Just Let Me -- G -- Indoctrinate You!

Thursday, May 14, 2015

It's Not Everything that can be counted counts and Not Everything that counts can be counted THING

Dear America,

"Not everything that can be counted counts,
Not everything that counts can be counted."

perhaps the most appropriate way to start this thing today is to quote Einstein, or is it really something William Bruce Cameron said? -- the world may never know .....or do we? 

Sure, it's a mystery.  And in the midst of a really good mystery, what do we do?  We dig in. Investigate.   Try to find the answer.

And then I found this:  quoteinvestigator.com

Of course, attributing the quote to Einstein is simply a no-brainer -- he's the more romantic one, am I right?  

He's the one 
we would all like to see
 to be the one 
who actually said what we see
...on the pages of quotable history.

And why?

For it drips wit

But if you are a prolific clicker to the links around here, then you would be one to be counted as one who counts; you would be included in the group who now knows that this axiom-maximus is most likely NOT an Einstein thing --  it's a William Bruce Cameron, the Sociologist, thing.

And yet, having said all this -- the real truth is, that all this talk about who said what has nothing to do with what I want to say today.  It's, dare I say, being a wee bit counterproductive on my part; my apologies, but not really.

"Not everything that can be counted counts,
Not everything that counts can be counted."

 Let's cut to the chase and chase to the cut, shall we?

In the most simplest of terms, and quite certainly fitting universally into every problem on the planet --  this catchy collision of compound counterintelligence  happens to be the answer to the question posed at the Georgetown University "Conversation on Poverty" just the other day.

So do we decide to throw even more money at the problem of prevailing poverty levels,..

OR

do we simply remind everyone of what the purest form of self-reliance looks like, sounds like, counts like?

And like the president said:

"And it seems to me that if coming out of this conversation we can have a both/and conversation rather than either/or conversation, then we’ll be making some progress."

Exactly.

By the way, that is verbatim; it comes right out of the "Remarks by the President in Conversation on Poverty at Georgetown University,"  transcript HERE.

I must add that the entire read is worthy.

The underlying ties to faith and community are remarkably present throughout the panel discussion and thus, for me being G, makes it far more palatable to finish the nearly fifteen pages of text. 

Here's a snippet giving you a little taste of what I'm talking about; it's when the Harvard professor Robert Putnam is speaking:

....And I don’t mean Bill Gates and some homeless person.  I mean people coming from college-educated homes -- their kids are doing better and better, and people coming from high school-educated homes, they’re kids aren’t.  And it’s not just that there’s this class gap, but a class gap on our watch -- I don’t mean just the President’s watch, but I mean on my generation’s watch -- that gap has grown.  
And you can see it in measures of family stability.  You can see it in measures of the investments that parents are able to make in their kids, the investments of money and the investments of time.  You can see it in the quality of schools kids go to.  You can see it in the character of the social and community support that kids -- rich kids and poor kids are getting from their communities.  Church attendance is a good example of that, actually.  Churches are an important source of social support for kids outside their own family, but church attendance is down much more rapidly among kids coming from impoverished backgrounds than among kids coming from wealthy backgrounds.  
And so I think what all of that evidence suggests is that we do face, I think, actually a serious crisis in which, increasingly, the most important decision that anybody makes is choosing their parents.  And if -- like my grandchildren are really smart, they were -- the best decision they ever made was to choose college-educated parents and great grandparents.  But out there, someplace else, there is another bunch of kids who are just as talented and just as -- in principle -- just as hardworking, but who happened to choose parents who weren’t very well-educated or weren’t high-income, and those kids’ fate is being determined by things that they had no control over.  And that’s fundamentally unfair. 
[Yeah....guess it was more than a little.]

That last part -- the part that I made bold -- is my favorite.

Putnam says, 

But out there, someplace else, there is another bunch of kids who are just as talented and just as -- in principle -- just as hardworking, but who happened to choose parents who weren’t very well-educated or weren’t high-income, and those kids’ fate is being determined by things that they had no control over.  And that’s fundamentally unfair. 

IN PRINCIPLE, he is absolutely right.

And in principle, the answer and what is missing out of the equation is....drum roll please:

"Not everything that can be counted counts,
Not everything that counts can be counted."

AND in principle, if I may be so bold, we are all born with complete control over doing the very things that may not count in order to eventually be one included in the group that counts and be counted as a productive part of the whole.

AND at this point, I am fairly certain that "both/and" "either/or" an Einstein and a Cameron and a President Barack Obama would agree with me.

Let me give you another part that I love; this one coming from David Brooks --

When you talk about people as your brothers and sisters you don’t talk about them as liabilities to manage.  They’re not liabilities to manage.  They’re assets to develop because every one of us made in God’s image is an asset to develop.  That’s a completely different approach to poverty alleviation.  That’s a human capital approach to poverty alleviation.  That’s what we can do to stimulate that conversation on the political right, just as it can be on the political left.

...."every one of us made in God's image is an asset to develop."

Please.  Someone.  Tell me why our school's and universities can't have THIS conversation every day.

FOR IF our kids did -- all the way from early childhood and carrying them sweetly, gently, carefully, spiritually developed  and self-assured into their higher education years, we would end chronic poverty.  It's a "human capital approach to poverty alleviation" that counts.

Now yesterday, when I caught a tiny part of the Rush Limbaugh Show, he was discussing the whole idea that for so much of human history, for so many of us, we all came from poverty!   It's like, duh, right.  

It hasn't been until we left the agricultural and farming age and moved into being of the industrial age, that we all began to create a life of happiness and substance and even a little wealth.  The food in our belly today has come directly from the toil of our ancestors who came from circumstances of universal lack.

AND the PRESIDENT not only KNOWS this, he reflected upon it for a moment, saying:

...We don’t dispute that the free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history -- it has lifted billions of people out of poverty.  We believe in property rights, rule of law, so forth. 

And then, like right on cue, his next word was:   "BUT..."

Are you kidding me, Mr. President?

The free market IS the greatest producer of wealth in history, or it's not.

This is the problem with conversations sometimes; sometimes we just go round and round  and round and nothing gets done.

Let's have a conversation.  Let's have a panel discussion.   Let's get together and have a committee meeting, a congressional hearing, a board review; it's all about a chat that never really ends.

"Not everything that can be counted counts,
Not everything that counts can be counted."

Yup. That about sums it up.

To grow a person of character, because character truly counts, in an environment where not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts is a hard one to figure out, isn't it?

No.

A person of good character usually turns out good, even when not everything around them is of good character or good, when they stick with being a person of good character and good, 

The unequal distribution of productivity, accountability and responsibility in recognizing the wealth of opportunity that abounds in the every day and in the every thing we do says it all, backwards and forwards.

Make it a Good Day, G 

OR,
 we can throw more money on it....BUT.....
COUNTING Dollars and adding common sense into the equation, go to Newsweek, HERE.

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