This ad put forth by Eisenhower in the 1956 presidential election was my favorite of the ones I watched from that year because of the way it told a story and the way the narrator is an average American citizen instead of a newscaster or TV personality. The ad follows a cab driver and his dog on a walk in DC – they stop to look at the White House and the cab driver wonders aloud about Eisenhower as a person rather than a leader. In doing this, the cab driver humanizes Eisenhower and brings him to the level of the average citizen, which I think can be beneficial for anyone running for president. Part of this humanization of Eisenhower comes about in talking about where he came from – a small town and a poor, hardworking family.

Even though some of the things the cab driver mentions are war and violence, the overall feeling of the ad is peaceful and makes the audience feel like all of those things will be okay because Eisenhower has it covered. The overwhelming feeling of security is present here as well. The ad shows the American people, and says, “I think he knows all about people like me…”, “he’s thinking about children maybe”, and “how to help farmers grow crops”, etc. At the end, the cab driver says, “while I’m thinking of him, I got a feeling he’s thinking of me”. This gives the audience the sense that Eisenhower really is thinking of them and cares about each individual. Given nothing else, this is definitely an ad that would make me want to vote Eisenhower into office.

I was assigned to watch the republican ads for the 2012 election, which included Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. In every sing one of these ads, Romney attacked Obama for something. No matter what Romney’s campaign comercial was discussing, it always attacked Obama for something. I think this aspect is clearly demonstrate in this commercial, which is why I chose it to be my favorite.

Romney opens up with, “did you see what president Obama said today?” which almost sounds like a form of ‘gossiping.’ He then describes what Obama said and emphasizes it in his voice by repeating himself. What was interesting to me was that when the comercial showed the clip of of Obama speaking, what he said was “voting is the best revenge.” We were given absolutely no context, yet Romney took Obamas words and slightly twisted them in front of the public. To me, I kind of laughed at this commercial, because it just seems like either side is saying, “they’re bad because they did this… but me, I would never!” In a sense I feel like Romney’s whole campaign was just beating Obama down instead of discussing why he would be a good president, or how he would benefit our country.

My election was 2008, Obama vs McCain. My favorite ad was from Obama’s side called Yes We Can by Bezio on the google doc. It was an ad basically putting one of Obama’s speeches into song, featuring singers, such as John Legend and WILL.I.AM, and other famous people, such Kareem Abdul-Jabar, with Obama speaking over their voices singing. There was also a person signing ALS which was really cool to see.

I really liked this ad because it was easy to watch and didn’t seem to come off with too much of a political agenda. I also really liked the positive message of equality and how we can be better in this nation with equity, diversity, and inclusion. He mentions how enslaved persons fought for freedom, and how “nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change”. He also states that America is not as divided as politics like to say, which is a really encouraging point as the media and news focus heavily on republican vs democrat vs whoever else, in my opinion. I think just the overall “Yes we can” message is very powerful and super inspiring for America to hear over and over again throughout the ad.

This game was frustrating for a number of reasons. The first of those reasons being the fact that it is meant to simulate actual life for people living in sub-Saharan Africa. While playing the game, which seems impossible to do well at, I just felt sad and defeated thinking about Kodjo and Fatou as real human beings. In each game they started out strong – 100 health, subsistence met from last season – and things look good for two or three turns, and then boom… maize yield is low, there’s a drought, and Kodjo has a disease that requires a CFA 300.0 trip to the doctor. When this started happening, I honestly just didn’t know what to do. I tried to solve the problems, but nothing seemed to work. And then I thought if I can’t solve these problems as I sit in my warm, furnished house on my $1200 computer, how can someone who is impoverished, malnourished, and dehydrated solve these problems? The answer, I suppose, is they can’t. They have to make sacrifices, and just when you think you might have enough money to buy something, another more pressing issue may occur. So, really, throughout this game, I just felt defeated and sick to my stomach thinking about the actual human beings living in the environment this game is meant to simulate.

What really got to me though was when I got a few rounds in and a checkbox came up that said “Attempt to have a child”, and all I could think was “Are they serious? How on earth am I supposed to keep a child alive when I can barely keep myself alive?” Again, I thought about the people living in the environment the game is meant to simulate. They don’t have the resources to take care of children, AND they also don’t have the resources to prevent having kids. Birth control is unavailable and most people are not educated about sex. This results in overpopulation and underfunding and lack of resources, which then results in more deaths, especially child deaths. Many people think first about clean drinking water and food as the most essential resources for individuals in sub-Saharan Africa, and while they are extremely high on the list, I would argue that investing in sex education and cheap birth control strategies should be higher on the list because this can help with overpopulation, which would then mean less tangible resources like food and water are needed further down the line.

I am going to conclude that this game is broken or designed to be nearly impossible, because my god is this game frustrating. First off, the tutorials are broken so you have no idea how to play the game and are simply thrown in. Secondly, few of the metrics have any labels. My family was using 9.8 wood a day… 9.8 what? Pounds? I needed to know this because we were over harvesting the available fuel wood, and I needed to set collection limits in town. But the collection limits are in tons, and our daily fuel use has no unit. This caused my family to not be able to cook enough food per day, meaning I had to spend more and more money on extra food to prevent starvation. On that, I think it is ridiculous that this so called “not perfect village simulation” mandates each person have 2500 calories. That is very hard to do and the game should allow you to change the metric.

My family started prosperously, albeit with a few minor setbacks due to missing food quota’s and the woman needing medical care. But with the game not informing me on what metrics things like wood are available in, combined with a drought, food yield started declining massively. Not having enough food to sell (combined with not explaining the small business mechanic) led my family to begin to lose money quickly. I increased the quota, which settled that issue, but fuel was still scarce and the following season we missed our food requirement due to the lack of wood. This continued for several more seasons, causing drought and greater food insecurity, along with Fatou getting the flu. Eventually, food stock got depleted and both of my villagers died.

This game is impossible and I did not have a good time playing it. This was my most successful run, not including several runs which failed early. But also I could have just been managing my resources poorly, which is fair enough. not entirely my fault since the game had no tutorial, but certainly eye opening on how hard it is to manage a family- let alone a village. It is certainly a position I wouldn’t want to be in right now. It is challenging, with problems flying at you every minute, which are incredibly hard to manage

The introduction of systems theory and the homeostatic feedback loop is really helpful in thinking about leadership and structural problems within a society. By imagining systems, such as Professor Bezio’s example of the educational system, as “living” things that can self-regulate, the long-term impacts of decision-making by leaders become more clear. For her example, Prof. Bezio explains that the education system needs some input to maintain the level of health that will allow it to operate. This input comes in the form of money and teachers. However, anything beyond what is needed to keep the education system running, like technology updates and diversity laws, and standardized testing, is not “necessary.” The education system will continue to work just off of inputs, even if it is not working right or effectively. Therefore, updates to systems carry an incredible amount of weight, because not only are they not “necessary,” but they can also be destabilizing and detrimental.

The reading uses the example of the Moro community to demonstrate how these updates, while seemingly positive in the short term, can often have long-lasting negative effects that were not intended. This example reminded me so much of MacAskill’s Doing Good Better, and the PlayPump. I think that his message of effective altruism applies beyond making charitable donations to policy work, such as reforming the education system. We shouldn’t just make decisions because they seem good, we should make decisions that are the most good for both the present and the future.

By comparing real-world systems to a human body, Dr. Bezio makes very clear why it is important to constantly make sure our systems are working properly and fix issues when something is wrong, and not continue on the path that clearly is upsetting the system. And like our bodies, systems are supposed to last a long time. When looking at a system, we need to think about it in terms of its longevity- how this system will function for years and years to come. I think that many systems are built this way (with the future in mind), but unfortunately, we do not know what the future is going to look like. Take for example the pandemic. Many of the systems in our daily lives, if not most, were not built with a catastrophe like this in mind. However, these systems adapted and are continuing to adapt, with a lot of focus on what life will look like once the pandemic is over too. It is important for the leaders of our systems to continue thinking this way, and constantly evolving as things change. The responses from systems to recent movements for racial equality have not been as good as they were to the pandemic, however, and have caused many issues within our society. It is imperative that we continue to critique and adjust these systems until they fit in with the current state of our world today.

The village simulator game was extremely frustrating, mostly because I perform very poorly in video games. Throughout the hour long endeavor, I was so confused and consistently disappointed. For some unknown reason, the ‘help’ button and the tutorial video were unavailable, so it became a guessing game. And that guessing game did not go well. Coupled with my lack of agricultural/fishing knowledge, I did not know how much or what to invest in. First off, the work days for Kodjo and Fatou were initially 12 hours a day, and exceedingly cruel and inhumane work day–especially for two teenagers. Their health began dramatically declining due to such tough conditions and lack of nutrients, but because money needed to made I only lowered their work days to 10 hours, still an absurd amount of hours to spend on hard labor. Both kids had only completed 6 years of schooling and were unable to spend more years in school because of immediate financial need. When one’s entire income depends on agriculture, fishing, and small business endeavors, the wages one earns are very volatile depending on the season, and usually very low. I repeatedly took out loans because I needed money to buy more supplies in order to increase my yield of crops, but it only resulted in increased debt. This just felt like a consistent losing game, and even though it’s a “game,” the village simulator depicts everyday life for many people across the globe. The lack of resources and monetary capital is breathtakingly tragic, and puts one’s life in perspective. The thought of completing maybe a 6th grade education and then spending the rest of ones life in a never-ending cycle of property, highlights the severe inequalities in our country. It makes me think how in the world BILLIONAIRES exist when millions of human beings live in such grueling and horrible conditions–the level of inequality is truly disgusting.

I did this “live update” style, where I jot down my thoughts and observations as I go along.

So, right off the bat, this looks confusing to me. I’ve never experienced this lifestyle so I’m not sure how much time to invest in what, and the default setting of 12 hours of labor seems pretty absurd to me, especially since that virtually means there is no time for school for these two teenagers, Kodjo and Fatou.

It took me a minute to figure out how to change seasons, but once I did for the first time, jumping to 2014, I only got bad news. All my crops failed, I allocated time horribly, basically, I failed at everything. Apparently, cotton can rot? And I didn’t have the expenses I needed to transport it? I never even thought about that…

I ended the turn again and now, somehow, I’m in severe debt. As in, had to take out a loan from the bank debt. Apparently, I’m not allowed to be over 100 CFA in debt, which is going to make things very complicated considering I was banking on investing in my small business to see if I could get things going off the ground that didn’t have to focus so much on farming and fishing. Not to mention, the health of Kodjo and Fatou isn’t doing too hot. How is everything going downhill so fast???

Okay, I’m going to have to reset this game. This is literally impossible. They both need doctor’s visits but they’re so far in debt I can’t even switch turns and I already took out too much money from the bank. I don’t know why they even bother to have little trinkets to buy; it’s not like I’ll ever be able to afford them anyways.

After playing thoughts 

After playing a couple more rounds, and failing miserably every time, I think it’s very eye-opening that even in a simulation I can’t seem to control these resources properly. Everything I think is important isn’t or is in some other way, I’m constantly working my family to death, doctor’s visits are crazy expensive, and bad crop luck seems to plague this family no matter what I do. There’s never enough water, never enough wood or fuel, never enough money, never enough anything… I’m not even positive there is a way to make Kodjo and Fatou happy, healthy, wealthy, and overall content and successful, which seems to be anything other than just plain starving or going into severe debt.

I got very invested in this game very quickly. I played three times, and it took me a little while to get the hang of how i worked. I did not set myself up well to succeed because I misunderstand the allocation of hours, and left a large set of time as “idle” to allow for rest, not realizing that the 24 hours was a combined for both individuals, and not 24 hours in a day. As a result, the crop yield, food harvested, and water collected were not enough for the two individuals. While I made it through a few more seasons, this error ultimately led to their deaths. Over the next three rounds, I was able to keep them alive longer, however, as soon as there were three or more poor crop yields in a row, regardless of me buying fertilizer or high yield seeds, I ended up in debt and therefore unable to provide the necessary elements for the family, again resulting in their deaths. I got very attached to this family and the success of the community as a whole. While I was good at determining what limits would be beneficial for the community wood collection and fishing, I never made enough money to buy any infrastructure for the community. While this may be because I don’t have a strong understanding of what an appropriate tax rate is, I found it quite frustrating how expensive infrastructure is. Overall, I think in order to succeed, there is a lot that I would need to learn to successfully help my family and community survive, but I do think I learned from my failures, similar to what was discussed in Dorner. I frequently failed, but was able to quickly learn from my mistakes. However, there are likely many components that I failed to see that were more indirect problems that appeared as a result of solving others. Dorner claims that failure in such a scenario does not occur from one moment or one mistake, but happens gradually overtime. this was very apparent in how I could see my family and community deteriorate slowly, but not until it seemed a little too late to come back from effectively or sustainably.