The Signal That Motivates

‘Six meat pies for 10 dollars’, noted my partner while we were driving in Newcastle, New South Wales recently. He had read it on a sign and I replied that it was a great deal. This seemingly insignificant event got me thinking about why it seemed cheap. Nothing about meat pies as such would provide a clue (and especially not for those of you who live outside Australia), but something does provide the context for knowing how to declare whether something is cheap or expensive. That something is the price system.

Now, if you visit a pie shop in Australia, you will likely pay four or five dollars per pie. Therefore, six for 10 dollars is indeed inexpensive by comparison. None of this is interesting in isolation from the entire network of prices we live with every day. If you pause to consider how prices motivate a great number of your choices in life, it is instructive to think about how you would live if there were no prices.

A story from my year teaching English in Slovakia provides just such a backdrop for what happens when prices are eliminated from daily life. A Slovak friend discussed with me on a number of occasions how he would run a bread kiosk on the main street in Prešov. For starters, he would not charge the same prices as the other kiosks because none of them made any money. My friend had spent a certain amount of time in the US and therefore ‘knew’ how the capitalist system worked. He would charge at least twice what the other bread vendors did.

‘Would you sell the same bread?’ I asked.

‘Of course! Why would I trouble myself with different bread when I know what kind people like to buy’.

‘Then why would you charge so much more?’

‘Because I want to make money!’

‘But how will you persuade people your bread is worth twice the amount they can pay elsewhere?’

‘I don’t need to. They will know that my bread is better because it is more expensive’.

‘But if it is exactly the same bread, why would people buy yours? Wouldn’t people think you’re just ripping them off so you can make a quick buck?’

‘People are not smart enough to know this!’

This exchange brought home to me the idea that it is not an individual business that sets prices in isolation from all other businesses. Indeed, the price one charges for anything must reflect what people are willing to spend based on their values and incomes. Therefore, if a loaf of bread in Slovakia typically cost the equivalent of 50 cents, charging a dollar would not motivate a buyer to change vendors - or not for long.

I did not fault my friend for his faulty reasoning. After all, he had grown up in a socialist country where prices did not exist and thus he had never learnt their function. To him, a price was an arbitrary figure to be chosen at whim. Additionally, the habit of comparison shopping was only beginning to take hold.

I spent months discussing the western system to him, even though I myself was far from an expert on the subject. I based my knowledge not on theoretical study but on decades of living in freer countries. I knew what an average loaf of bread cost in various countries and I also knew that a more expensive loaf cost more because of better or specialised ingredients. And so it went for everything from cars to stereos to bicycles. I realised over time that prices are how people make the simplest decisions about how to conduct their lives. Will I go out for dinner Friday night with my friends to the hot new cafe in Sydney? I’d better check their menu online and decide if it’s worth the cost, versus staying home and cooking. Will I spend the weekend away with my partner or will we stay home and do something locally, instead? A check of hotel and restaurant prices will determine our choice to go away or not.

Now consider the resulting chaos if no price system existed, as I experienced in Slovakia. What if, instead of individual buyers and sellers setting prices constantly, we had elected officials decreeing what things ‘should’ cost, and not just for the things some of us think of as ‘free’, but everything. To those of us brought up in the semi-free nations of the western world, we would quickly find out what life was like under the Soviet bloc dictatorships. I found out myself what that system did to people on a daily basis. Since then, I have made myself the solemn promise that I would never take my freedom for granted again.

Since returning to the west nearly two decades ago, I’ve spent years learning about history and economics. From my studies, I have concluded that I revere prices in the same way I am devoted to my loved ones: they reflect the rational choices we all make to ensure our lives are better and happier.

The Banana Incident

As I trudged up the hill away from my dormitory in Prešov, Slovakia, I noticed something odd on the train tracks below the viaduct. There were unusual bits of some yellow substance strewn at random intervals all over the place. After a minute, I recognised them as banana peels. I thought to myself how bizarre a sight, especially since I hadn't seen bananas for sale once in the city since I’d arrived the previous September. Why now? And why so many banana peels? Had passengers thrown them out the windows of the trains as they passed through the city? I was at a loss to explain it.

Later in the day, after I’d finished teaching at the local high school, I went to the shops in town. I found that bananas had indeed come to Prešov, but how? Yes, the communist era had officially ended nearly four years before, but there were many remnants of the command economy still in place. Notably, the system of distribution of goods had not fully been privatised. Even though I had lived in the country for seven months, I still held to many of the notions about the free movement of goods and services most Americans take for granted. Hence my confusion over the bananas.

Within less than a day, all the bananas in Prešov had disappeared, despite their exorbitant price in every shop I visited. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had already begun to grasp the principle of supply and demand, even in a distorted market like Slovakia. When a scarce item came onto the market and especially one as obviously desirable as bananas, people bought them up regardless of price. And further, I noticed people buying them in quantities I had never seen before then. Instead of a bunch or two, as one would see in western supermarkets, I saw little old ladies with ten or more bunches stuffed into their baskets and satchels. Didn’t they know the bananas would spoil before they had a chance to eat them all?

Then I remembered what I’d seen on the train tracks. The little old ladies - and anyone else who had hoarded the bananas - ate them up with reckless abandon. In a country where ‘capitalist consumption’ was still looked upon with suspicion, there was an awful lot of consumption going on. In a country whose ruling ideology had forced people to live for the sake of their comrades, I witnessed what appeared to be more callous disregard than brotherly love.

I fully admit I knew little about economics or political philosophy at the time. When I left the United States to go teach English in Slovakia, I held the typical views of the majority of liberal arts university graduates, which is to say vaguely leftwing, but not educated. I entered the country with the notion that communism or socialism had been improperly applied. When I left the country the following year, full of observations of daily life in a former dictatorship, my basic politics hadn't changed much yet, but I had primed my mind with the seeds of how my worldview was to change over the coming decades.

Today, nearly 20 years after I left Slovakia, I still think about the ways my experiences have coloured who I’ve become in the intervening years. While most of my high school and university peers have held to the same ideas with which they were brought up, my views changed because I removed myself from my familiar surroundings. I had no choice but to observe in order to try to grasp the strange habits of the people in a country I called home for a time.

In the end, what I learnt was to exercise my ability to think independently, without regard for the popularity of my conclusions. In other words, I grew up.

Homesickness

Sometimes when I’m alone in the serenity of my beloved beach house, I get to thinking about the choices I’ve made in my life. With few exceptions, everything I have undertaken, whether successful or not, has brought me closer to the ideals I’ve sought for myself since childhood. In speaking about the unusual paths I’ve followed since finishing high school in 1984, I say: ‘Had I not gone to Belgium, I wouldn’t be in Sydney today’. Those who know me well understand my shorthand manner of expressing how I got from there to here.

Occasionally, in those solitary moments of reflection, I flick through the pages of my life and pause on those spikes of excitement that make me realise what I chose at that time was right for me. Those are the moments that I feel homesick.

To many, homesickness refers to that state of longing for the place one felt most comfortable and happy. Perhaps it’s one’s hometown one hasn’t visited in many years. Perhaps it’s the seaside village where one met one’s first love during the summer in between school years. Perhaps it’s even a person one loved most who always provided a sense of comfort that one could call home.

Homesickness also implies a sadness in the place one finds oneself now, where the friends aren’t as easy to come by or the city doesn’t provide the options one would like. For me, however, homesickness is not a lament or even a longing. It’s an affirmation that I have lived my life to the fullest so far. It’s also a recognition that the people and places I have left behind have marked me in immeasurable ways.

When I think of Milwaukee, the city of my birth, I feel homesick for the house I grew up in and the many good years I had there as a child. It’s the high school where I came of age and the old friends who still live there. It is also the place I knew I would leave someday, for even as a child, the city proved too provincial for my own ambitions.

As for Québec City, I feel homesick for the adventurous spirit I encountered in the people I knew there. I feel an honour in having mastered their unique brand of French - reviled by some but absolutely cherished by me. When I want a reminder of the young man I was as a university student, I put on a playlist of my favourite Québécois songs and again I am there, trudging through the snowy, sludgy streets of the city.

And then there’s Phoenix, that hot, dry and sprawling place where I found my first real love. He is still there, of course, soldiering on with his life just as I am in my current home. To me Randy is Phoenix, so all I need to do to feel that homesickness for my old desert paradise is to think of the great things we did together. Yes, it can even put a lump in my throat, but a lump of fondness, not regret.

Today, when people ask me if I miss home, I say yes, of course I do. Then I describe the exhilaration of flying back into Sydney and seeing the Opera House from above. All my new memories come rushing back to me and I smile to myself. I am home.

At 15, I Kicked a Dog

It is 2024 and I have all but clinched the nomination to become candidate for President of the United States. Suddenly, an old schoolmate from the 1980s emerges in the media with stories of me cruelly kicking a dog and apparently enjoying the sadistic act. This friend - barely an acquaintance of mine today - can vouch for the accuracy of his tale and assures the rapt-with-attention press that this character flaw makes me a dangerously bad candidate. My poll numbers drop for a time and the blogo- and twittersphere are ablaze with denunciations of my monstrousness. How could anyone trust a fellow with the highest office in the land if he abuses poor, defenceless pets?

Weeks later, a small news item appears, buried in the alternative press, clarifying the report of my cruelty: the schoolmate had dropped the leash on his pit bull, the pit bull charged after me, I kicked the dog in the one place it would stun the creature so I could avoid certain attack and I hightailed it home, reporting the incident to my mother, who then spoke with the schoolmate’s parents.

What does the above fictional story illustrate? Context matters. It also serves to highlight that acts committed by an adolescent do not often have a bearing on adult behaviour decades hence. Even if I had kicked the dog intentionally and revelled in the act, odds are I would have come to regret the act at some later point in the future and made amends with the schoolmate. Haven’t we all known people who as children were insufferable in some way only to become fine or even exemplary men and women as adults?

As we have entered another Presidential election season in America, these are the kinds of stories splashed all over the news as attempts by one side to discredit the other. The problem with this approach is it says nothing about a candidate’s actual views and policy positions. Whenever I hear about such things, my first reaction is: so what? I don’t care what a 60-year-old man did at age 15. I do care what he intends to do about the runaway spending in Washington and the increasing statism in general. I want to know what principles of government he advocates and how he plans to implement them.

Many years ago, I listened to a lecture countering the validity of showing starving children in faraway countries on TV. The essence of the lecture was that a picture is not an argument. The fact that some people are starving in Somalia, for example, says nothing about why that is so. It says nothing about why some countries stagnate for generations in grinding poverty whilst others progress rapidly and their citizens are able to lift themselves out of their miserable states and achieve great things.

And so it goes with contemporary smear campaigns during election season. A smear is not an argument. It is only a grown-up’s temper tantrum writ large. As such, I treat those tantrums for what they are: irrelevant ramblings of the irrational. If I want to know where a candidate stands on a panoply of issues, I go to the source. I don’t wait for the press to spoon feed me horror stories of dog kicking.

One of the great lessons my dad taught me was always to be sceptical of what the press presents as news. The more outlandish the story, the more likely it’s mudslinging. To my readers I suggest: do your due diligence and never let anyone else tell you how to judge a candidate. Oh, and in my fictional universe, I did clinch the nomination.

The Best Years of Our Lives

I only met Lily Ellis a few times. On each occasion that I saw her, she was engaging and warm. Though she barely knew me, she’d give me a kiss on the cheek and chat with me a bit before whatever event we were at got underway. Afterwards, she would give me a proper farewell and another kiss on the cheek. When I heard that she’d passed away, I was crestfallen. Though she was nearly 80 years old, she crackled with vibrancy. I did not know that she was ill, or that she was to undergo surgery this year.

When my partner told me of her death, I thought immediately of her daughter Mally, whom I had come to know through him. Mally had invited her mother to come live with her and her family in Australia just five years ago. Lily had spent most of her life in Zimbabwe and other parts of Africa, finally deciding to leave the comforts of her home to venture out into foreign territory. Many people emigrate to other parts of the world in youth or middle age, but I found it particularly adventurous that an elderly lady would make the trek to a faraway country such as Australia.

Lily’s family chose their Rabbi to give her eulogy. He lovingly told the details of her life in Africa and Australia, her triumphs and tribulations, her loves and losses. One thing he said resonated with me in particular: before she passed, Lily described her time in Australia as the best years of her life. Just then I wished I had had the opportunity to know her better. Those of us who choose to become immigrants are a breed apart. Not only do we uproot ourselves, leaving behind everything familiar and comfortable, but we do it with aplomb. We are adventurous souls in search of a better life, fully aware we may not find it, but fearless enough to light out anyway.

In the debates about immigration in Australia and America, the one thing left out of the discussion is actual immigrants and what they bring to their new countries. In both Australia and America, immigrants are viewed as parasites at worst or unimportant at best.  ‘We don’t need more people’, is the common refrain. Due to decades of welfare statism and environmentalist propaganda, immigrants are no longer welcomed as those who will enrich the societies they move to, but rather native born locals view them with suspicion or, dare I say it, derision. It may be true that some immigrants are layabouts only seeking to live off of others, but I believe the vast majority are resourceful and hard working.

Think about it. To make the enormous effort to plan and then move to a new country, often without knowing much about the place he will call home, an immigrant must be more independent than the average person. When he arrives in the new country, he must begin the work of getting to know his way around, finding a place to live, meeting new friends, and the list goes on. The last thing on the mind of a new immigrant is how he can ‘game the system’ so he can sponge off of others. Even the dreaded ‘boat people’ (a term I find profoundly insulting to those who endure extreme hardship to find a better place to live) are far more virtuous than given credit.

I have a request for my readers. Next time you think about immigration, instead of lumping all these people into an amorphous collective, pause to consider the Lilys, the Jasons, the Mallys and all the actual people who risk life and livelihood to find a better place. A place they can call home, just as you do.

Words and Deeds: A Tribute to My Dad

‘If you don’t stop jumping on that bed, young man, I’m going to come over and swat you!’ exclaimed the young father, tired from a long day’s drive in middle America.

‘You do, you die!’ replied the three-year-old boy, as he continued to jump happily up and down on the rollaway bed in the hot motel room. A stunned silence descended over the room, followed by peals of laughter from the boy’s older siblings. Soon his harried parents joined the kids in their mirth, the long day’s drive and the temperature of the seedy motel room forgotten as unimportant details.

As it turns out, I, Jason Lockwood, was the young boy and the tired father was none other than George J. Lockwood, now 80 years young. This minor event in an anonymous motel room more than four decades ago highlights an immutable fact about Dad: he raised his children to be independent adults. Never mind that sometimes that independence manifested itself at inopportune moments, like bedtime after a gruelling drive across the fruited plains of my country of birth.

When I was seven years old, my little friend Christopher from two doors down and I decided it would be fun to set fire to a broom on a neighbours’ back porch. We thought we could contain the fire, but when the entire thing broke into a raging blaze, Christopher’s father took notice from next door and leapt the fence that separated the two properties. He dragged me home to report to Dad what I had done and you can bet there was hell to pay that muggy summer’s night. Dad gave me a spanking the likes of which I’d never experienced and grounded me for a full two weeks!

This second memory from my childhood serves to remind me that Dad was serious about raising his kids properly. He wanted us to understand the consequences of our actions. Therefore, if we misbehaved, the resulting punishment fit the deed. I roundly deserved the spanking and grounding, in other words.

Despite these lessons learnt the hard way, Dad was a fair man. Both he and my mother always ensured we sat down to a proper family dinner every night of the week. We ate what my mother cooked and we discussed the ideas of the day around the dinner table. Sometimes the ideas were serious and other times more light hearted, but Dad, sitting at the head of the table, served as unofficial moderator for the evening’s discussion, while Mom ensured that we spoke in turn. As a child of the 1970s and early 1980s, our discussions often ran to political events of the day. Civility was key, and we were all required to remain respectful of our parents’ and siblings’ viewpoints.

Dad enjoyed a lifelong career in journalism, working at the Milwaukee Journal from the 1950s to the mid-1980s. He was a conservative at a notoriously liberal news organisation, but despite his divergence with the editorial views of the newspaper, he thrived in his many roles over the years. He would frequently give me tours of the newsroom and the print floor with the big, noisy contraptions that spat out newspapers at lightning speed. He would always introduce me to a new employee, bring me to have a chat with the editor of the Journal, Dick Leonard, or show off the latest technology that would make producing the newspaper quicker and more efficient. To this day, I attribute my love for language and technology to those visits to Dad’s office.

Throughout my childhood, Dad repeated his “roots and wings” speech to us time and again. It consisted of explaining to us that he and Mom gave us a foundation of ideas and love and from which we would take flight as independent, well adjusted adults. The most important lesson from the speech, however, was that I must always think for myself. Only I was the master of my own mind and I should never surrender it to anyone for any reason. With Dad, facts mattered. Facts were king. Without facts, no argument could or should hold sway. In his career, he was a ruthless editor, excising any words from a news article containing inflammatory or biased language.

Soon after entering high school, I declared to both my parents that I wanted to study abroad on the AFS program. Dad, always the realist, insisted that I carefully consider what a big step this entailed. I would be required to live far away from home, attend a strange school and learn another language. It was not enough, in Dad’s eyes, to want something. I had to earn my way in the world, which left no room for passive star gazing. Rather, any goal, however immediate or long term, must be followed up with a plan of execution. Only then, according to Dad, would I meet success in any endeavour I undertook in life.

I did finally realise my dream of living overseas on a high school exchange program, but found that Dad was right: the goal required careful planning. It also meant that however laudable the desire, sometimes one’s plans did not always play out as expected. Another of Dad’s lessons to me was always to have a plan B - or even plan C, D, E or F!

As I entered adulthood, Dad’s lessons and advice became less frequent, but no less strident. After my first experience living overseas in Belgium at 18, I went on to study and later teach overseas, too. Dad always supported me in my decisions, with the ongoing proviso that I think carefully through each choice I made and only undertake a new adventure with the full knowledge that it was right for me. I cannot stress this last point enough. Dad never demanded that my siblings and I follow in his footsteps. We were to make our own choices, bearing in mind the enormous responsibility independence of thought and action required of us.

Upon my return from teaching English in Slovakia in 1993, I was at a loss for what I would do next with my life. Still in my 20s, I had not yet decided upon a career. I thought it made sense to return to university to study for a master’s degree. I considered history or economics as possible areas of study. I was certain Dad would approve. After all, education was held in the highest regard in my family. Also, Dad held a master’s in journalism himself.

I recall vividly the telephone conversation with Dad:

‘I have decided to study for a master’s degree’.

‘In what?’ Dad asked.

‘I was thinking history or maybe economics,’ I replied, somewhat surprised by his curt retort.

‘Where are you going to get the money to pay for this?’ Dad questioned, taking me utterly by surprise.

I stammered a reply I no longer recall, but Dad’s message was clear: don’t go back to study unless it was going to advance my actual career opportunities and only if the cost was within my reach.

I never got the master’s degree. Instead, I studied both subjects on my own, spending money on the books, but not the exorbitant university fees. Once again, Dad had provided his unique brand of parenting, even to his grown up son. His message was not that further education was wrong, but that it should be the right decision to make in the context of the rest of my life’s goals. I eventually took a beginning computer programming course for a few hundred dollars at a local college in Milwaukee. That one course moved me to pursue a career in software. 16 years later I am still in the field, happy for the dressing down Dad gave me in the summer of 1993. Without it, I might have made a costly error and gone into debt to boot.

At the age of 41, I announced to my family that I had accepted a permanent position with my company in Sydney. This time, instead of admonishing me, Dad asked: ‘When can your mother and I come visit?’ You could have knocked me over with a feather! Upon reflection, however, his reaction made complete sense. After many years of instilling in me firm roots, I had finally graduated to taking flight with my own wings. Dad could safely assume that my decision was rational, that my choice of uprooting myself once again would enhance my life and career. It has, in spades.

I realise as I write this paean to Dad that it is not so much about him as it as about my relationship to him. As I pause to consider Dad’s quiet heroism - as journalist, husband, father and friend to many over his eight glorious decades - I am almost moved to a silent prayer of reverence. I say almost because I am not literally religious, but prayer is the right word in this context because it conveys the kind of high regard the religious hold for the concept of a God.

Dad has certainly suffered setbacks and disappointments in his long life. Over the past decade, cancer, diabetes and heart attacks have nearly bested him. Dad is a slugger, though. He possesses an indomitable spirit that cuts through all disease and discomfort. To this day, I watch in awe as he and Mom continue on with their lives as if nothing can stop them. I know that no-one lives forever and Dad is no exception to that immutable law of the universe. But, and this is a big but, the spirit that is George Lockwood will live on. As he is still before us - still passionate and still feisty - I will continue to revel in his deep commitment to his values here on earth.

I salute you and I love you, Dad.

The Eyeglass in Reverse

Imagine for a moment a distant future where one's primary focus, when dealing with other people, is to see their virtues first and ignore whatever vices they may possess. In daily life, people spend their lives improving their minds, not as part of formal schooling, but as an on-going process of perfecting their skills. As a result, the majority of adults perform to the best of their abilities, be it in their chosen professions, their romantic lives or even the hobbies they pursue in their free time. Gone is the neurotic clinging to flaws or the sneering sarcasm prevalent in the olden days of the 20th and early 21st century cultures.

In this shining new Grecian age of the perfectibility of man, people curiously look upon the past as a barbarous relic. In those days of yesteryear, mediocrity and incompetence became a fine art. Clay feet were the norm, and the wider culture reflected this norm in its art: movies about drug addicts, musicals about squatters in Greenwich Village, paintings that depicted nothing save a jumble of spatters of paint on canvas. The men and women of today scratch their heads in confusion over the people who inhabited this previous world. What on earth motivated them to wallow in their simpering, empty, listless lives?

The people also recall that their recent ancestors lived on the brink of destruction, electing ever more dictatorial leaders who boastfully prided themselves on their ignorance of history and economics. Then, at a critical juncture, a new age of rationality began to take hold as people rejected the nostrums they heard everyday in the mass media. A once silent minority of men who valued their lives so much that they refused to give into the irrationality they saw around them set about forging for themselves a new future. The culture at large saw them as kooks and radicals, but they failed to see the one thing that set these men apart: they possessed an indomitable sprit. They refused to give up.

The above is a fable, of course. My goal in presenting it was not to wish for a utopia that doesn't exist, but to highlight how one's focus can determine the outcome of one's life. Over dinner some weeks ago, one of my housemate's friends dominated the conversation by insisting that she could discern other people's character flaws. She thus possessed the ability to figure out how messed up the people around her were, or so she claimed. I said little in reply, other than to point out that my method was to look first for virtues in others and only reject them if they proved unworthy of my attention.

I rarely have found reasons to reject people I deal with. Most everyone I have known over the course of my life has had some good traits and I have found their company valuable to me to one degree or another. I choose my associations carefully and if I sense that someone is lacking in virtue, I minimise my contact with them. Put simply, I don't have to become best friends with a barista. I only care that he makes an excellent coffee. And so it goes for all the people I choose to deal with, from co-workers, to friends, to romantic partners.

It is extraordinarily difficult to maintain my position, but as I have grown older, it has become easier. Habits begun as a young man are now second nature to me, but the world today can constantly challenge a positive outlook. I rarely find others willing to challenge cultural norms to the degree that I do, but they do exist. Those others who do exist prove to be the ray of sunlight I need to soldier on.

Over that dinner conversation, I struggled to come up with an expression to describe the disagreement with my flaw-obsessed interlocutor, but then it hit me: this person looks through the eyeglass in reverse. I find it describes the viewpoint perfectly: in looking through the wrong end of a telescope, objects appear smaller and distorted - flawed even. If, on the other hand, one looks through the right end, one's field of vision expands, enabling one to see with greater depth and clarity those objects ordinarily invisible to the naked eye. It's what I do every day.

Perhaps, instead of blindly accepting the popular wisdom of the day by looking through the wrong end of a telescope, you too can widen your field of vision by flipping it around for a change. Try it sometime. The results might surprise you.