We worry about the wrong things

From dress codes to climate change, our biases affect our thinking

Sorry, Dude, you wouldn’t be welcome at my club — though I can’t say why. (Photo by Igor bispo on Unsplash)

---

For a few years in his early middle age, my dad had a job that paid for a country club membership, which gave him access to a golf course and brought his lucky kids to a pool on long summer days. Four decades or so later, I caught a similar break, which is how my kid got a chance to become a fine tennis player. Our club isn’t really a fancy place, but it has a big pool, like the one where I learned to swim, flanked by gorgeous red clay tennis courts. I just couldn’t give up the membership when I left that job a few years back, which is why I received a mystifying memo last week from club management.

“We kindly ask all members to respect fellow club members and (club) employees by adhering to the club’s Dress Code Policy,” the note read. “In particular, please refrain from wearing hats backward at any time while on club property.”

Somehow I had missed the hats-forward rule. Mind you, I’m not a hat-backwards guy, but I’m kind of offended on their behalf. I mean, it’s perplexing, this notion that wearing a baseball cap the way a catcher does suggests disrespect to club members and to the people who pull their beer taps. While we’re at it, we might as well question the club rule requiring only shirts with collars for men. I mean, the collarless shirts I wear when I’m playing on those fine red clay courts cost me about 40 bucks each, which surely signifies that I’m in a social stratum appreciated by even the snootiest of my fellow club members, not to mention being a sucker for sports apparel companies’ marketing campaigns.

Indeed, my unconcern about collarless shirts and backwards caps proves that I’m ill-suited for a country club leadership role. If it were up to me, I’d consider some different rules — like, I’d have the club crack down on parents who allow their youngsters to whine and scream ceaselessly as older people (ahem!) are trying to relax by the pool. “We kindly ask you to respect fellow club members by teaching your children that whining is not a respectful way to achieve an objective,” the rule might read.

I’m dreaming, of course. That sort of a rule might even invite pushback from the club members who support a certain presidential candidate who has built a political career on whining about anything that doesn’t glorify him. Maybe you know who I’m talking about. His clubs must welcome whining. His party seems to, at least.

But our little country club isn’t unusual in that it reflects a reality of contemporary life: We often seem to worry about the wrong things. And since we have finite amounts of both time and capacity for attention, that misplaced worry can distract us from what really ought to draw our concern. That, it seems, is key to the odd choices that voters routinely make, leading them to vote against what’s actually in their own best interest.

A whole nationwide political campaign could be built on distractions from what really matters. In fact, you could draw the support of tens of millions of people based on a strategy of intentionally downplaying what should take priority and elevating what really ought to matter less. Gosh — who knew? — I could even argue that this is exactly what’s happening.

Take, for instance, what every poll suggests is front of mind for voters, as it typically is in an election year: so-called pocketbook issues. An Economist/YouGov poll last month found that the top issue for voters in this presidential election year is “inflation/prices,” which you might consider understandable. After all, the Covid-19 pandemic brought a worldwide surge in inflation, starting in mid-2021 and lasting until mid-2022. In the U.S., the inflation rate rose to 7 percent annually at the end of 2021 and 6.5 percent at the end of 2022.¹

That was hard for people to handle, and it didn’t make people happier to note that inflation in the U.S. was lower than in most advanced economies. Anyway, by the end of last year, the inflation rate had dropped to a 3.4 percent. It’s now below 3 percent — notably, lower than the inflation rate in every year but one during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. None of those candidates faced pushback at the polls because of inflation.²

In other words, the economy is in better shape now than it was during almost all the years that defined economic reality for people in middle age and above. With healthy consumer spending powering the economy forward and inflation nearly under control, the Federal Reserve is expected to cut interest rates this month. So you might conclude that voters’ intense focus on inflation is a misplaced priority — that it’s a backward view, rather than what we ought to expect to be atop the agenda of our next president.

Likewise, all the attention to our southern border and its supposed impact on crime and on illegal voting by non-citizens is based more on fear than reality. We know where that unrealistic fear originates: Donald J. Trump. Our most recent former president has claimed that the administration of President Joe Biden had created a society awash in “bloodshed, chaos and violent crime,” a lot of it caused by illegal immigrants, and he has asserted without any evidence that millions of non-citizens have voted for Democrats. Our country, Trump said last year, is becoming a “lawless, open borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare.” None of that is true, but its repetition has drawn believers.³

Many studies have found that immigration is not linked to any increase in crime; in fact, the opposite is true: Immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes. And crime actually has been falling in America since Biden took office. Crime did surge early in the pandemic, and it was understandably frightening: murders were up by nearly 30 percent, and assaults rose by more than 10 percent. But that occurred in 2020 — the last year of Trump’s tenure in the White House. You might reasonably argue that voters concerned about crime ought to weigh the issue in the context of Trump’s failure to keep it under control.

But beyond voters’ attention to issues that ought to concern them less, you get a good sense of voters’ misplaced priorities in looking at what doesn’t draw their attention. In one section of the Economist/YouGov poll that showed inflation and immigration as voters’ top concerns, voters were given a list of 15 topics and were asked which they considered important. At the very bottom of the 15, by voters’ rating: climate change and the environment.⁴

That assessment is stunning, revealing that voters still minimize the importance of an issue that threatens the survival of hundreds of millions of people, which inflation and immigration surely do not. In what is almost certain to be the hottest year on record, the world is beginning to learn the consequences of the carbon that has been spewing into the atmosphere at enormous rates since the start of the Industrial Age.

Climate change is the world’s greatest health threat, according to the UN, causing about 13 million deaths annually, with more humans in mortal peril each year. Weather-related events displace about 23 million people annually, putting them at risk of extreme poverty. As oceans become more acidic, the marine resources that feed billions of people are diminishing rapidly. Heat stress is sapping the water supply, affecting grasslands used for grazing and causing declining crop yields, so that within a few years, the food supply for billions of people will slip below tolerable levels.⁵

We are, in fact, heating ourselves to death, and we aren’t demanding that our political leaders do much of anything about it. Indeed, one of the candidates insists that we are already doing too much. Campaigning in New York City this week, Trump offered a curt assessment of climate change: “That’s not our problem,” he said. In fact, it is. We’re more inclined, though, to worry about less important stuff, including the price of eggs and the notion that immigrants are a threat to our safety.⁶

Psychologists have some ideas about why we tend to focus on matters of less importance than the longer-term threats that ought to demand our attention. In considering climate change, for example, foremost among the reasons we tend to dismiss the fears might be something called the availability heuristic, a concept that was developed in the 1960s by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.⁷

A heuristic is a mental shortcut that humans adopt that enables us to quickly make judgments without deep thinking — often unconsciously, and frequently drawing on our biases. It’s the way we might decide whether it’s safe to walk on a dark side of the street without knowing the crime statistics for that block, or to put some extra salt on our dinner even if we haven’t seen how much salt was already added in the kitchen. Heuristics developed evolutionarily, helping our ancestors to survive uncertain threats. They are convenient for decision-making today, but they often lead us to incorrect judgments.

When we make a decision based on the availability heuristic, we decide whether something is likely to occur based on how readily examples come to mind. So extensive media coverage of crime makes us over-estimate the real danger of crime, and attention to the influx of immigrants at the border — with nearly a decade of daily repetition by Trump of their threat — has elevated that issue into a heuristic. Over time, we have come to believe that those threats are serious.

Yet the true impact of climate change is only beginning to seep into our consciousness. We still tend to think of the growing incidence of violent storms as oddities, rather than the new normal because most days aren’t marked by such turbulence; we assess a single year with adequate rainfall as disproving warnings of long-term drought. And political campaigns that focus on short-term problems and dismiss such intractable issues as climate change are partly to blame for our refusal to face reality.

We might imagine voters demanding that candidates offer reasoned solutions to our most pressing issues. But that would require us to overcome the heuristics that we rely upon to make most decisions of the day. So we worry about other matters, including those that are right in front of us — like grocery prices and crime.

And, apparently, hats on guys at country clubs. My club’s offense at the notion probably can be blamed on a heuristic — namely, a quick assessment of the guys who ought to show up at a country club, and those who ought not. Think of who wore their hats backwards: Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (“I looked good in it that way,” J.D. Salinger has him say), Walter Matthau playing Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple on Broadway, and countless rappers of the 1980s. Looking at those characters and their progeny, the people who run country clubs apparently come down on the side of the conservative columnist William F. Buckley, who in 2001 griped that backward caps amounted to “a bit of contemporary infantilism.” Buckley, you know, was very much a country club guy.⁸

If you consider the matter hardly worth worrying about, I’m with you. But if you’d like to get riled up about something that matters, how about taking a whack at drawing politicians’ attention to what ought to be the most prominent issue of this election season? Demand attention to climate change. I’d take my hat off to you.

1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/as-rate-cuts-near-federal-reserves-inflation-gauge-shows-cooling-price-increases

2. https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832#:~:text=This%20is%20why%20most%20central,798

3. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fact-checking-trumps-speech-crime-and-immigrants

4. https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econtoplines_W3lebBm.pdf

5. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/causes-effects-climate-change

6. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/donald-trump-shrugs-off-global-warming-worries-says-that-is-not-our-problem-in-latest-remarks/articleshow/113111967.cms?from=mdr#google_vignette

7. https://www.britannica.com/topic/heuristic-reasoning

8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2001/07/01/holden-caulfield-american-whiner/bc1fc389-5c00-439b-a4b5-724336ef0850/

---

---

DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN NOW: MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

IF YOU’RE A READER who wants to hear more of Rex Smith’s views, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay. 

AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or get the podcast there.

It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.” It’s worth your time!

---

NOW, LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS

If you’d like to learn how to write opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live class Rex co-teaches that is offered by Marion Roach Smith’s global platform for writing instruction, The Memoir Project. Click below for information on our upcoming schedule of classes.

Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too. 

---

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-REX SMITH