Leaving the Frontier

In a column this week in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen offers the interesting insight that the current gun control debate is not really about guns at all.  And he’s right.  According to Cohen, the debate, and those long lines at the gun dealers, are all about fear of government.  That fear actually combines two fears, a concern that the government will come and take away guns as a means of protecting individual liberty and skepticism that government can protect against guns owned by “bad guys.”  Cohen does not delve into the logical absurdity of such a compound fear – how can a government strong enough to take away all citizens’ guns be at the same time not strong enough to protect against guns? – but does thoughtfully note that the Second Amendment is more fiercely defended than the First; you cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theater but you can bring in a gun.  And it ignores the reality that stable democratic governments around the world, successfully and peaceably, ban the private ownership of guns.  Among the democracies in the world, violent deaths per capita in America not only top the rankings, they are three times the number in the country that’s number two.

That mix of logical absurdity and unequal concern about different forms of liberty, and of the reality found elsewhere, should have been a clue for Cohen to delve a step deeper, but he (probably wisely) chose not to.  For it signals entrance into the jungle of human emotions we call the unconscious.  Any good Jungian would immediately recognize that we are dealing here with the Other, that part of our thoughts and emotions that we find so reprehensible that we deny having them at all, projecting them onto convenient targets outside ourselves.  Even saints have violent emotions and lascivious thoughts – remember Jimmy Carter’s Statue of Liberty comments? – but if we are not reconciled with ourselves, it’s much easier to blame immigrants or Muslims or teenagers, or government. The whole of living becomes them against us.  In other words, the enemy that we fear, and call oppressive government, is really ourselves.  If we were reconciled with our own nature, it would be much easier to accept that everyone, ourselves included, would benefit from reasonable regulation of our ability to do violence.

That projection of our own worst feelings onto others serves not only to paint them with an undeservedly tarred brush – why, for example, should an immigrant wish to behave any worse toward others than we would? – it also enforces an unworkable distance between us all.  When government becomes the hated Other, capable of committing our own worst impulses against us, we become incapable of working together to solve our greatest problems.  And that feeds our fear that in case of trouble, government will not be there to help us.  We create the government we feared.

The obvious question of course is why America’s attitude toward gun ownership should differ so widely from that of other democracies.  It is that we have an ethos in America of rugged individualism, shaped by our early frontier history; that ethos rejected the social niceties of European civilization in favor of solitary exploration, gun in hand, of a new continent. In that ethos, any stranger is danger, the Other, and a gun must be always ready for protection.  John Wayne is almost as much a symbol of America as Uncle Sam.  But in Leviathan, written at the same time as America was first being explored, Thomas Hobbes was describing that American frontier living when he called the life of mankind outside civilization one of “continual fear and danger of violent death … solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."   As Hobbes pointed out, the purpose of civilization is to move us beyond that.  Frontier living is a pathway to something far better, not a goal in itself.  When we enter real civilization, we check our guns at the door.

It is no coincidence that America not only ranks far in front in terms of violent deaths per capita, but that the American mortality rate for those under the age of 50 is the highest among the 17 nations of Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan.  Older Americans, as Harold Myerson of the Washington Post points out, have available a Medicare system that has much in common with the universally available health systems of the other countries. Younger Americans must rely on the rugged individualism of private provision of health services.  Our education systems that we like to believe are the best in the world are currently ranked about 26^th internationally and still falling. Other measures of the quality of life show the same kind of at best mediocre American performance.  As Myerson notes, what truly sets us apart internationally is the indifference we show our fellow citizens about the quality of their lives, and our own.  Behavioral psychologists describe our American culture as having an “empathy gap.”  Our emotional ties to frontier values ensure that our lives remain, relatively speaking, “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.”  It is time we set aside the emotions and values of the frontier and claim the civilization we first came to this continent to build.

Game Changers

My teenage grandson, looking at international issues, comments, “Everywhere you look, there’s a problem.”  That’s true, and we tend to see them just that way, as a multitude of messes, too much some days to even think about.  But let’s look at them another way.  Let me posit two groups, side by side, each historically convinced it has a culture superior to its neighbor’s, one prosperous while the other struggles, the struggling one seeking, sometimes violently, to share the prosperity of the richer, the richer disdaining the other’s economic and perceived cultural failures.  That could describe the Germany/Greece, or Arab/Israeli, or Latin America/U.S., or a myriad other neighbor relations around the world, or, increasingly, a world divided between a prosperous “North” and an emerging “South”.  The trouble spots have a common thread to them that we have a hard time admitting.  What do you do about the poor who are always with you when they live next door?  Many would say that extensive aid is simply “throwing good money after bad.”  It's better to battle for territory or resouces every step of the way.  Winning is what counts.  Yet the losers, the aggrieved poor, people or nations, in our globally linked, high-tech world, replete with destructive capabilities, are more and more capable of dragging the world down with them to share their misery.

There will of course always be the poor, individuals and nations, just as there will always be the selfish, con artists and corporations and other nations, who exploit them.  The situation as presented seems to have no solution.  It constitutes what game theorists and strategic planners call a “zero sum” game.  In such games (like chess or horse racing or football) a win for one side is always balanced by a loss for the other.  Foreign policy analysts are fond of describing power relationship dynamics between nations as “a chess game.”  Such zero-sum games, chess for example, typically begin on an orderly field or playing board and proceed through slaughter until only one side, itself badly mauled, remains, and the field is a total mess.  Thus, they constitute a process of sub optimization.  Each participant winds up with less than they had or could have had at the beginning, and the consolation is that the other party is worse off than they.  That describes much of our world today.

But there are other games.  One of my favorites is a jigsaw puzzle.  There, the total mess is at the beginning, and the object is to put the pieces together in a way that produces a coherent and beautiful result.  At the beginning, unless someone has sneaked a peek at the box cover, no one knows the final result, and what the intermediate steps will require.  The more complex the puzzle, the more participants are welcome, each putting together what they can, and the result is a picture satisfying to all.  The result is optimal for all.  That is the world as it could be.

What is required is the vision to see the situation in terms of larger projects in which the parties can cooperatively work toward solution.  I love the metaphor imbedded in the beginning jigsaw puzzle American toddlers play with, where they learn geography by putting together the pieces shaped as individual states into a picture of the whole U.S.  The reason the U.S. works as well as it does is because each state recognizes that it is not complete in itself, and must rely on the cooperation of other states.  That did not come easily; a civil war took place in the middle of the process.  But the result is greater than the sum of the parts.  Germany and Greece have a start toward the solution to their issues by having the vision to recognize the need to construct jointly a more viable EU.  Other trouble spots can share their own common vision.

The world contains many needed mega-projects these days, from climate change management, to modernization of the Middle East, to creation of a global solar power grid, to management of global food supplies, and on and on.  We need to begin organizing them in ways that invite the cooperative participation of parties currently in conflict.  Initially, they will be small, and riddled with conflict.  But the end result can become a beautiful world that fits together; the alternative is a field littered with the dead.

Reforming the Political Infrastructure

People scratch their heads over how we got into, and how we get out of, the stalemated politics that led to the “fiscal cliff” crisis these last few days; the answers go back a long way.  In a political science course I took years ago, the professor was fond of remarking on how our current American political structure is a fossil of 16^th and 17^th century Tudor and Jacobean England.  Any political structure has strong points and flaws, and our founding fathers were consumed with correcting the perceived flaws of the England they knew, from religious establishment to arbitrary monarchy to “rotten boroughs” to a “House of Lords” based on  inherited privilege.  So they created a political landscape of separation of powers, fixed terms of office, small electoral districts with residency requirements, substantial powers reserved to states, veto powers both in congress and in the presidency that require compromise, and a legal framework within which boundaries of action are determined not by a powerful president or opinionated congress, but by a court. All these served well to avoid the flaws of Tudor England; James Madison was one of the great political visionaries. But even Madison’s vision could not foresee the changes that time, demographics and technology would generate in the American body politic. For example, the America Madison saw was a young, agricultural America, replaced nowadays by an aging, urban country with vastly different needs.  What he and others created was for their time and for only the future as they could understand it.  And what they created has led inevitably 230 years later to a two party system prone to extreme factionalism that produces the kind of crisis we’ve just been through, with more promised to come.  In short, the failures of the political process these days result not so much from the failures of individual politicians as from a creaky political infrastructure built to solve the issues of 16^th century England, and will not go away until that infrastructure is fine tuned for the 21^st century.  Like our roads and bridges, politics will continue to fall apart until some major repairs are initiated.

Three major infrastructure features dominate our political problems these days.  First, the fixed terms and residence requirements for electoral districts mean that individual senators and representatives derive their power from a combination of local interests and affluent funders. They are immune from the many national party disciplines found in a parliamentary system, and as a consequence, national parties operate actually as a confederation of politicians whose real power derives more from local than from national interests. That’s why the Congress is such a mob scene these days.   This assures that only two parties will be significant at any given time – the party most likely to be elected and the party next most likely. It also assures that a coherent national strategy from each party for solving political issues during crisis situations will not exist.

Second, the residence requirement for electoral districts combined with the redistricting power of state legislatures at each census cycle has produced so many “gerrymandered” districts that congressional races are no longer determined by the general election, but by the primaries. State legislatures are generally beholding to one or another broad ideology, either red or blue, and ensure districts will elect according to that point of view.  But individual districts are often dominated by narrow views that only loosely fall within the ideas of the national party. Thus, primaries are dominated by party extremists who produce their own form of “rotten boroughs”, districts in which a splinter group of extremists can guarantee continuing election without regard to what their national party or the general electorate feels.

Third, the fixed terms two, four or six years in length for our representatives, president and senators encourage lengthy, expensive election campaigns which invite funding by special interests and consequent corruption. Third parties are forced out of the process by the residency requirement for candidates and by the sheer expense of it.  In a parliamentary system, by contrast, lack of fixed terms produces short, relatively inexpensive election campaigns.   The most expensive campaign, a separate election for the presidency, is eliminated altogether.  That, combined with national party discipline, which can involve placement of candidates in highly favorable or unfavorable districts as chosen by party leaders, means the role of special interests not interested in compromise is much more subdued, and room is created for the growth of third or fourth parties capable of forcing compromise and coalition in the national legislature.

We need, for real reform, to find changes that will encourage the growth of third parties, promote the development of unified strategies by national parties which can be voted up or down, reduce the expense of elections, and strengthen the role of national parties in planning solutions to our problems. We need not, and should not, “throw the baby out with the bath water.”   Changes might include, for example, making residence only within a state the requirement for the House of Representatives, thereby enabling placement of candidates by a state organization of each party, setting a fixed short campaign length to reduce expense, or limiting gerrymandering by establishing national standards for the creation of election districts subject to review in federal court. Whatever we do, the goal should be to strengthen the ability of the congress to reach solutions to national problems without excessive impasse.  The problems and issues of our 21^st century world move too quickly for us to continue 17^th century methods for their resolution.

Getting to the Top Line

The dirty secrets bag of tax reform is finally being opened for just a little peek inside, and one of the major taboo subjects is slipping out.  The now discussable (though possibly not yet actionable) secret of just what is included or not included in that little line marked “Adjusted Gross Income” is being revealed in a variety of ways.  A lot of blather is going on about general tax rates and deductions, but those things mostly affect only what is entered on that “AGI” line.  The very rich do not need many tax deductions and general tax rates to them are almost a matter of indifference, because much of their income does not make it to that AGI line in the first place.  Millions of dollars of income, often the majority for the wealthy, disappears without ever making it there.  I first was sensitized to that about 50 years ago, when I learned the esoteric trivium that tax differed on turpentine producers depending on whether the tree from which pine resin was drawn was alive or dead.  There was an exclusion from taxable income for one or the other (I forget which) because it affected the personal income of Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, the author of that particular piece of legislation.  That of course was not even the toe nail of the camel in the tent.

Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, Economic Adviser, Harvard President, etc., rats on his fellow wealthy elites by listing in a recent Washington Post column some of the more conspicuous secrets of hiding income available to the very wealthy.  For example, valuation practices in the tax code make investment partners able to end up with over $50 million in untaxed IRA’s, limited for the rest of us to a $5,000 annual contribution.  Only 1 billion in tax dollars is raised from the 1.2 trillion passed through inheritance and gift each year, a less than 1 percent rate.  “Like kind exchanges” (which are really sales of large  properties) by real estate investment operators are excluded from capital gains taxes,  this after the investors have already received depreciation allowances for appreciated property values unavailable to most home owners.  And wealthy investors and companies can shield most of their income by causing it to appear in low-tax jurisdictions like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Ireland, etc.

Ray Madoff of the Boston College Law School points out that much of the income of the wealthy is not even required to be reported to the IRS, much less taxed. Aside from the inheritances and gifts cited by Summers, Madoff’s list includes payouts from trusts and distributions from life insurance.  It is the kind of exclusions from income listed by Summers and Madoff (and there are many, many more) that make the taxable income of the wealthy so much less than their true gross income that taxing what shows up on the tax form is often only a trivial exercise.

We live in such separate bubbles these days, aware only in minimal ways of the lives of those far up or down the socioeconomic scale from us.  Few of us know what it’s like to live on food stamps, even for a week, or the life that can be led when virtually all income is sheltered not only from taxation, but from any societal responsibility at all.  One of our societal shames is the sense many of the wealthy have that their wealth must remain hidden.  It can only come from a sense of shame, whether admitted or not, that they receive far more from society than they contribute. 

One thing that should unite us is visibility across the tax systems sufficient to know that loads are being borne fairly.  It is part of the glue that holds us together.  That we no longer have.  Summers and Madoff are right in their insistence that true tax reform will require a more open and visible income reporting system.  Any citizen receiving the benefits of our society should be responsible enough not to hide what he or she takes and contributes in relationship to that done by others.  We have lost something worthwhile since the days when Socrates, after receiving an unfair death sentence, refused the opportunity for exile instead, on the grounds that, having accepted the benefits of citizenship, he was obligated to accept its adverse actions as well.  Nothing like a death sentence, only reasonable disclosure and fair taxation is being asked of us today.  The time for dirty secrets should be gone.

George Will and the Christmas Spirit

It’s time again to wish George Will a handsome glass of syllabub and the Christmas Spirit.  Poor George, he needs them so very much!  One detects this, because as the Great Holiday approaches he becomes more and more incoherent in his rages against health reform, unions, the Welfare State, universal suffrage, and all other symbols of unrestricted peace and love.  Bah, humbug, have the poor no poorhouses to go to?  This year his incoherence particularly targets unions and unrestricted voting, hateful reminders of the latent capacity of the poor to upset, through sheer numbers, the blissful profit counting of the rich.  Perhaps he senses the unsettling approach of Marley.

He rails against unions for their “frenzy against freedom”, labeling them grandly as “the enemies of freedom”, and celebrates Michigan’s new “Right to Work” law.  In the interest of his cherished freedom of opinion, he cheers for the decline of the unions (is there some contradiction there, George?), and celebrates the loss of union membership (made possible though the layoffs initiated because of the recession brought on by the excesses of the wealthy.)  Others have already spotted his misuse, in his own frenzy, of Jefferson’s celebrated defense of the right to hold one’s own RELIGIOUS opinion and not support through taxes the RELIGIOUS views of others to argue for the right of non-union workers not to pay union dues. George’s frenzy did not prevent him from careful deletion of the word “religious” from the quote.  Subsequent reprints of that column have also carefully neglected to include the misused quote.  And of course, as a devoted studier of Supreme Court decisions, George should have noted, but did not, the distinction between the unrestricted freedom of opinion and carefully regulated freedom of action.  In right to work laws, the issue under debate is not opinion, but the “free loading” of non-union workers who receive the benefits gained through collective bargaining without paying for them, thereby creating their own little welfare state.  In that perspective, right to work laws are very close to the antithesis of the Jamestown Colony’s “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”.  I’m sure George’s fellow princes of capitalism would welcome the voluntary rejection of higher pay and benefits by such principled workers.

Again in his pre-Christmas frenzy, though, George failed to note the unions’ perhaps greatest attack against freedom. For as Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-laureate economist, notes, it is unions that provide a major counter-force against corporate managers’ freedom to set their own excessive salary increases while simultaneously laying off thousands of workers.  Corporate boards of directors have long ago been made toothless in that regard.  I wonder how poor George overlooked that?

George’s own version of Christmas Spirit exhibits itself in his robust defense of the freedom of those who don’t care enough about overcoming the many barriers to voting to insist on exercising their right to vote.  He asks, compassionately I am sure, “should the indifferent be required to vote?”  He laments that long voting lines are created as the local jurisdictions in places like Alabama and Mississippi tidily try to clean up their voting registers while the untidy poor wait to vote, and fears that eventually voting will be a required exercise for all citizens. Oh, the Horror!  He notes that Hitler was elected with an average voter turnout of 86 percent.  Might it have been preferable for Germans not to be allowed to vote at all?  George regards “lackadaisical citizens choosing not to vote as a non-problem.”  Perhaps he should investigate the suspicious finding of sociologists that voting is itself a means of attaching citizens to the society, and serves to promote social stability.

Ah, the vicissitudes of George’s pre-Christmas doldrums.  All the sweetness and light in the air about us is getting to be too much!  Meanwhile though, we’ll wish him joy and peace, though he may lodge some objections to its too easy availability to all.  Merry Christmas, George!

Assault Weapons and the Second Amendment

I really didn’t want to write about this, but continued silence about last week’s violence in Connecticut could be interpreted as a kind of mute acceptance of the outrage and depravity of the world, and that mustn’t happen.  Some things are obvious.  Assault weapons in the hands of emotionally/mentally disturbed individuals are both a moral outrage and a growing danger to us and our children.  The right of “we the people” peacefully to assemble, whether in shopping malls or elementary schools or churches, and for whatever reason, is being jeopardized by “we, the people.”  A gun rights advocate in Virginia was quoted in the Washington Post this morning as saying about the assault rifle used in the shooting, “Who wouldn’t want a Ferrari?  Shooting it is a blast. It’s fast and accurate.”  Other gun rights advocates are forming long lines at gun stores to load up before they might be prevented from further purchases.  They forget that the mother of the Connecticut shooter was killed by a gun she herself had purchased.  Ralphie, in Christmas Story, was more responsible in his desire for a Red Ryder BB gun than that.

We are sacrificing our children for an absurd interpretation of an 18^th century document.  I dislike joining the blame game, but five old men on the Supreme Court bear as much responsibility for Connecticut as anyone.  The Second Amendment was written at a time, and in both a societal and military framework, vastly different from ours, and our understanding of both ourselves and our societal needs has expanded enormously, points the court majority steadfastly continues to ignore.  At that time, the largest places in America had populations of about 25,000, most people lived in a village or rural setting, and dangers were all around in the form of wild animals and Indian attacks.  The military threat was invasion, on foot and with muskets, by British or French infantry.   Implicit in the Second Amendment rationale is a vision of community we no longer possess.  Madison, the author, recognized the dangers inherent in unrestrained freedom; he even included in its language reference to the needs of “an orderly militia.”  He expressed, in his other writings, the knowledge that left unrestrained, the freedoms expressed in the Constitution could easily lead to corruption and excess.  But he believed that the peer pressure of the small communities in which Americans lived would provide the necessary corrective to such excess.  Even as late as the early 20^th century, that was still a valid belief.  Anyone who has read To Kill A Mockingbird, and sees in it, as I do, a community very like the one in which I grew up, has seen the enormous role for good or ill played by peer pressure in the America That Was.  But we now live in socially fragmented times where high migration, large population centers in which we are all strangers to each other, and moral ambiguity is the norm.  The societal discipline of peer pressure is no more.

The rationale given in the Second Amendment was a military one.  Militias armed with rifles provided by the militiamen themselves were important to protect against the still serious threat of a land invasion from England.  They would look rather silly these days guarding against atom bombs and missile attacks.  One strong virtue the military provides, though, is rules of engagement.  We have learned as our understanding of human psychology expands that the social judgment of young people is not fully formed until their mid-twenties.  And for some, it seems never to form.  Mechanisms for emotional discipline are important.  In hostile situations where emotions run high and weapons are at hand, tightly enforced rules of engagement are a necessary discipline, one obviously lacking in civilian settings where emotions can run equally high.  Easy availability of firearms without either the emotional discipline of peer pressure or of rules of engagement is a recipe for catastrophe, which we are experiencing more and more.

So, what can be done?  A preferred option would be repeal of the Second Amendment.  Its proper time is long past, and democracies around the world do very well without such a safeguard.  That is probably a political impossibility, in which case, the outlawing of civilian purchase, ownership or use of assault weapons should be the minimum acceptable reform.  Simply outlawing ownership, though important, will not by itself be enough.  That outlawing of assault weapons should include criminal liability for gun manufacturers who sell assault weapons to other than military purchasers.  The gun manufacturers are the other culprits, along with the five old men, for the criminally chaotic state into which our society is drifting, and it is they who fund the NRA and other lobbying groups who fight reform.  Reform is no longer a matter of idle discussion.  The tears of our children, and of bereaved parents, demand we find a better way.

Kansas and the EU

When I was a child, the height of the Dust Bowl had been only a decade earlier, and references to it were common. A standard joke was about a farmer praying for rain – not for himself, he had seen it once before, but for his children, who had never seen any. That’s what people did back then, crack jokes about things too difficult to think about otherwise.  So the recent Ken Burns special on PBS about the Dust Bowl days of the 1930’s brought back sobering memories.  Now comes news just this week about how the Midwestern drought has intensified to the point that 100 percent of Kansas, 96 percent of Nebraska, 91 percent of Oklahoma and large portions of other states from South Dakota to Texas are declared to be under “at least” severe drought conditions; 63 percent of the area where winter wheat is grown is considered to be in danger of losing the crop because of drought conditions.  We are speaking here about one of the major breadbaskets of the world, whose crops feed hungry people around the globe. Climate change is beginning to hint at its full potential.  The news is being lost on the back pages of newspapers, and shouldn’t be.

We shouldn’t, this time around, face the devastation of Dust Bowl days.  A lot of the horrors of those days – children unable to go outside in Oklahoma because of the days long dust storms, wide spread pneumonia from dust inhalation, clouds of dust spreading to the east coast, desperate “Okie” migrations to California – were the result of poor farming practices which we’ve learned much better about since.  Some people in the 1930’s wanted the Midwest declared the new American Sahara and forgotten about (remember New Orleans after Katrina?).  FDR refused to accept that, and major federal agricultural research and assistance programs salvaged the Midwest for us and for the entire world.  The farm aid and research programs of today stem from that time.   The Midwest has changed a lot since then, though, with mega-farms and millionaires replacing desperate dirt farmers.  That causes simmering resentment in urban areas against farm subsidy programs, which are increasingly viewed as costly leeching by undeserving giant agricultural corporations.  Which brings me to the EU.

Word is beginning to spread in Washington these days about a possible free trade negotiation starting up between the U.S. and the EU, to create what David Ignatius of the Washington Post calls TAFTA,  a Trans Atlantic Free Trade Area.  According to Ignatius, a major barrier is the U.S. concern about the agricultural support programs of the EU, which provide levels of subsidy and protection to French and other EU farmers undreamt of in this country.  I suspect that any concessions gained by the U.S. on that front would have to be matched by American concessions on agricultural subsidies.  Given the urban resentment in this country, tying reductions in U.S. farm aid to the prospect of enhanced exports to Europe would certainly be an attraction. 

I, an urbanite, resent the raids on the Treasury by the giant agricultural corporations as much as anyone. But I also remember the haunted look in the eyes of small farm relatives in those post-Dust Bowl days.  Climate change is introducing us once again to what could become dangerous times on the farm – times that could pose major threats to our national, and global, food supply.  Multi-million dollar checks to Billion dollar corporations don’t make sense.  We need to trim silly subsidies like the subsidy that pays annual checks to suburban home owners on the gulf coast because the land their house is built on was, many years before, subjected to rice crop damage from hurricanes.  But we need also to be prepared for hard agricultural times – times when the role of the federal government in agriculture looms large. Anyone driving on a back country road can look out and see how technology-intensive farming has become, and it will be more complex as climate issues grow.  For example, increased agricultural irrigation needs to be traded off against depletion of water sources from urbanization and climate change.  We are just as much in danger of losing some of our cities to dwindling water supplies as we are our farms.  Agricultural research, innovative ways to grow and conserve crops, etc., will be just as important as they were in the days of FDR. 

This is one of those areas where, as I’ve mentioned, international policy and domestic policy increasingly unite.  We have to think through carefully how we trade off our domestic agricultural interests against the prospect of enhanced manufacturing exports.  We need to stop thinking that climate change, foreign relations, infrastructure development, green technology, agriculture policy, economic stimulus, etc., are all neat categories which can be analyzed and acted on separately, just as we need to think less of Rust Belts versus Farm Belts.  China watchers like to refer to the 21^st century task of China as a “great rebalancing”, where all the old arrangements need to be rethought and brought into new relationships.  That is our task also.

Building Better Machines

A recent article in Scientific American, entitled “The Wisdom of Psychopaths”, comments how similar many of our society’s leaders – politicians, movie stars, major entrepreneurs – are to what is known as “classic psychopaths.”  They are ruthless, uncaring of consequences to others, superficially charming, overwhelmed by their own self worth, driven to satisfy only their own desires and needs.  And we are busy building more of them all the time.  Sometimes we do it by the way we raise our children, sometimes by the entertainment we prefer, sometimes by how we vote on Election Day, sometimes by the values we elevate through our ideologies.  For example, Michael Sandel, in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, reports that Larry Summers, then President of Harvard, spoke in Harvard Chapel about how Economics enables us to “economize on altruism.”  But sometimes, we just leave it to our engineers.

Case 1: many of us are not aware that when gas prices skyrocket or the charges for our heating in winter become outrageous, they are not the product of some malevolent decision by an evil plotter out to do us harm, but simply the calculation of a computer program, possibly thousands of miles away. Knowing only formulas that define relationships between a change in price of gas or electricity and the resulting change in demand, and uncaring about the possibilities of leaving people stranded or freezing, the program sets prices or selects energy sources to maximize profit for the corporation involved.  The program is effectively autonomous in its decisions, and not at all altruistic.

Case 2: General Electric and other major companies are proudly announcing their achievements in industrial robotics, which is maturing as a way to provide “on-demand” production of consumer goods to exact customer specifications.  The results are great: soon you’ll be spelling out exactly what your dream toaster will be, and it will be arriving on your doorstep the next day.  Of course other consequences will occur.  Millions may be out of work as they are replaced by robots, but hey, that’s capitalism, and for every winner there are multiple losers.  The robots won’t care.

Case 3: the current controversy over the use of “killer drones” for attacking specific terrorists is tempered by the knowledge that a human operator is “in the loop”, actually issuing the decision to strike.  But that’s not really efficient, so engineers are busily working on ways to enable the drone to perform autonomously, thereby opening up a whole new category of homicide: “oops, computer error.”

Case 4: the visionaries of the internet are looking forward to 2045, the year they estimate that all-wise intelligent machines will take over the nasty job of making all the decisions that run the world. The near-term project in that pursuit is to develop computers capable of designing new computers smarter and faster than they are; then the new computer will design its successor, etc., etc.  You may have seen one step in that direction recently on Jeopardy when a computer developed by IBM trounced the greatest human Jeopardy champions.  But will the machines making the decisions for us have really human values and emotional intelligence?

Another article in that same Scientific American noted that a three pound human brain contains the complex circuitry and computational capacity equivalent to the entire internet, so I’m not holding my breath for that 2045 dawn of a new age.  We’ll still outnumber the machines about 10 billion to one.  But that visionary goal illuminates a challenge we face in the near and far future: how to control the burgeoning technology we are so rapidly creating to assure its “built-in” values are truly human, not just the residues of defunct 19^th century philosophies, and that we ourselves stay human, too.   For example, Economic Determinism and Laissez-faire Capitalism, with their emphasis on “economizing altruism” are an example of thinking based on early understandings of Darwinian evolution and the human genome that are now being outgrown; we don’t want them embedded into our machines, and need also to get them out of our heads.  More generally, we have not yet faced up to the task of building ethical machines or an ethical technology-dominant society.

Isaac Asimov solved the problem neatly with his conception of the three laws of robotics; that was great for fiction, but real-life solutions are going to be a lot harder to arrive at.  It was interesting, though, that his first law was equivalent to an age-old truth – the first line of the Hippocratic Oath, “First, strive to do no harm.”  A step forward some engineers might love the challenge of might be to view such ethical principles as “constraints” built into a linear programming algorithm seeking profit maximization.  Who knows? It might actually achieve something.  That would still not solve the altruism issue; that’s Asimov’s second law.  But it’s a step in the right direction. And many such steps are required before we can unleash autonomous machines on our society.

Of course, the fundamental problem we face is not simply building better machines.  It’s building better people.  We really need to outgrow the stage of human society where an objective observer can point out that our leaders are generally psychopaths.  And that will be the hardest job of all.

China and America in the 21st Century

I first became aware of the imminent (then) demise of the Soviet Union back in the early 1980’s from an article in The Wilson Quarterly.  The article noted the rapid emergence of a new educated middle class in Russia, and commented that, “You can threaten a peasant with a gun; it’s much harder to frighten a nuclear engineer.”  Putting that together with the lessons of social history and of my own experience analyzing the changes in supervisory styles occasioned in the U.S. with the emergence of employees more knowledgeable about current technology than their managers, it was easy to see that some major upheavals were on their way in the USSR.  When Reagan made his famous challenge, to “tear down that wall”, the real foundations of that wall had mostly already been eaten away.  I feel somewhat the same now about China. 

China is riding a major housing bubble, and lives off dominance in exports, both enabled by a rapidly growing middle class.  It is a gift to them, but a dangerous one that breeds social revolution.  Increasing inequality as the power brokers of the Communist Party become far richer than those around them nettles the newly affluent middle class.  A highly testing dominated traditional educational system robs the new entrepreneurs of what they perceive as necessary training of their children for global competition.  Trash and polluted air accompanying China’s “industrial revolution”, not important twenty years ago, are now becoming a major public offense.  Revolutions are often thought of the end result of extreme poverty, but far more common is the “revolution of rising expectations”, which can take a variety of forms.  It was prosperous American merchants and land owners who set off the American Revolution, not desperate peasants.  China’s is currently taking the form of growing public resentment against the perceived “corruption” of Communist Party leaders.  A recent analysis by Washington Post reporter Jia Lynn Yang compared this growing resentment of the Chinese middle class to the Tea Party and Occupy movements in the U.S., but more stratified cultures, such as China’s, often see “rising expectations” revolutions take more violent forms, such as that of the American or French Revolutions.

Americans tended to view the 20^th century as the century for struggle for super power status between the U.S. and Russia.  That was really first predicted by De Tocqueville back in the 1840’s, based on his recognition of the characteristics the two countries had in common.  He was not blinded by the then feudalism of Russia versus the raucous democracy of America to all the nations had in common. 

Now Americans view China as a somewhat mysterious rising power from the East on a collision course with the U.S. for dominance as a global super power.  China-U.S. relations are perceived as perhaps the largest international policy issue of the 21^st century, aside from global climate change.  But what is notable also about China’s issues, starting with a polyglot culture spanning a continent, is that they are very much the same as America’s. The rising levels of inequality in both China and in the U.S. are among the greatest, measured on standard international indices, in the world.  Both countries’ educational systems are characterized by areas of brilliant achievement combined with wide-spread trouble spots.  Environment and the need for clean technology are sore spots in both nations.  How to deal with issues of migrant labor occupies both countries.  Constructing an infrastructure capable of supporting a 21^st century economy is an overwhelming need in both.  And other nations rich in people and unexploited resources are nipping at the heels of both, from India and Brazil to South Africa.

Looking longer term, the international super power of the 21^st century will likely be the nation which best addresses its domestic issues.  Both China and America are shaky on doing that in many ways.  China’s problems are its own, and mostly must be dealt with just by China, as they best learn how.  But it is well for us here in America to remember that in a global world “foreign policy” and “domestic policy” are no longer separable.  What we do in dealing with our own infrastructure and education and inequality will determine our standing throughout the world, and our failures will resound worldwide.

Bad-Faith Statistics

I’m just back from a pleasant week away, and was planning on saying something about the EU debt crisis, but it’s still ripening on the vine – or in this case, more a fuse than a vine.  In my assessment, that fuse will sputter on until 2014, when all the moral, political and fiscal bills will come due, so I’ll have probably lots more to say before then.  Meanwhile, some of the statistics being tossed about by columnists like Robert Samuelson on the Washington “Fiscal Cliff” topic are so egregiously bad-faith that I have to tut-tut about them immediately.  By bad-faith, I mean statistics that are deliberately misused by someone who should know better to present a picture opposite to what they actually portray.  And Samuelson, an economist, should know better.  He’s not by himself, by any means, and not all the misrepresenters are conservatives.  But his blatancy stands out.

First, he portrays himself as presenting an even-handed analysis of the role of Social Security.  Maintaining that benefits should be cut, he presents the arguments against doing so as “shortsighted”.  He notes that a principal argument is that most of the elderly are poor, presenting statistics that, to the contrary in his view, 25.9 percent have family income over $75,000, 19.4 percent have income from $50,000 to $74,999, and 18.8 percent have income from $35,000 to$49,999.  He “forgets” to note that adds up to 64.1 percent, meaning 35.9 percent have family incomes below $35,000 and 54.7 percent of the elderly have family income below $50,000.  The median family income in the U.S. is about $52,000 and the family poverty level is about $20,000.  So over half the elderly live with incomes below the national median income, and the majority of those are more than halfway down to the poverty level. That of course argues directly the opposite of Samuelson’s view.  The elderly are not in general affluent.  It should be noted, by the way, that until Social Security began paying benefits 60 years ago, over half the elderly lived below the poverty line, so there has been substantial improvement.  And that benefits the whole nation, something Samuelson seems also to “forget.”

Samuelson then argues that Social Security benefits are not truly “earned” because payroll taxes are used to pay benefits to others, not the worker who paid the taxes.  But Social Security is a form of casualty insurance, which, like all insurance, uses current premium payments to pay benefits to those who have had losses, in this case the loss of income from retirement. Samuelson’s argument is like saying that insurance benefits, after years of paying premiums, are not really “earned” and should be cuttable at will by insurance companies.  I doubt he would regard his own insurance that way.

The Social Security issues arise in the first place because we, as a society, have not come to terms with how we should treat the elderly.  Are they only discards from the labor pool, no longer productive but still, regrettably a “cost of doing business”, or are they honorable fellow members who have done their duty over many years in many ways and deserve a full place at the table?  In the latter view, the economic statistics would show the elderly as having essentially the same median income and poverty rate as the population in general.  The fundamental sticking point is that we continue to deal with the problems and issues of the elderly as only employment related, when they are beyond the time of inclusion in individual employers’ labor pools.  Social Security and Medicare are regarded by employers essentially as unfortunate externalities, which because benefits come after the employment period, only weigh employers down without benefitting them.  But the elderly contribute, and have long contributed, to society in many ways, not just through employment.

We need, as other nations already have, to look at decoupling Medicare and Social Security from individual employment – to regard retirement and health provision as obligations of the whole society.  Though it has immense dangers of its own, perhaps we should consider funding Social Security and Medicare from the General Fund via an income tax or VAT.

We have to deal with the Fiscal Cliff without sacrificing the elderly poor among us.  We all shall be elderly (more and more so according to the demographers), and some shall always be in need. But we are more than just a “cost of doing business.”  Shakespeare put in Cardinal Wolsey’s mouth the lament, “If I had served my God as I have served my king, he would not, in my old age, have left me naked to mine enemies.” We as a society are better than that, but we threaten to behave just as callously whenever the subject of taxes is raised. By coming to terms with the real social value of our elderly, perhaps we could reach societal statistics we can cite without shame.