“But they’ve repaid the debt several times over”

This gets repeated a lot in Debt (David Graeber), and in the world in general.  It annoys me as a criticism of lenders or lending.

Would you rather have $100 now, or in a month?  I’m guessing now, unless your tax circumstances are about to change drastically.  How much additional money would it take for you to prefer payment in a month?  $10?  $15?  What if there were significant transactions costs to receive payment?  What if there was risk involved?  The fact that you would rather have money sooner than later is known as the time value of money.

This is the principle behind interest on a loan: you’re compensating the lender for them not having the money until later.

How much of an increase would you need to agree to delay receiving some money by 50 years, instead of $100 now?  I’m guessing it is a lot.  Many times the original $100.  The implication of the phrase “but they’ve repaid the debt several times over” is that this is morally wrong.  But if you’re not referencing the timespan on which that repayment took place, the statement is meaningless.  To compare apples to apples you need to do a present value calculation, which tells you the equivalent of what they paid if it had been delivered as a lump sum at the beginning.

This statement often gets entangled with the idea of usury (unfairly or immorally high interest rates).  I am not a big fan of the usury taboo: you’re not hurting someone by giving them the option to take a loan .  The counterargument is that deal was opaque (which is a fair criticism) or that the borrowers circumstances were so bad they had no choice.  Which is definitely a thing, but… maybe we should fix the problem at that end?  Much like debt forgiveness this appears to be a call to give poor countries/people more money, with a layer of obfuscation added by debt.  I am extremely curious why this seems to be more attractive than my solution “just give them money”.

Debt: The First 5000 Years (David Graeber)

This book seriously changed my thinking when I first read it, and I’ve shared many cool ideas from it, but I’ve found that when the ideas are challenged I don’t know enough to defend them.  So I’m going to reread the book and really dig in, with the following goals:

  1. Understand and be able articulate Graeber’s ideas without ambiguity
  2. Look up the data he cites and opposing arguments
  3. Update my beliefs based on what I learn

And I’m going to publish it here, probably chapter by chapter but if I need to break it down smaller I will.

What I publish will be a mix of “my understanding of his arguments”, “steelmen of his arguments”, “his argument updated by other things I know” and “things this made me think about”.  I will try to make it obvious what’s my opinion and what is his, but the application of the principle of charity is inevitably biased by what I consider charitable.

A few people have expressed interest in doing a small group chat over Whatever, in response to my “talk to me for an hour” offer.  If there’s enough interest, this strikes me as a good topic for that, so let me know if you’re interested.

And now, Debt: The Introduction.

You know what would be helpful?  A definition of debt.  Here is my idealized definition of debt:

Person A has a way to spend money to make more money later, but not the initial starting money (capital).  Person B has money, but no way to spend it to make more money.  Person B gives person B the money and A gives B money on a set schedule, up to a certain amount.  Everyone is better off.  Hurray.  The difference between debt and investment is that debts are owed no matter what, whereas in investment the risk is shared.

Graeber definitely isn’t using that definition.  There are a number of examples he gives that make me want to scream the chronological distribution of payment is not the issue here.  E.g.:

  • France billed Madagascar for their own invasion, and for the building of infrastructure they didn’t want.  Madagascar not having the cash on hand to pay them, this became a debt paid by onerous taxes.  Graeber claims Madagascar is still paying France, but I don’t trust him that this is the same bill.  He provides no source for this claim and I couldn’t find one.  But the wikipedia article on the subject makes it sounds like France had a bit of a dust up and somehow found itself running Madagascar, so I’m not convinced it’s unbiased.
  • France billed Haiti for the property damaged and confiscated during the Haitian slave rebellion, and convinced the rest of the world to embargo Haiti (unclear how long this lasted).  Haiti finished paying this in 1947.  No seriously, they had to pay France for no longer being slaves.
  • A Japanese legend about a woman who committed various commercial misdeeds, including loaning rice with a small cup and reclaiming it with a large cup.  The problem here is theft by deception.
  • Also in Madagascar: in the early 80s Madagascar had a resurgence of malaria, after almost wiping it out, because they couldn’t pay for their anti-malaria programs any more.  Graeber blames the IMF, which imposed austerity in order to refinance loans made by first world banks to Madagascar.  He makes no mention of whether Madagascar would have been able to pay for mosquito programs absent the loans.
  • As late as the 1970s, moneylenders in the Himalayas would take borrowers’ daughters as collateral and rape them as interest payments.  (source: “Galey 1983”, which probably exists because google scholar found other citations to it, but not the piece itself).  No one would have been happier if fathers had the ability to compel their daughters into prostitution proactively.
  • Graeber’s strongest point is that much of the debt owed by third world countries was taken by dictators and used for either personal enrichment or to repress the populace that is now forced to pay it.  Which is an extremely fair point, but still not any worse than repressive taxation in general.

So that’s a whole bunch of times the economic concept of debt was not the problem.  But… maybe the social constructs around debt let humans do things they wouldn’t otherwise do (this seems especially likely in the dictator case).  This seems curiously tied up with the concept of quantification (which is how he distinguishes between a debt and an obligation).  The way this makes sense to me is that this is an anthropology of debt, not an exploration of the economics

 

This is not a comprehensive summary of the chapter but it’s odds and ends and I don’t want this to turn into liveblogging, so they’ll all wait till their own chapter.

Parenthetical Reference ends three or four undending debates in or at EA in a single stroke.

 

…it’s the difference between “tzedakah”, which is a mitzvah/dedication I have to making the world better and where EA analysis is really important, and “generosity”, which is about being kind to the people around me.

Generosity is when my friend’s family has a health crisis and I come over with $100 worth of takeout and frozen food. It’s also generosity when I support my local arts and/or religious communities, and when I go out of my way to financially support free media. Generosity is good and we should feel good about it. It’s one of the ways we live our values. It can be personal and subjective and can be about feelings as much as ROI. In fact, it is inherently subjective, and the right specific generous acts should be different for different people, because they are distributed like tastes, interests, friendships, communities, and other personal attachments.

Tzedakah is deciding to donate 10% of my income to saving lives in the developing world, and doing my research to make sure it’s doing as much good as possible. Tzedakah is saying BED NETS BED NETS BED NETS. Tzedakah is a sense of urgency to make the world better for people I will never meet and who will never know or care about me personally.2 Tzedakah isn’t a corner I want to cut to buy something nice for myself.3

“What about the arts?” Sure, generosity.  But don’t cut your bednet budget for it.
“Donating based on numbers ruins the make-the-donor-a-better-person function of charity.” It arguably taints generosity but not tzedakah.
“I don’t need to feel guilty not donating to help my friend’s cousin coming back from Iraq because it’s more effective to…” No, you don’t need to feel guilty because when and how to be generous is personal choice.  Stop arguing it’s objectively wrong.

I’m so glad we could clear this up

Motion sickness cure: mint gum

I get really severely motion sick.  It’s worse when my sinuses are worse but even at my best I’m trading off how much misery I can stand with how much boredom I can stand.  I’m actually better with misery, but it still slows me down mentally and often lingers for many minutes afterwords.  Entirely accidentally I seem to have found a treatment: –mint gum.  It’s not quite 100%, but it doesn’t get any worse over time, and the ceiling is fairly low.  E.g. I’m writing this on a plane.

Internet occasionally mentions mint candy or aromatherapy as a treatment for nausea, but never gum.    I feel like the chewing part is important but who knows.  I suspect this isn’t very wide spread because if it was those stupid wrist bands would not be as popular as they are, but I doubt I’m the only one either.

Bone Broth

Bone broth is having its moment- paleo likes it, nut jobs who believe vaccines cause autism like it*, whoever the hell these people are like it, my nutritionist is a big fan.  The idea seems obvious- bones are full of nutrients that hard to get, especially in the typical American diet, surely drinking bones would be good.  Especially for calcium.  Everyone knows bones have calcium.

I got suspicious when I noticed that the nutritional label on my broth** reported 0% of my RDA of calcium.  I checked a few more brands, the top contender lists 2% calcium RDA and 4% iron/6 grams of protein.  Most list 0.  nutritiondata.self.com gives considerably better numbers, but no source.  Their listing contains a good deal more fat (9g, as opposed to 0 in any of the commercial broth I’ve found) and a non-zero amount of carbs.  None of the micronutrients they listed (vitamin C, a few Bs, iron, calcium, manganese) are fat soluble, but maybe there is something to preparing it at home.

Some of the websites touting bone broth list other substances that aren’t on nutritional labels but they believe are important.  I am well disposed to believe this claim.  There is no reason to believe science knows all the micronutrients we need, much less a USDA oriented towards the well being of farmers, not consumers.  The specifically mention glycosaminoglycans, a class protein/sugar hybrid found in joints.  This seems utterly plausible, but I was unable to find any numbers of this. At all.

I found one scientific paper on bone broth.  It is in Korean***.  It has some English but not enough for me to actually determine the micronutrient:protein ratio.  Beyond that you have studies about the components of bone broth and the assumption that it will be absorbed in this form.  For example this paper on collagen and rheumatoid arthritis (PDF).  Given it has 60 people and RA is a cyclic disease, their results are actually pretty good, but that still leaves it open to any number of manipulations.  The second best paper is a press relief on an informal study of chicken soup.

That leaves protein.  Everyone agrees bone broth has serious protein, but unfortunately not the most important kind.  Protein is made up of amino acids, of which there are two kinds: non-essential (which your body can manufacture) and essential (which you must take in via diet).  The RDA for protein is 0.8 g/kg body weight, of which 0.1 g should be of the essential amino acids (there are per-acid requirements but I’m not tracking 9 individual requirements), so 20% is putting  you ahead of the game, except that broth is missing two EAAs entirely.  After 20  hours of cooking (see korean) paper, 25% of the amino acids are glycine.  For comparison:

  • The pumpkin-based protein powder in front of me is 20% essential amino acids (and has way more iron than broth)
  • Whey protein is 60% EAAs.
  • Soy is 34%

I have trouble digesting protein and find bone broth stunningly easy to digest, so this is still a win for me, but it’s a slam dunk.

While traveling I’m using bone broth powder, which I’m increasingly convinced is a fancy way of saying “bone-based protein powder”.  I’m okay with bone based protein powder, although I might not have packed the pumpkin if I’d realized this.

Do you know what else is basically a protein powder?  Cricket flour.  They taste similar, cricket has a better amino acid profile (25% essential) and more trace nutrients (although I’m still tracking down how many more).  It is also cheaper, which should make !broth feel bad.

I find it more plausible than the average miracle food that bone broth has effects beyond what you’d expect from a naive read of the nutrition facts, because I expect animal bone + meat to fulfill a broader range of requirements than some berry.   I do feel better when I drink it, but a lifetime of digestive and chewing problems has given me a tendency to develop food security blankets, and broth is currently filling that role.   Simply by being a security blanket that is not jelly beans or peanut butter cups****, broth is a health food for me, personally, but I can’t really extrapolate beyond that. The current press around it appears to be almost entirely groundless.

Once again, the state of nutritional knowledge is embarrassingly bad and I would like us to shift money towards increasing it.  Also why the hell can’t I test the  nutritional content of broth I make myself?

 

*To their credit, they have an explanation that doesn’t rely on mercury, which has been extremely thoroughly disproven.  If they had presented it as a fringe thing they needed to prove, I would have entertained their hypothesis.  They presented it as fact, without any attempt to distances themselves from the atrocious denialism of the mercury-based anti-vaxxers.

**I buy it frozen on the theory that my time and not having my house continually smell of meat was worth the extra money.

***I don’t think this would be hard to determine if you read Korean, volunteers would be welcome.

****Trader Joe’s brand- I’m not an animal.

ETA: I only just learned that bone broth means “bones + connective tissue”.  Clean bones give you hardly any protein, even if there’s marrow in them.  Apparently I don’t need to pay $10/bag for store made stuff, I can use $8 worth of chicken feet and liver and eat for a week.

Spreading the Wealth Around

Conventional effective altruism wisdom is that however much money you are donating, you should give 100% to the best charity, because it is the best.  I think that is one perfectly good choice among several.  Until recently my explanation was “the estimated difference in effectiveness between these charities is many orders of magnitude smaller than the confidence interval of the estimates, so they are functionally the same, so I might as well do what makes me happy.”  Scope insensitivity makes donating $n to two charities twice as satisfying as $2n to one charity.  I would have given to several more charities this except my job matches donations by hand and the admin has other shit to do.  But recently I realized it is more complicated than that.

Synergies

I spend a lot of time reminding people that estimates of genetic influence and heritability are only valid for the environment in which they are measured.  The same is true for charitable interventions.  The effects of any one intervention depend on the environment, which depends in part on other interventions.

Free condoms and instruction on their use doesn’t appear to make a big difference in teen pregnancy- but that study measured a single free condom program that existed in an environment with lots of existing programs.   Anyone who wanted condoms already had them.  That doesn’t mean such a program wouldn’t be useful in a population with no knowledge of condoms.

Interventions are synergistic.  Tostan’s educational programs won’t do much for anyone who died of malaria, but I’m also not excited about saving infants from death only to spend their entire lives in misery.  We could run around funding whichever need is most dire at any given moment, but organizations are costly to set up and a lot is lost when they disband.  Keeping the operational capital of the second and third best things live will let us react faster when we hit diminishing returns on the first.

And that’s when we know what to do.  Tostan and even GiveDirectly are very much works in progress, and because Tostan is so complex and culturally specific it’s slow to scale.  GiveDirectly can scale much faster, but too fast and corruption will become an enormous problem.  If we want those solutions ready to go when disease and nutrition are solved, we have to work on them now.  And that’s before taking into account the synergies.

Predictability

100 small donors each dividing their donations among 5 charities is better for the charities than 20 small donors giving 100% to five different charities, because it’s more stable.  If a minuscule change in numbers causes half your donors to abandon your cause (and maybe come back two years later), your funding will swing wildly.  This is terrible for operational capital.

Risk of Neglect

And that’s assuming favorites are properly distributed.  If there’s an organization or cause that’s everyone’s second choice it should probably get some money, but under a favorites only system it never will.  My source at Effective Altruism Outreach says that’s exactly what the recent EA survey showed is happening to metacharities*; everyone has their favorite real cause, and then likes metacharities.  I’ve increased my estimate of metacharities’ value recently**, so I now think they’re underfunded, so this seems bad.

If you’re a very large donor none of this applies to you because you’re in a position to change charities’ behavior rather than just react to it.  If you’re a small donor who’s happiest donating to the charity with the single best numbers, keep going, I don’t think you’re doing any harm at the scale you currently operate on.  But if you’re like me or Brian  and will have more fun spreading your donations around, I think you’re doing a good thing and shouldn’t change.

 

*The publicly accessible survey summary doesn’t give numbers for individuals’ second choices.   This is still a good example if it’s not literally true so I haven’t bothered looking up the numbers, although I should do so before I actually donate to metacharities.

**I’ve also increased the number of friends I have working at metacharities.  This means I hear about the really cool stuff they do that can’t be publicized, but also that I’m more likely to be suffering from a halo effect or cognitive dissonance or simply a desire for my housemates to have more money because hiring a cleaner would make everyone’s lives easier.

2015 donations

GiveWell: $6,000
I needed to use up company matching quickly before quitting and GiveWell is never a bad choice.
Raising for Effective Giving: $5,000
I am generally fairly skeptical of fundraising charities, especially fundraising charities targeting EAs.  Their mechanisms for evaluating effectiveness seem pretty weak (e.g. Giving What We Can counting donations pledged to be made in 40 years by people who have never donated once).*  That doesn’t mean they’re ineffective or can’t become effective, but I didn’t sign up for this movement to throw money and hope it was at the right place.

REG is different. First, they started with an extremely specific mission: convincing poker players to pledge small portions of their winnings to effective charities. This is a group that was donating minimally before, and is much more susceptible to quantitative arguments than the general population.  They count only money already donated, not pledges. And their plans for expansion seem similarly crafted for very specific niches.  (More or less the same model for fantasy football, microtransactions in video games).  The money raised goes to charities I like

Tostan: $5000
Continuing education courses in small African villages teaching things like literacy, numeracy, cell phone usage, basic medical info, human rights… a lot of different stuff, basically. That makes them hard to measure, and they turned down GiveWell when they tried. But! They did share their data with someone at the Gates Foundation, who found them extremely effective, and I trust his judgement. My focus isn’t “who is producing the highest numbers right now”, it’s “who has the best system for improving themselves and is aimed at the right thing.” Tostan’s classes grew out of requests from the community, so it some ways this is the continuing ed version of GiveDirectly.

That said, I’m working on getting numbers from them. There’s a few different charities I’ve given money to that called me to thank me and ask for my input on their long term plans. My response is usually “but I gave you the money on the assumption you were better at curing poverty than me”, but this year I’m hoping to leverage it into getting them to talk to one of the evaluator charities.** It is not my only plan for accomplishing this, but it seemed worth a shot. And I’d like to offer that as an argument for donating to charities that do things uniquely right while falling down in other ways: once they’re paying attention to you you can nudge them to do better.

 

*This was uncomfortable to write given that I have friends that work at fundraising charities, but I think they will understand that that is why I had to publish it.

**Specifically Giving What We Can, whose wildly optimistic numbers could theoretically be part of the puzzle that gets Tostan to publish more public data.  I’m also trying to get Treehouse to talk to Impact Matters, on the strength of last year’s donation.

Solstice Speech Playlist

I mentioned I had a few things playing in my head when I wrote the speech and more than one person has asked what they were, so here is the list in no particular order.

This is who you are- Trans Siberian Orchestra


“You can run from all the memory but never get that far/For in the end they’ll find you/For this is who you are”

I Get Knocked Down- Tubthumping


“I get knocked down, but I get up again/You’re never gonna keep me down”

“Don’t Let us Get Sick”- written by Warren Zevon, performed by Madeline Martin


“Just make us be brave/and make us play nice”

A good part of the first act of Hamilton, but especially
Guns And Ships

Yorktown


“I’m Hercules Mulligan/I need no introduction/when you knock me down I get the fuck back up again”

Vindicated- Dashboard Confessional


“And I am flawed/but I am cleaning up so well”

More than Useless- Reliant K


“I’m a little more than useless/ And I never knew I knew this/ Was gonna the day, gonna be the day/ That I would do something right/ Do something right for once”

Amigone- Goo Goo Dolls


“Is it too late to call and tell you to be strong?”

No one who knows me expected me to go this whole thing without mentioning Guardians of the Galaxy


“Usually life takes more than it gives, but not today”

There isn’t a good clip for this, but the following memory was very present in my mind: I was 13, and either about to watch or had just watched Schindler’s List. My mom explained that the beauty of it was that this guy had up until that point been a mild negative on the world, found something morally righteous he needed to do, and the skills he’d acquired being a mild negative were instrumental to doing it. People who’d been morally righteous their whole life couldn’t have done what he did. That stuck with me in a way basically no other moral instruction from my parents did.

Talking about controversial things (discussion version)

There is a particular failure pattern I’ve seen in many different areas.  Society as a whole holds view A on subject X.  A small sub-group holds opposing view B.   Members of the sub group have generally put more thought into subject X and they have definitely spent more time arguing about it than the average person on the street.  Many A-believes have never heard of View B or the arguments for it before.

A relative stranger shows up at a gathering of the subgroup and begins advocating view A, or just questioning view B.  The sub-group assumes this is a standard person who has never heard their arguments and launches into the standard spiel.  B doesn’t listen, A gets frustrated and leaves the subgroup, since no one is going to listen to their ideas.

One possibility is that the stranger is an average member of society who genuinely believes you’ve gone your entire life without hearing the common belief and if they just say it slowly and loud enough you’ll come around.*  Another possibility is they understand view B very well and have some well considered objections to it that happen to sound like view A (or don’t sound that similar but the B-believer isn’t bothering to listen closely enough to find out).  They feel blown off and disrespected and leave.

In the former scenario, the worst case is that you lose someone you could have recruited.  Oh well.  If the latter, you lose valuable information about where you might be wrong.  If you always react to challenges this way you become everything hate.

For example: pop evolutionary psychology is awful and people are right to ignore it.  I spent years studying animal behavior and it gave me insights that fall under the broad category of evopsych, except for they are correct.  It is extremely annoying to have those dismissed with “no, but see, society influences human behavior.”

Note that B doesn’t have to be right for this scenario to play out.  Your average creationist or anti-vaxxer has thought more about the topic and spent more time arguing it than almost anyone.  If an ignorant observer watched a debate and chose a winner based on fluidity and citations they would probably choose the anti-vaxxer.  They are still wrong.

Or take effective altruism.  I don’t mind losing people who think measuring human suffering with numbers is inherently wrong.  But if we ignore that entire sphere we won’t hear the people who find the specific way we are talking dehumanizing, and have suggestions on how to fix that while still using numbers.  A recent facebook post made me realize that the clinical tone of most EA discussions plus a willingness to entertain all questions (even if the conclusion is abhorrent) is going to make it really, really hard for anyone with first hand experience of problems to participate.  First hand experience means Feelings means the clinical tone requires a ton of emotional energy even if they’re 100% on board intellectually.  This is going to cut us off from a lot of information.

There’s some low hanging fruit to improve this (let people talk before telling them they are wrong), but the next level requires listening to a lot of people be un-insightfully wrong, which no one is good at and EAs in particular have a low tolerance for.

Sydney and I are spitballing ideas to work on this locally.  I think it’s an important problem at the movement-level, but do not have time to take it on as a project.**  If you have thoughts please share.

*Some examples: “If you ate less and exercised more you’d lose weight.”  “If open offices bother you why don’t you use headphones?”, “but vaccines save lives.”, “God will save you…”/”God isn’t real”, depending on exactly where you are.

**Unexpected benefit of doing direct work: 0 pangs about turning down other projects.  I can’t do everything and this is not my comparative advantage.

Talking about controversial things (speech version)

Some of the things I said in my speech were so obviously personal that controversy wasn’t a relevant concept (I personally am terrified of dementia).  Some were uncontroversial (babies dying of malaria = bad).  Some were so controversial and such a minority view that they were obviously meant to be provocative (female circumcision is, on the individual level, a loving choice).  But what I want to talk about are the statements that are controversial on a national scale but tend to have strong agreement w/i a subgroup.

I always get really nervous when people say things in that category as if they’re certain, much more so then when people state their batshit views as a certainty.  I think it’s because in the latter, you can be reasonably sure the person knows the views are fringe and can take their certainty as a sign of belief, rather than security other people agree with them.  Moreover, the social consequences for disagreeing with them are likely to be localized.  They can get as mad as they want but the worst I will face from other people is annoyance I took the troll bait.

But if someone is stating a locally-uncontroversial/globally controversial view as a certainty, and especially if they’re implying negative things about people who hold the opposite view, I don’t have that security.  It suggests they don’t recognize that “good” (for however you define it) people could hold different views, and that there might be severe social consequences for publicly disagreeing.

An example:  in a 5 person seminar I took in college in 2004 (biology, no human component), a professor said the following: “something something I’m from Texas…. but don’t blame me I hate George Bush.”  I felt really unsafe that a professor would so obviously put down the views of a nontrivial minority of his students.  This despite the fact that during those ellipses, I was thinking “ew, did he vote for George Bush?”

It was important to me during my speech to not just list bad things in the third world, as if the first world were some egalitarian dream.  It was also important to me I didn’t shy away from talking about scary things because I was worried about the personal consequences (e.g. people get mad at me).  At the same time, I wasn’t invited to give a speech on Things Elizabeth Thinks.  I was fulfilling a specific purpose and it wasn’t okay to use it as a platform for my pet projects.  But it’s a purpose that can really only be fulfilled with a substantial amount of raw emotional energy, which is inherently personal.

My original thought was to mention the number of black teenage boys and young adults shot down by cops.  Nothing ends potential like dying.  If that had been controversial to the point that people in the room (most of whom were strangers to each other) felt comfortable disagreeing, I would have said it.  But there was a serious risk that someone would either disagree and feel uncomfortable saying anything, or would agree but still feel like this was a group that didn’t tolerate dissent because they didn’t acknowledge disagreement.  Under other circumstances I would simply have acknowledged the controversy, but the speech really wasn’t set up for that.  But saying nothing felt like throwing black people under the bus because their pain was inconvenient to me.

 

 

My ultimate solution was to

  1. remove direct references to race.  Under other circumstances this would be a bullshit move (white men and black men do not face equal chances of imprisonment), but the entire list was full of things that obviously applied to a specific group and I never named the group, so I felt good about it in this context.
  2. Moved from talking about shootings to the criminal justice system as a whole.  This tends to be less of a lightning rod and there’s more room for numbers to settle arguments.  And while I wasn’t thinking this at the time, someone pointed out this actually affects a lot more people.
  3. An intermediate version talked about politicians punishing people disproportionately because it got them votes.  I dropped this because motives are hard to argue and ultimately irrelevant to the damage done.
  4. Dropped argument that the people were entirely innocent.  Some of them are, of course, but you can argue that to death without making any progress.
  5. Focused on the sticky nature of the criminal justice system rather than any one decision.  Then if I had to argue it, it was about results, which are provable with numbers.

 

There’s a lot of bad stuff about race in America I left out.  But there’s a lot of non-race bad stuff in America and the rest of the world I also left out.  The speech could only be so long.  This to me felt like a respectful acknowledgement of the issue while integrating it into the larger purpose of the speech.