A Matter of Choice

"Pressure pushing down on me...

Your name is Pius Heinz and you have a choice to make: call your opponent’s $39.5 million all-in bet (costing you another $37.1 million in chips), or fold your off-suited ace/king combo and wait for a better opportunity to take him out of the game. Your cards beat his 10/7 of clubs statistically 62% to 38%, but there’s no way for you to know that. He could have you beat already. You only get what you’ve got at this point. More importantly than cards, though, you’ve got five years of experience in Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments and you know that with a bet that large before the flop, Martin Stascko is either trying to pull you into the hand by appearing weak, or trying to push you out by making the stakes too high for comfort. But the stacks are in your favor. You know that even if you lose you will still have nearly double his chips. He seems unsure. You sense that he’s overvalued his hand, and that he thinks that you think that he’s hoping you’ll fold. It’s a large bet, but this is the World Series of Poker – no time to be intimidated by the three-foot-tall stack of hundred dollar bills sitting to your left on the green felt table. So you casually nod and say “call” to which the crowd cheers and jumps to its feet. What’s just been set up is one of the most exciting and tense situations for fans of poker to witness: the outcome of the tournament now depends purely on luck. You and your opponent stand and begin to pace while the dealer prepares to flip the next five cards at a rate which seems excruciatingly slow.  And it all happens within five seconds.

...pressing down on you - no man ask for.

Before coming to the 2011 World Series of Poker, Pius Heinz was studying business psychology in his home country of Germany. He decided to leave school and play on the tournament circuit after racking up substantial winnings on sites like pokerstars.com. His story is not uncommon among professional poker players who often start in low-stakes games, increasingly online. He evaluated his own potential, based his decision on his own unique circumstances. And in the end, when the bets were made and the last two men stood over their cards turned face-up on that felt-topped table, it all came down to luck –  

The flop: a 5 of clubs, a 2 of diamonds, a 9 of hearts. The crowd erupts. Despite the appearance of another club, your odds bounce to 72%. This is looking good. The turn: a jack of hearts. Staszko’s flush draw disappears. Your odds jump again to 77%. You inch a little closer to the biggest stack of money you’ve ever seen, but you don’t want to look. You know there are still ten cards in that deck that will give Staszko the double-up he needs to make a comeback. If he lands so much as a low pair, the hand is his. So you stare flatly at the dealer’s knuckles as he flips that final card. The river: it’s a 4 of diamonds and you just won the biggest tournament in all of professional poker with an ace high.

Under pressure - that burns a building down...

The economy in general and jobs specifically are almost constantly in the news these days. Prospective students would have to try very hard to ignore what kind of job market they face. With so much focus from the media, the amount of data available can be overwhelming, and varying viewpoints send mixed signals to someone trying to base a major life decision on them. Take for example two stories about two different economic studies, both presented by the same reliable news source – NPR. The first article discusses a report by Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce. Their recent economic study found that unemployment rates for college grads have fallen to just 6.8%, while those without a degree are significantly worse off at 24%  “in large part because the economy lost so many jobs in manufacturing, construction and other blue-collar occupations” (Sanchez). The report goes on to say that “if you have a college education and work for a business where half or more of the employees do not, you probably make 35 percent more than a worker with a high school diploma” (Sanchez). As someone wondering whether or not to go to college, you might be thinking, “I like those odds.” But if you were to look at other stories from the exact same news source, you would get a much bleaker picture concerning the state of our educational system and the economy. That’s because NPR also reported recently on a survey by Rutgers University which reveals that only half of the recent college graduates surveyed were employed full-time, and that “more come out with debt than with jobs” (Ludden). Six out of ten college graduates take loans, and on average that debt is $20,000 (Ludden). The fifty percent of recent graduates who do find full-time work in their field are now experiencing ten percent lower pay than those who graduated just before the recession hit (Ludden). Mixed signals like these are an indication that what’s needed in decision making is the situation-relevant, system 2 reasoning of an expert poker player – because, if your decision about higher education revolves around human capital, you could go mad trying to weigh the pros and cons based solely on national statistics.

...splits a family in two... 

I took a job for a company whose business it was to spread cow shit on alfalfa fields. My first and only day was spent in a manure pond pushing the liquid-y fertilizer closer to the pump which siphoned it into trucks. It was hot and comparatively humid for the desert due to the stinky, greenish swamp I was in. At one point, my tractor stalled and I couldn’t get it started again. While I sat, simmering, waiting for the boss man to come tell me what to do, I received a call from the U.S. Army’s recruitment office. This wasn’t the first time they called (I’d gotten a call at least every six months since high school due to the need for troops in Iraq, I guessed) but it was the last. I’d refused plenty of times before but always apologetically, so they kept calling as if they could wear me down. This time was different. I engaged with the officer. I told him I was stuck at a crappy job and we both laughed at the pun when I told him where I was at. Then he got really somber and asked me, honestly, “why wouldn’t you want to get out of there, then?” I thought some and told him as friendly as I could that it was because, “I’d rather push shit around with a tractor than join the military.” He said that he understood, and thanked me for my honesty and for having a sense of humor. I thanked him helping me kill some time and hung up. I spent the rest of the day contemplating just what choices life had narrowed down for me. I never went back to that job, and soon after I was enrolled in a woodworking program at the local community college. 

...puts people on streets"

I earned an Associates of Applied Science degree from the College of Southern Idaho in Woodworking / Cabinetmaking just in time for the housing market to crash and for all the jobs in that field to dry up. I found myself competing with skilled craftsmen who had twenty years of experience. The one shop where I could find work went under about three months after I started. I remember the last projects I worked on were headboards for two bedrooms in a twenty million dollar Sun Valley mansion. It was an awesome, confusing, and very humbling experience.

"I still don't know what I was waiting for.

And my time was running wild.

Maybe there are just too many considerations to make. The opportunity costs of choosing a career path, for example, are infinite – you must give up doing literally everything else. Or maybe it’s because many students, like novice poker players, simply don’t take the proper considerations into account. Germain and Tenenbaum describe two mental processes related to decision making: system 1, which deals with intuition, and system 2, which deals with reasoning (St. Germain and Tenenbaum 14). When used by experts, system 2 consistently provides better results than system 1, which is relied more heavily upon by a novice (St. Germain and Tenenbaum 14). System 2 requires a bank of knowledge and experience to draw upon and make conclusions from; system 1 is characterized by a cursory knowledge of the game being played and less reliance upon “situational-relevant cues” in favor of pre-packaged reactions (St. Germain and Tenenbaum 14). ...in 2007, at the age of 22, I found myself drifting from one dead-end job to another, all the while in and out of school. I had no direction because I had every direction – or as I saw it, an endless potential and endless time to find myself. One day, though, between jobs and feeling as though life was finally closing in on me, I asked my dad for a little guidance. Instead of telling me where to go or what to do – because that’s just not his style – he let me in on a secret. “I’m fifty years old,” he said, “and I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. You just have to find something you don’t hate, because if you hate your work then you’re going to hate your life.” 

In their study, Christie and Munro conducted interviews with 49 British college students, grouped them by their attitudes toward student loans (so-called debt avoiders, debts inevitable, and debts by choice), and gained insight into how their attitudes were shaped by their cultural environment (624). The debts inevitable group, broadly characterized by the need to take loans as opposed to want, was the largest group and was made up of students with the fewest resources coming from family (Christie and Munro 628). Their decision was based largely on avoiding the types of “dead end jobs” in which many from their social circles had become stuck (Christie and Munro 628). The remaining two groups were better off, with a higher percentage of college-educated parents and more money coming from them to help cover the bills. What differentiated these groups was that the debts by choice group took loans in order to enjoy a better lifestyle, while the debt avoiders rejected the debt burden, largely because they saw it as unnecessary (Christie and Munro 626, 631). What all groups had in common, though, was that “none of the students in this research had taken a well-informed or carefully weighed decision about the probable balance between the costs and the benefits of higher education before they started” (Christie and Munro 633). Even the debts inevitable group, who was generally the most articulate about their considerations, was found to be overestimating the ease with which they would be able to pay back debts (Christie and Munro 634). For younger, more financially inexperienced people it seems that, often, the higher-level reasoning of a system 2 thought process just doesn’t occur. There’s no personal experience to draw from, so they make choices based more on constructs than on strong reasoning or situation-relevant concerns. They might as well say, “Hey, I’m told this is a good hand, so I think I’ll bet.” And even though an expert player like Pius Heinz might decide the same, the reasons for doing it would be more nuanced, more numerous, and therefore more reliable. 

A million dead end streets.

Even with this much uncertainty, though, college enrollment is at a record high. It’s not that people don’t see college as their best hope in beating the curve, but that the amount of hope to be had has diminished across the board. For me, the choice to undertake a potentially crushing debt burden had more to do with which kind of burden I thought I would hate the least. I reason that if the choice is to hate my work, or to hate my debt, I’d rather hate my debt. And if I don’t become one of the 6.8% who can’t find work at all, at least I had a few good years of trying before I resigned myself to literally digging holes. For many like me, the choice is not entirely financial.It’s well known in the study of economics that indicators like GDP fail to take into account things like volunteering, or the external effects of pollution, which can have a huge effect a person’s well-being (Diener and Seligman 23). So, in addition to consumption, Diener and Seligman propose research and development of a system which takes those things into account, things like emotions, social engagement, and finding purpose in life (Diener and Seligman 21).  Whether or not the U.S. is ready to move in that direction policy-wise, considerations like these get to the truth of what it’s like to choose in a way that economic cost / benefit analysis seems unable to do. “Economic models are built,” the study says, “on the assumption that people choose alternatives to maximize their well-being. But one problem with these models is that people do not necessarily realize what might enhance their well-being best; instead, they make choices on the basis of hunches and cultural prescriptions” (Diener and Seligman 22).

Every time i thought I'd got it made...

There is evidence that this myth of widespread, long-term job stability post WWII may actually be an illusion. In reality, that lifestyle was only ever available to a privileged few (Hollister 316). A more accurate interpretation is that that sort of employment serves mainly as a symbol for the good life. Hollister explains that the symbolic “job” is a “model of what a career should look like and a goal toward which workers could strive” (Hollister 316). It’s a function of an outdated American Dream. A carrot on a stick. In the “new economy” the individual is responsible for his or her own employment, and that’s scary – if not depressing – for those preparing to start careers or a costly education (Hollister 317). The mixed information described by Hollister doesn’t make the choice any easier for anybody, either. Would Pius Heinz have been able to rise through nearly seven thousand other players to get to that last hand without a firm grasp on what he was doing?What I said to her that day about math ended up changing more than just her attitude toward algebra. It has also helped me get over some of my hang-ups as well. I told her simply that somebody had made the whole thing up. The units of measurement, the base ten system, all of it. It’s a tool that we created. It’s useful, sure. But in the end, it’s all contrived for our benefit – so here I am, learning how to write.

...it seemed the taste was not so sweet.

A decrease in myopia was also counted as a gain from schooling because narrow-minded people tend to make hasty decisions, overstating present costs and undervaluing future benefit (Oreopoulos and Salvanes 169). When boiled down, the overall value found in school (besides money or slightly better odds at finding work), appears closely tied to decision making itself. “Critical thinking,” Oreopoulos and Salvanes say, “helps individuals ‘select pertinent information for the solution of a problem [and] formulate a relevant and promising hypothesis.’ In other words, it helps individuals process new situations or problems and make better decisions” (165). And the irony is not lost on those authors that one reason many of us drop out or never start college is because we lack the types of skills that college itself can help us learn. Obviously, though, studies like this are forced to generalize, and some students – like poker champion Pius Heinz – might be completely justified in putting off school to pursue other options.

So I turned myself to face me..."

It really is a strange mix of hope and malaise that a student endures from day to day. I was relating this to my grandmother one time on the phone, expressing my concern about the utility of a college degree and the general state of things. Keep in mind that this is a woman who was alive during the great depression and who would tell stories about the lard sandwiches they had to eat for dinner. Before I could finish my thought she gave me some advice that not only rings true but also encapsulates that dichotic mix of feelings that come with being a student during a “great” recession. “You need an education,” she said, “because no matter what happens, they can’t take that away.”