Month: January 2022

Market-Based Approaches

My house, my rules.

It’s the ultimate power move.

Many of us were subjected to this edict as we grew up. Our parents ruled the roost. And we had no choice but to comply.

I was no different.

I knew that I would need to finish my homework before I could watch television. And if it snowed, I’d need to shovel the sidewalk before making any snowmen.

It didn’t matter if I thought the rules were fair. They were final.

If I rose in protest, my pleas would be ignored. If I asked why the rules were the way they were, my parents would reply with Because I said so.

I was left with only two choices. I could obey. Or I could rebel and face the consequences.

I was a good kid, so I generally took the first approach. But plenty of my friends and classmates followed the second route, particularly as we all reached adolescence.

The rebelliousness forged conflict between my peers and their parents, just as their days under one roof were dwindling. With the freedom of adulthood nearly at hand, the whole situation seemed so pointless.

And yet, it was entirely predictable.

More than two centuries ago, a crisis played out on the shores of North America. A crisis that was essentially spurred by the words Because I said so.

The “parent” in this situation was the British crown. And the “children” were the residents of the American colonies.

The crisis centered on a plan to tax the colonists for such items as stamps and tea. The colonists reacted with rage, dumping chests of tea into the Boston Harbor.

The British reacted by passing a series of restrictive laws, known in the colonies as The Intolerable Acts. The colonists responded to this affront by declaring independence from Britain and winning the Revolutionary War that ensued.

The erstwhile colonists had done it. They’d freed themselves from the unilateral edicts of the British crown. And while the next steps remained uncertain, one thing was abundantly clear. My house, my rules was never going to fly.

The founding fathers took two steps to wipe out this option, for once and for all. They created a representative government, giving many Americans a say in the legislation they’d encounter. And they embraced an emerging economic model called capitalism to fuel the nation’s fortunes.

Many of the early theories of capitalism stemmed from the work of Scottish economist Adam Smith. In such publications as The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote of the “invisible hand” of the market defining patterns of prosperity.

As the leading intellectuals of the era parsed Smith’s work, they came up with a novel idea. Perhaps market-based approaches could efficiently govern society. The United States of America was among the first nations to put such a theory into practice.

Over the years, these twin tenets — free markets and a representative democracy — have become the core of the American ethos. They’ve proven that no matter the outcome, we have a chance, and we have a say.

Still, we tend to tire of this winning formula. We seek to cut through the red tape, to sidestep debate, and to avoid bipartisanship. We aim to rule with iron fists.

Even if it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

The mandate came at a moment of exasperation.

Nearly two years into a bruising pandemic, America seemed to be stuck in neutral. Many Americans had received a vaccine to protect them against a deadly virus, but many others had not. Progress in quashing COVID had waned.

Into this quagmire came a hand grenade, courtesy of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (or OSHA). Employees at large businesses would need to get vaccinated or face twice-weekly COVID testing. Businesses that didn’t comply would face steep fines.

It was a bold move with noble intentions. But it was ultimately a futile one.

OSHA’s directive quickly met legal challenges, which wound their way through the courts. Eventually, the United States Supreme Court blocked the action, arguing that OSHA had overstepped its authority. It turns out that Because I said so wasn’t a valid justification for such a broad government directive.

The high court’s ruling left a vacuum of ambiguity. Should businesses enact their own vaccine mandates to help stamp out the virus? Was the entire matter now moot?

As the debate waged on, I thought back to a move one major corporation had made before OSHA drafted its ill-fated policy.

Delta Airlines had asked its employees to get the COVID vaccine. But if they refused, Delta would charge employees $200 per month. The airline justified the surcharge by stating that it would cover the financial risk unvaccinated employees would levy on the company. To hammer home the point, Delta pointed out that it was paying an average of $50,000 in medical bills for each of its employees who were hospitalized with COVID.

On its face, this directive seems like the ill-fated OSHA one. Yet, it didn’t face legal resistance —or just about any resistance, for that matter. In fact, 90 percent of Delta Airlines employees got vaccinated weeks before the policy even took effect.

Why such different outcomes? Well, Delta Airlines skillfully explained the reasoning for each facet of its directive. They gave employees a choice on how to proceed. And they relied on a market-based approach to get the vaccine-hesitant off the fence.

It all came down to a simple point. Decisions have consequences. And the more directly we feel those consequences, the more likely we are to change our behavior.

In a capitalist society, we’re most likely to feel the sting of consequence financially. So, if eschewing a vaccine helps us to potentially spread a devastating virus, we might face anger and ridicule, but not the medical bills of those we infect. But if the decision makes our wallets $200 lighter each month — while our bills and expenses remain the same — we’re more likely to change course.

I often wonder why we don’t take this approach more often when tackling the big problems our society faces. Instead of trying to herd people like cattle to the desired outcome, why don’t we let market-based approaches guide them there?

We would likely make more progress at staving off climate change with market-based approaches. We could speed up adoption of new technologies. And we could optimize the way we live work.

Sure, such an approach is not universal. Texas’ move to a market-based approach for electricity providers failed spectacularly when the state faced a massive winter storm. And such approaches threaten to exacerbate, rather than eradicate, patterns of pay inequity.

But those are the exceptions, not the rule. Market-based approaches belong in the conversation more broadly. Top-down directives do not.

So, let’s leave My house, my rules behind. Let’s stop acting on our authoritarian impulses. And let’s let the invisible hand take over.

We’ll be setting ourselves up for greater success.

The Option Anvil

There’s a picture that used to hang on the wall in my childhood home.

I’m probably 8 years old in this photograph. I’m wearing slacks and a button-down shirt. My chin is resting in the palm of my hand as I peer over a chessboard.

My parents have long adored this picture. Its candid nature seemed reminiscent of an oil painting. And it captured my essence as a child — pensive, quiet, and conscientious.

An image like this might seem to be a prelude. It might appear to be a hint of what was to come. If I took such a calculated approach to a complicated game back then, one might think, I’ve surely grown into a master tactician by now.

But appearances can be deceiving.

Yes, I was staring at a chessboard. But there were no kings or queens or rooks atop it. In their place were nondescript circular game pieces, which were either painted black or white.

Yes, this image was of me playing checkers.

Why was I so pensive, so stoic? Why was I so indecisive while playing such a straightforward game?

It all had to do with the burden of choice in my midst.

Give me liberty or give me death!

Such were the famous words of Patrick Henry. This rallying cry, uttered during a speech at the Second Virginia Convention in 1775, helped inspire the Declaration of Independence a year later. And its legacy perseveres in our society today.

Freedom is a hallmark of our nation. The liberty to chart our own path is paramount.

But for all the time we spend defending this right, we forget one thing. The actual process of choosing between options is extremely difficult.

You see, choice introduces us to both reward and risk. If we choose properly, we find ourselves in an advantageous position. But if we don’t, we face the embers of rebuke and the sting of regret.

In the moment, it can be hard to identify which decision will lead to the right outcome. It’s as if we’re playing Let’s Make a Deal and guessing what’s behind each door.

So, we waver. We procrastinate. We do all we can to mitigate the damage of a wrong choice.

And in the process, the decision gains mass. It transforms into an option anvil, weighing us down.

Yes, it sure seems liberty comes with its own set of shackles.

Steve Jobs was a visionary. A pioneer. An empire builder.

The legacy of Apple’s founder is multifaceted. But one aspect of it is particularly poignant.

Jobs was known to wear the same outfit to work, day after day. Tennis shoes, jeans, and a black turtleneck. That look was omnipresent in the keynote addresses Jobs delivered year after year. And it became synonymous with Jobs himself.

Why would Jobs opt for such a basic wardrobe? Why wouldn’t he use some of his vast fortune on flashier styles?

It was all a matter of choice.

As the head of a leading technology company, Jobs had plenty of monumental decisions to contend with each day. He didn’t want his choice of clothes to be one of them, so he removed any ambiguity from the equation.

Eventually, others in the tech industry followed this principle. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was known to wear hoodies to the office each day. Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes tried to evoke Jobs with her own set of black turtlenecks.

This all might seem quirky and quaint, particularly to those of us far removed from Silicon Valley. But there’s something deeper at play.

Even though these tech tycoons had enormous power and influence, they still recognized the toll that decisions can exert. So, they sought to budget their energy, expending it on only the most consequential of choices. It was their way of making that option anvil just a tad lighter.

We might not have the means to get a wardrobe of black turtlenecks. But we can still emulate the Technorati in this area. And we stand to come out ahead for doing so.

It was the experiment that changed everything.

Back around the year 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a table of jam samples at a supermarket. The jams were free to try, and shoppers even got a coupon for taking a sample.

It all seemed simple enough. But there was a catch.

The amount of jam available for sampling was not constant. On one day, shoppers saw six options at the table. On another, they saw 24.

And that difference in sample size led to differences in behavior. Far more people bought jam when they had six options to choose from than when they had 24 to consider.

These results might seem counterintuitive. In the land of Give me liberty or give me death, going with the narrower solution set seems downright unpatriotic. And yet, The Jam Study proves that abundant choice can overwhelm us. The option anvil is quite real.

There are reminders of this research all around us. For instance, modern restaurants will often model their menus after Chipotle or Five Guys, rather than The Cheesecake Factory. And many service providers have bucketed their offerings into three tiers, rather than selling individual products piecemeal.

These businesses have done their homework. To them, the cost of indecisiveness outweighs the benefits of expansive choice.

And yet, we individuals still find ourselves behind the curve. We demand all the choices, even though it’s obvious that we buckle under their weight.

It’s a grim scene. But the die is not cast.

We can still chart a more sustainable destiny. We can note the impacts of a gauntlet of decisions. And we can be intentional about which ones we should pursue.

Yes, this process gives us one more decision to navigate. And no, it doesn’t mean that we get exactly what we want all the time.

But such a tradeoff can help improve our stamina. It can make us more adaptable, focused, and resilient. It can get free us from that option anvil, for once and for all.

I believe that’s a choice worth making. Do you?

Crisis of Consideration

They were supposed to be a juggernaut.

The 2012-2013 version of the Los Angeles Lakers had it all, from a professional basketball context. An all-time great in Kobe Bryant. A former Most Valuable Player in Steve Nash. A former Defensive Player of the Year in Dwight Howard. And a supporting cast of players that were mostly in the prime of their careers.

It was an accumulation of talent that many considered among the best of all-time in the National Basketball Association.

While another ballyhooed superteam across the country — the Miami Heat — was still celebrating their championship run from the season prior, the Lakers seemed poised to win the next title. All they had to do is show up.

Or so everyone thought.

The team lost four of its first five games, costing the head coach his job. But the coaching change did little to change the team’s fortunes, as the Lakers continued to lose more games than they won for several more months.

It took a late-season surge to push the team’s record over the breakeven mark. Los Angeles didn’t clinch a playoff spot until the last day of the season. And the San Antonio Spurs made quick work of them in the postseason — winning four straight lopsided games.

What on earth happened to the Los Angeles Lakers?

There are plenty of explanations. The team struggled to learn a new offensive system, which led directly to the coaching change. Many of the team’s best players — who were on the wrong side of 30 years old — battled through injuries.

But less talented teams than the Lakers had encountered these setbacks before. And they’d persevered anyway. So why did the Lakers fold like a paper tent in a breeze?

The answer can be summed up in one word: Ego.

Too many members of the 2012-2013 Lakers were in it for themselves. They sought to play their game, rather than buy into the team dynamic. Tension built in the locker room, most notably between Bryant and Howard. And the Lakers never seemed to be all that cohesive on the basketball court as a result.

Yes, the Lakers suffered from a crisis of consideration that doomed their season. But they weren’t alone.

There’s a scourge on our society. A pervasive ailment that festers.

Coast to coast, in big cities and small towns, we must deal with people being wholly inconsiderate.

This takes many forms. It might be a driver who clogs the left lane while keeping their vehicle at a snail’s pace. Or a self-anointed VIP who cuts the line to get served first. Or a biker who revs his Harley engine in a residential neighborhood at 11 PM on a weeknight.

In all cases, the offender is thinking me, not we. They zone in on their own wants and needs, without a single thought to the disruption they cause others.

For a long time, this crisis went unaddressed. The inconsiderate continued with their shenanigans, while those aggrieved by their actions quietly fumed.

But recently, things have started to change.

Going through a public health crisis has raised the stakes of inconsideration. Now, one self-serving action can put countless lives in the balance.

With so much on the line, we feel emboldened to call out inconsiderate behavior. And laying out the dire consequences helps us demand change.

Sometimes, this leads to tangible improvements. Sometimes, the targets of our ire see shame in their oversight and vow to be better.

But other times, there is blowback. Those who act boorishly respond with aggression instead of change. And the intense backlash only helps to deepen the fissures omnipresent in our society.

Of course, we’d prefer the first outcome to the second one. But either result is better than the status quo.

You see, inconsideration is about more than bucking rules and customs. It also represents a failure of common understanding. A gap between perceptions of the world around us.

To emerge from this quagmire, we need to bridge that gap. But how?

I lay in bed in the middle of the night, unable to sleep.

Insomnia wasn’t the culprit. Neither was anxiety.

No, the cause of my sleeplessness was a constant barrage of death metal cascading through the wall from the apartment next door. The music was persistent, and it was unavoidable.

Enraged, I marched out to the hallway and knocked on my neighbor’s door. After getting no response, I called the apartment’s courtesy officer and alerted them to the issue. Finally, I abandoned my bedroom, resigning myself to a night on the couch.

After this hellacious night, all was well for a while. As the days went by, I nearly forgot that the incident even happened.

But about a month later, it returned. I once again woke up in the middle of the night, tortured by the angry tones of death metal.

This time, I emailed the apartment’s community administrator to alert them of the situation. I didn’t want to rock the boat too much, but I knew my neighbor was flouting the community’s noise rules. I wanted that neighbor to get fined.

I never did hear back from the administrator. But the death metal once again went away the following evening. Normalcy seemed to have taken over.

But then, a few weeks after this, the music returned. By now, I was at my wits end. I took out a pen and a Post-It note, and wrote:

Please be a good neighbor and stop playing death metal at 11 PM on a Monday night. Some of us are trying to sleep.

I taped the note to my neighbor’s door, retreated to my apartment, and slept on the couch again.

The next day, I was greeted with the following note on my door:

Sorry, fell asleep while it was playing. Moving out next month, so it won’t be me next time.

I can’t verify if my neighbor did, indeed move out in the subsequent month. But I never was woken up by death metal again.

This whole saga was unpleasant. No one likes to see their sleep patterns disrupted.

But its resolution shows the way out of the crisis of consideration.

That way out is through communication.

Now, Post-It notes are admittedly a clunky way of achieving that objective. But regardless of style points, they did the trick.

Maybe we can all take a page from this book. Maybe we can focus on communicating, instead of fuming about the behavior of others. Maybe we can stop pining for the end outcome and start thinking about the journey needed to get there.

It’s the considerate thing to do. So let’s get it done.

On Whiplash

I had a pit in my stomach.

I just had finished work on a college newscast that was an abject disaster.

The production crew had missed their cues. The anchors had botched their scripts. And I, the producer, had frozen like a deer in the headlights amid all this chaos.

This all resulted in a disjointed performance that was readily evident to anyone watching on their television sets. It felt as if we’d all wandered into the middle of Times Square in our underwear.

It didn’t matter that our viewership was in the dozens, not the millions. Everyone involved with the newscast was in a dour mood, even before our faculty advisor lit into us in the post-show meeting.

I felt directly responsible for the debacle. So, I emailed the advisor to apologize.

She quickly responded, stating that there was plenty of blame to go around, but that such matters were irrelevant. It was more important, she stated, for everyone to learn from the mistakes moving forward.

Onward and upward, she concluded.

I had never heard that phrase before. But after that moment, it would become all I would hear.

Whenever I found myself facing a setback, onward and upward would be a rallying cry. The three-word pep talk reminded me to focus on the future, rather than dwelling on the past.

I’m haven’t embraced this mantra alone. It’s been a rallying cry in America for generations. But is it the right one?

Time moves in one direction. And so do we.

With apologies to Benjamin Button and the best attempts of beauty products everywhere, we don’t get younger with time. We wear its impact as we mature and then decline.

The same concept is true for our society. Over the years, it’s matured from a nebulous concept into something stronger and more versatile. Someday, its decline will come. But we will continue to plow forward through that process.

These truths are self-evident. Our ancestors would be enthralled by the cultural and technological opportunities we have today. And while such innovations and adaptations are far from perfect, they still represent progress.

We don’t necessarily take all this for granted. But we have internalized onward and upward into our own processes. We aspire to land better roles throughout our careers and to improve as spouses and parents outside of the office. More broadly, we seek to innovate and drive transformational change.

This ethos has generally led to real-world rewards, spurring us to lean into the strategy ever more. But occasionally, the payoff hasn’t been there. Every now and then, we’re forced backwards, despite our best efforts to churn ahead.

And when this happens, we encounter whiplash.

Whiplash is the feeling you get when you’re riding in a car, and it stops short. It’s the jolting sensation that ensues when your momentum is halted faster than you can adjust to it.

Whiplash is particularly unpleasant because we don’t plan for it. It strikes without warning, leaving us in a daze.

Whiplash forces us to react. But that needn’t be our only response.

Few phenomena are as baffling as pandemics.

Human behavior, for all its irrationality, can be mapped into distinct patterns. We have centuries of historical texts and the work of esteemed psychologists to thank for that.

But viral microbes don’t show such predictability. And trying to forecast their attack has proven futile.

The COVID pandemic has punctuated this fact. Despite our best efforts, we’ve found ourselves one step behind at every turn.

At first, we weren’t sure how to protect ourselves from the virus. We focused on washing our hands and disinfecting surfaces, even though those efforts proved to have little effect in warding off the malady.

Gradually, we started to get the upper hand. Namely, we built strategies for preventing mass exposure to the bug.

We shifted many of our jobs away from offices. We wore face masks to the grocery store. We developed vaccines against the virus in record time and made progress with antiviral pills.

These efforts helped us approach pre-pandemic normalcy. With their assistance, we started to reopen our doors, and to restore the traditions the virus had stolen from us.

But just as the finish line seemed in sight, new variants of the virus appeared. Their presence evaded many of the defenses we’d built, halting our progress.

This reality hit hard for many of us. After getting a taste of semi-normalcy, this jolt back to the early days of the pandemic crushed our resolve. It’s led us to think that onward and upward was nothing more than a mirage.

I know this as well as anyone.

In the early days of the pandemic, I isolated myself from the world. I restricted my movements to a five-mile radius of my home for three months, only venturing outside to exercise, take a stroll, or shop for essentials. It was a demoralizing experience, even for an introvert like me.

In the many months since that period, I’ve worked relentlessly on getting back what I’d lost. I’ve reconnected with friends and family, returned to restaurants, and resumed traveling. I’ve done all this with the understanding that we were turning the corner in the pandemic, and that I’d have much more protection against the virus.

But the variants provided a brutal reality check. It turns out I was much less protected from infection than I’d hoped. And after all that time propelling ahead, the whiplash of this realization hit me hard.

I found my resiliency at its limits, and I was left frustrated at the situation at hand. But I turned my anger inwards as well, chastising myself for not anticipating such setbacks in the first place.

My experience likely wasn’t singular. I’m sure there were others out there kicking themselves for not seeing this setback coming.

But are those who wallow in regret realistic in their expectations?

Protection.

It’s the fundamental human condition.

Protection is the reason we lock our doors. Protection is the reason we put on a coat when it’s cold. Protection is the reason we curl into a ball when facing trauma.

Whiplash violates the laws of protection. It strikes with brutal efficiency, reminding us how vulnerable we really are.

We loathe that feeling of exposure. So, we play Monday Morning Quarterback, thinking about how we could have avoided the situation.

This is toxic.

For the more we dwell in the past, the less prepared we are for the future. The next bout of whiplash will jolt us back. And the one after that. And the one after that.

It’s far better to take the approach my advisor espoused. To boldly look to the future — but with a twist.

That twist is to consider all possibilities. To prepare for the best-case scenario but anticipate setbacks.

Such an approach allows us to hedge our bets. It leaves us less prone to the effects of whiplash. And it strengthens our resolve.

In an unpredictable world, that’s the best we can ask for. It’s time that we ask it over ourselves.