Irrational Knowledge

Little side moments in life sometimes tell you more about yourself than a deep analysis.  I remember practicing just from curiosity with pastels, when suddenly the total mess of colors on the page came together to somewhat resemble the picture I’d set out to draw.  Wow!  Or that time I got to emote in the class play. Or that time I really had fun, broken glasses and all, in a college game of hand ball.  Political speech writer and columnist Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post the other day, told about the moments he enjoys reading about cosmology even without a clue about what the equations are saying.  That’s all useless knowledge, the kind you can’t earn a dime from and that economists contrast with rational ignorance.  But it surely is fun, and a vital part of what makes us human.

Actually, it turns out that it can be quite useful, only in ways you’d never expect.  Argentina has discovered that making music a required course in school has resulted in significant reductions in juvenile trouble-making, and has improved the general education skills of their children.  A nephew of mine turned a youthful interest in art into a career in helping troubled youth via art therapy.  The son of friends of ours took occasional breaks from his work as an electrical engineer to enjoy theater, until he discovered that his real love was backstage engineering work in theaters, and made a career of it.

That’s why it troubles me that so many public school systems are managing penny-pinching budgets and the costs of increased security by eliminating courses like art, music and theater.  Instead of using art and music to soothe the savage breasts of teenagers, they are hiring more guards.  That they are also limiting the life chances and pleasures of living for their future adults is of no account.  How many future architects and artists and singers are being lost?  Who knows?  But from a utilitarian viewpoint, those are jobs, too.

The problem mostly doesn’t exist in private schools.  They know the value of those “soft” courses, and make them an integral part of their education.  I’m grateful that the private school where my grandsons attend makes music a standard requirement, right along with the fine math, science, history and literature courses they provide.  They know the value of such courses and are willing to pay for them.

The problem is that necessary penny pinching  of public schools.  School boards and county commissions are often stocked with hard-nosed business men who never had a music class and see no need for others to have one either – not at the taxpayers’ expense.  And career educators, who should know better, try to please their bosses.  That was the message of that really good movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus.  That a shy teenage girl had been turned into a future state governor by the experience of studying music was meaningless; Mr. Holland’s job as music teacher was still eliminated.

Yes, better readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic need desperately to be taught and cost money to do so.  But so do music and drama and art.  And they too must be paid for.  And as is obvious from the private – public school contrast, it’s the poorer kids who suffer when they’re not.  The well known reason is that the costs of public education are funded by the property tax.  Poor neighborhoods lack the high property values that enable good education.

There’s a lot of talk these days about education reform, from charter and magnet schools to core standards.  There’s value in all those things.  But no real reform is going to occur until public schools are better funded, and that requires reforming the property tax system.  Economists and other pennypinchers go on about the rationality of ignorance, but that doesn't work anymore in our 21^st century world.  It’s time we started celebrating the irrational human beauty of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and started digging into our pockets to provide it.  Our children, and our futures, deserve it.

The Theology of Climate Change Denial

When Galileo obtained one of the first telescopes from its Dutch inventor, he set busily at work examining things like the surface of the moon and discovering the moons of Jupiter.  The response from the Inquisition was fascinating.  The telescope, they declared, was a creation of the Devil designed to lure faithless souls to damnation by presenting them with false images of worlds not in accord with scripture.  If science contradicts belief then science, not belief, must be in error.  That of course is the mark of the “close your eyes and believe harder” branch of theology that we thought abandoned soon thereafter.  Not so.  Only one hundred years after the Scopes trial, the hard facts of science are once again being challenged, this time by the theologians of the “Don’t blame my SUV” community.

Twice this week, I have been astounded by the theological bent that climate change denial has taken.  By the way, personal note, I am a person both of faith and of science; I find no conflict between them.  The first experience this week was after I gave a short lead-in about the recent IPCC report before a group discussion on the impact of climate change on world food supplies.  A participant announced firmly that he could not accept climate change because 1) a friend back in 1980 had predicted a six inch rise in sea level by 2000 and been wrong, and 2) Eisenhower had warned against grant-seeking scientists at the same time he warned against the military-industrial complex.  I tried to encourage the “regret-free” approach recommended by the IPCC, and hope I at least left him thinking, but I’m doubtful.  Theology is a hard mistress.

The second experience this week was reading the column by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post in which he chastised climate change action advocates on the basis of the inherent uncertainty of science.  This is of course much like the Inquisition’s position in 21^st century language.  The science behind climate change has to be a fantasy created by the Devil.  Krauthammer, for example, accused advocates of attributing climate change as the cause of every extreme weather event.  In fact, climatologists and other knowledgeable advocates have been very careful to state that no one event can be attributed to climate change with any certainty.  Instead, they look to the frequency of extreme events as one of many measures of change.  He also criticized over-reliance on computer models, when in fact many of the findings are things like long term (thirty years or more) temperature changes, changes in ranges of species and glacial melting, all observable fact.  And all the findings in the IPCC report are very carefully annotated with degrees of certainty, many of them over 95 percent.  Aside from that, has Charles stepped outside lately?  My brothers on the gulf coast have warned me not to go there between the end of April and the end of September because of the increased heat.  Those moons of Jupiter are really there, Charles.

Theology is a language for talking about sacred things.  When one encounters it, a natural question is, what is the sacred thing?  A charitable explanation is that it is the classical conservative position that the present should not be sacrificed for an uncertain future.  All well and good.  But advocates these days, perhaps too conservatively, are not arguing unreasonable sacrifice; they argue for “no regrets” actions proportional to observed change which will result in good outcomes whatever eventually transpires.  Unfortunately the sacred word that pops to mind in many cases is “Mammon.”  The actions which in many cases are required to ameliorate or adapt to climate change are often community wide, not for the direct personal benefit of any one individual. Personal treasure is threatened, and that is intolerable.

The IPCC report notes that climate change will require cultural and social adaptations as much as it does technical ones.  Perhaps the greatest of those is that we are really going to have to learn how to work together, often altruistically often for the benefit of unborn grandchildren.  In our modern, “follow your own bliss” American culture, that will be very hard for many.  We need to work on this.

The Chains of Consequences

Corporations have come a long ways from the days when companies such as the British East India Company were creatures of the sovereign, with the mission of spreading empire to faraway places.  Monarchs gave corporations their marching orders, and knew they would be followed.  The East India Company had its own army to speed it along, and succeeded in adding Empress of India to Victoria’s long list of titles.  She had wanted that desperately because her cousin was already an emperor and got to march in first on state occasions.  Actual profits going to anyone were only a secondary concern.

Corporations had started off the same way elsewhere, as arms, sometimes militant, of the nation.  But along the way corporations had begun to be licensed by the monarch indefinitely, with no requirement for renewal. They were immortals!  They soon made their own declarations of independence and dedicated themselves to the pursuit of profits as happiness.  That independence required the evolution of a different kind of social contract; corporations, no longer creatures of the sovereign but not themselves sovereign, still needed the consent of society to function, and that was provided through regulation.  Our policy model for that regulation assumed the mutual interest of the corporation and American society in profit making. Hence the famous declaration that was taken to mean, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”  (That’s not what was actually said, but what society in general read into it.)  Howard Meyerson, in the Washington Post this past week, pointed out that the classic American corporate model established was in fact the stakeholder version of capitalism.  In it, profitable business includes value to the shareholders, the employees and to the public.  Companies such as Ford Motor Company are shining   examples of that model.  That model still works in other countries.  A battle royal is currently raging in Tennessee, where Volkswagen seeks to apply it to its new operations there by being friendly to unions in the German style that has made them leaders in adapting to a 21st century high-tech world.  They face stiff opposition in Tennessee, where the Senate president declares such friendliness to be "Un-American." But our social contract with corporations is based on that model, and it is the premise of our corporate regulation policy.  But it was a different kind of profits than we see today.    We have gone astray.

Beginning in the 1970s, an altered ideological stance emerged for corporations.  Libertarian ideologues headed by Milt Friedman argued that the focus of profit making was on shareholder profit as the measure of all things, and that the corporation had no obligation other than to shareholders.  The idea was happily accepted by corporations; it gave them freedom for the kind of global maneuvering we see today.  Now, not only the concerns of the sovereign could be ignored, but the concerns of the people as well.  But acceptance of shareholder capitalism was a major, unrecognized alteration of the social contract.  Corporations no longer needed to include employees in profits, or to spread the benefits of their profits to the communities around them.  Even price gouging and tax evasion become acceptable corporate goals under such ideology.  But the social assumptions underlying corporate regulation had not correspondingly changed.

The consequences have been devastating.  That change in corporate ideology coincides, as Robert Reich has pointed out with the flattening of the wage curve which has resulted in worker earnings remaining flat for the past 35 years while all productivity gains accrued to the top twenty percent, aka the shareholders.  And a consequence of that has been the economic stagnation resulting, again as Reich has pointed out, from lower demand as the public becomes less and less able to afford corporate products.  Regulatory policy that assumes the friendliness, loyalty and community spirit of corporations that have no intent of behaving that way has no chance of success.  We have placed ourselves in economic chains and leg-irons through our own efforts.

We need fundamental restructuring of our corporate regulation policy.   We can no longer assume the corporation as a friendly giant out to help us and our communities along with helping themselves.  No tax breaks should be provided without “poison pills” of very large payments to assure the corporation adheres to its promises and stays around to do so.  Breaks should be provided only with commitments to pay fair wages and benefit the community.  Corporate raids on natural resources like water supplies through things like fracking should be assumed contrary to the public interest unless strongly proved otherwise.  And the burden of proof should be entirely on the corporation.  Corporations have lost the right to public trust, with its consequences for tax breaks and easy regulation. They must work to regain it.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

After three years of negotiations, an agricultural reform bill has finally passed in Congress, and presumably will soon become law.  Some of it involved eliminating outrageous subsidies that go mainly to big corporations.  That’s good.  Stiffer environmental regulations on farms that the bill includes are good, too.  It requires a label showing country of origin on meat.  That’s a good idea in itself, though critics complain it will add costs to the consumer for the sorting of animals at stock yards and may set off trade wars with other countries.  That’s bad.  But the ugly part of the bill is that of the $16 billion in projected savings, over half, $8.6 billion comes from cuts in the food stamp program.  But that was done to avoid a House conservative alternative proposal to cut 5 times as much from the proposal.  The bill is classic compromise legislation, and good, bad or ugly, it’s the face of democracy.

One question that arises is whether in this complicated 21^st century, we can any longer afford such compromise.   Fifty years ago in political science, it was popular to talk about “iron triangles.”  The concept was that isolated special interest areas like agriculture are composed of a triangle of interests consisting of a congressional committee (the Agriculture Committees in the House and Senate, a lobbying group (farmers and ranchers) and a bureaucracy (the Agriculture Department).  All decisions are worked out by members of the triangle, and other areas did not intrude.  That’s how subsidies arise and continue like the annual payment to home owners whose house sits on land formerly part of a rice field which encountered hurricane damage.  That was indeed how it worked back then.  But the plight of those in poverty in the cities, environmental issues, international trade agreements, an internet-based world in which everyone knows and is concerned with the business of other, and dozens of other things have turned the triangles into unrecognizable multi-faceted configurations.  Previously, relatively small groups of Congressional leaders cut deals to get things done quickly. Sometimes the results, like the subsidies, were self-interested and against the public interest, but often great things were done.  The Civil Rights Act was passed with the efforts of a relatively small group of Congressional leaders pushed hard by Lyndon Johnson.  Even Johnson couldn’t get it done today.  The face of democracy begins to resemble something done by Picasso, and it’s getting uglier by the year..

Now, the consequences of decisions have widespread impacts no longer ignorable by others.  The particular form food stamp cuts took affects well over a million people in 850,000 households in about a third of the states.  Taking over half the savings out of the incomes of the poor may work as a political compromise, but it ravages the lives of people.  International treaties currently being negotiated will be affected.  Pollution levels are tied in.   Good enough in compromised legislation may no longer be good enough.

Beyond that, many of our problems arise quickly and must be solved quickly.  The long-term unemployment issue is a case in point.  Climate change legislation is another.  Three years topass an inadequate solution no longer suffices.  And beyond that, the results of time-consuming legislation get locked in.  Thirty years ago, Congress in the early days of the Reagan era hastily passed an elimination of the Social Security minimum benefit.  The public outcry caused them just as hastily to repeal what they had done.  When agricultural legislation takes three years to negotiate all the angles, the prospect of changing it is slim.

Congress’s latest success shows just how much Congress is broken.  Some of the causes are obvious.  It’s far too large these days.  435 members in the House generally cannot even agree on an agenda, much less significant legislation.  Its internal procedures are antiquated.  Procedures that made sense in 1814 no longer do.  It’s composed of far too many gerrymandered extremists, etc., etc.  Such a Congress can no longer adequately manage the complexities of today’s society.  None of these problems are at the Constitutional level.  The Constitution does not specify 435 members in the House or 60 votes to invoke cloture in the Senate.  But reform requires willingness of the Congress to address its own structural problems and of states to reduce gerrymandering and it can’t be done entirely from within Congress.  That’s as hard as changing the Constitution.

Congress’s fundamental problem is that it is the victim of culture lag, and that lag includes unwillingness to recognize the problem.  We are relying on a horse-and-buggy congress in a supersonic age, and our Congressional representatives in general don’t even see the problem.  It’s the kind of problem that can only be corrected at the ballot box.  It will require a long, hard push.  It’s time we began.