Archive for February 2010

The Red Queen

February 22, 2010

In Chapter II of Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll Alice is talking with the Red Queen:

‘It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this IS the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I WISH I was one of them! I wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I might join—though of course I should LIKE to be a Queen, best.’

She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen as she said this, but her companion only smiled pleasantly, and said, ‘That’s easily managed. You can be the White Queen’s Pawn, if you like, as Lily’s too young to play; and you’re in the Second Square to begin with: when you get to the Eighth Square you’ll be a Queen—’ Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run.

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she COULD NOT go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’

Not that Alice had any idea of doing THAT. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried ‘Faster! Faster!’ and dragged her along. ‘Are we nearly there?’ Alice managed to pant out at last.

‘Nearly there!’ the Queen repeated. ‘Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!’ And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice’s ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.

‘Now! Now!’ cried the Queen. ‘Faster! Faster!’ And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, ‘You may rest a little now.’

Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’

‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’

________________________________________________________________

Alice says that in her country you get somewhere by running very fast. And the Red Queen replies that in Looking Glass land it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place, and if you want to get somewhere else, you have to run at least twice as fast.

Looking Glass land is, of course, Washington D.C. For the President, Senators, and Congressmen, while running all the time are staying in the same place.

This week the three will be running together grasping an Alice-like or reasonable idea that together they might reach the goal of reforming our present system, really a non system, a hodgepodge, of providing for the nation’s health-care and health insurance needs. Nobody believes they will.

But the real lesson of the Red Queen is something else. The lesson is that just to stay where we are, and not lose ground, let alone move ahead, we have to be running all the time. A kind of running in place as those joggers who wait interminably for a hole to open up in the early morning traffic before dashing across the street, to get where? Well, to the other side.

Things in Washington are also much like the situation described by the Sicilian Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his novel, Il Gattopardo: “If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change.” Again, a kind of running in place just to be able to stay where we are.

The line from Il Gattopardo could mean two things. One, that things will not stay the same if we do nothing, and that things could even get worse.

And, two, even if and when we do make changes, as, for example, the endless series of reforms that we have made and are still making to our health and education infrastructures, the result will be more of what we had before the changes, the same, and not visibly worse for the changes or reforms.

Should we abandon reforms altogether? Running with them while staying in the same place is clearly failure. Perhaps as the Red Queen suggests, if we were to run twice as fast? But who knows what she meant by that. Not Alice, seated propped up against a tree and clearly at the end of her rope.

We might look to the Red Queen for a slightly different principle, and it might be this: For any evolutionary system, in this case our system of providing health care through insurers, doctors, nurses, hospitals, health clinics etc. we might look less at the parts of the system and more to what we might do in order to maintain the fitness of the parts of this one system relative to the systems it is co-evolving with. For everything is evolving, and evolving along with everything else.

The principle? Well we may be running as Alice and the Red Queen, and at the end of the run be still in the same place. But things about us will have changed, and we along with them. Evolution is making sure of that.

This means that we ought no longer to look at our health care system in isolation from everything else, no more than we ought to look at our country and its problems in separation from the world. Health care exists in the context of a changing world, is a part of those changes, has problems stemming from those changes, and is only exacerbated by our refusal to adapt to those changes.

That might be what the Red Queen meant by running twice as fast. Real improvement in our  health care, educational, and other systems will only come about as we treat all of them as evolving parts of a rapidly evolving world.

Obama needs to turn his back on the Congress and begin to lead the country

February 19, 2010

Barack Obama was sworn in as this country’s 44th president on January 20, 2009. What happened on that day was something that I hadn’t believed possible, at least in my lifetime, that a “Black” would be living in the White House.

Even if he never did anything else as president this in itself, I thought, would go down in history as a huge accomplishment — Barack, Michelle, and their two children, Malia and Sasha, becoming rightful “owners” of the White House. What a thrilling message from a country of one time slave owners this sent to the world.

Also the swearing-in ceremony meant that George Bush was gone. This was good news for the country. While George Bush wasn’t at all a bad man, he was clearly a bad, probably terrible president, perhaps the country’s worst ever.

Bush lacked judgment, of what was possible and what was important. Witness his sophomoric attempt to replace Social Security with private retirement savings accounts. This was never going to happen and he wasted much of his first term of office promoting it.

But most of all Bush, without a realistic vision of his own for the country, quickly fell victim to the persuasive powers of the men about him, men with agendas of their own, in particular Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their neo-conservative mentors, and with their encouragement led us into long and futile warring in the Middle East, much as in Vietnam earlier, war still costing us more than we can afford, both in regard to our soldiers’ lives and our country’s wealth.

In addition, Bush, instead of trying to reign in the country’s increasing entitlement obligations, that which Republicans were supposed to do, created even larger, more unaffordable entitlements by his Medicare prescription drug Act of 2003.

However, the first black family to occupy the White House, while of huge importance, would not be enough to save the country from the wrong turns of the Bush years. Obama would have to do this himself.

For one, he would have to somehow stem the country’s rapidly expanding budget shortfalls while leading the country out of recession. On its face an impossible task in that increased Federal spending in the form of stimulus money seemed to be the only response available to him to stem the recession and accompanying job losses.

But if Obama had just limited himself to stimulus spending, sending hundreds of billions of Federal tax dollars to shovel ready work projects throughout the country, that, even meaning as it would higher budget deficits, might have been acceptable.

But Obama didn’t stop there, and here is where I most fault the president. For one he continued to expend our lives and treasure in futile war efforts, that which Bush called democracy building, both in Iraq and even more so in Afghanistan, in that country growing imprudently to say the least our already heavy commitment of dollars and soldiers.

For two, he put himself fully behind an ill-timed health care reform bill, not even of his own creation but that of Democratic politicians in the Congress. Obama was thereby committing the country to additional hundreds of billions of dollars in new deficit spending.

Needless to say none of the efforts of the first year of his presidency are going well. And worse, he is blaming others, most often the Republican leadership in the Congress for the failures. But is it party politics and party obstructionists that are most at fault?

Isn’t it rather the President’s highly risky commitment to old (war and entitlements) and new (health care reform) expenditures that is arousing the opposition, not just  from the Republicans, but also from some members of his own party, and most of all from large numbers of Independent voters, those who may very well now make up the country’s largest voting block, and who need, therefore, to be listened to.

After a year of passively accepting the will of a politically Left leaning Congress in regard to social welfare programs, as well as the will and positions of the congressional Right in regard to the so-called anti-terrorist wars in the Middle East and elsewhere in Africa and Asia, Obama ought now to turn his back on both groups and lead the country in directions of his own devising.

Clearly it’s just not enough to be the first black in the White House. Obama should follow the examples of earlier presidents, in particular Roosevelt and Truman, Reagan and Bill Clinton, and do what they did and take the country’s problems into his own hands, and stop relying on those whose primary concern is always their own political futures.

No longer should the President give the excuse that the problems he faces were not of his making, no longer should he wait for the leaders of the two parties in the Congress to come to him. He should go out to the people with ideas and plans of his own, plans to change the status quo both in regard to the war on terror (which he should end) and Federal entitlement obligations (which he should reduce), perhaps the two greatest problems that the country now faces. If he does this the politicians, for their own survival, would have to follow.

The Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature by Thomas Henry Huxley

February 17, 2010

I take (borrow) the following from this interesting web site that I only today encountered:  “Spiritual Insights Quotations and the Faith vs Reason Debate”.

The Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature by Thomas Henry Huxley, published in 1863, was the first book explicitly devoted to the topic of human evolution, and discussed much of the anatomical and other evidence for the evolution of man and apes from a common ancestor.

Something of the nature and direction of Huxley’s work can perhaps be gauged from the fact that it featured the following frontispiece:-

Why is it that today, in the year 2010, nearly 150 years since Thomas Henry Huxley set about to make everyone aware of not the theory, but the fact of evolution, there are still a majority of our fellow citizens who have probably never seen this array of like skeletons, let alone come to grips with what they, the skeletons, are saying about us, all of us?

Is this what we’re now confronting, both in Europe and the United States?

February 17, 2010

From The Wall Street Journal’s Review and Outlook today:

“The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck’s entitlement state* for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments.”

This position statement raises a number of questions to which there are not yet clear answers. Hence the on-going argument between the political Left and Right.

For one, doesn’t it imply that at one time the “entitlement state” was affordable. And if so why no longer, especially given the fact that developed nations are today so much richer than they were in Bismarck’s time, nearly 150 years ago? Has the “un-affordability” of the welfare state been clearly demonstrated?

Then, doesn’t it also imply that at some point excessively high taxes will slow economic growth, resulting in less wealth out there to be taxed? Commentators on the Right assume that Europe has already reached that point, and that President Obama’s policies, if successful, will do the same for us.

It is true that those who clamor for more, for higher wages, greater benefits, especially those who work in the public sector where profitability is of little moment, act as if there were no point at which taxes become excessive.

This is especially true in France today when hardly a week goes by without a work stoppage of some sort by disgruntled employees. In France these constant strikes seem to be the rule, not the exception, probably since President Truman’s Marshall Plan in the late 40s and early 1950s put an end to the communist vision of cradle to grave security for all.

And a third and final question that this position raises — has it been somehow decided (perhaps I missed it) that it is the state’s and not the individual’s responsibility to assure that everyone is provided for? If people go without health insurance, shelter, jobs and job training (education), not to mention food and clothing, has it been decided that it is the state’s responsibility to meet this lack?

In other words do people’s rights as provided by the state extend to housing, jobs, healthcare, and all the rest? As our great depression president, FDR, would have it?**

A couple of notes:

*Actually this is probably a mis-characterization of Bismarck’s program. The socialists were threatening Bismarck’s own position in the government of Emperor William I. His social welfare policies were probably meant to take the teeth out of his opponent’s, the socialists’,  proposals.
See Otto von Bismarck and German Unification.

**See The Economic or Second Bill of Rights.

Just the facts, ma’am

February 14, 2010

In his Times piece yesterday, February 13, Charles Blow points out that the President’s language  (the President’s thinking?) has not changed much between press conferences, that of 2/9/2009 (his first) and that of just one year later, 2/9/2010 (his last).

On February 9, one year ago, the President said: “I am the eternal optimist. I think that over time people respond to — to civility and rational argument.”

And that on February 9 of this year he said much the same thing: “I am just an eternal optimist…. And all I can do is just to keep on making the argument about what’s right for the country and assume that over time people, regardless of party, regardless of their particular political positions, are going to gravitate towards the truth.”

Blow concludes from these two statements that the President hasn’t changed during his first year in office, that he still naively believes that people, and in particular members of Congress, can be changed by reasonable argument. Of course this is not how things work and as a result the President has accomplished little or nothing in respect to the country’s real problems.

Get tough, Mr. President, Blow seems to be saying. Crack some heads. Stop being Mr. Nice Guy.

I read the same two texts and come to quite different conclusions. In my opinion the President is not, in spite of his statements to the contrary, telling us the truth about the country’s problems. Is he covering them up? Probably not. But he is, at least in public, not facing up to them, that which he would be the first to admit that he has to do if he would find solutions.

For example, two spending areas, one discretionary and one mandatory, are consuming larger and larger portions of our tax dollars. The one is defense, in this year’s budget some 663 billion, well over half of the total discretionary budget, and nearly 13% up from a year earlier.

The other is entitlements, social security, medicare, and medicaid, together accounting for two thirds of all the mandatory spending budget. In particular Medicare at $453 billion is up nearly 7% from a year ago and Medicaid at $290 billion is up 12%. The CPI rose only 2.7% for the year, and most of that was because of higher energy  prices.

These are facts and the President is not addressing them. It’s ironic in that Obama himself, in his recent press conference tells a story about Senator Moynihan. Moynihan was in an argument with a Senate colleague who, getting flustered with Moynihan said to him, “Well, I’m entitled to my own opinion.” And Senator Moynihan replying, “Well, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

Well while listening to the press conferences on u-Tube I was asking myself if the President was confronting the “facts,” or was he only interested in his own facts. He is certainly implying, and he is most likely mistaken about this, that his facts are ones that we might all agree on and that we should have them in mind when we set about trying to solve the country’s problems.

As a country we haven’t yet agreed to the so called facts about anything at all, not even the meaning of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Be it Guantanamo, global warming, bank regulation, surges in Irak and Afghanistan, let alone the perennial favorites, education and health care, we’re not, although citizens of one and the same country, looking at the same facts.

What facts did the President have in mind when he was ready to go along with the Senate Health Care bill? Well among others, there were such as these: One in Ten Americans are without health insurance. Preexisting medical conditions prevent some from obtaining reasonably priced health insurance. And many, who lose their jobs, also lose the health insurance that went along with the job.

And it’s true that the Senate bill would address these facts, do something about these unsatisfactory conditions, but what about other facts, the fact, for example, that public and private health expenditures are consuming a larger and larger portion of the country’s gross national product, over 16% in 2008.

The US Department of Health and Human Services makes the following projection: “Over the projection period (2009-2019), average annual health spending growth (6.1 percent) is anticipated to outpace average annual growth in the overall economy (4.4 percent). By 2019, national health spending is expected to reach $4.5 trillion and comprise 19.3 percent of GDP.”

This fact alone should call for a complete retooling of how we provide health insurance and health care in the country. The present arrangements are no longer viable. The country cannot become primarily about health care, when one of every five dollars earned, perhaps one of every four in the near future, goes to the health industry. There are too many other things, now neglected, that the country should also be about.

Other facts in regard to health care that the President is not directly confronting. People are living longer and longer, entering into that period of life when health care and health insurance are most in demand, that which results in increased insurance costs for everyone, especially for those who are still working and can pay.

In addition, the care itself is becoming more and more expensive, especially during that period of old age when there are more people living longer. The care is more expensive, much more expensive because of new treatments, miracle drugs, wonder machines fueled by wonder technologies, improved hospital and surgical procedures, and other such, all now available, but at a greater and greater cost, one we cannot afford to pay.

These facts are all well known. But no one is confronting them. Not the President, not the Congress, not the private insurers, no one. Why? Because these facts are a political third rail. He who would take away available treatment because of an inability to meet the cost, he who would balance the budget over health care, well that person or persons will not be returned to Washington. And those in Washington know that. Is the President no different?

Would that I had come earlier to the United States!

February 3, 2010

Columbia University’s Pierre-André Chiappori, as cited by Guy  Sorman in the City Journal, says:

“Academic life in the U.S. is determined by competition at all levels, he adds. ‘It’s often said that American universities recruit only the best among the Europeans. I would say instead that we become better because we are immersed in permanent competition. I would have been better at what I do if only I had come earlier to the U.S.’”

What if our schools were to accept his judgment, that we become better at what we do because of the competition? It’s certainly true of athletics, which is all about competition. Why might it not also be true of learning, say, math or history?

But, whether or not it’s true is for more and more of us no longer a pressing issue. For we have become, not only in our schools, but also in the way we raise our children, afraid of competition.

We’re afraid of  turning off or away all those who can’t or won’t or don’t want to compete. And with reason, for that does happen.

And it can get ugly, as one can readily see in a large family with competing children. For there will always be winners and losers. And because of this we go out of our way and try to lessen the harm done, by such things as having all the children speak up in turn at the family dinner table, by being sure that all the kids in the classroom are raising their hands and asking questions, and by countless other similar esteem promoting actions.

But of course our efforts are mostly in vain. Competition is, as they say, in our genes, and our memes. It’s a part of everything we do. We can’t do away with it.

Rather than try we ought to accept the truth of what Chiappori says, and allow the few to enjoy the great benefits, to themselves and the larger organization of which they are a part, that come from competition, while trying at the same time to lessen the downside, the discouragement that will probably fall upon the many.

In any case, that’s reality. That’s also what’s going on between nations as they compete for global market share. And because of the competition, and the greater productivity and greater wealth arising therefrom, hundreds of millions who have only known poverty in their lives are now working and earning money and becoming the first of their families to move up into the middle classes.

The Old and the Young

February 2, 2010

The old, we’re told, will remain young by caring for the young, by caring about the young. Show me a real old man or woman, someone who looks and acts old, and I’ll show you someone who is probably no longer close to children.

Children are not only ours and the country’s future, but in the present they are our sanity, contributing mightily to our well-being. In spite of the really difficult work involved in bringing up children there are very few who ever choose not to do this work. And there are very few grandparents who do not pitch in and help with this work, seeming to understand that this is to their own benefit no less than that of their children.

Who would defend the old if the inevitable selfishness of old age, the selfishness arising from long years of living for oneself and one’s survival, were not attenuated by the presence of the young, by what is the transforming and life giving presence of one’s children and grandchildren?

In the words of David Brooks, “One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don’t. As Vaillant writes in his book “Aging Well,” “Biology flows downhill.” We are naturally inclined to serve those who come after and thrive when performing that role.”

Now enter into the old/young equation the Federal government. Not only do our leaders in Washington seem not to have read Vaillant, but they are, by their redistributive policies heavily skewed in favor of the old, turning Vaillant’s conclusions on their head.

“Far from serving the young, as Brooks tells us, “the old are now, [by the number and extent of the Federal programs directed to their benefit] taking from them. First, they are taking money…. the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.”

Then they are taking, as Brooks goes on to explain, their freedom, and with the loss of freedom, opportunity, there being for the young considerably less of both as the old receive more and more of both in the form of generous Federal entitlements.

Brooks points out the extreme irony of the situation. While we are there for our children and grandchildren the government, more and more, is there for us. As if they considered it our job to care for the country’s future, and their job to care for us.

Again a situation where one group of citizens, in this case the old, has powerful friends in Washington, and the other group, children, does not.

The situation is doubly ironic in that the old, if they were to demand and accept less for themselves from the Federal government, if they were to insure their own brief future less, they would be insuring more the only future that counts, that of their children and grandchildren.

More on the Schools from Today’s News

February 1, 2010

Three comments from today’s news concerning the performance, or failure to perform, of our public schools, two from the Times, and one from Time Magazine.

First Ross Douthat, in an op ed piece. He cites the sociologist, Kristin Luker who in her history of the sex education debate concluded that, “… it is surprisingly difficult to show that sex education programs do in fact increase teenagers’ willingness to protect themselves from pregnancy and/or disease.”

Douthat comments:  ‘This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s attended high school. What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem. (And, of course, the impact of entertainment: the MTV reality show ‘Teen Mom”’is far more absorbing than the average sex-ed curriculum, and probably more influential as well.)”

Reasonable, right? Would anyone without his own dog in the fight disagree with Douthat? It’s been evident for a long time, in my case for more than 50 years, that what is taught in the classroom does little or nothing to change the already ingrained habits of thought and action of today’s adolescents. We go on talking at our students, not with them or to them.

The second comment, this one from the event now taking place in Davos, Switzerland, is from Azim Premzi, head of the Indian outsourcing company, and is quoted in Alison Smale’s Times article, Bankers Put focus on ‘Real Economy.’

Premzi says that, “there may be too many people pursuing a moderate amount of education, which will leave them overqualified for low-skilled jobs in agriculture or other areas, but not qualified enough to take part in an increasingly high-tech economy.”

Also reasonable, right? What he gently calls a “moderate amount of education,” really means the school’s failure to educate large numbers of our young people, even those who have graduated from high school. It’s probably true, as he says, that too many young people upon leaving school are little fit for any job at all, let alone one in the high-tech economy.

Premzi clearly implies that we ought to be doing something else, perhaps as in Germany and in other countries, and begin to give our young people while still in school the training necessary to get and retain a job upon graduation. Whatever he means by the “moderate amount of education” that our kids are supposedly getting it is clearly not enough, and probably of little or no value to them.

Joe Klein, writing on education in Time Magazine, is the least convincing of the three. He is probably correct when he accuses the New York teachers’ union of blocking Secretary Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” by their refusal to accept Federal stimulus money that would go to support school choice and competition (charter schools) as well as a new emphasis on teacher evaluation and accountability, all three reforms anathema to the union.

But in what he says about American schools he repeats generally accepted but irrelevant clichés that don’t at all have the depth of meaning he would give to them. This is unfortunate because his criticism lends further support to the public perception that what is wrong with our schools is first and foremost the refusal of the teachers’ unions to reform themselves.

Here is what he says: “American schools have been slipping for decades — our students are now 32nd internationally in math scores, 10th in science, 12th in reading. It will be impossible to rebuild our economy — to create the sophisticated, high-paying jobs we need — as long as we have an archaic, industrial-age school system. It’s also hard to keep a strong democracy with a citizenry that is increasingly uneducated and ill informed.”

In regard to his three judgments, really critical put-downs of the teacher union dominated public schools, here is what I would reply.

First of all such international comparisons as the ones he mentions have been shown to be without substance. It’s enough to think about what groups of students are being compared to understand that such comparisons are impossible to make. Our students do quite well when the two groups being compared are in fact comparable, say at the international Math Olympiad. However, this is rarely the case.

Secondly, there are very few of those “sophisticated, high-paying jobs,” of which he speaks, out there. Most jobs that are available are in the service and retail industries and are definitely neither sophisticated nor high-paying.

In fact, there are now plenty of graduates to fill the jobs of which he speaks, and if not they would quickly appear among the thousands, tens of thousands of much better qualified new arrivals to the country, than from the inner city high schools, even from those schools where the union obstacles to reform have been lifted and removed.

And finally, the Jeffersonian complaint, that our democracy is in need of an increasingly educated and well informed citizenry. Of course, but don’t look to our schools to make this happen. The schools have never created such a citizenry in the past, and no matter what they do in the present, even if the union leaders are sent to a desert island, will they create Jefferson’s desired citizenry.

A well informed, literate, and thinking public is as much our dream as it was that of Thomas Jefferson. We ought, however, to have learned during the intervening 200 years or so between him and us that such is not in our power, let alone in the power of our schools, to make happen.

There are good citizens, just as there are good people, but are we any closer today than ever before to knowing how to make them?


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