Archive for December 2009

On Reading Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

December 30, 2009

During the present holiday season I have been reading Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. And of my doing this, of my reading, Dennett has this to say (p.509):

“Here you are, devoting several hours to reading my book. Shouldn’t we both be out raising money for Oxfam or picketing the Pentagon or writing lettters to our senators and repesentatives about various matters? Did you consciously decide, on the basis of calculations, that the time was ripe for a little sabbatical from real-world engagement, a period ‘off-line’ for a little reading?”

Well, no, none of that. I’ve never felt that reading good writers was not the best use of my time. In any case I probably left the “real world” years ago, once I was able to understand that my interests were not the interests of most people, even those closest to me, my own family.

One might even make the case (and I suppose that people have) that I’ve never been in the real world, only in a world of my own which has always seemed real enough.

As for Dennett, when I do take the time to understand what he is saying I find myself pretty much in full agreement. And I’ll have more to say about this agreement.

For the moment, on this the next to last day of the year, let me just place here in my Blog space, one of Dennett’s, and one of my favorite poems, W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, along with the Brueghel painting that inspired it. These words and image, encountered once again while reading Dennett, are what I’d like to take with me going into the new year.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

America is going the way of Europe, and that’s OK

December 18, 2009

Why is it that the Right in America is so afraid of the Welfare State. Why is it that Europe, the favored travel destination of most every member of our elite some 100 years ago, is now held up as the place where we most of all don’t want to go, the kind of place where we certainly don’t want to live.

The answer most often given is that Europe has become the place where fewer and fewer people work, and instead the place where more and more people depend on cradle to grave government subsidies.

How is it that following the longest world-wide battle in history, lasting some 200 years or more (and for some not yet over), when one side, capitalism, has clearly won out over the other side, socialism, how is it that socialism’s replacement, welfare, has been able to jump into the battle and become today the new threat to the free market capitalists, the clear winners of that longest battle?

Is it just a case of cutting off one head and seeing another one spring up in its place?

No. The answer is that capitalism, while becoming the most efficient wealth creator ever, and while relegating its rival socialism to the historical dust heap, has done little on its own initiative to distribute an adequate portion of its enormous wealth to those who somehow have not much profited from the highly profitable world-wide exchange of goods and services.

Capitalism while enormously successful has failed too many people. That’s the reason for welfare.

Because of this failure (both in Europe and America)  government funded social safety nets have come into being. It’s because capitalism has permitted an ever growing number of failed individual human lives, people left behind as it were in the wake of those powerful and inhumane market forces that refashion to their own not human ends the land and water surfaces of the earth.

Entitlements come into play and provide a much needed safety net. Entitlements are the results of the efforts of some, mostly on the political Left, to cushion the lives of those millions in this country (say those without health insurance), and those hundreds of millions world-wide (say those without jobs). For most of these millions the profits obtained by ubiquitous market exchanges have not much trickled down to them.

Social Security, then one generation later Medicare and Medicaid, along with various other anti-poverty and community social service programs, were enacted into Law by the Democratic controlled Congresses to provide social safety nets adequate to the needs of the growing numbers of people not able to provide for themselves and their families. This is what we mean by welfare. It’s not bad, and it’s here to stay.

You might say if you want that we have been following, since the end of the Second World War, Europe’s lead, becoming a state, like the countries of Europe, where welfare payments  consume a larger and larger portion of our federal  budget. But we had no real choice. Our people’s need  was there and we would have done this on our own, with or without Europe’s lead.

The problem is not welfare, or the welfare state. The problem is whether we are wealthy enough to pay for the programs that we have already enacted, let alone the health care reform act that Congress  is about to pass.  The problem is particularly acute because of growing entitlement spending during the past 40 years or so.

“Since 1970, the historical ratio between defense spending and entitlement spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has flipped. In 1970, total defense spending was 8.1 percent of our economy or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — more than twice the 3.8 percent of GDP spent on the big three entitlement programs.

“Today, the core defense program has fallen to 3.9 percent of GDP, while entitlement spending has more than doubled to 9.6 per­cent of GDP. By 2030, the big three entitlements will absorb roughly 81 percent of all federal revenue if taxes are rightly held at historical levels.”

To read more about this seemingly disastrous state of affairs go HERE and HERE and HERE.

Is the Right, for whom entitlements are a nemesis, right? Need we be afraid that it will happen here as in Europe, that “fewer and fewer people work, and more and more depend on cradle to grave government subsidies?”

I don’t think so. But the federal government, while not turning away from its commitment to welfare and an adequate safety net, should direct a much higher proportion of its efforts to job creation, that which would mean in many cases just getting out of the way of the entrepreneurs, those who make welfare or the redistribution of a country’s wealth, even possible.

At one time agriculture consumed a huge portion of the country’s wealth, a huge portion of the government’s outlays, some 40% of GDP. This changed only when agriculture become more efficient.

The only answer to the welfare state’s not consuming the lion’s share of the country’s wealth is to grow the country’s wealth. The threat to us is not what’s happening in Europe. It’s what’s not happening in Europe. The pie, the wealth is not growing, at least not growing enough to insure investment in future growth.

So as in the past the Federal government has to get out of the way of the people who are able to make the pie bigger. Only in this way, when there is more there to start with, higher earnings and higher federal revenues, will workers get to keep a larger portion of those earnings and will those who need help, the poor, the old, the unemployed, the sick and the handicapped, and all the others, get that help, that which might even mean, in the best of possible worlds, a reentry into the work force.

The President: “For Make No Mistake…”

December 14, 2009

In his Nobel speech President Obama says this: “For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.”

These words, of course, won him plaudits from the Right. And mostly silence from the Left, at least to the extent that I’m aware of the Left’s reactions to the President’s address.

But doesn’t one have to qualify the President’s statement, because taken at face value we would have to say that since evil does exist we ought to be able to find it, confront it, isolate it, and take the necessary steps to rid the world of it, as we’ve done, say, with the small-pox bacillus.

But we can’t do that. We’re not even able to find and confront Bin Laden, for many the embodiment of evil in this world.

In fact man has never had that kind of power over evil. Evil, if the President is right and evil does exist, always lies a bit beyond our ability to confront it and vanquish it. We speak of it but even if up close to it, as in a police line-up, we probably wouldn’t be able to recognize and identify it.

So the President’s words need qualification or explanatory notes. Otherwise the statement that evil does exist in the world is without real substance or meaning.

The actual situation in the world is something else. Mostly, and this is probably true for Obama, as well as for those on his Right and Left, one can’t assume that the the good will prevail, that people will always do the right thing.

To the extent that we are realists, as the President I’m sure would have us believe of him, we know through experience that a good number of people will not do the right thing, but rather what may be, or at least appear to be, some very bad (evil) things.

Furthermore, while we may say that evil exists in the world, we find it much harder to say that this or that person is evil. In fact, Obama doesn’t say this. He is careful to say only that evil exists, a safe enough statement and one that probably pleased his listeners at the Nobel ceremony. In addition, I’m sure that no one in attendance thought that the evil of which the President spoke was in the room with them.

It may very well be that the President only used the word evil in his ceremonial talk because he needed, there before the Nobel Committee of Peace, their support for him and what’s fast becoming his own war in Afghanistan. For one can and should fight evil.

An interesting question, — do you think that if Obama felt that evil didn’t exist he would have ordered the additional troupes to Afghanistan?  I would say yes. Because whatever his reasons for sending the  troupes, it couldn’t have been to combat the putative evil in the world.

For me the President would have done better not to have mentioned evil. This kind of language, as George Bush showed us, doesn’t help to improve relations between and among peoples. In my own lifetime I have never encountered evil. I would have to admit that I don’t know whether it exists, and I suspect that Obama doesn’t either.

Cruelty, horrible actions that seem “evil,” yes, but these are not “in the world” but only in the world of men. The world out there includes much more, and most, if not all of it, lies outside man’s good or evil  designation.

Animals that prey on other animals, trap them, and eat them while they’re still alive, — do we call these acts evil? I don’t think so. And yet these acts are as horrible as any done by man to man, or woman.

Why is that? Why is there no evil in the world other than that of just one animal, man? Well we’re told by those who pretend to know that man, different from all other creatures, should know better. The polar bear dining on the walrus cub shouldn’t.

So by not knowing better than to do something, when we should know better, that makes us evil? No, I find that explanation unsatisfactory.

Actually the only thing that gives some reality to the concept of evil is the fact that man, throughout recorded history, has made use of it, or something like it, to describe behavior that he doesn’t understand, let alone approve. In that sense the idea of evil has been around a long time. We’ve talked and written about it forever, but does it exist?

Again, no. It doesn’t. I much prefer Plato’s substitution of ignorance for evil. Ignorance I know. I’ve encountered it many times, and I know that to do something about it is within our means. If he had given it more thought the President wouldn’t, couldn’t have said or meant what he said.

Atul Gawande, Transforming Health Care

December 11, 2009

Is Atul Gawande on to something in what he asks in a recent New Yorker article, “The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?”

Can we, as he suggests, usefully and justifiably compare the place of health care, in particular the escalating cost of health care today, with the place and high cost of agriculture in the economy some 100 years ago?

And more important can we apply the example of all that we learned from our successful efforts to reform American agriculture in the 20th. century to our present attempts in the 21st century to reform health care?

I think so. What Gawande is saying is both highly interesting in itself and highly relevant to the national debate now going on over health care reform.

What Americans are most afraid of, at least those who work and pay taxes and who are ultimately responsible for providing the revenues that pay for all government programs, are the escalating costs that they now, and later their children and grandchildren, if nothing is done, will have to pay for their health care.

Gawande points out that, ‘Medical care now absorbs eighteen per cent of every dollar we earn, that between 1999 and 2009, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family insurance coverage rose from $5,800 to $13,400, and the average cost per Medicare beneficiary went from $5,500 to $11,900.”

These numbers ought in themselves to be enough to push our leaders to act. So far they haven’t done so.

Americans are asking if the health care bill, now before Congress, will help to make health care affordable. And more and more they are of the opinion that it won’t. Gawande, however, says there is a good chance that it will, and he bases his argument on the agriculture/health care comparison.

Everyone agrees that sooner or later costs will have to be substantially lowered, that the present health cost trajectory is unsustainable, and that if nothing is done, to cite Gawande’s words: “Health-care spending will essentially devour all our future wage increases and economic growth. State budget costs for health care will more than double, and Medicare will run out of money in just eight years. The cost problem threatens not just our prosperity but our solvency.”

While Gawande admits that the Bill doesn’t directly confront the problem of escalating costs (“we crave sweeping transformation [but] all the current bill offers [are] pilot programs, a battery of small-scale experiments”) he strongly suggests that the many small pilot programs in the present Bill, as earlier in the case of agricultural reform, may be the very best way to reform our medical practices.

In 1900 food costs consumed some 40% of the American family’s income, considerably higher than the cost of health care today. At the time agriculture was notoriously inefficient and whereas some might have called for huge federal programs to reform the nation’s farms the government instead went about reform piecemeal, supporting hundreds, perhaps thousands of pilot programs meant to show the farmers how things could be done differently and more efficiently.

At the time it was clear to almost everyone that only by improving the productivity of farming could the living standard be significantly raised, and the U.S. emerge as an industrial power. As Gawande writes, “We had to reduce food costs, so that families could spend money on other goods, and resources could flow to other economic sectors. And we had to make farming less labor-dependent, so that more of the population could enter non-farming occupations and support economic growth and development.”

And that is what we did and what happened, while admittedly “in the attempt to reform how we grew our food there were compromises and concessions and wrong turns, ultimately we were successful because the government agencies leading the reform efforts were allowed to proceed by trial and error, continually adjusting their policies over time in response not to ideology but to hard measurement of the results against societal goals.”

So today it’s clear to everyone that in order to compete successfully in the global economy we have to  reduce the amount of our wealth now consumed by the health care industry. And to do this we ought to follow the agriculture example.

In a section of the Bill, entitled  “Transforming the Health Care Delivery System,” what is offered are, pilot programs, piecemeal efforts to change things locally, or in particular segments of the health industry, such as medical record keeping and the greater use of these records by clinicians. And for Gawande these programs are our best chance of bending the cost curve down to something well within our means to handle.

There are, in fact, as on the millions of small farms earlier, any number of inexpensive improvements that might be made in the way we deliver health care in our hospitals and clinics, and that, if copied nation-wide, as in the case of the earlier agricultural improvements, could result in significantly lower costs, as well as better treatments, just as the agricultural reforms resulted in more and better food at lower costs.

Health professionals, just like agricultural workers, will need to be shown in order to learn, and then, without pressure from without, proceed themselves to make the desired changes and deliver better services at less cost to their patients.

Again, in Gawande’s own words, “The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front. Government has a crucial role to play here—not running the system but guiding it, by looking for the best strategies and practices and finding ways to get them adopted, county by county. Transforming health care everywhere starts with transforming it somewhere.”

At West Point the President allies himself with Karl Rove

December 3, 2009

What has happened that President Obama finds himself allied with Karl Rove (and the Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress) on the hawkish side of the debate regarding the U.S. role in Afghanistan, while, for example, nearly the entire gamut of NYTimes op ed writers from left to right (not to mention myriad liberal voices throughout the country), have lined up against his position to send additional U.S. soldiers into battle as outlined during his most recent speech at West Point?

Has our president succumbed to the power of the military/industrial complex? Much like the Congress, that so far has chosen not to substantially reform how health care is delivered in the country, but has rather given up its own power to change things, apparently succumbing to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries who would keep things as they are?

I don’t really believe that the President has done this, nor even that he believes that primarily by force of arms the Afghan people, never yet in history tamed to the will and desire of a foreign power by any means, will now obediently follow our direction, ousting Al Qaeda and the Taliban and establishing a central government capable of uniting the country and its people in shared tasks (for the first time ever)?

Yet President Obama has decided to send 30,000 additional American soldiers, at a cost of about $1 million each, into battle with a ragtag assortment of Taliban fanatics, Al Qaeda terrorists, warlords, drug traffickers, and various other insurgents.

I find myself much more convinced by the arguments, not of the President, but of those, of whom there are more and more, who are writing and speaking against the decision to send additional troupes.

Together, this time in opposition to the President, are Thomas Friedman of the Times, and George Will of the Washington Post, both of whom, liberal and conservative, although currently speaking out against the President’s decision, are often sympathetic to this President and his views.

Here I quote two passages from their two most recent op ed pieces:

Thomas Friedman: “To now make Afghanistan part of the “war on terrorism” — i.e., another nation-building project — is not crazy. It is just too expensive, when balanced against our needs for nation-building in America, so that we will have the strength to play our broader global role.”

and George Will: “The president’s party will not support his new policy, his budget will not accommodate it, our overstretched and worn-down military will be hard-pressed to execute it, and Americans’ patience will not be commensurate with Afghanistan’s limitless demands for it. This will not end well.”

The Minaret Ban, “disgraceful” or highly appropriate?

December 1, 2009

“Uninformed,” that’s the only way to describe the NYTimes editorial opinion regarding the successful Swiss initiative to ban the construction of minarets. The Times editorial writer condemns the Swiss vote, calling it “bigoted and meanspirited.”

In order to hold his opinion the Times writer has to be totally ignorant of the thinking of the Swiss voters who supported the ban in large majorities. An equally uninformed reader of the editorial might very well say, yes, that was disgraceful and silly, for why object to a rather pleasant and attractive architectural feature of the mosque.

But the vote was not at all about minarets, in themselves unobjectable, innocuous symbols of a major world religion. The vote was about the proper place of Islam in modern day Europe.

I call the editorial writer uninformed because otherwise how could he not have seen that the minaret in the eyes of the Swiss voter was not just a harmless symbol of a major world religion. No the minaret was the harmful symbol of a major world wide religion still living in the past, still tied to a now totally rejected view of human nature as embodied in too many passages of the Quran and the hadith, and most particularly in the Sharia stemming therefrom.

For the voters were rejecting the view of man embodied in the Sharia, or Islamic law, and in that regard the minaret ban seems highly rational, highly moral, fully appropriate to circumstances in present day Europe, when Muslim immigrants are arriving in larger and larger numbers, readily taking for themselves all kinds of material goods and advantages, while rejecting the very things that created those goods and advantages, the scientific outlook, reason and the rule of law, democracy, and respect for the individual rights of all peoples.


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