In the Sunday, November 23, 2008, New York Times, in the Connecticut and The Region section,  I was struck by the inadvertent juxtaposition of two articles.  The first, in the Town Green column by Larry Bloom, was entitled “On the Local Level, A Bid to Pool Resources.”  The second, alongside it, was an article by Jan Ellen Spiegel, entitled “Charities Struggling with Their Own Needs.”

In Bloom’s column, the major point made is that Connecticut is the “national champion of governmental redundancy.”  We have 169 towns, with 169 separate governmental systems.  In Spiegel’s article, she talks about the fact that charities are “just starting to sort out how to deal with the as-yet uncalculated effects from potential cuts to state funds in the wake of Connecticut’s projected two-year $6 billion deficit, and the impact of the stock market’s vicissitudes on donors, corporate giving, and investment portfolios of foundations.” (more…)

Pitney Bowes is sponsoring a program with the American Red Cross called Holiday Mail for Heroes to enable Americans to send cards to active and wounded members of the armed services, military families, and veterans during the holiday season.

This is the second year of the campaign, and it has shown me not only the power of these handwritten letters and cards for those receiving them, but for the senders and the people who have volunteered to get them to the recipients.  Today, we desperately need to come together and connect emotionally.  The fear that the economic crisis has caused in many people has had the effect of making them suffer alone, and of making them believe that they are powerless to help themselves or others. (more…)

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In the Sunday, November 2, 2008, New York Times business section was a great column by Robert J. Schiller, a professor of economics and finance at Yale, and a person who understands how the world works better than just about anyone teaching, researching, or writing today.  In a piece in the “Economic View” section, entitled “Challenging the Crowd in Whispers, Not Shouts,” Dr. Schiller attempts to answer a question on many peoples’ minds:  how could Alan Greenspan and other experts have so completely failed to predict and head off the worldwide financial meltdown that has taken place the last 18 months?

Schiller, who wrote a book entitled Irrational Exuberance , warning very specifically about the risk of a meltdown in the housing and financial markets, notes that there were experts who saw what was happening, but they were in a minority, and were treated as if they were less credible and of lower quality than the experts who held the prevailing view.  He explained that, Dr. Irving Janis, a Yale psychologist, in a book entitled Groupthink, talked about the often unconscious insecurity experts feel when they are not receiving acclaim from their most renowned peers and the unconscious self-censorship that follows from it.   As Schiller cogently states:  “They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.”  He goes on to describe how he experienced some ridicule and criticism from those who disagreed with him, and how difficult it would be for many people to buck conventional wisdom. (more…)