I've been thinking a lot lately about this little old lady who lived in my neighborhood in Chicago. It was on this street lined with interesting old brownstones with cool little apartments. She lived in a garden level apartment (for those who don't know, this essentially means street level apartment) From what I understand she was a florist so she didn't make a ton of money and sometimes struggled to make ends meet but had been scraping by, renting the place for like 20 years. I'm not really much of a "flower" guy, but the flowers and plants she had on her little like 6 foot by 6 foot patio/stoop were fuckin awesome. Seems like she planted them so there was almost always something in bloom. Most of the buildings in the neighborhood had a flower pot or two out front, but hers were pretty impressive. I was fresh out of college and had been renting in the neighborhood for about 3 years before she passed away. After she was gone it was impossible not to notice that the new people who moved in had no plants. Over the next few years all of the buildings stopped putting flowers out on their stoops, the burnt out porch lights were no longer being changed, etc... I don't want to imply the neighborhood fell apart, it was a nice neighborhood, it was just that the neighborhood was noticeably less pretty, the details were missing. I'm totally aware that I'm making a leap here, but after talking to some neighbors, I truly believe her love for flowers and her beautiful little garden had a ripple effect, 2nd and 3rd order effects that none of us really understood until she was gone. That her little garden inspired other renters to add their own little piece to the neighborhood. I don't know how we measure and reward someone like her, how we measure someone who's little daily actions cause positive ripple effects, but fuck I really wish we knew how.
I think we'll always measure with numbers, be governed by numbers, but more and more I find myself hoping we get better at it--that we figure out better metrics by which to measure success and quality of life--to notice the ways things ripple out. Lately every time I hear someone degrading someone else because that person isn't rich enough or educated enough, her little garden pops into my head.
Just to be clear, I recognize that markets often do a good job of measuring certain things, but lately it feels like our current iteration of measurements, if we really wanted to, we could maybe make them better.
Some things shouldn't be measured, or be about any external validation. I'm sure that old lady wasn't doing it for recognition or reward, but just because she felt it the right thing to do. A sense of personal or civic pride if you like, or wanting to make her little bit of the world that bit nicer, for everyone.
It's something we mostly forgot. Parks and gardens are maintained at lowest, most efficient cost; businesses build the cheapest box building planning laws let them; people couldn't care less about much of anything beyond them and theirs. Everywhere you look things are that much more dull and uninteresting, or messy and rubbish strewn than they once were. I suspect it was an intended consequence of the Thatcher/Reagan years. It's certainly removed a lot of the humanity.
I remember two stories on HN - one about a guy somewhere near NY, who is quietly digitizing tons of old newspapers. It is all available on his website for free. Another about a couple who are collecting seeds, I think.
Yet, do these stories and the one above contradict the parent's Narrative around Reagan/Thatcher? They are examples of altruistic individualism- removing the "materialistic" part but not returning the "collectivist" part.
The difference, of course, is these sorts of things are now exceptional enough to be newsworthy. There will probably always be examples. For my parent's generation it was far more just the usual way of things as so many were involved.
Erk, big question! The Reagan/US experience was different in the details, but broadly followed the same road and rationale. I'll cover the UK case as I live here. It's a huge topic, so I've probably summarised this poorly...
Thatcherism ushered in a widespread, total belief in materialistic individualism. Until the recession, anyway.
Not just the cliched Harry Enfield loadsamoney, or for US readers Gordon Gekko "greed is good" in Wall Street, and the rise of the yuppie, but the abolition of the majority of the post-war consensus. Thatcher herself seemed to have a genuine, but strange, belief that this would turn us all out like the little old lady mentioned in the GP. We'd have massive amounts of civic and social pride, whilst inhabiting a society where everything has been shaped around the individual alone, with competition for everything. Others in government were far more straightforward about the intended result.
Anything collective was bad. The welfare state, public housing, public ownership, public amenities were bad, as a matter of dogma. Even when they were good. That included tiny things like the council employing park keepers and gardeners, or big like providing enough public housing. You could buy your public housing, but the local council was not allowed to build a replacement or spend the proceeds on buying a replacement. Post-war, through the seventies, both political parties agreed, and even competed, to provide adequate public housing, public facilities, adequate regulation, an adequate safety net etc.
There was plenty wrong with the UK in the 70s, and some of the Thatcher changes were necessary. Just some. Unions were certainly overly powerful. Others, from the long term perspective have been remarkably damaging. It didn't have to be so brutal. It didn't have to go from safety net to now where we have a punitive, vindictive welfare system intended to punish and stigmatise. After 40 years of neoliberal policies to end state control and direction, local government is more centrally funded and controlled than it's ever been.
We ended up with individual insurance and pension schemes. Invest in the wrong scheme? Tough shit. The employer was divested of any responsibility to provide for their workers with a collective scheme. Not just pensions, but connections to the community, fair wages, wage differentials, job security. Billions in proceeds from oil or privatisations? Piss them away in tax cuts. Norway built a national investment scheme that's worth hundreds of thousands for each citizen. Collectivism is always bad.
As so often is the case, the right answer was somewhere between the two extremes.
Maybe the erosion of the safety net and the great disconnect between productivity increases and increases in wages?
People who were not independently wealthy are not able to afford to do anything with their time that doesn't earn them money. People are less able to take risks, more apt to settle for less so long as less is stable and safer.
There is also a chilling effect on communities as everyone scrambles to "get theirs" when these support systems have their legs kicked out from under them.
It was an explicit policy goal of both Reagan and Thatcher to destroy the power of organised labour, and along the way all sorts of small community activities got swept away. Working mens' clubs, bands, and so on. Providing beautiful flower views for the neighbourhood with no commercial motive is "socialism", or something like that.
Of course, it was never directly stated like that, and conservatives continue to occasionally extol voluntarism. But they don't practice it or celebrate its values among themselves. The people celebrated in the post-80s society are those who can take the most, not those who give the most.
There's also possibly a gendered component to this; the hidden army of little old ladies and stay-at-home mums who overwhelmingly organise "community" activities. The 80s made it a lot harder to be a non working parent, so the mums went out to work and the children were left with the grandmothers.
Let's not forget the famous, defining, Thatcher speech:
"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation"..."There is no such thing as society." -- https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
Given the chaos of the 70s, this argument had a strong point. However, the effect of saying the government no longer had an obligation to house people had the obvious effect:
"“Will the Prime Minister accept,” he demanded, “That, 10 years ago, in 1979, there were 2,750 households in temporary accommodation in London; that the current figure is over 25,000 and that a further 2,000 people are sleeping on the streets?" -- Jeremy Corbyn MP, May 8 1990.
I think NeedMoreTea is pointing to the practice of looking at the numbers and optimizing as much profit as we can out of them, which tends to remove or not account for the human element. It's easy to do a quick glance of the balance sheet and see that the money and hours spent on gardening are a drain on the family budget. A similar thing can happen for government budgets. After all, you don't need flowers to survive, nor do you need many government programs to maintain a country.
Just look into the suicide rates stemming from Universal Credit and PIP, and the sheer number of incorrectly rejected claims. Or the growth of food banks and homelessness.
Numbers aren't the problem per se. We don't tend to have great numbers for matters of the human heart. We can count the number of steps we took in the last day, but how do we count the wellbeing we imparted on those around us?
Something like 2 years ago, a friend of my flat mate came to visit from her home country. She is a very energic person and transmits happiness, we would be just having a drink and talking and suddenly she would get up and start dancing, no reasons needed, "I just feel like it".
We were talking avout drawing and I suggested her to draw something nice for us, told her that if she did I would proudly stick it on the outside part of our flat door so other neighbors could see it.
And boy did they love it. Not because the drawing was beautiful per se, but because of the good idea of bringing some colorful touches to a boring and standard common corridor. Also, most of my neighbors have kids, so they started making their own drawings and sticking them on their doors.
Fast forward to present day. Drawings change every so often, the children draw new pieces wishing Merry Christmas, or the arrival of the Spring. We at home also encourage our visitors to draw something, most are shy about it because "they don't know how to draw" without realizing the expectations are those of a 3-years old kid :-)
Such an inocuous idea has had a very positive impact on a very little aspect of our lives in this particular building. Also the first impressions from new people coming to the place are always fun to see.
We need less robotic-like number optimizations in our lifes, and more of the good-old "do as you feel like" (even if it's not optimum or maximizes some metric)
I suspect we are a fairly long way from measuring that. And even when we do manage to measure that positive ripple effect, do you want to?
The reality is, numbers are used for accounting. If we start keeping an accounting of small actions such as that, what freedom will we have?
People being mean, nice, depressed, etc. they are what make is human. By accounting for the little things we’d incentivize uniform behavior and lose all diversity of any kind.
I too think on those little things a lot. I recently had a family member move away, and since then every family get together is just flat in comparison. I think in a small way, those flowers did the same to the neighborhood.
Sometimes I think it’s enough to say, we lost something when they left. Or gained something when they were here. Maybe that’s enough of a quantified “number”.
> And even when we do manage to measure that positive ripple effect, do you want to?
> The reality is, numbers are used for accounting. If we start keeping an accounting of small actions such as that...
This is a really good point. I think your point fits well with a sibling comment to yours, Gibbon1 pointed out something called The McNamara Fallacy which says we often trick ourselves into believing that the most important things are those which we can measure quantitatively, that they must be more important if only because they are measurable.
I do still wish we were better - on a level above The Individual - at recognizing the ways we add value to one another's lives. I do feel like, on a societal and systems level we're missing out on a lot of the little ways we make each other's lives more colorful, the ripples or 2nd and 3rd order effects. Taken as a whole, all of these little value-adds, everything from the artist, a neighbor's little garden, to the guy on my team who writes hilariously snarky code comments, I think these things probably add-up and affect us more than we realize.
Maybe we need to be better at teaching from a young age to notice those little ripples? Anyway, thanks for your comment, it helped me see it differently.
It is a catch 22. think all I want as a technologist, indirectly the reason to measure to see that I am going in the right direction, hoping the products I build help people create more of above type of interactions between us. Years ago when I was reading about this, I have come to conclusion that these places are what Hakim Bey called "temporary autonomous zones" and I accept them as just experiences to be lived rather than quantified.
You seem to be hedging and I'm not sure why. Your core point is one that every good engineer should understand: not all important things can be practically measured. We've all watched metrics or standards defined with the best of intentions driven into the ground by a narrow-minded focus on the wrong numbers. Why should we be surprised that this is true in economics or politics or philosophy?
Increasingly I think that there are many things that measurement simply doesn't apply to. That our industrial and post industrial society has conditioned us to believe that the applicability of statistics to complex but still mass produced items can be extended to humans and social situations in a simple way.
But actually, it can't. Humans are all very different, calculus's of human affairs must deal with penalty functions full of infinities of loss.
> I don't know how we measure and reward someone like her, how we measure someone who's little daily actions cause positive ripple effects, but fuck I really wish we knew how.
We do know how. It's called civic engagement. We try to teach it to our children in organizations like the Boy / Girl Scouts, which gamify personal development and social contribution in the form of badges. As adults, civic engagement is driven by communal recognition and appreciation, in the form of honorary plaques presented at fund-raising banquets in front of friends and neighbors. But this has been in decline, for two underlying reasons.
The first and biggest reason is the breakdown of community and communal institutions. In rural areas, communal institutions have been squeezed by population decline, as people have left for cities in search of economic opportunity. People working multiple jobs to make ends meet don't have the time or energy to volunteer in their communities. In cities, the failure of municipal planners to put enough housing on the market for people to buy affordable apartments has driven people into the rental market, which prevents people from putting down roots and committing to their communities. If you look at the Bay Area, most 20-somethings look around and know in the back of their minds that they are going to need to move away to start a family. Why would you put your heart and soul into an urban garden if you're not going to be around to enjoy the fruits of your labors?
The second reason is a fearful overreaction. Civic engagement is a spectrum, and on the extreme end you find nativism and xenophobia. The social stability required to promote civic engagement means that such civically-minded organizations tend to be led by socially conservative people, and if left unchecked, these organizations can be unwelcoming. But there's no reason why civic volunteering needs to be socially conservative, and indeed, civic volunteering is made better when it's more welcoming and inclusive. Unfortunately, many people have knee-jerk reactions and throw out the baby with the bathwater, and reject these kinds of organizations on principle, but many such people would be put at ease by strong community leadership that fostered an inclusive environment for them.
Ultimately, it takes strong community leaders to give civic expression room to take root, grow, and stay inclusive over time. So the real question isn't how can we promote civic engagement - it's why don't we have strong local leadership?
Speaking of knee-jerk, you should note social conservatives tend to be the bedrock of organisations for a reason. While I love a good ol bashing of yesterdays politics, placing blame on people who think differently to you is the exact thing you are complaining about.
You don’t need to capture such things with numbers. What’s needed is neighborly love... if you see her struggling (financially, physically, emotionally, etc), then help her and encourage the other neighbors to do so as well. Let her know she’s appreciated. Encourage each other.
I think this one aspect of what the Chinese are trying to build with their social credit system. Not to say this is a good idea, I think there is no way to implement something like this fairly, but I know they give social score for neighborhood improvements under some narrowly defined criteria.
Given extensive enough monitoring and ML wouldn't it be possible to monitor the emotions of the citizens in a neighborhood and reward people who positively impact their neighbors?
No, because you get what you measure. If there are concrete rewards attached, people will immediately try to game the system. You can ameliorate this somewhat by being careful what you measure, but you'll still wind up with a metrics-driven tick-the-boxes response rather than an organic result driven by individual human motivations.
I think we'll always measure with numbers, be governed by numbers, but more and more I find myself hoping we get better at it--that we figure out better metrics by which to measure success and quality of life--to notice the ways things ripple out. Lately every time I hear someone degrading someone else because that person isn't rich enough or educated enough, her little garden pops into my head.
Just to be clear, I recognize that markets often do a good job of measuring certain things, but lately it feels like our current iteration of measurements, if we really wanted to, we could maybe make them better.