Short Takes #10: Changing One's Views
John Kenneth Galbraith | Allostasis | 401(k) Participation | The ‘No-Shoes’ Office | Taking A Lesson From The Nordics
Faced with the choice between changing one’s views and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
| John Kenneth Galbraith
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But a counter to the binary, black-and-white viewpoint of either not changing, or embracing change grudgingly, is allostasis [emphasis mine]:
No doubt, change can, and often does, hurt; but with the right mind-set, it can also be a force for growth. It’s not as if we have any choice in the matter. Like it or not, life is change. We’d be wise to shift our default position from futile resistance to being in conversation with change instead.
A concept called allostasis can help. Developed in the late 1980s by a neuroscientist, Peter Sterling, and a biologist, Joseph Eyer, allostasis is based on the idea that rather than being rigid, our healthy baseline is a moving target. I see it as parallel to the concept conceived by Richard Rohr of order, disorder and reorder. Allostasis runs counter to a more widespread but older and outdated model for change, homeostasis. Essentially, homeostasis says healthy systems return to the same starting point following a change: X to Y to X. By contrast, in allostasis, healthy systems also crave stability after a change, but the baseline of that stability can be somewhere new: X to Y to Z.
Allostasis is defined as “stability through change,” elegantly capturing the concept’s double meaning: The way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing, at least to some extent. If you want to hold your footing, you’ve got to keep moving.
From neuroscience to pain science to psychology, allostasis has become the predominant model for understanding change in the scientific community. The brain is at its best when it is constantly rewiring itself and making new connections — what we experience as a thriving and stable consciousness is actually a process of ongoing change. Overcoming pain, be it physical or psychological, is not about resistance (which often worsens the experience) or trying to get back to where you were before a distressing event or situation. It’s about balancing acceptance with problem-solving and moving forward to a new normal. A healthy response to change and disorder, whether it’s within ourselves or our environments, is one based on the allostatis process. And yet this concept is still little known to laypeople. This is unfortunate.
Adopting an allostatic outlook acknowledges that the goal of mature adulthood is not to avoid, fight or try to control change, but rather to skillfully engage with it. It recognizes that after disorder, there is often no going back to the way things were — no one form of order, but many forms of reorder. Via this shift, you come to view change and disorder not as something that happens to you but as something that you are working with, an ongoing dance between you and your environment. You stop fearing change, which is to say you stop fearing life.
| Brad Stulberg, Stop Resisting Change
401(k) Participation
Automatic enrollment is having a big impact:
85 percent of workers with access to a 401(k) participate, according to Vanguard — up steadily over the past decade.
The average participant savings rate in plans administered by Vanguard reached a high of 7.7 percent of wages in 2024, boosted by automatic enrollment and escalation of contribution rates.
These changes have made the 401(k) system more resilient, with retirement savers staying the course despite upheaval from the pandemic, market gyrations and inflation over the past five years, notes David Stinnett, head of Vanguard’s Strategic Retirement Consulting group.
“Due to these default features, people just keep going,” he said.
Combined participant and employer contribution rates have climbed steadily over time to an average of 12 percent of wages, up from 10.8 percent as recently as 2015. And there’s been strong adoption of target date funds, which automatically rebalance portfolios to age-appropriate asset allocations. At Vanguard, 84 percent of participants used target date funds in 2024, up from 69 percent in 2015 — and 59 percent were invested solely in those funds, Vanguard reports.
Here’s the rub: only half of private-sector workers are covered by a workplace retirement plan at any given time, mainly because small employers are less likely to offer plans.
The coverage gap helps explain why median retirement account holdings for workers 55 to 64 years old was just $185,000 in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve, and the amounts saved by low-income workers have fallen in recent years. There are also persistent disparities in savings by race and ethnicity, with median Black households holding only 14 percent as much as white households, and Hispanic households just 20 percent compared with white households.
Confirmation, again, that defaulting to opt-in pays big dividends because monkey brain.
The ‘No-Shoes’ Office
A Silicon Valley trend may have hit — and passed — its peak: shoeless offices:
Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who studies work culture, said the shoes-off trend was partly “the pajama economy in action.” That is, now that people who worked from home during the pandemic are back in the office, they are bringing their home habits with them.
The phenomenon, he added, is consistent with Silicon Valley’s 996 culture (in which people have been working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week). If you’re at work for 12 hours, he noted, “you might as well wear your slippers in the office as you’re not getting to wear them at home.”
Taking A Lesson From The Nordics
There’s no magic in how the Nordic countries have managed prosperity and social equality: it’s just smart economic and sociall policies:
The Nordic countries appear to have developed a social and economic model that combines prosperity with equality. This column identifies four key pillars of the Nordic model:
(1) substantial public investment in essential services,
(2) influential labour unions,
(3) high public expenditure on social insurance, and
(4) high and progressive taxation.
Equality in hourly pay, linked to high union density and strong coordination in wage bargaining, is the main reason for lower earnings inequality in the Nordics. Further research is needed to determine the implications of this for productivity and growth and whether the model is replicable.
Now, let’s get the Democrats out of low gear, the GOP out of the White House, and push ahead. We’ll have to fight hard for a better future.2
There ought to be a future we can choose. It’s up to us to find it.
| Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira
