Why Context, Reputation, and Perception Matter, Presidential Edition

Here's an unpopular opinion, at least among Democrats currently: President Trump has every right to not concede the election, and to pursue any legal avenues he wants to ensure that any issues with the vote are corrected (short of using the DOJ to do so, which would have the potential effect of influencing the outcome).

So, then, why are more moderate people not supportive of his efforts to do so?

Imagine, if you will, a hypothetical world in which Trump is a reasonable, well balanced, well spoken individual, with a track record of honesty and careful consideration of all perspectives (you may need to imagine someone other than Trump, as this is about as far afield of reality as one could imagine). Let's imagine, the day after the election, after not having claimed victory in an absurdly ridiculous rambling press conference filled with lies (remember, in this hypothetical, Trump is not himself), you give a speech something akin to this:

This is proving to be a very close election, and we want to ensure that all votes are counted, and all checks are conducted, before we conclude the winner. We understand that the news media, in their pursuit of informing the American people as quickly as possible, may "call" the election one way or the other before this time, but please understand that their calls are not the official results, and given how close the result appears to be, we want to make sure we allow all appropriate time for the officials to do their job.

The American people can rest assured that I will accept the results of the election, once they are known and certified, and that there will be a peaceful and orderly transition of power if applicable. In the interim, we will coordinate and share data with the Biden team, so that in the event that he is certified as the President Elect, there will be no delay in the transition process. We ask that everyone have patience, and allow the election officials and courts to do their jobs, and understand that media calls are not the same as certified results. We will do everything possible to ensure the integrity of the election results, and to ensure that the will of the American people is reflected in their government.

Now, I'd guess that type of speech/message would be well-received (in that context), and people would understand the intent, and accept that approach. The thing is, though, that's basically exactly the same thing Trump is doing, ignoring all the peripheral rhetoric and actions. So why is everyone (outside of the right-wing bubble) so convinced that Trump's position is utterly ridiculous and tantamount to an attempted coup, and that he should obviously concede the election?

I contend that the answer to that question is context: the combination or reputation, perception, and general context related to the person involved. If Trump was the type of person as hypothesized above, and phased his position as above, I don't think the majority of people would have an issue with it, Democrat or otherwise. But Trump is not that person; in fact, he's about as far away from that person as is conceivable, in word and in deed. As a result, his actions appear as an attempted coup, and engender fierce push-back, even though the core proposition might be reasonable.

Context, reputation, and perception matter. Trump is perceived as an authoritarian fascist who will attempt to hold on to power at all costs, and his refusal to accept the result of the election are simply reinforcing that perception.

The Importance of Understanding Gray Area

I have a frequent debate with a person at work, who shall remain nameless, about whether or not an expression of a percentage chance of an outcome has any validity. That is, his opinion is that it has no value for someone to opine that they believe an event has a certain percentage chance of occurring; in his mind, this is a non-statement, and the only valid expression of this form is a binary opinion: yes or no. In contrast, I think it's perfectly valid to say you think an event has a percentage chance of happening; that is, I think that statement has meaning.

(You may think his opinion is absurd, as I do, or that my opinion is absurd; I'm not going to debate the merits of either per se. Rather, I'm going to write about why I think the ability to understand my perspective is important, in the broader sense.)

The main reason he holds this opinion, I believe, is that you cannot "guess check" an opinion on an outcome which is expressed as a percentage chance. That is, it makes it impossible to claim someone was right or wrong; they can still assert they were correct in their judgement of relative chance, no matter the eventual outcome. This is what leads to his conclusion that it's a non-statement: if you cannot later check the validity of the prediction, then in his mind, the prediction has no value whatsoever.

Obviously, I think that's dumb and wrong. As a simple counter-example, I use weather predictions to plan activities, despite the fact that they are typically expressed as percentage chances, and I think the percentage-based predictions still have lots of value. Moreover, I think a binary prediction in most similar contexts would have vastly less value than a probabilistic one: I'm far more interested in the chance of rain, for example, than the ability to potentially ridicule the weather person for being wrong on a binary prediction.

However, in the broader sense, I think this is also somewhat indicative of a societal issue at large. Specifically, there's a trend in society to place everything into binary buckets: police are good or bad, you're either a Republican or a Democrat, "silence is violence", etc. This bifurcation of opinion on societal issues is not good for the country, and in all likelihood, does not represent the typical opinions of most American people, if not pressed for a binary view on a topic. Most people have nuanced views on topics, and the grouping of those views into binary groups tends to sacrifice most of the nuance of opinion.

Side-note: It's entirely possible that the forceful bifurcation of viewpoints in the US is a result, at least in part, of purposeful societal attacks by foreign powers, in an efforts to destabilize the country by creating internal strife. There is lots of evidence of this type of activity on social media, for example, especially with respect to politics. To the extent that these efforts have been purposeful, I'd say they have been very effective to-date.

I think people should be careful when grouping themselves and others into pre-defined, often binary groups. It's not remotely correct, for example, to assert that if someone is not vocally and visibly calling for defunding of the police, that they support the police using violence against innocent civilians. In a similar vein, if someone isn't chanting "Black Lives Matter" along with the rest of an angry mob, that doesn't mean they are a de facto racist white supremacist. Believe it or not, there are gray areas, nuanced opinions, and reasonable reasons for people to not be in the binary groups, just as there is value to expressing that you think something has a percentage chance of coming to pass.

That's my opinion, anyway.

On Housing, and the Upcoming Rental Issue

I want to write a bit about what I perceive as issues with the housing market in the US, but first a hot and very controversial take: rent should be automatically cancelled for renters in months where they have a significant and documented financial hardship. I'll let that simmer, and get back to it; first, though, what's wrong with the housing market.

Housing, like food, water, and basic medical care (and clothing, to a lesser extent) is in most cases a necessity of life in a modern society. You need access to food and water to live, clothing and shelter to protect from the elements, and basic medical care for ailments which would otherwise dramatically shorten the general societal life expectancy (eg: stopping bleeding, setting bones, antibiotics, etc.). These could be considered the "basic essentials" of a modern civilized society, and most countries have figured out ways to make each of them generally available to everyone. This is not without cost, though, and that's what I'm going to be primarily concerned with here.

Housing, in particular, is very expensive in the US. In many areas, the cost of housing vastly exceeds the cost of production of housing, so much so that governments have gone to extraordinary lengths to attempt to "compensate" for this. Rent control, affordable housing measures, housing projects, housing subsidies, and various temporary measures like eviction moratoriums are all examples of government programs intended to work around, in some capacity, this basic societal issue. As with other government efforts, results vary, although in most cases there are significant drawbacks or compromises inherent in each program (from the somewhat ubiquitous "wealth redistribution" effects, to the effective destruction of neighborhoods through heavy-handed demographic manipulation). It would be nice, conceptually, if these programs were not perceived as necessary evils.

So what would that take? To answer that question, we need to understand what the root of the issue is.

To that end, first we must understand if there is enough housing to go around in general, and if the supply can keep pace with the demand. In the US at least, that answer seems to be "yes"; that is, there is both enough current capacity to house everyone, and enough manufacturing capacity to keep up with changes in population (this is helped by the fact that the US is near or below the replacement rate in terms of population growth, due to the country's extreme anti-children economic policies). So basic organic supply is covered.

Next, we need to understand why supply is artificially constrained, if the basic supply is sufficient, but housing is not generally accessible. For this, it's informative to consider the people who own the housing in the US, and why. Broadly speaking, there are two types of residential property owners: people who own and occupy a residence, and people who own a property for investment purposes. The latter group will rent out the properties to people who cannot, or choose not to, purchase a property, and attempt to profit from this passive investment over the long term.

Unfortunately, housing in the US is economically advantaged in terms of an investment, relative to other passive investment options. This has the effect that general investors compete with would-be residents for control of the assets, thereby driving the price higher. Optimally this would not be the case: monopolizing a societally critical asset for profit motive should be discouraged by governmental policy, not encouraged; that's one of many idiotic government policies, of course. There are many ways to fix that, but given the general corrupt and malicious nature of politicians, none of those improvements seem particularly likely.

However, there might be another way to encourage more private ownership of residential property, independent of fixing the asinine profit motives inherent in the current laws, which brings us back to my hot take. If we allow a certain "blanket" rent avoidance circumstance, it would have two immediate effects in the market. First, it would cause landlords to hedge against this scenario, being more selective with tenants and charging higher rent. Second, it would make long-term property holding as an investment more risky, per this possibility. Both of these factors would depress the value of properties as investment assets, relative to properties as owner-occupied units. That effect seems unequivocally a good thing.

That doesn't solve the whole problem, of course, and ignores the fact that like fixing the perverse economic incentives to monopolize property for investment, enacting such a change would involve politicians doing something beneficial for the society (which, admittedly, is very unlikely). We would still, for example, need "baseline" housing for people who would have no expectation of being able to ever pay for such. That said, I think such a change would go a long way toward helping address the issue of affordable housing, at zero cost to taxpayers, and with more efficacy that every other government scheme attempted or ongoing to-date.

That's my opinion.