Keep Running: A Graduation Speech for the Class of 2020

Keep Running: A Graduation Speech for the Class of 2020

Graduation was canceled, but that means that we have to be even more resilient. Below is the speech I prepared for a special celebration of one.

Good afternoon honored guests, esteemed faculty, parents, and the amazing graduating class of 2020. Before I begin my speech, we should note all who could not be here today through illness, bad Wi-Fi, or untimely passing. We love them and miss them dearly. However, we realize that they are all here with us in spirit on this joyous day.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude for having been chosen to speak on such a momentous occasion. Of all the members of the class of 2020 I can imagine that there are many who might be as qualified than I am or perhaps more so. But I was chosen. So, I get to tell my story and give my advice.

In West Virginia High School Track and Field, there is an event called the 300 intermediate hurdles. The runners start a quarter of the way around the track, and all come towards the same finish line that is used for all events. The hurdles are high, but not that high. I just googled this while writing and it seems that they are 36 inches. Three feet doesn’t seem that daunting, but you’re running at full speed and you have to clear them and not lose your stride. If you find yourself jumping hurdles, you’re doing it wrong. The key is to kick with your leading leg and then snap your hip over with your trailing leg so you’re basically a real big bounding step.

I was in track for three years, and if you can believe it from looking at me was a fairly successful sprinter given the context of school size and state. During my track career, I think I participated in every possible event except for long jump and the distance races. This happened because my coach, Harrison County Sports legend Ted Robinette, god rest his soul, would say “MIHELIC! You’re running the 400 relay” when I had never practiced the 400 relay and the thing I really wanted do was run my 20 second event and then go flirt with girls and smoke cigarettes. You know, the things a track athlete does.

One meet Coach Robinette did that thing, asking me what I thought of the 300 hurdles and I told him they were high and the race was longer than I wanted to run and he told me I was running the 300 and that’s fine I’ll be ok since I ran the shuttle hurdles I’ll know what to do. Now, here’s where I point out the intermediate hurdles are six inches higher and I’m not that tall.

Class of 2020, let me tell you there is nothing like the tension and anticipation you feel when you’re in the starting blocks coiled and ready for the pistol to go and then you start thinking if its ever coming and sometimes you get caught off guard. But the starting for the 300 is away from everyone, on the back straightaway where the first handoff zone for the 4 x 100 relay is so you’re all alone and your teammates on the bleachers are flirting with girls anyway and it’s just you and the lane and the hurdles. It’s a lot like right now, here.

The gun goes off and you set off at a full sprint like you know how to do and I, this specific time, started to realize I had no plan. If you do the hurdles a lot, you know how many steps to take, you know how many times you breathe during the race and you have a plan. I didn’t have a plan. I ran ran ran, then hopped. Then I did it again. I was in the lead. I was on one of the outer lanes, so you feel like you’re in the lead, but we were coming up to the last turn and I started getting a bit cocky. I had this. I was going to win the heat. Those girls will be impressed.

I was rounding that turn and then I felt another feeling that is unmatchable, that of your body failing you. I came up on one of the last hurdles, right before the home stretch. I kicked my front leg and that back leg just said no. Instead of clearing that hurdle and winning that heat, my foot hit clear in the center of the crosspiece of the hurdle.

And we’re going to put a pin in that right there. Because this is a graduation speech, it is clearly not just an excuse to talk about the highlights of my sporting life which is half a lifetime ago now. NO! this is a didactic frame because we’re going to talk about failure.

I have failed in many ways, many times. I was unemployed for two years, each week reaching out to try to find a job, any job. I got engaged at way too young an age to a great person but who I was not the right person for. Twice I ran for election and lost. Twice I was demoted at work. Twice I was escorted home by the police. Once they didn’t take me home.

I applied to MFA programs in 2004 all out of state because I wanted to leave West Virginia and find greener pastures, but I didn’t get in anywhere, so I was in West Virginia for another year. I had all sorts of crushes go unrequited, and some of those people I even told about my crush and they said we’re better friends. The specific person I’m thinking of right here was right since at the time I was waving a whole army’s worth of red flags (Which makes sense since I just told you about them in the last paragraph there). Just this year I applied to Harvard and Harvard said we don’t want you here. I flew to LA to be on Jeopardy only to be reminded now that when I was on the television, I got a question about Rocky Balboa “wrong”.

Failure can define you if you let it define you. If you allow it to be the final act in your story. But what it can also be is a teacher. What you learn through failure is the humility to know where your weaknesses are, and where you can improve. If you’re failing at something — if you’re trying for the first time or you’re failing at something you though you have mastered, every mistake is a teacher. True wisdom is being able to find those moments and have the bravery to admit to yourself that you have failed this time. You are not a failure. This resilience is a mark of character that you can learn through adversity. The most interesting person has a lot of scars. If you’ve never failed, you don’t know who you are.

I’m going to take this pin back out now.

I kicked that hurdle and it fell over and I went tumbling after. I was splayed out on the track on the part of the track that is right in front of the main bleachers where everyone was sitting. And I got up. And I started running towards the finish line. There were two more hurdles. I didn’t try the fancy hurdle step, but instead did the inelegant little hop over the last two and finished.

I didn’t come in first. But I tell you what. I didn’t fucking come in last either.

It is a lesson I learned from my father a long time ago but never really understood until I got older: “Suck it up and drive on”.

And here is where I stop for a second and transition. My father was a huge part of helping me develop intellectually. I feel his absence today. He set an example in showing what can be achieved and the hard work it takes to keep developing your knowledge, like watching him study hard when he had to take the boards again. He and my mom encouraged me by letting me explore my interests. They didn’t work against me when I decided I wanted to study poetry nor did they kick me out too often when I wanted to stay inside reading the encyclopedia or make me go to bed when I was staying up late just to finish one more chapter.

My parents were my first and best teachers, but I have had the good fortune to have great teachers at every level. From Pat Clayton in elementary school to Karen Morgan and Mary Anne Ferris in high school to Doctor P and Jim Harms and Mark Brazitis and Greg Eiselein and Tim Dayton and Christina Hauck and Joe Stachnick beyond that, I have been fortunate to find guides who have helped me develop by sharing their knowledge. I have found two more mentors here at Roosevelt, and the sadness I have in leaving the school is tempered with the knowledge that Professors Langer and Ziliak are now a part of my life and we live in parallel. Roosevelt’s economic department has been an intellectual home for me like no other. I have been challenged and grown academically and personally. Here I want to note all my peers who I was fortunate to work with, learning and growing together. I have many friends I have made through my schooling, but meeting Anita takes the cake. There’s not enough praise I can give her as all human languages are too constrained in the face of her greatness. She is the most important person in my life. She makes me laugh and she makes me want to be a better person, and with her I know I can do anything.

I know that because I have been through a lot and have picked myself off the ground and kept running. Those mistakes and how you approach them are what define you. When you fall, will you get back up?

And class of 2020, that’s what I have to share with you. This year is not a good year to be graduating. Many of us are trying to start our lives or at the very least a new chapter. There are a lot of scary things out there from a virus to a pandemic to Murder Hornets and near-earth asteroids. We cannot live in fear but learn from our mistakes and know that when we fall down, the best thing we can do is pop back up and keep running.

Thank you, and good luck.

Budgeting Assumptions in the Time of COVID-19

So normally, high level you look at what your activity was last year and you adjust that based on what you think is coming in the next year taking into consideration your contracts and other outside information.

You do the same with your expenses and look at what the activity is expected to be and you multiply that by your wages and overhead and add in your salaried employees and your other fixed and variable costs and tie it all together and you have a budget.

The problem this year is the unknown and the assumptions you make. I have spent a chunk of today trying to find what other kinds of organizations are looking at in terms of hits in their activity. I cannot find anything that is a direct parallel to our situation. Universities are game planning for this to hit their bottom line through 2022. Some public health people are saying that we are looking at optimistically a vaccine at the end of 2021. The Federal response has a lot to be asked for in terms of both health and economically. Economists range from a roaring recovery this fall and winter as pent up demand to a pessimistic slow growth back to where we were in January, made harder because of so much capacity loss in the service sector – loss exacerbated the longer we have this semi-shutdown situation.

There is no consensus, but we need to make realistic assumptions about our income and expenses. Because often the budget comes down to those two numbers and the difference between them. We end up with many estimates under uncertainty coming up with a bottom line. Often an error in one estimate is not additive, it is washed by an error of similar magnitude but an opposite sign so we can get pretty close to realty – it is pretty amazing in a normal year.

Unfortunately, it is not a normal year. Thus, there are two sorts of things in my head as we think on budgeting:

1) Baseline and projection: The lookback for what the future looks like cannot really be annualizing the last financials’ income and expense. We have the time period through February, and then March and April and not even done with April numbers. I hope to have some preliminary numbers through April as soon as possible. Then once we have our baseline there is more unknown about when we return to anything like “Normal” if we do at all. Which leads me to the next part.

2) Strategic concerns: How do you look at this crisis as an organization? Is it just as many people go home as possible and work from home for as long as we need to? Do we imagine this is just a pause from what the prior life was? Alternatively, does the crisis accelerate operational concerns we were worried about before. Are programs and business lines impacted disparately? Then we have to think that if activity is down, the overhead is supported by fewer hours. The longer this lasts the less sense it makes to support all the fixed costs from positions to real estate that is empty. None of these are fun considerations but ultimately important for the long-term success of the agency. How proactive are we strategically, and do we tie that into the budget?

These concerns on the short term are always present since the future is always unknowable; it is just even more in flux now. What it makes me think about is the futility of budgeting in a normal time. Those errors I spoke of above always exist. The hope is that they do wash and are not additive. For me, this is a conflict between two strains of my thinking. The idea of point estimates, looking at income and expenses and their difference is an accounting view. However, thinking of economics I would put measure of uncertainty around your final numbers. You might budget a gain or loss but have error bands. Unfortunately, that is not how it is done. This is not a problem unless your budget is used as a constraint and is not flexible, but that is a concern for later.

Macro Models, the Grapes of Wrath, and COVID-19

With the COVID-19 pandemic in the background, I have been trying to think of how all the social orders have been upset and what the post pandemic world will look like. In parallel, I have been revisiting some fiction I read when I was younger. The whole thing has made me more distractible and narrowed my bandwidth, but I started Piketty’s new book the week it came out, but the problem was that it coincided with the rise of the pandemic into full blow consciousness of something that was happening here. All of the pre-pandemic economic texts will also have to be evaluated with the lens of the pandemic. And we still are in the process of whatever it might be. It looked initially that there might be a sense of solidarity that grew out of this, but it soon has devolved that the best we can do is survive in spite of all those who would want us to not survive. We have to hope that the institutions are not too degraded.

It has made me more melancholy, and this is most likely not helped by my choices of fiction to get through all time at home. I started with Camus’s the Plague and have been reading the Grapes of Wrath. Camus brought to mind the need for survival, and how capricious and random that survival is. We can do what we can to limit our exposure, but the plague comes for us all. Steinbeck has in many ways felt more relevant than our Algerian friend since what the Grapes of Wrath is about first and foremost is the death of the American Dream in two different senses. In the first sense, it is about community and the sense of place you have by growing crops on your land and losing that to the banks and other forces out of your control but then it is also about the false Edens that we are presented with. California of the Joads was supposed to be a place that they would get to at the end of the road and be able to eat grapes falling at them from the left and right.

But there is no garden of Eden in California or elsewhere. What the Joads find is hundreds of thousands of people just like them, wanting to do work and everyone else in the same boat. The people thus fight for scraps and sheer survival. But we also see the attitude of the California natives, themselves only a generation or two removed from their own migration. They hate the Okies. They hate the Okies because their suffering shows in stark light the immiseration that their own lifestyles depend on to be supported. There’s hate for the outsiders going way back in America. Their poverty brings us disgust and hate because we do not admit to ourselves that we are very close to having that suffering brought upon us. Steinbeck has a character say that he is able to live on fifteen dollars a day, then what is stopping the bosses from offering an Okie twelve dollars an hour? The worry about the race to the bottom is real.
This does not happen in a vacuum though. We see it today not just in anti-Hispanic racism, but also the urge to open the economy quickly. It is not about the need to work, but the desire to increase the suffering of those seen as lesser. If you are poor or a minority or working class in the service industry, your humanity is discounted by overweight people in shiny late model Ford pick up trucks.

Photo by Max Andrey from Pexels

This is how it always has been. If you look at the models we have examined in this class, the implication is that individual militancy is destructive. In Grapes of Wrath, there is a scene where a labor contractor comes into an impromptu camping site where a lot of families are gathered on the edge of a town, colloquially called a “Hooverville”. The contractor tells the assembled mass that there is work and they should all come. One of the men stands up and asks to sigh a contract for promise of work and a set pay rate, asking for his basic rights as a man to be respected. Then the contractor goes back to the car and aa deputy sheriff comes out and is prepared to arrest the man who stood up for his rights if ever so briefly. Steinbeck wrote fiction but the scene made me think of all those scenes in labor history that do not make the pages of the history books that are taught in school – from Haymarket Square to Ludlow Colorado. What is a common denominator in these situations is that agents of the state either directly took part or were neutral as the Rockefeller or Carnegie sent thugs at workers who stood up for their rights?

The bias of the state towards capital was not just in the past. More recent research shows that you only get your way in the statehouse or in Washington if your preferences align with those of the rich. There may be direct influence because of need of politicians to keep their jobs thus the money spigot needs to stay turned on, or it may simply be affinity of those in power to either be of the upper classes or to want to be part of that crew sometime. We live in a democracy but are ruled by millionaires. Simultaneously to this, we have seen demonization of minorities to an ongoing propaganda campaign to make sure people do not look at structural factors but remain atomized. Success or failure in America is seen as a personal and moral judgment on the person and the rules of the game that are being played are ignored. As Warren Buffet has said, there is a class war in America, and his class is winning.

What is to be done then? We see in economic models from Goodwin, Beveridge, Marx, Robinson, and Blanchard that show individual militancy either will just increase inflation like Blanchard or will decrease the average rate of employment like Goodwin. Working as an individual or a singular bargaining unit or setting up a cooperative organization does not transcend the logic of capitalism because you are still working under these rules. Ultimately if we remain in thrall of capitalism as an economic system we need to go back to the words Marx and Engels wrote in 1848, “Workers of all lands unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”. The question then comes if we can accomplish all that, so we end up with the best solution in the game theoretic outcome Mehrling outlines, why is the working class happy to allow the existence of a capitalist class? It sets the stage for a move beyond these models and into a post capitalism.

The problem is in creating that worker unification. So many people of the working class have bought into the idea that the current system is the best of all possible systems, even if they are directly victimized by the system. It takes an act of political imagination to move beyond the existing ideology and into one where they can take power. In America it ranges from an allegiance to the state since the idea of America has been so successfully wedded to the existing economic structure, and combined with a distrust of all bureaucracies that the idea of a worker organization would just relocate all the bad things about the existing state. This is where I get back to my melancholy. The Okies in California were white Americans, and they were still able to be seen as an other. They were outsiders by creation, and by necessity as in crisis there was an us and a them – artificial identities that became very real. We are in the midst of our own crisis, one making the last one seem quaint. From the ashes of that one rose the Tea Party and Trumpism in America. I know what needs to be done, but I don’t know how to make it so, and that’s what frightens me, as destruction and hate seem to be much easier than solidarity and building a new world. This is especially true when the state is not neutral

Clearing the Mist: Models and Ideology

Models are deliberate simplification. You do not necessarily have one kind of labor and one kind of input and you have that input at a higher amount by applying a to b. But models do reduce the complexity and see how things look at the root of the relationship -- a truly radical examination.

Gary Langer, in “Capitalism, a Classical Model,” does just that, taking the simplest of models and building upon it to see what is “true” (1). He works through a simple model that is self-reproducing, the application of labor to corn to make more corn, a surplus over the amount. This surplus is what allows more growth to happen in the next period if your economy does not hit up against restraints, but those are not seen in the simple system.

The question with the surplus is what happens to the surplus at the end of the year. How is it divided. In our system we assume ownership of everything and the only thing to own is corn. How do you divide it? If the original supplier takes all the surplus and the worker is stuck with their subsistence due to the iron law of wages, everything is profit. But the amount of that profit then is defined by the production process so that you have profit but it will not become more profit on the same level of inputs unless you change how the agents in model go about making the new corn. Better technology allows increased profit, to the point where the level of technology in the production process is what determines the rate of profit (3). This surplus is all that is left over, no matter how big, so it is the shape of the pie to be fought over between the different agents in the model, those who do the owning and those who do the working.

Langer then moves from the basic outlines of his simple model. He remarks that there are stories that we tell ourselves about why certain tings happen, why profit is created and who does the hard work. He calls this ideological construction “Mystification” because it spreads a foggy mist (4) over the simple relationship between the workers and the owners in the simple capitalist relationship. Langer claims that the goal should be to see the world as it is without these mystifications (6).

The argument is further extended, noting that the rate of growth is limited by the rate of profit, since it is the surplus in its entirety that can be plowed back into production as a long as you have idle hands around. Any creation of consumables outside the simple corn production cycle lowers the amount of growth possible.

Langer continues by laying out the idea of the “Widow’s Cruse,” a thought experiment where we see that profit is not diminished by consumption. In this framework, the growth of the system based on the rate of growth of population is knocked out of alignment. If the owning class consumes luxuries and does not reinvest, then the growth of the system slows and thus wages shrink, meaning that there is always some cream at the top to skim off for the owning class since the working class must do more with less (7).

The author also works through some the implications of the system where the agents are conscious people. This system generates class differences and thus various levels of antagonism, so out of the profits and wages must come an overseer, managerial class to keep discipline among the workers to generate that surplus (8). This class interest also means that the owning class works together. In Langer’s model this means that the owners diversify their holdings so that they are protected from ill effects (8). This diversified ownership means that the owning class becomes not wholly interested in their individual holdings but their class and the continued replication of the system, an ownership that grants them power they are not afraid to yield to maintain their place in the system and the system itself (9).

This sense of class consciousness is where I want to transition to this idea of class consciousness as it arises as an implication from the simple model. I am supposed to be writing a reaction paper and it is hard when I have been taking in so much information about the coming and current crisis I cannot focus. It is interesting that we are looking at classical models right now. I have also been making my way through the Wealth of Nations concurrently to this class and it had me thinking about the absence of the state in Capital and in Smith. The classical model was based on the best knowledge of the time and in my recollection, it shows up more in terms of factory inspectors and mints and not as fully fledged economic actors. But now, we sit here and wait for the state to act but these models are about the conflict of the three great classes from Land Labor and Capital. Marx is more political in the Manifesto where the state is the organizing committee of the whole bourgeoise. The state itself is an edifice that interacts with these three interrelations but sits on top of and around as it sets the rules and sanctions for the relationships. It is also a huge source, with the media as an institution creating the mystification, the formal creation of ideology that says that the current order is the best and only natural order.

It is not though. The most recent headline I saw forecasting the decline in activity was a 30% unemployment with a 50% drop in activity. Why is it dropping? It is because labor is dropping out of the process. Capital without labor is dead, living like a nightmare on the minds of the living. If you do not have L in your production function, K does nothing. This matters now because we can see how integral the working class is to the economy. The hope is that it reinforces the class positions and multiple roles people have in the economy as workers and consumers and we can move past this crisis with a world that is built more for the working class of the world, who is the vast majority of the people. It takes a crisis sometimes to clear the mist.





 
Cited

Langer, Gary. “Capitalism: A Classical Model,” July 7, 2006

Very little of the gain, Most of the Pain: The Stock Market and the Real Economy

Something like 80% of all traded securities are owned by the top 10% of households by wealth. So it is galling when we see the stock market moves being used as a proxy for the real economy. And I get it - it's the only number we have in real time, and one theory of equity pricing says the market is omnipotent and it is just pricing in the future, so a drop is scary. (Though there is question about causation here, in a mutually reinforcing dialogue with many possible futures).

Anyway, the real frustrating thing is that there is an asymmetry with the real economy. Presidents don't usually have a lot of control over the economy. One thing that they can do is make corporations richer through tax giveaways, just like the rushed TCJA did. What we saw was an increase in the level, not really of growth. Some corporations were lauded for giving one time bonuses that accounted for fractions of the paper increase in the value of their company, but we didn't see widespread wage growth. In terms of the share of the pie, labor's share has been on a secular downward trend for a generation now. The huge problem is that drops trigger broad corporate austerity - so you look for costs to cut to maintain profitability in the short term because publicly traded companies only care about the short term.

So while I feel the impulse from the left to have some glee about the market dropping in order to discredit Trump, the real effects will not be felt in the portfolios of the rich, but retirees and the working classes who will get hit in real terms.

The Left at the Local Level: Aiding Access

One of the things I have been asking myself in the last five years as I have become more active in my community is “What does it mean to be a leftist at the local level?”.

You see, one of the things that makes me mad about policy discourse at the federal level is the household analogy, where we “need to tighten our belts” in times of trouble but that is the exact opposite response since it only exacerbates the times of trouble. The constraints at the higher level are not one of finances but resources that become idle just when politicians say it is time for austerity.

As much as I hate it at the federal level, that analogy is somewhat true at the local level, because we are constrained not just by the tax base, but state laws limit how much and how quickly holes can be filled. You can have referenda, but there are always competing priorities both within and between governmental units. 

The best thing you can do as a leftist, in my opinion, is to make sure that the institutions you have power over are run as efficiently as possible. Milwaukee kept electing socialists in the twentieth century because so called “sewer socialism” worked in maintaining efficient and equitable public services.

There is a next step though. When I was knocking doors for the referendum in 2016, the thing that I tried to emphasize was that the library was for more than books. The library is a community center, and it has evolved from the mass-literacy project spearheaded by Andrew Carnegie 100 years ago. As the role changes, the library has always been a center of information. That is why I am so excited for projects like this in Edwardsville.  Having a social worker on site can help people with coordination issues connecting with the state at different levels, and the library is by definition in your neighborhood. Navigating the social welfare system is time consuming and relies on much individual savvy from individuals, so I am glad to see this sort of thing expand – perhaps even into Brookfield. Creating access to social workers connects the most needy to programs that could help. The problem is making sure that people are aware of the program.

Bernie Sanders for President

As both a private citizen and someone chosen by the people of the Village of Brookfield to serve in government, I want to talk about who I am and why I support Bernie Sanders for both the nomination of the Democratic Party and as the President of the United States.


I think there are many policy reasons to support Bernie, from how he approaches the student debt crisis to healthcare. However, for me what drives this is that he is the most human and genuine person to be this close to the presidency in a long time. I does take a certain kind of narcissism to put yourself up for any office, let alone the highest in the land. What it seems to me from watching the man since before he became a senator is that he is driven by the ideal of making the world a more fair and equitable place. The idea behind Bernie’s policies is that no one should be left to suffer, and that no one should be left behind. 

I do have a personal stake in this. I have been insured for a long time, but there was a time when I was not. During that time, I had several medical emergencies I had to make quick choices about. When I was hit by a car, I declined treatment from the EMTs because I could not afford an ambulance ride. When I was passing a kidney stone, instead of going to the hospital I went to google to see what I should do. When I cut my hand I did go into the hospital and the bills I received for some stitches were the equivalent of two months of take home pay for me. 


I do not want to live in a country where people have the sort of fear and uncertainty I had in those moments. I would happily be taxed more as we transition to a system where everyone is covered. We can do it. We cover less of our people and we still pay out twice the GDP in health expenditures as other OECD countries do. With that, we still have worse health outcomes. Bernie’s health care plan is the only one of the Democratic candidates’ plans that remove the profit motive where it sits at every level of the transactional health delivery system we have in America today. Other plans who try to make a rhetorical move where you can keep your plan if you like it enables predatory health insurance companies and every other intermediary you are not even aware of to still exist and to keep creaming off profits.


There is more to Bernie than health care. He understands that the world is accelerating in how fast carbon emissions are affecting global weather patterns and has embraced the Green New Deal. He understands that the accumulation of economic and political power is detrimental to the nation if it wants to keep calling itself a democracy. He has known this for years, and he has fought for it for years. I hope that when you vote in your primary as a Democrat, and in the fall as an American, you choose Bernie as your next president.