As I anxiously await the debate tonight, I am struck by an Facebook exchange on a friend’s Facebook page, which addressed one of the major issues that lies in the shadows, but is nonetheless very much present: poverty and public policy.

Anna Hsiao read Ayla Ryan’s wrenching autobiographical story, “What Being Poor Really Means,” and remarked:

I guess it’s easy to take money away from starving children when they aren’t yours. Right, Mr. Romney?

Eli Gashi, a mutual friend from Kosovo and a former student at The New School wondered:

How can people vote for Romney – I dont get it

Anna Hsiao responded:

It’s pure ideology… They’re voting for his money, because that’s somehow gonna make them rich, too.

Muma Honeychild, a friend of Anna’s from Poland, whom I don’t know, insisted:

but how, really?

Anna:

Like it requires rational cause-effect thinking! We are masters of voting against our own interest – Bush’s two terms, hello….

While, Aron Hsiao, Anna’s husband and a student of mine, offered a different theory:

People mistake the absence of misfortune and a hindsight of fortuity for moral and ethical superiority. It’s a monotheist and specifically Protestant tendency, to my eye. “You’re suffering? Well, I haven’t suffered. God and the universe have punished you and rewarded me. Clearly, you have done something wrong and I have done something right.” That’s the morality of Mitt, and the morality of half of America. They will only develop “empathy” once they, too, find themselves shocked and crying out about the injustice of what has just happened to them. “Why do you failures not take responsibility for your own suffering!?” will become “Why has God forsaken me?!” and only then will they–at length–understand (and only some of them). It will only take another Great Depression to cause America to once again to loathe the idea of a Great Depression. The consciousness colonized by monotheism in most of its present guises cannot learn from mistakes, because the universe is an ordered space not of causality and physics, but of governance by fiat carried out by a moralistic, judging God. The rocks fall only on the heads of the sinners; those skulls that remain intact are the saved. They do not think to don a helmet or to place a “Beware the falling rocks!” sign; no mere helmet or sign can forestall God’s judgment.

To which I responded:

I find this exchange really interesting. I wonder. Would all of you mind if I reproduced it on Deliberately Considered? The question, repeated. The reference to a materialist and then a cultural explanation. I would add my wonder: the materialist explanation is inadequate because Romney is proposing an irrational response to the economic crisis, or at least is pretending to. On the idea of monotheism being the explanation: I would suggest my specification. Monotheism yields belief in one’s own truth, yes. A certain kind of Protestantism may be related to a lack of empathy for the unfortunate, but there are many other kinds. A good sociologist of religion might help us with this. Where is Weber when you need him?

Anna Hsiao:

Mine was merely a frustrated rant in response to what you call Romney’s inadequate and irrational response. I’d love to see a larger discussion on the subject on DC!

I replied:

“The rant” opened up an interesting discussion. I will try to turn it into something for DC.

So here it is. Thinking about inequality and abject poverty, and the kinds of albeit inadequate assistance we now provide, how could anyone support Romney – Ryan, who propose radical cuts in government support for the poor? Is it possible to think about the poor, including the working poor, and understand their situation and propose an increase in their taxes and cutting food stamps? If you pay close attention, it is clear that they do, after all, have much more “skin in the game” than the super rich, who have no moral qualms about hiding their money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Can charity do the trick for Ayla Ryan and her family and the millions of others who have suffered disproportionately during the Great Recession, but also the bubbled booms of the preceding years? And I wonder how does all the talk about the middle class relate to this?

I hope Jim Lehrer raises the issue of  poverty and real human suffering in American tonight, but I fear he won’t.

‘Skin in the game’ is a widely used and imperfect aphorism of uncertain origins. The political meanings of the phrase have been used by all sides in political debates, and each side seeks to appropriate its meaning to connect with people on an informal level. The political application is relatively new compared to its application in business, finance, betting and war. ‘Skin in the game’ has become part of the rhetoric in debates on taxes, deficits and entitlements, and its use is likely to increase as the debates heat up.

‘Game’ is a metaphor for actions of all types, and ‘skin’ is a metaphor for being committed to something through emotional, financial, or bodily commitment. Skin is also a synecdoche representing the whole being. Taken together the phrase implies taking risk and being invested in achieving an outcome. The late columnist William Safire sought the origin of the phrase and didn’t resolve the issue, but he did dispel one widely held explanation. It was not the billionaire investor Warren Buffett who coined the phrase. Buffett likes executives in companies in which he invests to also have their funds, or their skin, invested in the firm. Safire learned from a money and investment specialist that the expression is much used to “convey financial risk in any kind of venture, but you could stretch it to mean some kind of emotional investment. Can you have skin in the game of your marriage? Well, you ought to.”

Ever since humans first walked the earth, our skins have been in the game as hunters, gatherers and cultivators. Over time, animal skins were used for trade and as currencies. For instance, buckskins were monetized, giving us our current buck and the use of the word skin as slang for money. The aphorism has been widely used in informal everyday language and increasingly has become popular in political speech. Safire observed in his New York Times column that ‘skin in the game’ has penetrated the U. S. Senate Chamber. He quoted Senator Tom Coburn in his advocacy for healthcare spending accounts as saying, “H.S.A.’s give consumers some ‘skin in the game’ by putting them in charge of health-care dollars.” When interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, President Elect Barack Obama explained that a long-term fix for the economy would demand sacrifices from all Americans, “Everybody’s going to have to give. Everybody’s going to have some skin in the game.” And the Republican Representative David Camp is on the books as saying, “I believe you’ve got to have some responsibility for the government you have. People have co-payments under Medicare, and everyone should have some ‘skin in the game’ under the income tax system.”

Democrats tend to say that the wealthy aren’t paying enough taxes, and Republicans frequently lament that around 45 percent of all households pay no federal income taxes. Similar arguments are applied to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and public pension and retirement programs. Democrats seek to preserve these programs without making major changes to them, and Republicans insist that to preserve these programs, substantial changes are needed, and more skin needs to be put into the game. These opposing views will dominate public policy discussions through the 2012 elections and beyond. Ultimately, public policy will resolve whose skin should be in the game, and how much of it should be committed.

Evidence for penetration of ‘skin in the game’ into everyday language is abundant. When googled, the phrase pops up 13,200,000 times on the web; there are 615,000 finds in images; 3,360 in books; 283 in news, etcetera. By focusing on a micro aspect of an issue, it is possible to access issues from another perspective. I would encourage you to explore the Web and The New York Times archives. It is another way to use a micro approach to gain perspective on macro issues. It taught me that Democratic Senator Warner has a skin in the game approach when developing a solution to bring down the US deficit: “there’s no option but to push ahead. A way forward won’t be found unless there’s a grand enough bargain that everybody feels they’ve got some skin (in) the game. And also on the world stage there is skin to be put in the game. When discussing U.S. military action in Libya and the need for United Nations authorization and involvement from neighboring countries, a senior administration official noted that, “It’s not enough for them to just cheer us on. They have to put some skin in the game. The president has made clear it can’t just be us.”

If invoking the phrase wasn’t effective, I don’ think it would have migrated into so many aspects of our lives. I doubt that it would have shifted from personal and interpersonal micro concerns to collective and macro issues. ‘Putting skin in the game’ touches us on an elemental level and reaches beyond reason. It is this characteristic that makes it attractive for political rhetoric for those promoting shared sacrifices, and others seeking personal investment in solutions. The next time you hear the expression, you might want to stop and ask: what is being asked by whom, and for what purposes?