Hard Choices

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by

Chris Johnson
in ,

People have a difficult time making hard choices.

The Trolley Problem brings is one of the ways that we explore ethical choices. The general premises are that there are five people that will die if you do nothing. There is one person, who is currently safe, who can be sacrificed to save the five.

Do you do nothing and let five people die, or do you throw the switch and kill the one?

What if we change the problem statement a little, what if the one was a child? What if the one was a woman? What if the one was a “person of color”? What if it was your wife?

Now take that same list of changes and insert it into the five. What if one of the five was a child, a woman, a person of color, your wife?

Ok. How about if your daughter was the one and your son was one of the five?

The problem hasn’t changed, but the emotional stress is greatly increased.

Politicians know this. They use it to their advantage.

The term is “Emotional Blackmail.”

Consider the following dilemma, you can choose to pay more in taxes or the school system’s proposed budget is capped at a half million increase rather than the 3.5 million increase they were asking for.

For me, that’s an easy choice. Cap at a 0.5 million increase. At which point the emotional blackmail begins.

“If you don’t give use the extra three million dollars, we will have to fire teachers.”

Is that really the only choice?

That is the question I posed a teacher. What other things in the budget can be cut, before we have to fire teachers.

Now, I’ve been told that I’m against teachers. That I oppose her. Why? Because I don’t want to cut teachers?

For her, there are only two choices, pay or cut teachers. If I don’t want to pay more in taxes, I must hate teachers and want them fired.

So I asked her about programs in the budget that could be cut instead. In our first iteration, there were no programs she was willing to cut.

The problem she has is that every cut is equally bad. Every choice is equally bad. Since all the choices are bad, the only option is to get the 3 million dollars out of the stone of taxpayers.

We had a similar issue at a family level years ago. We had a 16k windfall. We all agreed we would put that money into the homestead. The problem was that nobody could agree on what we should do.

Should we get new siding for the house? Should we replace one of the vehicles? Should we pay off a loan?

It wasn’t even that simple, there were about a dozen different projects or expenses we were considering.

By default, humans will spiral rather than make a hard decision.

I had to listen to people tell me that project A was more important than project B, but B was more important than C. And C was more important than A.

It was a circle. Everything was more important than everything else.

The first process was having everybody create an ordered list of by importance.

They couldn’t do it. They all had situations where they had multiple things with equal importance. Or worse still, some couldn’t do it because they couldn’t choose.

The method that did work was creating binary choices.

We lay out a grid, in that grid we compare every item to every other item, asking if item row was more important than the item in the column.

Once that grid is filled out, we can create an ordered list. Once we had ordered lists, we could present and come to an agreement as to what our priorities were.

Roof Paint Gutters Truck Car Computer Foundation
Siding Roof Siding Gutters Siding Siding Siding Foundation
Roof Roof Roof Roof Roof Roof Roof
Paint Gutters Paint Paint Paint Foundation
Gutters Gutters Gutters Gutters Foundation
New Truck Truck Truck Foundation
New Car Car Foundation
New Computer

From this table, we can create an ordered list

  1. Roof
  2. Foundation
  3. Gutters
  4. Siding
  5. Paint
  6. Truck
  7. Car
  8. Computer

The problem we have with our school budget is that every program is equally important. In the end, they will likely fire teachers and programs.

        

Comments

6 responses to “Hard Choices”

  1. ABC123 Avatar
    ABC123

    Well written and great analogies.

    1
    Reply
  2. CBMTTek Avatar
    CBMTTek

    “What if we change the problem statement a little, what if the one was a child? What if the one was a woman? What if the one was a “person of color”? What if it was your wife?”

    Not a good enough contrast. Try this instead: “What if it was your dog?”

    And, when it comes to politics, they never cut the bloat. They always, ALWAYS, want more money, so they threaten the things the public wants and needs in order to get their luxury/pork projects. The city legislature wants to build outhouses for the homeless, so they claim some kind of budget crisis, and threaten to cut firefighting and police.

    Stupidly, the public buys into it as well…

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    Reply
  3. pkoning Avatar
    pkoning

    “What other things in the budget can be cut, before we have to fire teachers.”
    Right. But this is exactly what dishonest politicians do. Whenever uppity voters start objecting to wild spending, their answer is to cut STARTING WITH the most important positions. So you begin by laying off firemen and police, then teachers. The useless overhead never gets cut.
    It’s all about teaching the voters a “lesson” — don’t mess with those in power because they’ll make you suffer.

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    Reply
  4. Tom from WNY Avatar
    Tom from WNY

    Now you know why the Progressives, Politicritters and Public are in a panic over DOGE.

    I have to account for what I do during the workDAY not workWEEK. Federal employees can do it as well.

    As far as cutting Gov’t. programs/personnel; it becomes a what do we REALLY need conversation.

    Reply
  5. Archer Avatar
    Archer

    The problem we have with our school budget is that every program is equally important. In the end, they will likely fire teachers and programs.

    With respect, no, that’s not the problem.

    Oh, they will fire the teachers first and then (and only then) cut programs, but not because every program is equally important. They’ll do it because firing teachers is what hurts the community most and has the most visible effect. The media headlines practically write themselves, and the journalists and their left-leaning viewers eat it up.

    Remember, we’re dealing with emotional toddlers here. When they don’t get what they want, they throw the loudest and most damaging tantrum they can, to punish those uppity voters for not toeing the line on their agenda.

    They could absolutely find places to reduce their budget — which in your scenario DID get increased, just not by as much as they wanted — without firing teachers, but that wouldn’t send the same emotional-blackmail message to the community.

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    Reply
  6. Allyson Avatar
    Allyson

    I keep pointing out that they don’t need to be cutting anything out of the budget. That’s literally how we ended up where we are now, both in our community with the schools, and our country as a whole.

    What we need to do is take the pool of money that we have and put it in a pile. Then we need to make a list of all the things that need to be done and how much they cost. Start pulling things off the list depending on their importance. I tend to look at things like teachers and go well, it’s impossible to teach without teachers, so we probably need those, and I move them to the top of the list.

    When you have a list like this, you will automatically pick the things that are important to you first. Once you have those things that cannot be cut the over by the money, you can start looking at what’s left. You get to a point where the things left on the table kind of look like the bottom of the junk drawer when you a finally get around to cleaning it. You’ve salvaged everything you need, put aside the things you want, thrown away the trash, and then there’s a bunch of stuff at the bottom that you look at and tried to decide about. That’s how you do a budget. Do it from the bottom up, never from the top down.

    Reply

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