory and decision-making level. That's well-illustrated in this piece at BioCentury. Steve Usdin is looking at Mike Makary's FDA and an upcoming decision that will reveal a lot about how things are going to be run. Readers may have noticed that the current version of the Novavax coronavirus vaccine has had a sudden regulatory hold put on it at the FDA - and that was after the agency's own reviewers had recommended approval. The reason for the unexpected screeching halt have not been made public, but Makary has put his new assistant Tracy Beth Høeg in charge of reviewing the application, and this is not a good sign at all. [links omitted]

Even if you don't get fired outright, you may find yourself wondering what the hell you're doing there, and for how long you'll still be there or want to be there.

The ones getting fired now might well be the lucky ones.

-- CAV

Tariffs vs. Comparative Advantage

Economist Alex Tabarrok recommends reading a Maurice Obstfeld piece at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, titled "Trump's Tariffs Are Designed for Maximum Damage -- to America."

I found this interesting because it elaborates on the consequences of something I suspected when I heard (on the Yaron Brook show, I believe) that Trump's "reciprocal" tariff formula was based not on tariffs being levied against American imports by any given country, but in large part on the trade deficit with the particular country. I suspected correctly that the more our trade with any given country is saving us money, the more punitive the tariff.

Obstfeld lays this out as follows:

The tariff plan displays a basic misunderstanding of the reasons why nations trade in the first place -- reasons that imply the United States will run deficits with some trade partners (bilateral deficits) and surpluses with others (bilateral surpluses). The reasons reflect the operation of comparative advantage. For example, the US imports aluminum from countries that can produce it most efficiently, while embodying it in exports where it has the advantage, such as aircraft. This will tend to lower US trade balances with efficient aluminum producers and raise them with aircraft importers. The same is true for households and businesses. I have a surplus with my textbook publisher, Pearson, because I am relatively better at writing textbooks while they are better at publishing and distributing. But I chose to have a deficit this year with my ophthalmic surgeon rather than trying to remove my cataracts myself.

Yet the USTR [US Trade Representative] report reveals up front that their "calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing." This is a fundamental misconception and suggests that Trump's administration did not even try to calculate the true heights of trade barriers. For example, Korea was hit with a tariff of 26 percent, even though it has a free trade agreement with America and its tariff rate on US imports was only 0.79 percent in 2024. The tariff's entire justification was Korea's sizable bilateral surplus in goods with the United States, much of it due to Americans' taste for Hyundai and KIA vehicles. [bold and link for comparative advantage added]

The piece goes on to discuss further costs that switching suppliers to dodge high tariff rates might also incur.

One part of the piece that I found not as clear pertains to the overall trade deficit: This deficit reflects that Americans spend more than they produce, obliging them to import the difference from abroad. This would seem to run counter to the fact that, as the philosopher Harry Binswanger once pointed out in "Buy American Is Un-American:

The lucrative workings of free markets do not depend upon lines drawn on a map. The economic advantages of international commerce are the same as those of interstate, intercity, and crosstown commerce. And if we kept crosstown trade accounts, the "trade deficits" that would appear would be as meaningless as are our international "trade deficits." Fact confirms theory: the U.S. ran a trade "deficit" practically every year of the nineteenth century, the time of our most rapid economic progress.

While perhaps in the modern era we do overall have a massive debt to other countries, I wonder if, say, foreign investment in the US isn't being accounted for, or I am simply unclear on that point. But surely it is inaccurate to look only at material goods bought and sold in international trade when such things as investment opportunities and services are also major components of any economy.

Like wage (which simply means "labor price"), the term trade deficit is unfortunate for the cause of clarity in economic discussions.

If we replaced the term wage with labor price, it would be easier to see the similarities between wages and other production costs.

The term trade deficit, which merely describes aggregations of individual transactions across a border, bears an unfortunate and confusing resemblance to terms like the federal deficit, which reflects a shortfall of money taken in by the government relative to its expenditures. These similarly-named phenomena are fundamentally different: The first is merely a result of trade (and none of the government's business) and thus harmless; the second should be avoided or eliminated.

-- CAV

Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. A greybeard reflects on the time he reset printers systemwide to charge people a nickel a page for print jobs:

Having sent this out, I fielded a few anxious calls, who laughed uproariously when they realized, and I reset their printers manually afterwards. The people who knew me, knew I was a practical joker, took note of the date, and sent approving replies. One of the best was sent to me later in the day by intercampus mail, printed on their laser printer, with a nickel taped to it.

If it isn't obvious that this link is strictly for entertainment purposes, its title will make it so: "The April Fools Joke That Might Have Got Me Fired"

2. Rabbit Hole of the Week: A biology professor takes a deep dive into "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters." Among many other things, you will learn why small animals do so much better in falls than we do:

When any object falls, it accelerates until the drag force equals the force generated by gravity acting on its mass; from then on, the velocity is constant. This speed is known as the "terminal velocity"; for a full-sized human it's about 120 mph and is very terminal indeed. However, the drag on an object is proportional to its cross-sectional area, while the force due to gravity is proportional to its mass (and thus volume, if density is constant). As objects get smaller, gravitational pull decreases more rapidly than drag, so terminal velocity decreases.

Of course, as an old gem of black humor notes, it's not the fall that hurts you, it's the sudden stop at the end...

Indeed, sufficiently small animals cannot be hurt in a fall from any height: A monkey is too big, a squirrel is on the edge, but a mouse is completely safe. The mouse-sized people in Dr. Cyclops could have leapt off the tabletop with a cry of "Geronimo!" secure in the knowledge that they were too small to be hurt.

The whole thing is this good, but it's a half-hour read.

3. Some time back, I noted an interesting shopping site for visually impaired people who like to cook.

I followed through on sending my wife there for Christmas ideas, and my favorite two gifts have been the butter slicer and the wide-mouthed funnel.

It's more satisfying than you might think to slice up an entire stick of butter all at once without making a mess.

As for the wide-mouthed funnel, I like not having to worry at all about making a mess or scalding my hands when I pack a hot school lunch for my daughter.

4. At Ask a Manager, someone exposes the office plagiarist during a meeting:

A colleague kept stealing my work -- copy-pasting stuff from documents I'd written, and claiming PowerPoint decks as her own. So I embedded my name in everything I made -- in the footer or the slide master, in a tiny white font. Then when she claimed the work was hers in a meeting I asked for the mouse to "point to something" and "accidentally" highlighted where it said "documents created by (my name) on date.

More fun where that came from here and here.

-- CAV

Record Set, Message Missed

Although business writer Suzanne Lucas pitches her piece to HR professionals, her post mortem of Cory Booker's record-setting filibuster has lessons for anyone interested in effective communication.

Her broad points are:

1. Focus on substance over spectacle.
2. Tie actions to clear goals.
3. Engage in two-way communication.
4. Don't preach to the choir.

Lucas starts off by noting that, contrary to Cory Booker's stated goal,

... the focus of the headlines and reporting wasn't about the policies that Booker advocated for or the solutions he proposed. It was about the record-breaking speech, which overshadowed its purpose. For leaders of all kinds, it's a cautionary tale: Are your actions driving meaningful change, or are they just grabbing attention?

I'm no fan of Booker, and I suspect our lazy and incurious news media deserve some of the blame for its focus on nonessentials. Nevertheless, it is clear that Booker could have greatly increased his odds of success by following her advice.

For example, regarding her first point about the hazards of creating a spectacle:

Booker's speech broke a record previously held by Sen. Strom Thurmond, who filibustered against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. While the delivery was historic, Booker's speech inadvertently revived discussions about Thurmond's opposition to civil rights -- an unintended consequence that distracted from Booker's intended message.

Don't let flashy execution overshadow your core message. If your team walks away talking about how you said something rather than what you said, you've missed the mark.

Always ask: Will this method amplify my message or distract from it?

Her other points are just as worthy of consideration, too.

-- CAV

For Starters, Walker's Legacy in Danger

Special elections in Florida and Wisconsin provided shots across the bow to the Trump Administration, at least according to the Wall Street Journal. The GOP retained two safe congressional seats in Florida, albeit with less-safe margins than normal, and lost the election for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat.

Whatever one can glean from elections so early in a term, I think it is fair to say that if there really is a "MAGA backlash," it is nothing compared to what there will be if the worst-case scenario of Trump's "liberation day" tariffs -- 20% or more across the board -- comes to pass; and then either Trump refuses to back down or Congress fails to get him under control by finding the will to take back its authority over tariffs.

If that happens, that paper's warnings to the GOP will definitely apply:

Republicans can console themselves that they held the Florida seats and thus their narrow House majority. And we hope the results don't scare House Republicans into backing away from their tax and regulatory reform agenda. That's what Democrats would love, so next year they'd get the benefit both ways -- motivated Democrats and sullen Republicans after a GOP governing failure.

But the elections are a warning to Mr. Trump to focus on what got him re-elected -- especially prices and growth in real incomes after inflation. His willy-nilly tariff agenda undermining stock prices and consumer and business confidence isn't helping. [bold added]

The piece goes on to note the worst consequences of the Democrat victory in Wisconsin:

As for Wisconsin, Republicans in that state will now have to live with a willful Supreme Court majority that could reverse nearly everything the GOP accomplished under former Gov. Scott Walker. School vouchers, collective-bargaining reform for public workers, tort reform and more are likely to be challenged in lawsuits by the left. Congressional district electoral maps will also be challenged and could cost the GOP two House seats. [bold added]

Given that the only indications of congressional action on tariffs so far has been either merely symbolic or the exact opposite of what is needed, I expect a bloodbath in the midterms.

The cowards in the GOP would do well to start fearing their constituents more than the President.

-- CAV