Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 486

When Paying Cash Is Cheaper Than Health Insurance

When it comes to health care, paying upfront in cash instead of through your insurance could save you money. Here’s the WSJ, h/t Tyler Cowen:

Not long ago, hospitals routinely charged uninsured patients their highest rates, far more than insured patients paid for the same services. Now, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of health-care prices, the opposite is often true: Patients who pay up front in cash often get better deals than their insurance plans have negotiated for them [. . .]

“My favorite was the $5,400 MRI at an academic medical center in California,” Ms. Pinder says. “Insurance paid about $2,900 and the patient paid about $2,500. It looked like he got a great deal—but he could have paid $725 cash down the street.” When people see this data, she says, “they don’t behave the same way in the marketplace again.”

The WSJ chalks up the change to, in part, the ACA, but the cash discount is also not new, according to many of Cowen’s commenters. “As someone who has always had high deductible insurance, doctors offices would routinely give me cash discounts even prior to the ACA, charging rates well below what would have been billed to the insurance company,” wrote one commenter. That accords with what others have written about negotiating prices with hospitals; the option was there, if you knew about it.

Though it’s not a new phenomenon, the cash discounts the WSJ highlights point to the importance of empowering consumers to shop smartly. There are obviously key macro questions about health care policy and prices, but for the individual user, $2,500 versus $750 makes a huge difference in most people’s budgets. And for some health care spending, people can shop around for the best deal when it comes to health care, just like they can in other markets. Giving consumers more tools to do so, such as price transparency, could make a big financial difference to many Americans.And given a number of factors—the ongoing trend of disintermediation in the U.S. economy, the growing impatience with America’s technocratic class, new technological developments, and intense media focus on health care prices—the odds are good that the space for consumer choice will grow. Public policy should do everything it can to help that process along.

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Poroshenko’s Political Shadowplay

A closely contested vote of no confidence failed to oust Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk from his post yesterday, the latest in a series of high-stakes gyrations that have brought Ukraine’s governing coalition within a hair of collapse.

Though the governing coalition has always been a fraught enterprise, making uneasy allies of Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front and President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc, the precipitating factor in this latest crisis was not internal tensions. Rather it was the resignation of the technocrat reformist economy minister Aivaras Abromavicius two weeks ago. As he left his post, he made a point of pointing his finger directly at Porosehnko’s longtime friend, associate, and notorious parliamentarian “fixer” Ihor Kononenko for attempting to have his cronies placed in key positions at various state-owned enterprises (as well as within the economic ministry itself).Then, a week ago, International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde threatened that Ukraine could lose the remaining $11 billion tranche of a $17.5 billion bailout if Kyiv did not do more to fight endemic corruption.Finally, on Sunday, the final blow came: Ukraine’s deputy prosecutor-general, Vitaly Kasko, stepped down from his post, accusing his boss, Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, of blocking investigations into various allegations of corruption. Shokin, widely reviled by reformist activists, is accused of protecting a select group of Yanukovych-era elites who managed to retain favor with President Poroshenko. Poroshenko, for his part, has squandered a great deal of goodwill and political capital to shelter Shokin since calls for his resignation began to build last summer.Though both of the scandals seemed to point Poroshenko’s way, it is Yatsenyuk who enjoys the much lower approval ratings of the two men—less than one percent by some counts. Yatsenyuk is in fact the most unpopular politician in the country by most measures. But Yatsenyuk could not be removed without his entire party leaving the coalition, thus automatically triggering new elections. Western diplomats, and the United States in particular, have been stridently pleading with the governing coalition to stick together for the country’s sake. Coalition unity was, after all, the main thrust of Vice President Joe Biden’s speech to the Rada in early December. The results of any new elections are highly unpredictable, and could easily bring an even less reform-minded government to power.Thus, to square the circle, it appears that Poroshenko engineered what amounted to a theatrical spectacle—a feigned political near-death experience for the unpopular PM that would quiet some of the harsh criticism that the government was not doing enough.It may have all been a staged set piece, but it was a highly compelling spectacle to watch nevertheless. At 3pm yesterday, an hour before the parliament was set to convene, Poroshenko issued a dramatic statement calling on both Shokin and Yatsenyuk to step down. Then, just ahead of what was to be a non-binding vote disapproving of the government’s performance, Yatsenyuk took the podium and delivered a fiery and unrepentant speech. When asked by the Speaker of the Parliament Volodomyr Hroytsman to wind up his monologue, he balefully asked for “5 more minutes—this could be my last speech!” (Hroytsman’s leering response—“Why so pessimistic?”—in retrospect appears quite telling.)Before the disapproval vote easily passed with 247 votes (226 were the minimum required), reformists circulated a petition to proceed with a vote of no confidence against Yatsenyuk. All of Poroshenko’s bloc—136 parliamentarians—are said to have signed the petition. But when it came to the actual vote, at 8pm in the evening, only 94 of Poroshenko’s people voted against Yatsenyuk, netting only a total of 194 votes. The despised Yatsenyuk survived yet again. With the vote concluded, Hroytsman hastily gaveled the assembly to a close, foreclosing any further debate.A mass of people who had gathered outside the Rada to chant anti-government slogans were stunned. The bloc of young reformer parliamentarians, who have gravitated to the banner of former Georgian President and current Governor of Odessa Mikheil Saakashvilli in recent weeks, and who were pushing hard for the no confidence vote, also appeared blindsided. In a show of growing dissatisfaction within Poroshenko’s own fraction, reformist MP Mustafa Nayem didn’t mince words:

The failure of the vote on the resignation of the government was the result of an agreement between oligarchs on one side – Renat Akhmetov, Ihor Kolomoisky and Sergei Levochkin and on the other side Arseny Yatsenyuk and Petro Poroshenko.

On balance, then, Porosehenko appears to have sacrificed his reviled prosecutor general, but only symbolically heeded the popular calls for a ‘reset’ of the government. (In line with the Byzantine world of Ukrainian politics, of course, rumors have been circulating throughout the day that Shokin may not have actually been shown the door. Paranoid distrust of Poroshenko on this matter, coupled with a bizarre statement by Shokin’s own deputy stating that his boss was on sick leave, and the lack of any announcement from the President’s office as to the official acceptance of Shokin’s resignation, has left many reformers wondering whether they have even been denied even this victory. The American embassy in Kyiv warmly welcomed the news of the resignation, so at this point it would be difficult to imagine to have Poroshenko backtrack on the matter.)

According to parliamentary procedures, another no confidence vote against Yatsenyuk can not be held held for another six months. This does not mean that the maneuvering for advantage is over, however—not by a long shot. Earlier in the day, Yulia Tymoshenko’s “Fatherland” party, joined by a pair of Poroshenko’s own MPs, quit the ruling coalition, calling the entire episode a ruse to keep the status quo in place. Poroshenko’s coalition is thus now entirely dependent on the Western-oriented Samopomish for its governing majority. Samopomish party leaders are slated to meet tomorrow to figure out their next steps. Yatsenyuk for his part said that he is exploring deals with various other forces, in pursuit of what what he called a “reformatting” of the coalition.Poroshenko are Yatsenyuk are still standing—just barely—as the country as a whole teeters above a yawing precipice. Ukraine’s economy shrank by 10 percent last year, and the Hryvna has lost 11 percent of its value since just the start of this year. With more crisis surely ahead, there’s little hope of economic reprieve in the near or medium term. Somewhere in the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin is surely rubbing his hands with glee.

Apple Takes a Hard Line

It may be the most epic showdown yet in the post-Snowden tech privacy wars: Apple CEO Tim Cook has announced that the company will challenge a judge’s order that the company help the FBI unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters.

New iPhones are end-to-end encrypted, meaning that it’s impossible for anyone, even Apple’s engineers, to open them without knowing the user-created password. So according to the Washington Post, the FBI obtained a court order for Apple to create new software that would “disable the feature that wipes the data on the phone after 10 incorrect tries at entering a password. That way, the government can try to crack the password using ‘brute force’ — attempting tens of millions of combinations without risking the deletion of the data.”Tim Cook isn’t having it. “The government is asking Apple,” he said in a letter cheered by civil libertarians across the web, “to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals.”We’re sympathetic to some of Cook’s points. Apple’s tough encryption surely makes user information more secure from hackers and authoritarian governments. And the U.S. government’s request—not that Apple simply open the iPhone (that would be impossible), but that it actually have its engineers write from scratch a complicated new software to facilitate the FBI’s efforts to break into the phone—is quite invasive, and possibly unprecedented.At the same time, the absolutist position the company is taking does not seem tenable in the long run. We already live in a world where the government and private corporations collect a huge amount of personal information about ordinary people as a matter of course. And now we are being told that the FBI can’t execute a lawfully obtained search warrant on an ISIS-inspired terrorist mass murderer? Something has to give.Apple is clearly entitled to act in the interests of its customers and shareholders and appeal this ruling. But in the long run, it seems doubtful that the American people will accept the current encryption arrangement. Even before the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, a majority of Americans wanted the NSA’s warrantless data collection program renewed. Young people are especially supportive of the NSA. Surely there is a compromise position in the encryption debate that would satisfy Americans’ privacy concerns while also making sure that the authorities can access—with a search warrant—the materials used by dangerous criminals.We’ve written before that Americans “have a 300 year tradition of balancing civil liberties, government power, and the safety of the community through a mix of legislation, judicial oversight, and public debate.” The standoff between Apple and the government is likely to reinvigorate this debate, and possibly produce badly needed legislative efforts to update our surveillance, encryption, and privacy laws. We suspect that the final compromise will be at least somewhat less friendly to privacy hardliners than Apple’s boosters hope.

Thailand’s Pivot to China Continues

Last week, Thailand and the U.S. held another somewhat scaled-down version of the annual Cobra Gold military exercises. Although the exercises proceeded smoothly, there were no signs of a change in temperature in the frosty Washington–Bangkok relationship. This dynamic doesn’t look good for the United States, as Thailand continues to move into Beijing’s orbit. The latest: China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) could take a dominant position in financing major Thai projects. East By Southeast reports:

Since seizing power, Thailand’s military generals have instead sought to deepen political and economic ties to China, which is now the country’s largest trading partner. “It has been analyzed that any related projects that could benefit the supply chain network and trading routes between the ASEAN region and China would receive great attention from the AIIB,” assesses Nithi Kaveevivitchai.

The Sino-Thai railway link, which aims to transform Bangkok into the hub of China’s ambitious Pan-Asia Railway Network, appears to be a particularly likely candidate for an AIIB infrastructure loan. After months of bumpy negotiations – during which Beijing insisted on downgrading the railway from high-speed to medium-speed – the project saw a breakthrough in January 2016 when China agreed to Thailand’s demand that it slash its interest rate from 2.5% to 2%.

As always, these investments are complicated and the loans may never even be offered. But, for now, it’s clear that Thailand sees Beijing as a plausible alternative to the United States and its allies—particularly Japan, which has been China’s big financial rival in the region. It’s looking more and more likely that a China-allied Thailand will be yet another problem President Obama leaves behind for his successor.

Savvy Saudis Making Iran the Enemy of OPEC

The fight over OPEC production cuts is turning into yet another Saudi-Iran battle. Saudi Arabia told Venezuela and other desperate countries in the cartel this week that it’s willing to accept limits on oil output and freeze production at current levels—if Iran and Iraq also accept them. Iran, though, says it has a huge quota boost coming since its sales were limited by sanctions. The FT reports:

“It is illogical to ask Iran to further decrease its output,” Iran’s Opec envoy Mehdi Asali told local newspaper Shargh. “Under the current circumstances that Iran’s production is much below its quota, it cannot expect us to further decrease our production,” he said. […]

Mr Asali blamed Iran’s Opec rivals for “irresponsible” behaviour as they increased production when Iran was under sanctions. “Now that the oil prices have fallen due to the increase in the production of these countries, they expect Iran to co-operate and pay the price for a balanced market,” Mr Asali said.

Iran’s oil minister struck a less combative tone in response to the Saudi-Russia proposal, saying “we look forward to the beginning of co-operation between Opec and non-Opec countries and we support any measure that can stabilise the market and increase prices.” But the minister didn’t go much further than that, and certainly didn’t hint at any commitment to freezing production at current levels—a commitment that would hurt Iran more than most other petrostates, as it is raring to get its sanctions-ravaged oil output back up to speed in the next few months.

For the Saudis, Iran’s throwing a wrench in the works is just fine—it deflects the pressure from Venezuela and Russia and onto Iran. The status quo hurts Saudi Arabia less than the others (Riyadh is sitting on an absolutely massive, if fairly quickly depleting, sovereign wealth fund), so it’s willing to let prices stay low. In the meantime, a bearish market cuts Iran’s income, punishes Russia for its stand in Syria, and keeps U.S. shale production from skyrocketing. And now Iran’s insistence on a big quota increase at the same time everyone else is supposed to cut back gets Saudi off the hook with its fellow OPEC members.The Saudis think long and hard about oil, and over the decades it’s a tool they have learned to wield well.

Come on in, the Party’s Nearly Over

It may be hard to reverse the long-term impacts of excessive financial deregulation and tax competition, but it is apparently never too late to save one’s soul. We are delighted to see that Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has finally acknowledged the dodgy role that “big bills” ($100 bills, €500 notes and CHF 1,000 notes) play in global money laundering, corruption, tax dodging and organize crime, and has called for a “big bills” currency reform.

Well, welcome to the club. Indeed, I first proposed a $100 bills reform idea way back in the 1970s, when Summers and I were still in grad school.1 More recently, with TJN’s support, I was also among the first to campaign for a similar reform by the ECB with respect to €500 notes. The currency reform story is especially hot right now because the ECB has just proposed to cease issuing new €500 notes. The proposal is being actively considered by an EU policy conference.The ECB proposal has also received support from another latter-day saint, former Standard Chartered chief executive Peter Sands, now a visiting fellow at the Harvard’s Kennedy School. The road to Damascus may have become unsafe, but the road to Harvard is still as popular as ever with sinners.For reasons that are unclear, this ECB proposal is reportedly opposed by Germany’s Central Bank. It is also opposed by some libertarians who evidently believe, perversely enough, that we have the inalienable right to demand that governments issue paper currency in precisely the denominations best suited to facilitate tax dodging, money laundering, and the subversion of the rule of law.In any case, the ECB proposal on €500 notes apparently stands a good chance of being adopted. This is surely one small step for man. From a slight distance however, this whole big bills story is an object lesson in decades of missed opportunities.When I originally wrote about big bills back in the 1970s, there were less than four $100 bills in circulation per U.S. resident. Now there are more than thirty, at least 75 percent of which are working around the clock offshore to facilitate everything from drug traffic and bribery to sweatshop labor and terrorism. The United States may or may not deserve to be called “the worlds largest tax haven”—personally I prefer to rank it slightly behind Switzerland and the UK spider web of havens. But there is no question that the United States is the world leader in the provision of dirty money.My articles did help to generate a few positive results. These included a whole new interest in literature on “estimating the underground economy” and the role of $100 bills in drug traffic. I was invited to testify before The U.S. Senate’s Joint Economic Committee and briefly got access to unpublished Federal Reserve data on interregional currency flows, by denomination. It turned out that banks in Florida, California, and Texas were indeed the key sources of net outflows of $100 bills, and that the most important new source for $100 bill demand by far was the booming global underground economy. That finding, in turn, helped to trigger a crackdown on cruder forms of cash-based money laundering by U.S. banks, as well as a new interest in capital flight and offshore banking.But for decades nothing was done about big bills. While my recall proposal was reportedly hotly debated at the U.S. Treasury and the Fed, the role of $100 bills in the global underground economy was studied, but tolerated and studiously left alone—right up to the present day.Unfortunately, that meant that the newly formed Eurozone had to compete with $100 bills when the ECB came to introduce its new currency in 2001. The ECB decided to compete with a vengeance, introducing €200–€500 notes, at least two- to five-times as valuable as a $100 bill.Now, European policymakers are many things, but they are not naive. The ECB must have done this knowing full well that all these big new bills would quickly help the euro become one of the global underground economy’s most convenient payment/savings vehicles.Indeed it has. Not only are there now more than €255 billion of €100-€200 notes outstanding—outside of bank holdings, owned by the ill-defined “public”—but there are also more than €306 billion of €500 notes outstanding, worth at least $560 each. And, predictably—just like the 1970s demand for $100 bills in Florida—more than 25 percent of all €500 notes are issued in Spain, the EU’s major entrepôt for drug traffic.So while we are delighted to see Professor Summers’s belated support for a big bills reform, it is really too bad that he didn’t do anything about this 16 years ago while he was U.S. Treasury Secretary, during the Clinton boom years of the late 1990s. That would have headed off the ECB’s unfortunate decision to issue new €500 notes in 2001, and obviated the need for its February 2016 proposal.Are we in any case better late than never? Not really. To a large extent the horse is out of the barn, even with the ECB’s proposal—which would only prevent the issuance of new €500 notes, and would not do anything about the more than €561 billion of €100 notes to €500 notes outstanding. Of course it would not touch the more than $1 trillion in $100 bills outstanding.Having delayed action for decades, therefore, are the ECB and Professor Summers really now willing to demand a big bill currency recall? Thousands of drug dealers, arms dealers, terrorists, and tax dodgers around the globe are waiting breathlessly for the answer.

1See also my “The Cash Connection: How to Make the Mob Miserable,” Washington Monthly (June 1980).

Iranian Defense Minister Goes To Russia

The Iranians are sidling up to Mother Russia, as the AP reports:

Iran’s defense minister is visiting Moscow for talks about closer military cooperation.

Gen. Hossein Dehghan met Tuesday with President Vladimir Putin and also also with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu.Shoigu hailed a “high level of mutual trust” between Moscow and Tehran and their readiness to coordinate policies.Dehghan said in an interview with Russian state television that Tehran wants to expand military and technical ties with Russia.

We’ve written before about Iran’s deepening military ties with Russia, as well as the expansion of their ballistic missile program in defiance of some of the provisions of the nuclear deal. Russia already has a contract to deliver advanced long range surface-to-air missiles to Iran (the first shipment will arrive Thursday), and Tehran has expressed interest in other weapons systems including Su-30 fighter jets.

Needless to say, this is presumably not exactly how the White House thought things would play out after the nuclear deal was signed: from where we’re sitting, anyway, this is not the path Iran would be taking in order to become a responsible status quo stakeholder in the broader Middle East.

Tennessee State Legislature Takes On Campus PC

Here’s something you can expect to see more of in the coming months and years: The Tennessee state legislature is launching an investigation into the University of Tennessee’s diversity bureaucracy, asking the campus to justify how its various publicly-subsidized identity politics programs actually serve students and taxpayers. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

The House investigation has its roots in controversies last semester, when the Knoxville campus clashed with Republican legislators over two incidents that critics slammed as demonstrating excessive political correctness.

A post on the Pride Center’s website offering guidelines for the use of gender-neutral pronouns went viral in August after conservative news sites like Campus Reform, the College Fix, and Fox News portrayed its suggestions about using the pronouns as a hard-and-fast policy.… Tensions escalated in December when a post suggesting that people not use faith-based references at campus holiday parties also drew the indignation of right-leaning journalists.

This is not the only time Republican state legislatures have tried to intervene in the recent campus PC wars. In January, Missouri lawmakers leaned on their flagship state university to fire a professor who was caught on video trying to evict a student journalist from a campus protest. And it certainly won’t be the last. Even as campus politics are hurtling to the left with no end in sight, Republicans are accumulating tremendous political power at the state level. (Republicans fully control 30 of the nation’s state legislatures to the Democrats’ 11).

There is a long history of state politicians intervening in university politics when the general public feels that things have gotten out of hand. Such interference can itself get quite ugly and authoritarian, as it did during the McCarthy period. But taxpayers are entitled to know how the money they allocate to universities is being used, and there is a lot of room between neglect and McCarthyism. Lawmakers are right to ask for answers, and to consider cutting funds to diversity programs that have little or no educational value.Campus activists have grown accustomed to dealing with university administrators, who tend to cave to their PC program in order to avoid confrontation. They shouldn’t be confident that state politicians, accountable to ordinary Americans outside the campus bubble, will respond in the same way.

The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People

I didn’t vote for him but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job.

—John Wayne (b. 1907) on the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960

I hope he fails.

—Rush Limbaugh (b. 1951) on the election of Barack Obama in 2008

In recent decades, we Americans have become highly practiced in the skills and mental habits of demonizing our political opponents. All our instruments agree that we currently do political polarization very well, and researchers tell us that we’re getting better at it all the time.For example, Stanford Professor Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues recently found that, when it comes both to trusting other people with your money and evaluating the scholarship applications of high school seniors, Americans today are less friendly to people in the other political party than we are to people of a different race. The researchers conclude that “Americans increasingly dislike people and groups on the other side of the political divide and face no social repercussions for the open expression of these attitudes.” As a result, today “the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial animus.”1 That’s saying something!But if polarization is all around us, familiar as an old coat, what about its opposite? What would depolarization look and sound like? Would we know it if we saw it, in others or in ourselves? Perhaps most importantly, what are the mental habits that encourage it?We’re confronted with an irony here. We Americans didn’t necessarily think our way into political polarization, but we’ll likely have to think our way out. A number of big structural and social trends—including the end of the Cold War, the rising importance of cultural issues in our politics, growing secularization, greater racial and ethnic diversity, the shift from the Greatest Generation to Baby Boomers as the nation’s dominant elites, the break-up of the old media system, the increasing ideological coherence of both of our two main political parties, among others—appear to have helped produce our current predicament.Yet over time, the intellectual habits encouraged by these underlying shifts developed a life and autonomy of their own. They became “baked in,” ultimately forming a new popular wisdom regarding how we judge what is true and decide what is right in public life. The intellectual habits of polarization include binary (Manichaean) thinking, absolutizing one’s preferred values, viewing uncertainty as a weakness, privileging deductive thinking, assuming that one’s opponents are motivated by bad faith, and hesitating to agree on basic facts and the meaning of evidence.What are the antidotes to these familiar habits? We can recognize the mindset of the polarizer, but how does the depolarizer understand conflict and try to make sense of the world? Here is an attempt to answer these questions, by way of proposing the seven habits of highly depolarizing people.1. Criticize from within.In other words, criticize the other—whether person, group, or society—on the basis of something you have in common. The political philosopher Michael Walzer describes this approach as “internal criticism.” He writes: “We criticize our society just as we criticize our friends, on the assumption that the terms of the critique, the moral references, are common.”2 As Walzer and many others have observed, besides being depolarizing, criticizing from within is typically much more effective than criticizing from outside.This idea of recognizing something that is shared with the other—even in moments of fierce conflict—is beautifully reflected in Lincoln’s use of the term “better angels” in his first Inaugural address, on the eve of the Civil War. William Seward, who would serve as Secretary of State under Lincoln, had suggested that the new President conclude by calling in hope upon the “the guardian angel of the nation.” Lincoln changed it to “the better angels of our nature.” In Seward’s version, what was needed would come from outside us. In Lincoln’s version, it would come from within us, something “better” in the “nature” of both Northerners and Southerners.2. Look for goods in conflict.Some conflicts are entirely about good versus evil or right versus wrong, but many (probably most) are more about good versus good or right versus right. Each side, at least in part, is likely to be defending a goal or value that both recognize as worthy. Political philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin and William Galston have referred to this type of disagreement as one of “goods in conflict.” The challenge in such cases is to recognize and weigh competing goods—a challenge that is different from (and may be harder than) distinguishing good from bad. Looking always for the possible existence of goods in conflict not only contributes to depolarization, it also contributes to achieving valid (as opposed to phony) disagreement.3. Count higher than two.Of all the mental habits that encourage polarization, the most dangerous is probably binary thinking—the tendency to divide everything into two mutually antagonistic categories. Sometimes an important phenomenon actually does divide naturally into two and only two parts or sides, between which one all-or-nothing choice must be made. But in most cases, this way of thinking about the world is not only polarizing, it is highly simplistic and leads mainly to pseudo-disagreements as opposed to real ones. One may be the loneliest number, but in the area of social criticism and conflict, two (which is far from lonely today) is probably the most harmful. In thinking through any challenge or conflict, the highly depolarizing person’s first question to him- or herself is, “Can I count higher than two?”4. Doubt.Doubt—the concern that my views may not be entirely correct—is the true friend of wisdom and (along with empathy, to which it’s related) the greatest enemy of polarization. The playwright and political leader Václav Havel famously said that he would rather have a beer with someone who’s searching for the truth than with someone who’s found it. Now, Havel was a man of the firmest convictions. He went to jail for them and helped to start a revolution on behalf of them. So he was certainly not advocating, even in jest, a way of thinking that leads to passivity or an inability to choose; quite the opposite. He was advocating against the type of certitude that breeds smugness and contempt for one’s opponents, and which gradually transforms the natural appetite for empathetic engagement and the free play of intellect into an appetite for lecturing and pointing out to others the error of their ways. In today’s polarized environment, doubt is often treated as a weakness or even a sin (as is its cousin, changing one’s mind). But the opposite is more likely to be true. Doubt often supports true convictions based on realistic foundations, just as doubtlessness is nearly always an intellectual disability, a form of blindness.In his second Inaugural Address in 1865, as the Civil War neared its end, Abraham Lincoln could have declared his certainty that God favored his side. But in one of the most important statements ever uttered by a U.S. President, Lincoln, who could lead a war and sacrifice his life for his convictions while remaining deeply empathetic, said simply: “The Almighty has His own purposes.”5. Specify.Because generalization is both an ally and a frequent indicator of polarization, highly depolarizing people tend to be connoisseurs of the specific. This dedication to specificity can express itself in at least four important ways.The first way is a persistent skepticism about categories. Of course, categories and the process of categorization are essential to human thought and expression; we can’t do without them. But all categories are abstractions, and when we turn the healthy need to categorize into the sloppy habit of categorical thinking—applying abstract labels (such as the political labels “Left” and “Right”)—to everything and everyone on the grounds that we have accurately separated them into non-overlapping categories, the result is personally and socially harmful.It’s also worth remembering that, in many cases, creative and categorical thinking are at odds with each other. American musical innovators from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to Bob Dylan have been famously indifferent and even hostile to musical categories: Armstrong said that the only two kinds of music are what you like and what you don’t; Dylan, booed while on stage in London for not singing “folk” music, memorably told the audience that he cared about “American music.” The same is true of many of our most creative scholars, including the famous mid-20th-century sociologist David Riesman and the prominent political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, neither of whom was content for a moment to stay within a single disciplinary box or intellectual category.A second way to favor specificity is to consider each issue separately and on its own terms, as opposed to assuming the validity of a governing ideological framework, such as “conservatism” or “liberalism.” Indeed, in his seminal discussion of “the trap of ideology,” the great sociologist Daniel Bell tells us:

The point is that ideologists are “terrible simplifiers.” Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their own merits. One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out come the prepared formulae. And when these ideas are suffused with apocalyptic fervor, ideas become weapons, with dreadful results.3

A third way to specify is to privilege the specific assertion (including the empirically valid generalization) over the general assertion. As Jonathan Rauch observes, a turning point in the development of modern science was the discovery—in geology around the turn of the 19th century, and soon recognized by other fields—that shifting the argument away from abstract and often philosophically charged questions (“Can miracles be invoked to explain natural phenomena?”) and toward specific empirical questions (“Are fossils found in the same order throughout the Devonian shale?”) can help to diffuse paralyzing controversies and even turn ideological foes into fellow researchers.4 Scientists can be as stubborn and ideological as anyone else, of course, but the field’s focus on specificity and empirical inquiry (“Show me!”) has done much to foster more constructive conversations.

The fourth way to favor specificity is to rely first and foremost on inductive reasoning, which tries to build conclusions from the bottom up by accumulating specific data points, as compared to deductive reasoning, which tries to build conclusions from the top down by exploring the implications of true general premises or statements. Deduction is the great friend of ideology (especially “total ideology”).5 Induction specifies.6. Qualify (in most cases).To qualify something you say is to make it less definitive, less comprehensive, and more nuanced, and thus to acknowledge the possibility that some pieces of the puzzle may still be missing. To qualify, then, is almost always to announce—even if indirectly—a willingness to engage further with the other side in pursuit of getting it right.Another meaning of “to qualify” is to enumerate the qualities or characteristics of something. In this sense, the habit of qualifying is cousin to the habit of specifying.A third meaning is to be or become competent for a task or position. (As in: “She’s qualified for the job.”) The act of qualifying, then, is broadly associated with the condition of being duly prepared. In this sense, we might suggest that persons who “do not qualify”—either in the sense of lacking needed credentials or in the sense of making claims without duly qualifying them—are likely neither fully competent nor ready to fulfill the requirements of office or trust.Of course, in today’s world of dueling talking points and partisan political warfare, qualifying—in the sense modifying or limiting, often by giving exceptions—is frequently treated as a sign of insufficient zeal and perhaps even of wimpiness. But for the serious mind, the opposite is true. To qualify is to demonstrate competence. And for the highly depolarizing person, to err is human; to qualify, divine.7. Keep the conversation going.At the very heart of democratic civil society is the idea that we don’t stop talking to one another, even when—perhaps especially when—the conversation is frustrating and seems futile. Why? Because ending the conversation is tantamount to ending the relationship, and when the relationship ends, everything hardens, polarization reigns, and your opponents turn into your enemies. When we end a conversation, we typically fill the void with accusations, name-calling, exaggeration, and the striking of poses.Keeping the conversation going is itself a style of conversation, and even a way of thinking. The political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain reminds us that “a commitment to democratic politics, or the possibility of such a politics, commits one to an imperative to keep debates alive rather than attempting to resolve them definitively by silencing one side to a dispute….” In her own work, therefore, she strives to “articulate a strong set of claims that do not have the effect of silencing the voices of others.” She writes: “The need for, or conviction of, a correct and encompassing standpoint, the immediate excitement and visceral satisfaction of theories that make possible scenarios in which the analyst moves in on a given turf, sets up court, and summarily dispenses epistemic and political ‘justice,’ is one I eschew and devoutly hope that I avoid.”6The concept of “Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People” draws inspiration from two sources. The first, of course, is Stephen R. Covey’s outstanding book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Indeed, Covey’s fifth habit—“Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood,” which calls for empathetic listening—is itself deeply relevant to the task of political depolarization.The second source of inspiration is the seven virtues of classical Christianity. Moreover, just as those seven virtues are divided by teachers into two categories—the so-called theological or transcendent virtues of faith, hope, and charity; and the so-called cardinal or natural virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—the seven habits of highly depolarizing people can also be divided into two categories, with habits one through three being the highest habits, or those of the most overarching importance, and four through seven being the cardinal habits, or those attainable intellectual habits on which so much else depends.Will they work? They do for me. I have my own wounds from the culture wars, as many of us do, and some of mine have been self-inflicted. As I’ve attempted recently to transition to less polarizing ways of analyzing issues and expressing myself, I’ve found that it helps to keep these seven habits in mind, in the hope that they’ll eventually become my intellectual default settings.Making use of them certainly doesn’t tell me what to think about any particular issue, but attending to them does seem to help me think more carefully and, I hope, more honestly. Ultimately habits of mind oriented to depolarization are, to change metaphors again, less a microscope than a new pair of glasses—less a way of seeing a few things more clearly than a different way of seeing many things. And surely a different way of seeing is what’s needed. As Lincoln put it in 1862, when the occasion is piled high with difficulty, the first and great challenge is to think anew.

1Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization (Working Paper, June 2014), pp. 4, 6–7.

2Walzer, The Company of Critics (Basic Books, 1988), p. 230. See also pp. 143–51 for Walzer’s description of Albert Camus as a practitioner of criticism from within. While it’s true, of course, that social criticism is not in the same category of phenomena as political depolarization, Walzer’s insights about the former appear to be remarkably relevant to the latter. For example, Walzer writes (p. 151):

The standard view of critical distance rests on a homely analogy: we are more ready to find fault with other people than with ourselves. If we are to be properly critical, then, we must turn our own people into “the others.” We must look at them as if they were total strangers; or we must make ourselves into strangers to them. The trouble with the analogy is that such easy fault-finding is never very effective. It can be brutal enough, but it doesn’t touch the conscience of the people to whom it is addressed. The task of the social critic is precisely to touch the conscience. Hence heretics, prophets, insurgent intellectuals, rebels—Camus’s kind of rebels—are insiders all: they know the texts and the tender places of their own culture. Criticism is a more intimate activity than the standard view allows [emphasis added].

For recent social science research that supports the utility of “criticizing within,” see Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer, “From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (October 7, 2015).

3Bell, The End of Ideology (The Free Press, 1962), p. 405. The phrase “terrible simplifiers” comes from the cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt. Scholars have offered many varying definitions of “ideology,” but here we can define it as a set of ideas, attitudes, and symbols that work together to explain (justify, criticize, categorize) something, or in some cases everything (this can be called a “total” ideology), and which typically contains three interrelated components: an affective component (tells me how I feel about it), a motivational component (tells me what to do about it), and a cognitive component (tells me how to think about it). It’s also worth remembering that writers going back to Marx have emphasized that an ideology typically is linked to, and serves, a particular social interest or group. As Michael Walzer puts it: “The claim to monopolize a dominant good—when worked up for public purposes—constitutes an ideology” (Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality [Basic Books, 1983], p. 12). Ideological thinking can be very satisfying and arguably at times very productive, but research clearly suggests that ideological thinking also commonly fosters distortion, oversimplification, and the selective processing of information. See John T. Jost, “The End of the End of Ideology,” American Psychologist (October 2006), pp. 652–4, 657.4See Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, Expanded Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 70–4.5Daniel Bell defines total ideology as “an all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality” that is comparable to a “secular religion.” Interestingly, he suggests that intellectuals who embraces a “total ideology” are guilty of “the sin of pride,” by which he means the hubris of “assuming they know how life should be ordered or how the blueprint of the new society should read . . . .” The psychologist Hans Toch, looking at essentially the same style of thinking, describes it as a “closed system,” or “a set of beliefs that has come to be self-sufficient, in the sense that a person would no longer have to go outside of it for interpretations.” See Bell, The End of Ideology, pp. 302, 399­­­–400; and Toch, The Social Psychology of Social Movements (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), pp. 149–153.6Elshtain, Power Trips and Other Journeys: Essays in Feminism as Civic Discourse (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. xii, xviii.