Updated 3/23
Thers found a gorgeous case in a column by Thomas Sowell which starts off from an old newspaper column reminding him how good the persons of color had it back in Ronald Reagan's day:
What it is is another case of retroactionary thinking, possibly the most complex we've encountered so far. Two different trajectories are compared: one captured going forward in time, the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1988, and the other going backward, the Obama administration from 2016 to 2009. At the end of Reagan's sunny morning-in-America march ahead, the nation is looking pretty good, right? While by the time Obama has clawed his way back from the brilliant Obama future of five years from now, where every valley shall be exalted and all the hills made low, if you know what I mean, to the scary times of three years ago—well, you remember.
But hang on, you protest—how can you compare a time-forward model of a presidency with a time-backward one? Isn't that putting together apples and oranges, or worse, apples and anti-apples? And I have to admit I don't really know.
One possibility would be that projecting a sequence of events into backward time is a way of normalizing an otherwise incoherent body of data. For instance, if you look at the Obama administration in forward time, it doesn't make any sense in terms of standard Republican theory: an evil Mau-Mau vegetable-eating president and decreasing inequality, increasing economic activity, Jeremy Lin, and so on. You might as well say George W. was responsible for the situation in 2009, for Christ's sake. But simply switch that one parameter—the time dimension—and everything falls neatly into place.
When I first started working on this concept, back in December, I meant it as a kind of pawky nerd joke. But now we've been seeing so much of it, I'm beginning to believe there must be something to it. On the kind of level we're starting to reach now, I mean, beyond Merlin and time travel and backwards film to something more realistic—I'm picturing a kind of neural-cognitive deficit where the patient has trouble distinguishing the conceptual time-direction between antecedent and consequent. The man who mistook his wife for a fiancée, as it were, and conversely, which is where it would get awkward.
Update:
I forgot to add: R. Porrofatto in comments at Whiskey Fire (link above) noted that the headline Sowell began his column with, from the Times of 24 July 1992, was misleading in any case: the article itself made it clear that there was hardly any change in the disparity between black and white families' financial circumstances during the Reagan years. As for the Obama administration, I'd be guessing there aren't any good numbers yet, and we'll just have to wait before we judge. Unless one of those Republicans heading back from the future wants to say something.
Thers found a gorgeous case in a column by Thomas Sowell which starts off from an old newspaper column reminding him how good the persons of color had it back in Ronald Reagan's day:
One of the front-page headlines said: "White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80's, Census Shows."The 1980s? Wasn't that the years of the Reagan administration, the "decade of greed," the era of "neglect" of the poor and minorities, if not "covert racism"? [jump]
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| Salvador Dali, Voltaire, 1940. From Art History Videos. |
Wow, so Obama has made inequality almost twice as... Hey, wait a minute! There's something tricky going on here!More recently, during the administration of America's first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center has the headline, "Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics."While the median net worth of whites was ten times the median net worth of blacks in 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, the ratio was nineteen to one in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration.
What it is is another case of retroactionary thinking, possibly the most complex we've encountered so far. Two different trajectories are compared: one captured going forward in time, the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1988, and the other going backward, the Obama administration from 2016 to 2009. At the end of Reagan's sunny morning-in-America march ahead, the nation is looking pretty good, right? While by the time Obama has clawed his way back from the brilliant Obama future of five years from now, where every valley shall be exalted and all the hills made low, if you know what I mean, to the scary times of three years ago—well, you remember.
But hang on, you protest—how can you compare a time-forward model of a presidency with a time-backward one? Isn't that putting together apples and oranges, or worse, apples and anti-apples? And I have to admit I don't really know.
One possibility would be that projecting a sequence of events into backward time is a way of normalizing an otherwise incoherent body of data. For instance, if you look at the Obama administration in forward time, it doesn't make any sense in terms of standard Republican theory: an evil Mau-Mau vegetable-eating president and decreasing inequality, increasing economic activity, Jeremy Lin, and so on. You might as well say George W. was responsible for the situation in 2009, for Christ's sake. But simply switch that one parameter—the time dimension—and everything falls neatly into place.
When I first started working on this concept, back in December, I meant it as a kind of pawky nerd joke. But now we've been seeing so much of it, I'm beginning to believe there must be something to it. On the kind of level we're starting to reach now, I mean, beyond Merlin and time travel and backwards film to something more realistic—I'm picturing a kind of neural-cognitive deficit where the patient has trouble distinguishing the conceptual time-direction between antecedent and consequent. The man who mistook his wife for a fiancée, as it were, and conversely, which is where it would get awkward.
Update:
I forgot to add: R. Porrofatto in comments at Whiskey Fire (link above) noted that the headline Sowell began his column with, from the Times of 24 July 1992, was misleading in any case: the article itself made it clear that there was hardly any change in the disparity between black and white families' financial circumstances during the Reagan years. As for the Obama administration, I'd be guessing there aren't any good numbers yet, and we'll just have to wait before we judge. Unless one of those Republicans heading back from the future wants to say something.
