If Only...Then

Every student who has taken a high school math class is well aware of the truth table. There are many different flavors of truth tables, but one of the most basic is the implication or "if...then" table. This one is widely used because it so often mirrors real world actions of the form "If (condition) then (result)." For example, think of a child who promises his mother "If it rains this afternoon, then I will clean my room." There are four different possible scenarios, four different possible combinations of the above:

1) It rains in the afternoon and the child cleans his room.
2) It rains in the afternoon and the child does NOT clean his room.
3) It does not rain in the afternoon and the child clean his room.
4) It does not rain in the afternoon and the child does not clean his room.

From the logical perspective, only number 2 above is false. All three other combinations are true. Without going into detail, think of it simply as a promise: The child has agreed to do something if a certain condition is met, and he keeps his promise in three of the four cases. Only when the condition is met and he fails to keep his promise is the statement considered false.

We see this all this time in the real world. A family member, coworker, business or somebody else promises something in exchange for something else. At McDonalds, if you give the cashier money, then he will give you food. A parent promises a child an allowance in exchange for doing chores. A presidential candidate promises nirvana if you vote for him. Even though "truth table" sounds ominous, we live by them all the time and understand the most basic ones intuitively.

Go back roughly three decades to when I was a young teenager sitting in my high school sociology class. This, of course, is in the 70's, long before the days of the Internet, when computers were huge mainframes which the average person never saw. Driving about in a Ford Pinto while listening to an 8-track and looking for a payphone was commonplace. At that time, jobs were posted in the newspaper, job seekers had to read the classifieds to find job postings, then type out a resume and cover letter, and mail them in to the company. There were a few shortcuts here and there, such as photocopying the resume rather than typing it each time, but the basic idea is that the job hunting process was a very manual one. In reading that sociology text, one of the laments was how difficult it was to match job seekers up with the correct job. The author painstakingly explained how good people failed to find good jobs, simply due to the lack of a national job database. Like other sociologists, he blamed this squarely on the government for failing to throw money at the problem. "If only we had a national job database, then unemployment would be a thing of the past" was his basic lament. Fast forward thirty years: We now not only have a national job database, we have an international one, and we have immediate, interactive access to it. Any person sitting in front of a computer can find a job posting, read about it, and apply to it without even leaving the comfort of his chair. Not only has the sociologist's lament been met, but it has been exceeded. Yet, in spite of this, what is our unemployment picture? As of this week, we are at 5.5%, and even that claim is trumpeted with the headline "US Jobless Claims Fall Sharply." The sociologist's promise that a national job database would make unemployment a thing of the past was false.

Some years later my ex-wife and I bought our first home. It wasn't much of a home, it was a mobile home. Single-wide in fact. Still, as small and tacky as it was, we were pleased to have it, and we felt some remorse when we had to put it up for sale. We signed up a real estate agent who initially promised us that she could easily sell it inside of six months, but as the first few weeks passed, we had not had so much as a nibble, and it was becoming somewhat obvious to us that a sale was a long ways off. The agent, saving face, used the sales person excuse: I'm doing my job, there's just something that is out of my control. In this case, the mobile home was in an adult only park, and the salewoman latched on to that, lamenting that she could sell the home in a hertbeat if only it were in an adult park. (Never mind that she knew taht fact when she first took on the listing....). My ex-wife and I started to second-guess ourselves, questioning why we had not had the foresight to buy in a family park. Unexpectedly for all of us, however, at about the three month point, California's HUD ruled that adult only parks (with few exceptions) were discriminatory, and effective immediately all such parks were now family parks.

You can most likely guess the next two stages: My ex-wife and I were elated in the short-term, knowing that the lament had been removed. And yes, three months later, the mobile home sat unsold. I forget what excuse the salewoman used this time for not being able to sell the property, though I do remember that at the end of the six month listing she had the audacity/stupidity to aks if we wanted to relist.

I remember these broken promises as clearly as if they happened yesterday, the broken trust I placed in the author and the saleswoman still vivid in my mind. Be careful with the "If...then..." promises. They may sound safe to hide behind, but it's amazing how often they are ripped wide open, and it's amazing how long the memory of that broken promise can last.