We're all above average

Here are a few factoids that help explain the mid-term elections--and which the pundits haven't mentioned:

#1: Recently I heard about a study showing that the worst employees almost always rate themselves as superior ones, while the best tend to be very self-critical.

#2: If you watch American Idol, America's Got Talent, So You Think You Can Dance or similar programs, one thing they all have in common is the number of people who show up for auditions who have not just no talent--they have what you'd have to call "anti-talent"--yet who absolutely believe they're God's Gift to the Arts. Interviewed after the Simon Cowells have told them they suck massively, they stoutly maintain that the judge(s) know nothing.

#3: I visited Las Vegas recently. It's full of huge, fabulously expensive casinos, paid for by hordes of visitors, each of whom believes he will leave Las Vegas with his pockets stuffed with Benjamins.

#4: When I taught high school in a largely blue-collar semi-rural school district, I was stunned to discover that most of the students believed they already knew everything that was useful or necessary to know, and that the sole utility of school for them was as a place to socialize with their peers. As a corollary, I found that their belief in stuff like astrology was rampant and credulous, while any scientific claims were met by general scoffing and impossibly high standards of proof.

#4: Sociobiologists believe that human beings constantly overestimate their own skills and chances because it's good for the species for them to do so--even if such delusions have disastrous personal consequences. Warriors go into battle believing the bullet has the next guy's name on it. If they were realistic they'd run.

All this gets us an election in which people with no knowledge or understanding of economics all acted as if they were experts--that what they knew about balancing a checkbook was sufficient to know what the nation needed.

The Republicans' strategists understand mediocre people's intuitive overevaluation of their understanding, constantly telling them they knew more than those Democrat eggheads.

A perfect example is the balancing a checkbook analogy. In fact nearly every large business got there by going into debt. For that matter, nearly every middle class family is in debt because they bought their home on credit, not with cash.

Of course it's insane to go into debt to buy luxuries, or to gamble at the nearest Indian casino. But going into debt rationally is exactly what the word "investment" means. We buy a house on time--not too expensive a house, mind you--because it's a good investment. We shoudln't buy a luxury car on time because that's a bad investment.

So to say that government must always avoid deficit spending is a principle that doesn't work for business or for families.

And it's not what people mean, anyway. What they mean is this: "Deficits don't matter (to quote Vice President Cheney) as long as it's for things I like, spent on people I like. While no amount of money, deficit or not, should be spent on things or people I don't like. Democrats take money from white people and spend it on colored (black and Mexican) people and foreigners. Obamacare is free medical care for blacks and Mexicans taken from whites, so it's bad. The bailout was for rich people, who aren't as bad as blacks and Mexicans because they look like me, but it's still bad. Republicans are my tribe. Democrats are a different tribe trying to conquer my tribe, so they aren't just bad--they're enemies."

Good economists have conceded that all theories and predictions based on market and business leaders being rational fail. Economics only gains predictive power when it takes into account human foibles.

Ditto elections. So, as I keep saying, it's not about the economy. It's not not about the economy either, but almost nothing that was said by the Republicans and their minions and their masters was factual.

Go back to those business analogies. A big company gets in trouble. Its stock plummets. Sales tank. That happened at Chrysler, for example, largely because Chrysler cars look sexy but aren't reliable. In the crisis such a company should keep a tight lid on executive compensation and make sure to week out employee dead wood. But it also needs to spend--with borrowed money--on improving its product, and then on communicating how improved its products are. It can pay for that deficit spending when times are better. But if it doesn't spend then, times won't get better.

And then in good times it needs to reign in unnecessary spending (such as lavish manager compensation) so that it has a fat war chest for the bad times.

The Republicans have it exactly backwards--when the good times roll they spend like drunken sailors. Then in a bust they want to turn off the spigots.

That serves no one's interests but that of those who are insulated from suffering in the bad times--think CEOs with golden parachutes--and who have--and see--no need for a social safety net.

And the Republican Party and its faithful adherents always advocate policies that agree completely with the interests of the CEO/investor class. Purely by coincidence, of course.