There are lots of reasons to change a light bulb, and the most common one is that it doesn’t work, after all if it ain’t broke don’t fix it right?
At this point most Americans have experienced the difference between older incandescent bulbs that worked by heating a filament to glowing hot levels and newer LED bulbs that work by using a smaller amount of electricity to heat a small crystal. They are brighter, give us better control over the color of the light, and use much less energy. They also let us use new and funky colors to customize our living spaces with specific moods and themes. On every level they are the better option (other than maybe cost which I think is more a function of demand than manufacturing, but I don’t have industry information) but we still see a wide variety of filament style bulbs offered. Some of it is older lighting fixtures that either require those bulbs (even though there are compatible LED models for almost everything) or older industrial setups. Still, somehow there are millions of people who tried an LED bulb, and said “no thanks.”
Perhaps there is a reason that they didn’t switch? Maybe it’s something about the quality of light? Maybe they prefer that specific heat emission from an incandescent bulb instead of a specialized heat lamp? Maybe they have an apocalypse shelter full of backup bulbs and will be using it until their grand-kids run out of compatible lamps? Maybe it’s just good old fashioned mule-headed cussedness, clinging on to forms of living that were introduced in their youth instead of their middle age, like wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt that is identical to the one at Hot Topic but it’s forty years old.
Anyway, I’ve been playing with this lately: The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Fix the National Debt game
The goal of the game is to reduce the expected US national debt to levels where it will come in at specific percentages under expected GDP in 2033 and 2050. I really like this approach to educating people on the challenges of budgeting on a federal level. It opens up the real meat and potatoes of the budget to people. Yeah, just stabilizing (not reducing) defense spending saves us a trillion dollars while upping the medicaid age five years saves us under 200 billion, which is a drop in the bucket in this game. Even that trillion saved by reducing defense spending growth to 1% isn’t all that much when you’re talking about a decade of spending money on the United States scale.
These goal posts are completely arbitrary. Gross Domestic Product is a number that roughly calculates the amount of monetary value generated by an entire country, which can vary widely depending on all sorts of unknowable factors like weather, war, or fads. The federal budget is another number that widely varies depending on who the President is, what the congress looks like, and whatever the zeitgeist is valuing that year. Still, I need to demonstrate the sort of hill we have to climb so these work as well as anything.
The game has estimates for what each measure saves, these are numbers that could flow and change depending on who is proposing them and how they make their estimates. So even though something like repealing the 2017 tax cuts should have a relatively predictable value, every change triggers all sorts of ideologies during the drafting and implementation that could push the estimation one way or another. Things like closing tax loopholes or enacting universal free K-12, both of which the game offers as options, are so complex and stretched over time that it’s impossible to put a real price tag on them. So these are the conscious decisions of the people who built the test and should not be taken as any sort of real estimates of these sorts of measures, good or bad.
There is also the matter of who is providing this. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is a name so loaded it might as well have a frowny face for a logo. This committee has a board made up of a blend of the most established career politicians and bureaucrats possible. People who have never had a job that paid less than six figures or that could be described without vague gestures. These are small-c conservatives, people who only know the way things are now, and are generally cool with it, with maybe a tweak or two. They are allegedly not interested in serving any sort of ideal with their policy, just making sure things keep going as they have been going with as few tweaks as possible. They want what’s good for business, and what’s good for business is what’s predictable. So the range of proposed options and their effects are going to be limited to what that sort of person can imagine and accept. They aren’t about to ban personal income tax, or enact maximum salaries.
Okay disclaimers dispensed. This is all imaginary, but instructive. It makes the numbers real when they are usually just shown on a news headline with a bunch of zeros and angry eyebrows.
When someone has the gall to say the words “free community college,” everyone acts like they proposed taking every tank out of the DoD’s hands and giving them to your favorite arts major. Yet, according to this committee, simply stabilizing Defense spending would only cost us in the neighborhood of $100 billion. “Only a $100 billion??” you ask in shock, but again, that’s basically nothing in a budget that can add or subtract a trillion with few effects. Honestly, it’s a good thing computers came around when they did or the treasury department would be massive and filled with abacuses. This tool makes the argument that you have to cut deep into defense spending before it starts showing enough savings to pay for modest health care increases.
I think the point this whole exercise drives home is that for many people, especially people with stock holdings, this flickering, hot, buzzing light bulb is good enough. It doesn’t matter that many of these changes (which I believe are all abstractions of existing proposals in different stages of government digestion) are so minor that they wouldn’t even make the news, they represent the same upheaval to business as usual for some people as free healthcare for veterans would. For some people, even wanting to replace the light bulb with something that’s a little less harsh but otherwise identical is going too far.
I want to be clear about this: these people are wrong.
It’s a lazy cliche to treat everyone’s opinion as having equal merit and therefore of equal weight. I wouldn’t expect anyone to take my opinions about African history seriously, no matter how many times I stomped my feet online. Many people are always going to be opposed to any sort of change, just as there will always be people who don’t want to get on the life raft when the boat is clearly still above the waterline. Some people would rather sit in the darkness as the bulb fades than admit that they really should have just bought a new one at the store. Don’t be that person, realize that life is change, that improvement is the best sign of life, and that things can always get better. No idea is an endpoint, I’m sure at some point LED lights will be just as outmoded, and there will still be cranky millennials clinging to fifty feet of string lights.
Stay safe out there, keep moving.
Wheeler's Place 