Let's Talk Books And Politics

The Rise of Agricultural Imperialism

2013-05-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

Humanity has thus far managed to keep increasing its food production and fend off the predictions of inevitable food scarcity and growing hunger. How much longer can that continue? Perhaps not long at all, according to a book by Lester R. Brown: Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity. Brown is the president of the Earth Policy Institute.

"We are entering a new era of rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts. On the supply side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread, eventually bringing down our social system."

If that last sentence seems a bit over-the-top to you, recall that many people believe that food supply insecurity was one of the major contributors to the revolutions that swept the Middle East. That topic was discussed in Climate Change, Food Security, and Revolution.

Brown discusses the issues associated with food production and consumption in considerable detail. Here the focus will be on just one of his topics: "The Global Land Rush."

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) tallies a global food price index. A plot of that quantity over time is provided below.

Note the sharp rise over the last decade. The price has about doubled in that time. Those in the wealthier nations have been little affected by this increase, but in countries where food makes up the dominant component of a family’s budget, a doubling in price is a tragedy.

Note also the sharp spike in price that occurred in the 2007-2008 timeframe. Brown tells us that period was a shock to the major players and led to changes in strategy.

"As food prices climbed everywhere, some exporting countries began to restrict grain shipments in an effort to limit food price inflation at home. Importing countries panicked. Some tried to negotiate long-term grain supply agreements with exporting countries, but in a seller’s market, few were successful. Seemingly overnight, importing countries realized that one of their few options was to find land in other countries on which to produce food for themselves."

The largest area of land that could still be converted to modern agricultural use resides in sub-Saharan Africa. The idea of wealthy countries going into poorer countries and extracting produce for their own use is the traditional colonial approach. But this time, the wealthy countries are attempting to produce their basic food needs in areas where the native population is having a hard time feeding itself. This is something new.

The roster of countries that seem to need additional land in order to feed their people is rather scary. Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, along with South Korea, China, and India appear to be the major players.

Saudi Arabia is rapidly consuming its underground water supply while continuing to increase its population, making it ever more dependent on food imports. A politically volatile Middle East facing long-term food security issues is not a promising scenario. The fact that the two most populous countries on earth are unable to feed their own populations does not bode well.

"India, with a huge and growing population to feed, has also become a major player in land acquisitions. With irrigation wells starting to go dry, with the projected addition of 450 million people by mid-century, and with the prospect of growing climate instability, India too is worried about future food security."

Information on this quest for other counties’ land is difficult to obtain. Many sales or long-term leases are negotiated secretly.

Many of the targeted nations are poorly governed and do not have a well-established system of property rights. Often the land sought for "development" has long been used by local farmers who have no claim to the land other than tradition.

The World Bank has attempted to track these land deals and issued a report in 2011 in which 464 projects were identified.

"The amount of land was known for only 203 of the 463 projects, yet it still came to some 140 million acres—more than is planted in corn and wheat combined in the United States."

This land rush has attracted all sorts of bidders, including speculators. The quest for renewable energy has even led to land that could have produced food being diverted to producing biofuels.

"Particularly noteworthy is that of the 405 projects for which commodity information was available, 21 percent were slated to produce biofuels and another 21 percent were for industrial or cash crops, such as rubber and timber. Only 37 percent of the projects involved food crops."

Because land can be obtained most cheaply in sub-Saharan Africa, about two-thirds of the acquired land was from that region.

"George Schoneveld of the Center for international forestry Research reported that two-thirds of the area acquired there was in just seven countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Sudan, and Zambia. In Ethiopia, for example, an acre of land can be leased for less than $1 per year, whereas in land-scarce Asia it can easily cost $100 or more."

The idea of removing arable land from use by the local population is not an obvious benefit to the targeted country.

"Unfortunately, the countries selling or leasing their land for the production of agricultural commodities to be shipped abroad are typically poor and, more often than not, those where hunger is chronic, such as Ethiopia and South Sudan. Both of these countries are leading recipients of food from the U.N. World Food Program. Some of these land acquisitions are outright purchases of land, but the overwhelming majority are long-term leases, typically 25 to 99 years."

Brown also points out that more intense agricultural activities in these areas will lead to increased water usage. That will have regional ramifications. Reducing the flow of water into the Nile basin is something that Egypt will certainly notice.

Those interested in using the acquired land for industrial scale agriculture will be required to invest in the necessary infrastructure to support those activities, and will be hiring some local workers as part of their activities. The argument is made that this will produce a net benefit to the host countries. Brown has serious doubts.

"Since productive land is not often idle in the countries where the land is being acquired, the agreements mean that many local farmers and herders will simply be displaced. Their land may be confiscated or it may be bought from them at a price over which they have little say, leading to the public hostility that often arises in host countries."

"The displaced villagers will be left without land or livelihoods in a situation where agriculture has become highly mechanized, employing few people. The principle social effect of these massive land acquisitions may well be an increase in the ranks of the world’s hungry."

Many of these targeted countries are not only poor, they are also politically unstable. A traditional means of fomenting political turmoil is by taking land away from a large number of small farmers. Evidence of such discontent is beginning to appear.

"In Ethiopia, local opposition to land grabs appears to be escalating from protest to violence. In late April 2012, gunmen in the Gambella region attacked workers on land acquired by Saudi billionaire Mohammed al-Amoudi for rice production. They reportedly killed five workers and wounded nine others."

Given that the sub-Saharan region is expected to see a dramatic increase in population in the coming decades, any activity that would constrain the ability of those nations to produce food for their own populations seems misguided at best. It would be far better to assist these countries in increasing their agricultural output and then let them sell any excess on the open market. The current activity appears to be yet another occasion where the rich take advantage of the poor.

Brown would seem to agree.

"When virtually all the inputs—the farm equipment, the fertilizer, the pesticides, the seeds—are brought in from abroad and all the output is shipped out of the country, this contributes little to the local economy and nothing to the local food supply. These land grabs are not only benefiting the rich, they are doing so at the expense of the poor."

Disease and the Human Outbreak

2013-05-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

With reports coming out of China and the Middle East of human deaths being caused by new and mysterious viruses, what better time to encounter a book that delves into the issues associated with the emergence of new viruses. David Quammen has provided a survey of recent disease outbreaks and explores the paths by which viruses came to infect humans in Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. The theme that emerges repeatedly throughout Quammen’s work is that human’s are not merely the unlucky recipient of some random infection; rather, humans, as they multiply and modify or destroy ecosystems, are presenting themselves as an obvious target for disturbed or threatened life forms such as viruses and bacteria.

The term zoonosis is used to describe the transfer of a pathogen from a nonhuman animal species to humans. Quammen points out that the frequency of zoonosis seems to have accelerated in recent decades.

"The drumbeat has been sounding ever more loudly, more insistently, more rapidly over the past fifty years."

He provides this partial list of emerged viral diseases.

"If you assembled a short list of the highlights and high anxieties of that saga within recent decades, it could include....Machupo [1959]....Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976)....HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), Hendra (1994), avian flu (1997), Nipah (1998), West Nile (1999), SARS (2003), and the much feared but anticlimactic swine flu of 2009."

Quammen concludes that these outbreaks are a direct result of changes produced by human activity.

"Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first is ecological, the second is medical. As the two intersect, their joint consequences appear as a pattern of weird and terrible new diseases, emerging from unexpected sources and raising deep concern, deep foreboding, among the scientists who study them."

In fact, Quammen suggests we should think of ourselves as a species in a condition of "outbreak." This term can refer to the emergence of a rapidly spreading disease, but it also has a more general usage.

"Outbreak in the broader sense applies to any vast, sudden population increase by a single species."

"....we are hungry. We are prodigious, we are unprecedented. We are phenomenal. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak."

A fraction of the species on earth are capable of generating vast increases in population, but these expansions do not end well.

"And here’s the thing about outbreaks: they end. In some cases they end after many years, in other cases they end rather soon. In some cases they end gradually, in other cases they end with a crash."

Species that increase in number and become more densely packed become greater targets for infectious diseases such as viruses. Quammen speaks in detail of how the gypsy moth population grows until a specific virus becomes active and lowers the number to near zero; at which point the growth and decimation process begins all over.

Quammen details the actions humans take that increase the probability of zoonosis.

"We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond....We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there."

We use and abuse animals in ways that are unnatural. We are reminded that the SARS virus was transferred to a human by a civet cat, a member of the mongoose family. However, the civet was similarly infected by another animal, a horseshoe bat. This type bat is the reservoir for the virus where it has permanent residence. How did the bat and the civet come together in the first place? Most likely in the live markets of Guangdong province in China where both animals were caged and sold as food.

"We multiply our livestock as we’ve multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow these domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck."

Is it possible that the human outbreak could be limited by a disease so lethal that our population could be significantly reduced? The SARS virus had that potential. It had a high degree of lethality and it was easily spread from human to human. What limited its effect was the fact that it showed signs of illness before it became highly contagious. This drove most sick people off the streets and often into controlled medical settings before they could spread the virus. It also helped that the virus was spread by air travel to locations that possessed modern medical facilities. If the virus had emerged in different locations, or, if it became contagious before severe symptoms were exhibited, the result could have been disastrous.

Quammen and the scientists who worry about such matters suspect that the "next big one" is likely to emerge as a form of influenza. Influenza is a zoonosis. This class of virus is ultimately transferred from wild aquatic birds although it often reaches humans after being passed through an intermediary host such as a pig. Influenza viruses know how to infect humans, they mutate continuously, and can vary from mild to deadly in effect.

The flu pandemic of 1918 provides an example of the potential for harm. According to Wikipedia, 50 to 100 million people died (3-5% of the world’s population at the time) and 500 million were infected (about 30% of the population). The 10% fatality rate is not unusual (Ebola kills about 70% of those it infects), but the transmissibility is what made this pandemic so deadly.

While much progress has been made, we are still pretty much at the mercy of whatever mutations this class of virus chooses to produce.

"....there’s still no magical defense, no universal vaccine, no foolproof and widely available treatment, to guarantee that such death and misery don’t occur again. Even during an average year, seasonal flu causes at least 3 million cases and more than 250,000 fatalities worldwide. So influenza is hugely dangerous, at best. At worst, it would be apocalyptic."

Just to make sure we are paying attention, Quammen reminds us that bird flu, H5N1, is still out there. This flu emerged in Hong Kong in 1997. It was the first occasion where a virus with the H5 designation was observed to infect a human. The virus resides in duck species. Some die from it, others don’t, like the mallard and pintail, and they have spread it across the world. It is particularly prevalent in Egypt where duck and poultry populations are infected, and about a quarter of all known human infections have occurred. Most human infections come from transmission from an infected bird rather than via human-to-human transmission.

The virus is not going away and it continues to create new versions of itself. It is widespread and it has a high fatality rate of about 33%. If, or when, it emerges in a form that allows humans to infect one another, it could be catastrophic.

Quammen quotes one scientist, Robert Webster:

"’As long as H5N1 is out there in the world,’ Webster said, ‘there is the possibility of disaster. That’s really the bottom line with H5N1. So long as it’s out there in the human population, there is the theoretical possibility that it can acquire the ability to transmit human-to-human.’ He paused. ‘And then God help us’."

And don’t forget, there are two new and mysterious viruses out there that scientists are worrying over.

David Quammen has produced an excellent book. Not only is the topic timely and important, but it is presented in an extremely readable format. Quammen is a formidable writer.

North Korea Explained

2013-05-16T02:42:00.000-07:00

For those who are perplexed, and occasionally frightened, by the strange and seemingly irrational nation of North Korea, some enlightenment is available. Richard Lloyd Parry has provided an interesting perspective on the country in an article in the London Review of Books: Advantage Pyongyang. Parry is reviewing a book by Victor Cha: The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future.

Parry calms our concerns about madmen running the nuclear-armed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) with this assessment:

"Much writing and thinking about North Korea is still hobbled by the assumption that the rulers of the DPRK are ‘mad’. But no government without an iron grip on reality could have survived this long in such dire circumstances. Most of the Kims’ behaviour is rendered understandable, often logical and occasionally even reasonable, through the simple mental exercise of placing yourself in their shoes. This is not to defend an indefensibly vile regime. But if you accept that the North Korean government seeks only to prolong its survival, many things fall into place."

If one places themselves in DPRK shoes and looks around, one discovers that the nation is surrounded by well-armed, powerful forces that would intervene in the affairs of the country if they could. The goal of the government is to insure that any such intervention would result in an unacceptable level of pain for any adventurous nation. One of the best ways to forestall any intrusion in your affairs is to possess nuclear weapons and threaten to use them.

A crisis occurred in 1994 when the DPRK threatened to obtain nuclear material for a weapon from reprocessed reactor rods.

"It is startling to remember now, when North Korea’s possession of nuclear bombs, and perhaps the means to deliver them, are facts of life, that to Clinton the mere act of reprocessing was unacceptable. As the White House contemplated a call-up of reservists and the evacuation of Americans from South Korea, there was panic buying in Seoul, where the stock market fell by 25 per cent. The situation was defused by a brilliant and near-treasonous intervention by Jimmy Carter, who negotiated a compromise face to face with Kim Il Sung and then bounced the administration into accepting it by announcing it live from Pyongyang on CNN."

"The result was the Agreed Framework, an elaborately programmed sequence of reciprocal steps under which an international consortium would provide North Korea with ‘safe’ nuclear reactors, fuel, political normalisation and economic engagement, in return for a nuclear freeze and eventual disarmament."

"There was bad faith on both sides. Even as it shut down the reactors at Yongbyon [reactor], the North was secretly enriching uranium elsewhere. But the Agreed Framework averted war, placed Yongbyon under international monitoring, and prevented the construction of two much bigger reactors which would have provided enough fuel for thirty nuclear warheads every year."

While not an ideal situation, it was viewed as a means of buying time until the North Korean government either collapsed, or came to its senses.

The list of dumb things attributed to the presidency of George Bush is so long that most people tire before adding his disruption of this delicate balance between the DPRK and the rest of the world. When he coupled North Korea with Iraq, and Iran as an "axis of evil," the message he sent was interpreted as a threat to take preemptive military action.

"Bush does not lack detractors, but his vandalism of the delicate architecture of US policy on North Korea has been insufficiently recognised. His first secretary of state, Colin Powell, came to office reassuring reporters that ‘we do plan to engage with North Korea to pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off.’ Within 24 hours neocon pressure forced a humiliating retraction."

"Human rights in North Korea became a political weapon, wielded by the right as a means of undermining those, including the elected government of South Korea, who favoured continued engagement."

"Clinton had prepared, reluctantly, for war; having averted it, he had energetically concluded three separate diplomatic agreements with North Korea, with a fourth (on limiting ballistic missiles) in the works. After four years of Republican government all those agreements, and the safeguards they incorporated, had collapsed, with nothing to take their place. This was the sum achievement of George Bush, foe of rogue states and protector of the nation: to allow the world’s most isolated government to acquire the Bomb."

Victor Cha was a member of the team that eventually participated in the six-party negotiations. In the course of those discussions he received this message from the other side of the table:

"You attacked Afghanistan because they do not have nukes. You attacked Iraq because it did not have nukes. You will not attack us. And you will not attack Iran."

North Korea has the bomb and is issuing statements about all the terrible things it could do. How concerned should we be?

"The rhetorical torrent which began issuing from the state media in late March was unexpected in its intensity. But none of what followed has been inconsistent with past North Korean behaviour. The goal of the leadership is the same as it was in 1994: to strike a bargain in which certain assets (including the repeatedly frozen and unfrozen Yongbyon reactor, and the right to do business at Kaesong and the Diamond Mountains) are auctioned off in return for oil, food and cash."

"The noises from the North are widely misunderstood. They are not unilateral threats of war, but promises of retaliation in the event of US and South Korean attack. (This gets lost in much of the reporting because of the famous verbosity of North Korea’s official communiqués: the threat is quoted, while the balls-aching conditional preamble is cut.)"

Parry reminds us that in spite of all the threats, charges and countercharges, the Korean situation has been rather stable compared to other regions in the world.

"Clinton called the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas ‘the scariest place on earth’; but it has proved less dangerous over the last sixty years than the Falkland Islands, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia and broad swathes of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East."

He thinks this state of not quite unstable equilibrium will continue indefinitely.

"The sorry truth is that North Korea’s state of political undeath suits the most powerful players in the game better than any alternative."

"Until twenty years ago, the desire for national reunification was painfully felt by South Koreans; today, the political and social cost of integrating the strange, impoverished people in the North makes it positively undesirable. For Japan, the prospect of a unified peninsula is exciting in the short term (new markets, a check on South Korean competitiveness), but alarming for its end result: a union of 74 million people with distinctly funny feelings about Japan. For the United States, the prospect of another nation to rebuild, with Iraq and Afghanistan barely under control, is nauseating."

China is the one country that could force the North Korean rulers to toe the line by withholding the economic necessities that it allows to flow across the border. But it is in their best interests to maintain the status quo.

"The standard explanation points to China’s long border with North Korea and the chaos of refugees and fleeing soldiers which could follow a regime collapse in Pyongyang. But Cha identifies a stronger reason: the valuable cross-border trade, and the coal, iron and minerals which China extracts from the North. Copper, gold, zinc, nickel and rare earth metals like molybdenum can be mined more cheaply in North Korea, and with even fewer concerns for health and safety. China keeps the North afloat through gifts of cash, grain, as well as ‘friendship prices’, not out of fraternal feeling, but ‘to sustain a minimal level of stability and subsistence so that China can continue its economic extraction policies’."

It seems the only ones with a vested interest in a change of government are the long-suffering North Korean people.

Capitalism vs. The Good Life: The Faustian Bargain

2013-05-14T23:30:00.000-07:00

Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky have written an interesting book exploring the interactions between capitalism, society, and human nature. They chose to title it How Much Is Enough?; Money and the good life. The argument is made that society should have used the wealth created by economic growth to satisfy its material needs and then transition to a mode in which the goal of greater wealth would be replaced by the goal of greater "leisure." The term leisure does not connote inactivity. Rather, the authors define leisure as the time necessary to pursue "the good life." The claim is made that greater leisure had been the goal of societies before the advent of modern capitalism.

The authors use an essay written by Keynes in 1930, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," as a point of departure.

"Its thesis is very simple. As technological progress made possible an increase in the output of goods per hour worked, people would have to work less and less to satisfy their needs, until in the end they would have to work hardly at all. Then Keynes wrote, ‘for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.’ He thought this condition would be reached in about a hundred years’ time—that is by 2030."

The authors concede that such a notion likely seems quaint to modern ears, but they argue that a discussion of what the uses of our wealth should be and of what "the good life" should consist of is long overdue.

"Making money cannot be an end in itself—at least for anyone not suffering from acute mental disorder. To say that my purpose in life is to make more and more money is like saying my aim in eating is to get fatter and fatter."

The authors take the reader on a rather extensive tour of classical thinking in civilizations throughout the world to convince one that no society viewed the accumulation of wealth as a worthy goal in itself. Wealth was to be of benefit to society and the higher goal was to attain "the good life." The precise definition of what that was varied from society to society.

The authors provide this description of leisure and how it would lead to the good life.

"Leisure, in the true, now almost forgotten sense of the word, is activity without extrinsic end, ‘purposiveness without purpose’ as Kant put it."

Scientists, sculptors, musicians, teachers are provided as examples of people who would be using their leisure to pursue some goal based on the enjoyment of the pursuit rather than any monetary reward. Simpler people would have simpler pursuits available to them: learning a new language, a hobby, reading, writing, gardening....the list is long.

Some readers might be dubious about today’s ‘couch potatoes’ making good use of any increase in leisure. The authors address that concern.

"The image of man as a congenital idler, stirred to action only by the prospect of gain, is unique to the modern age. Economists, in particular, see human beings as beasts of burden who need the stimulus of carrot or stick to do anything at all."

Humans are capable of more than they are currently given credit for. However, some reeducation of the population would be required.

"Athens and Rome had citizens who, though economically unproductive, were active to the highest degree—in politics, war, philosophy and literature. Why not take them and not the donkey as our guide? Of course, Athenian and Roman citizens were schooled from an early age in the wise use of leisure. Our project implies a similar educational effort. We cannot expect a society trained in the servile and mechanical uses of time to become one of free men overnight. But we should not doubt that the task is in principle possible."

Capitalism was originally viewed as a servant of society. Its capability to create wealth was to bring about the means by which a better life for all would be attained. It was recognized that embracing capitalism would mean embracing the heretofore repugnant attributes of avarice and selfishness, but it was thought that the good produced would outweigh the bad. In any event, it was assumed that increased wealth would eventually dampen the power of greed.

"Keynes understood that capitalist civilization had, at some level of consciousness, undertaken to license motives previously condemned as ‘foul’ for the sake of future reward. It had struck a bargain with the forces of darkness, in return for which it would secure what earlier ages could only dream of—a world beyond the toil and trouble, violence and injustice of life as it actually is."

The authors make the analogy to a classical tale.

"We have called this bargain ‘Faustian’ in honor of the famous doctor who sold his soul to the Devil in return for knowledge, pleasure and power."

A similar sentiment to that of Keynes can be found in Adam Smith’s writings from which this is quoted:

"[Though the rich] mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose....be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interests of society."

Free market capitalists love to refer to Smith’s "invisible hand," but they never manage to recall that it was supposed to produce equality of wealth and be of benefit to society. Given that capitalism seems determined to produce the exact opposite to the result Smith expected, and in keeping with the authors’ analogy, perhaps the "invisible hand" is nothing more than the meddling of that fallen angel.

What Keynes, Smith, and others hadn’t anticipated was that when "needs" are satisfied, humans will continue to pursue "wants." There is a limit to needs, but wants are unbounded. This human characteristic seems to be inflamed by the income inequality that capitalism produces. How can one ever have enough if others have so much more?

Capitalism has produced wealth sufficient, if it were distributed more equally, to satisfy everyone’s needs. Society could have evolved to a state in which leisure has increased and people have more time to pursue their version of the good life. Instead we have evolved to a state where we feel the need to work ever harder to keep up, and where our wants can never be satisfied.

The authors provide an apt summary.

"In the language of myth, Western civilization has made its peace with the Devil, in return for which it has been granted hitherto unimaginable resources of knowledge, power and pleasure....The irony is, however, that now that we have at last achieved abundance, the habits bred into us by capitalism have left us incapable of enjoying it properly. The Devil, it seems, has claimed his reward."

Teachers: Overworked and Undertrained

2013-05-10T01:31:00.000-07:00

Jal Mehta has produced an article for Foreign Affairs that provides some useful insight into our education system, and provides recommendations on how to improve it: Why American Education Fails: And How Lessons From Abroad Could Improve It. Mehta discusses the education system as a whole, but much of his content is concerned with teaching as a profession. That will be the focus here as well.

Mehta emphasizes several times that one of the major problems is that the profession of teaching has never had the systematic approach to developing and accrediting skills that exists in other professions such as medicine and law.

"The United States needs a more thoroughgoing and systematic approach to educational improvement. To see what such an effort might look like, consider that any professional field consists of the following four components: human capital, which involves attracting, selecting, training, and retaining the people who work in the field; a core of knowledge that guides the field; effective organizational structures; and overall performance management and accountability."

"In recent years, the U.S. education system has become overly focused on the last element -- accountability -- at the expense of progress on the others."

Mehta argues that by focusing on obtaining good people and training them well these other professions can worry less about accountability.

"By contrast, stronger professions in the United States, such as medicine, law, and engineering, focus more on building their foundations than on holding their practitioners accountable. Doctors, for example, must clear a series of high bars before entering the field; develop a broad knowledge base, through course work and then extensive clinical training; and continually revisit their training, with practices such as hospital rounds. The medical profession places less emphasis on setting targets and making sure physicians meet them -- there is no such thing as No Patient Left Behind."

He claims that this is the approach used by the countries that continually outperform the US in international student tests.

"Such countries -- which include Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, top scorers on the Program for International Student Assessment, an internationally recognized test for 15-year-olds that measures higher-order problem solving in math, reading, and science -- all do certain things similarly. They choose their teachers from among their most talented graduates, train them extensively, create opportunities for them to collaborate with their peers within and across schools to improve their practice, provide them the external supports that they need to do their work well, and underwrite all these efforts with a strong welfare state. Because these countries do a good job of honing the expertise of their educators to begin with, they have less of a need for external monitoring of school performance."

Our education system is still burdened by attitudes formed a century ago when public education was established with limited objectives.

"Teachers received minimal training, the assumption being that they did not have a complicated job. The top education schools mostly avoided training teachers, seeing teaching as carrying the stigma of low-status, feminine work; they instead focused on cultivating the male administrators who would govern the system."

"For half a century, this model worked relatively well, largely because the expectations for what schools needed to produce were fairly limited....Teachers were mostly women, who had few other employment options and were generally not the breadwinners in their families, so their low pay did not provoke significant resistance."

A rather unexceptional public education system worked for a long time because the wealthy could always provide a better private education for their children, and the rest were able to find work after leaving school because of the nature of the jobs that then existed in the economy. As the character of the economy changed and demands on workers became much greater, our school system failed to respond in a systematic way to the new expectations placed on school graduates.

Mehta tells us that the cornerstone to a more effective education system is an improved approach to producing members of the teaching profession.

"Teachers learn mostly through experience, and U.S. teachers generally report that the training they do receive is of limited utility in practice. Licensing exams for teachers lack the rigor of the bar and board exams that exist in law, medicine, engineering, accounting, and many other professions. Some teachers master their craft over time, but others merely learn to control a classroom."

The experience of other countries is again illuminating.

"Any attempt to reform American education would have to start with attracting better teachers, retaining them, and helping them develop their practice. The most striking finding of comparative international research is that the best-performing school systems draw their teachers from the top third of college graduates, whereas lower-ranking school systems do not. A recent McKinsey report found that most U.S. teachers come "from the bottom two-thirds of college classes, and, for many schools in poor neighborhoods, from the bottom third." In Finland, teaching is the single most preferred career for 15-year-olds, a priority that allows the country to accept only one in ten applicants to its teacher-training programs. Similarly, in Singapore, only one in eight is accepted to such programs. By contrast, in the United States, even the most prestigious education schools commonly accept 50 percent or more of the applicants to their teacher-training programs."

Mehta believes that placing greater demands on the teaching profession will begin to attract higher quality applicants.

"....if it became harder to become a teacher, respect for the profession would grow, and schools might start to show better results. This process could boost public confidence in schools, potentially leading to higher teachers' pay and, in the long run, a greater desire by talented people to join the profession."

There is support for this type of initiative from the people most directly affected.

"In the past year, the country's two largest teachers' unions (the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association) and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which is the main organization representing state-level education officials, have released reports advocating raising the bar for entry into teaching. Under their proposals, prospective teachers would start out with provisional status for their first several years. Before becoming fully licensed, they would need to demonstrate their knowledge of their subjects and their skill in the classroom. Tenure would no longer be an expected and near-immediate step but would become an accomplishment similar to getting tenure at a university or making partner at a law firm."

Instituting such changes would not be easy and it would not be cheap. If we are to demand that our teachers are educated and accredited in the same manner as other professionals, then we also must begin to create work environments that are consistent with professionalism. Teachers in US schools put in more hours teaching than those in almost any other nation even though they have one of the shortest school years. If they are to be effective in honing their skills they will need the time and the opportunity to exchange experiences and methods with other teachers. Again, the comparison with other countries is illuminating.

"In Japanese schools, for example, teachers regularly come together to study one another's lessons and refine them. Doing this sort of work well depends on both structure and culture. Structurally, U.S. teachers spend more time in the classroom and less time planning and working with one another than do teachers in countries with higher-performing schools. Secondary school teachers in the United States teach an average of nearly 1,100 hours a year, compared with an average of 660 hours across the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] and fewer than 600 hours in Japan and South Korea. Culturally, for growth through professional collaboration to be effective, U.S. teachers need to feel as though they are members of a shared profession with a common knowledge base, rather than freelancers accountable only to what they think is right."　

The OECD tracks the educational systems of all its member countries (essentially all the wealthy nations) and produces summary documents. The latest US summary can be found here. It contains a wealth of comparative data, including this chart of hours spent teaching in the various countries for the various levels of education.

Instituting a more rigorous path for entry into the teaching profession assumes that there is an adequate body of knowledge available to be taught. Mehta indicates that the nation has failed to make the investments required to produce that knowledge base.

"Pilots are permitted to fly planes, lawyers to draw up contracts, and doctors to prescribe drugs because they possess an exclusive understanding of how to do these things. Teaching, however, lacks the type of codified, shared knowledge that ensures quality control in other professions -- hence the huge inconsistencies from classroom to classroom. In some regards, American education today is where medicine was a little more than a century ago: instead of relying on a shared knowledge base, teachers draw on a mix of hunches, occasional research, and some outright quackery."

"Anthony Bryk, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has estimated that whereas fields such as medicine and engineering spend 5-15 percent of their budgets on research and development, the U.S. education system invests less than one-quarter of one percent for those purposes. Not only does the field lack knowledge; it lacks the resources and infrastructure needed to produce it."

Mehta concludes by pointing out that most of the initiatives intended to improve education are being imposed from the top of the system. What he is suggesting are changes that will begin at the bottom and propagate upwards.

"Currently, a central part of the problem in American education is that government officials are trying to remake teaching from afar. But teaching is hard work and has proved difficult to change from above; efforts to do so have set teachers against policymakers. If the country implemented the needed processes to ensure skilled teaching -- better recruitment, training, knowledge development, and school organization -- teachers would come to be seen as experts, like those in other professions. The state could then shift its function from holding teachers accountable to taking on roles in which it has more of a comparative advantage and is more likely to be effective."

"In particular, the state could assist in the creation of curricula, invest in research and development....."

JAL MEHTA is an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent book is The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling. (Oxford University Press, 2013), from which this essay is adapted. Copyright ©Oxford University Press.

The Obama Effect: A Plague of Haters, Antigovernment "Patriots," and Militias

2013-05-08T01:10:00.000-07:00

If one obtains a picture of the world as provided by our traditional media sources, one is likely to be unaware that there are organizations out there training for the day when they have the opportunity to attack minorities, do battle with our police forces, and to bring down our government by force. The ignorant, the violent, and the bigoted have always been among us, but now they are receiving encouragement from national political figures. Economic uncertainty, immigration, growth of minority groups, the declining number and influence of whites, and the election of a black president seem to have been more than these people could handle.

We should thank the people at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for trying to keep track of these fringe groups and counter them with legal challenges wherever possible. We should also be sending SPLC donations so that they can continue their good work. This is how the SPLC describes itself:

"The Southern Poverty Law Center is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society."

"Founded by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. in 1971, the SPLC is internationally known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate groups. Our innovative Teaching Tolerance program produces and distributes – free of charge – documentary films, books, lesson plans and other materials that promote tolerance and respect in our nation’s schools."

This is what they intend to accomplish:

"The SPLC was founded to ensure that the promises of the civil rights movement became a reality for all. Since our founding in 1971, we’ve won numerous landmark legal victories on behalf of the exploited, the powerless and the forgotten."

"Our lawsuits have toppled institutional racism in the South, bankrupted some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups and won justice for exploited workers, abused prison inmates, disabled children and other victims of discrimination."

One of SPLC’s tasks is to keep track of hate groups, antigovernment "patriot" groups, and armed militia movements. You can find here an interactive map (the Hate Map) that will allow you to select the list of all the hate groups in your state. Every state has them; it seems everyone is hated by somebody.

"The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 1,007 active hate groups in the United States in 2012. Only organizations and their chapters known to be active during 2012 are included."

"All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics."

"This list was compiled using hate group publications and websites, citizen and law enforcement reports, field sources and news reports."

"Hate group activities can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing."

An article in The Economist provided this chart of the growth in number of "patriot" and militia groups and labeled it "The Obama Effect."

Isn’t it curious how comfortable the ignorant, the violent, and the bigoted are when there is a Republican president in office—and how riled up they get when a black Democrat enters office?

"Since 2000, the number of hate groups has increased by 67 percent. This surge has been fueled by anger and fear over the nation’s ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nation’s first African-American president."

"These factors also are feeding a powerful resurgence of the antigovernment "Patriot" movement, which in the 1990s led to a string of domestic terrorist plots, including the Oklahoma City bombing. The number of Patriot groups, including armed militias, has grown 813 percent since of the Obama was elected – from 149 in 2008 to 1,360 in 2012."

An SPLC article written by Larry Keller, The Second Wave, provides a history of these "patriot" groups and how they have evolved during the current resurgence.

"Almost 10 years after it seemed to disappear from American life, there are unmistakable signs of a revival of what in the 1990s was commonly called the militia movement. From Idaho to New Jersey and Michigan to Florida, men in khaki and camouflage are back in the woods, gathering to practice the paramilitary skills they believe will be needed to fend off the socialistic troops of the ’New World Order’."

"One big difference from the militia movement of the 1990s is that the face of the federal government — the enemy that almost all parts of the extreme right see as the primary threat to freedom — is now black. And the fact that the president is an African American has injected a strong racial element into even those parts of the radical right, like the militias, that in the past were not primarily motivated by race hate. Contributing to the racial animus have been fears on the far right about the consequences of Latino immigration."

Here is an example of the kind of nonsense these people tell each other in order to inflame their hatreds.

"In Pensacola, Fla., retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson tells a gathering of antigovernment ‘Patriots’ that the federal government has set up 1,000 internment camps across the country and is storing 30,000 guillotines and a half-million caskets in Atlanta. They're there for the day the government finally declares martial law and moves in to round up or kill American dissenters, he says. ‘They're going to keep track of all of us, folks,’ Gunderson warns."
This type of thinking has entered the mainstream with Republican politicians and conservative media personalities lending credence.

"A remarkable aspect of the current antigovernment movement is the extent to which it has gained support from elected officials and mainstream media outlets. Lawmakers complaining about the intrusiveness of the federal government have introduced 10th Amendment resolutions (reasserting that those powers not granted to the federal government remain with the states) in about three dozen states. In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry raised the prospect of secession several months after Obama's inauguration — a notion first brought up there in the '90s by the militia-like Republic of Texas. U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said she feared that the president was planning "reeducation camps for young people," while U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), evoking memories of the discredited communist-hunter Sen. Joseph McCarthy, warned of 17 "socialists" in Congress. Fox News host Glenn Beck, who has called Obama a fascist, a Nazi and a Marxist, even re-floated militia conspiracy theories of the 1990s alleging a secret network of government-run concentration camps."

Keller fears that these fringe groups may begin to collaborate.

"Militiamen, white supremacists, anti-Semites, nativists, tax protesters and a range of other activists of the radical right are cross-pollinating and may even be coalescing."

Let’s hope Keller is wrong.

If anyone still believes these people are not worth worrying about—remember Oklahoma City.

Psychiatry Finally Encounters Science—and Rejects It

2013-05-05T00:56:00.000-07:00

Psychiatry is unique among the medical disciplines in that there is no science that supports the diagnoses made and the treatments prescribed by the practitioners. Gary Greenburg posted a note at The New Yorker that suggested that this lack of a scientific basis, once a source of unease within the discipline, has come to be perceived as a benefit in the practice of psychiatry. Greenburg titled his article Does Psychiatry Need Science?

"....doctors in most medical specialties have only gotten better at sorting our suffering according to its biochemical causes. They have learned how to turn symptom into clues, and, like Sherlock Holmes stalking a criminal, to follow the evidence to the culprit. With a blood test or tissue culture, they can determine whether a skin rash is poison ivy or syphilis, or whether a cough is a symptom of a cold or of lung cancer. Sure-footed diagnosis is what we have come to expect from our physicians. It gives us some comfort, and the confidence to submit to their treatments.

"But psychiatrists still cannot meet this demand. A detailed understanding of the brain, with its hundred billion neurons and trillions of synapses, remains elusive, leaving psychiatry dependent on outward manifestations for its taxonomy of mental illnesses."

Psychiatrists develop diagnoses by observations of patients and by assessing self-reported symptoms of patients. They use the same approach in determining the efficacy of treatments.

"Indeed, it has been doubling down on appearances since 1980, which is when the American Psychiatric Association created a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D.S.M.) that intentionally did not strive to go beyond the symptom. In place of biochemistry, the D.S.M. offers expert consensus about which clusters of symptoms constitute particular mental illnesses, and about which mental illnesses are real, or at least real enough to warrant a name and a place in the medical lexicon."

The D.S.M. provides a cookbook approach whereby symptoms can be catalogued and compared with possible mental illnesses. Of course, a set of symptoms need not be uniquely associated with a specific illness so it is of limited precision. Its main strength is in its simplicity and its authority. It can be interpreted and used to make a diagnosis by anyone capable of reading: parents, teachers, school nurses, psychologists, and medical doctors with no training in psychiatry. Because it is produced by a medical association it is assumed to have the same authority as a similar document produced by any science-based medical profession.

"But this approach hasn’t really worked to establish the profession’s credibility. In the four revisions of the D.S.M. since 1980, diagnoses have appeared and disappeared, and symptom lists have been tweaked and rejiggered with troubling regularity, generally after debate that seems more suited to the floors of Congress than the halls of science. The inevitable and public chaos—diagnostic epidemics, prescription-drug fads, patients labelled and relabelled—has only deepened psychiatry’s inferiority complex."

Did psychiatry still feel uncomfortable with its lack of a physical basis for their actions, or had they become comfortable with the simplicity it provided? Greenberg became suspicious when he observed what transpired when a group of experts advocated adding the diagnosis of the condition known as melancholia.

"A group of seventeen prominent doctors—biological psychiatrists, experts in diagnostics, subspecialists in the field of depression, and even a historian—petitioned the D.S.M.-5’s mood-disorders committee to add a diagnosis they named melancholia."

"The proposal was not so much an innovation as a retrieval of an old idea. Melancholia is one of the most venerable of psychiatric disorders, noted by doctors at least as far back as Hippocrates, who attributed its characteristic dejection and unresponsiveness to external events to an excess of black bile. But melancholia lost its place in psychiatric nosology [disease classification] in 1980, when all forms of depression were consolidated under a single diagnostic label—‘major depressive disorder’—of which melancholia was only a variant. It was the D.S.M. equivalent of calling Pluto just another ice dwarf in the Kuiper Belt."

The group argued that melancholia was, in fact, a unique disease. While it had observable symptoms that might be confused with manifestations of other forms of depression:

"....an unshakeable despondency and sense of guilt that arises from nowhere, responds to nothing, and dissipates for no apparent reason—also displayed some distinctive physical signs: hand-wringing, for instance, and psychomotor retardation, an easily perceived slowing down of movement, thought, and speech."

The petitioners could provide evidence that melancholia could be detected by medical tests while other forms of depression could not.

"But some of the group’s proof was of precisely the kind that psychiatrists had been looking for since the nineteenth century. Thirty years of replicated studies had shown that patients with those signs and symptoms had a sleep architecture and cortisone metabolism that was distinct from that of other people, both normal and depressed. A night in a sleep lab could detect the reduced deep sleep and increased REM time characteristic of melancholics, and a dexamethasone suppression test (D.S.T.) could determine whether or not a patient’s stress hormones were in overdrive, as is generally the case among melancholic patients. And melancholia responded better than other kinds of depression to two treatments: tricyclic antidepressants (the first generation of the drugs) and electroconvulsive therapy (E.C.T., better known as shock therapy). Treatment success rates with this population reached as high as seventy per cent, much more robust than the anemic results found in trials that mixed melancholic and non-melancholic depression...."

One might have expected psychiatry to be thrilled with this request.

"Distinctive signs, symptoms, lab studies, course, and outcome—if melancholia wasn’t the Holy Grail, it was at least a sip from the chalice of science, one disorder that could go beyond appearances. You would think that the committee would at least have been eager to consider it as a partial remedy for ongoing concerns about the profession’s lack of scientific rigor."

But one would have been wrong.

"But the panel barely gave melancholia the time of day, let alone a full-on floor debate, relegating it to the same slush pile as the proposed Parental Alienation Syndrome and Male-to-Eunuch Gender Identity Disorder."

Incredibly, it was the scientific basis for the diagnosis and treatment that rendered it unacceptable to the D.S.M. committee.

"And the main obstacle was exactly what you would think was melancholia’s main strength: the biological tests, especially the D.S.T. ‘I believe you and your colleagues are fundamentally correct,’ committee member William Coryell wrote to the melancholia advocates, by way of explaining his panel’s inaction. But ‘the inclusion of a biological measure would be very hard to sell to the mood group.’ Coryell explained that the problem wasn’t the test’s reliability, which he thought was better than anything else in psychiatry. Rather, it was that the D.S.T. would be ‘the only biological test for any diagnosis being considered’."

As Greenberg so aptly summarized:

"A single disorder that met the scientific demands of the day, in other words, would only make the failure to meet them in the rest of the D.S.M. that much more glaring."

Science marches on, but psychiatry has found a sweet spot where it is comfortable and willing to live for the foreseeable future with diagnosis and treatment by committee revelation.

The History of Debt: Economics and Morality

2013-05-03T01:31:00.000-07:00

Robert Kuttner provided an interesting article on the topic of debt in the New York Review of Books. He reviewed the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, and took the opportunity to express his opinions on how debt is currently being handled. His chosen title, The Debt We Shouldn’t Pay, provides a clue as to Kuttner’s sentiments.

Graeber indicates that credit, and thus debt, has been part of human interaction about as far back as one can look. As soon as wealth began to be accumulated unevenly a system of creditors and debtors emerged. Kuttner provides this quote from Graeber:

"....the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors’ children into slavery."

Kuttner provides this summary of the main issues to be discussed with relation to debt.

"In Graeber’s exhaustive, engaging, and occasionally exasperating book, three themes stand out. One is the "profound moral confusion" in our understanding of debt. A second is the perennial struggle over debt forgiveness, and who receives it. A third is the function of debt in the politics of social class and social control."

The basic business transaction of lending resources should be quite simple. The debtor assumes a risk in borrowing resources that he might not be able to repay. The creditor assumes the risk that his resources might not be returned and charges a fee appropriate to the risk being taken. In an ideal world there is a balance of risks and both creditors and debtors lose occasionally.

However, we are not in an ideal world and creditors, being the wealthy, have easily balanced the scales in their favor. One approach utilized by the wealthy was to turn a pure economic transaction into a moral obligation.

"Graeber observes that debt is often conflated with sin. The version of the Lord’s Prayer drawn from Matthew (used by most Protestant denominations) asks God to forgive us our "debts," while most translations of Luke (and the Catholic liturgy) ask forgiveness for our "trespasses" or "sins." Graeber notes that in modern German, the same word, Schuld, means both debt and guilt. Likewise in several ancient languages."

Thus the debtor who was unfortunate in business was also a sinner and morally culpable. This imbalance in favor of creditors has been an integral part of history and has provided creditors with a range of options for punishing debtors for their sins.

One of the mechanisms that served as both punishment and encouragement for debtors to find payment "somewhere" was the system of debtor prisons. This ineffective and rather counterintuitive approach began to break down when economies became more complicated and economic swings became more severe. When the economy runs on credit and there is an economic collapse, no one can pay their debts. It is awkward for a society to come to the conclusion that all its merchants should be thrown in jail. When economics conflicts with morality, it is usually economics that wins.

"The British devised the concept of legal discharge from debt not out of a sudden attack of compassion but because the economic crisis of the 1690s had put much of the merchant class in jail. The cause was not improvident or immoral behavior on the part of debtors, but general economic dislocation beyond their control...."

Not surprisingly, it was decided that economics was a matter for debtors "of significance." Morals were to continue to be the issue for poorer debtors.

"But when the law was finally enacted, allowing a magistrate to settle debts with partial repayment, only substantial merchants could qualify for relief. Common debtors still languished in jail, since their penury had scant wider consequences."

This difference in approach to the wealthy and the non-wealthy persists to this day. When corporations do dumb things and acquire more debt than they can deal with they are allowed to declare bankruptcy, renege on debts, and then go back in business. When banks do dumb things, their mistakes are covered by the tax payers if the banks are big enough.

"The double standard in debt relief that favored large merchants, present at the creation of bankruptcy law in 1706, persists today in many different forms. It gets surprisingly little attention in the debt debates. Despite the tacit assumption that "surely one has to pay one’s debts," the evasion of repayment is both widespread and selective. Corporate executives routinely walk away from their debts via Chapter 11 of the national bankruptcy law when that seems expedient. Morality scarcely enters the conversation—this is strictly business."

The term "moral hazard" usually comes up when a non-wealthy person gets into financial trouble. Any attempt to bail the poor out runs the risk of encouraging them to continue to do dumb things.

While individuals of any economic standing now have access to debt relief through bankruptcy proceedings, individuals experience more restrictions than corporations.

"Homeowners, however, are explicitly prohibited from using the bankruptcy code to reduce their outstanding mortgage debt. White House legislation proposed in 2009 would have allowed a judge to reduce the principal on a home mortgage, as part of the effort to contain the economic crisis. Congress rejected the measure after extensive lobbying by the financial industry. Consumers may use bankruptcy to shed other debts, but a revision of the law signed by President Bush in 2005 subjects most bankrupt consumers to partial repayment requirements, while bankrupt corporations get a general discharge from their debts. Thanks to the influence of the same financial lobby, the rules of student debt provide that the obligations of a college loan follow a borrower to the grave."

The system of debt peonage that Graeber referred to persists.

Kruttner is particularly outraged by the application of "moral hazard" to nations.

"Proposals for debt relief for....Greece encounter resistance cloaked in the language of moral opprobrium and ‘moral hazard,’ the danger that debt relief will reward and thus induce reckless behavior."

He points out that there is a long history of debt relief for nations, and that some of the countries that benefited the most in the past are now the loudest moralizers when it comes to considering the sins of others.

"....the US ....wrote off some of the international debts of allies and enemies alike. (Britain, America’s closest ally, received near-total forgiveness of wartime Lend-Lease debt.)"

"Germany, today’s enforcer of Euro-austerity, was the beneficiary of one of history’s most magnanimous acts of debt amnesty in 1948. The Allies in the 1920s made the catastrophic error of helping to destroy Germany’s economy with reparations and debt collection policies. In the 1940s, after a brief flirtation with World War I–style reparations, the occupying powers agreed to behave differently: they wrote off 93 percent of the Nazi-era debt and postponed collection of other debts for nearly half a century. So Germany, whose debt-to-GDP ratio in 1939 was 675 percent, had a debt load of about 12 percent in the early 1950s—far less than that of the victorious Allies—helping to produce postwar Germany’s economic miracle. Almost every German can cite the Marshall Plan, but this larger act of macroeconomic mercy has disappeared from the political consciousness of Germany’s current austerity police. Whatever fiscal sins the Greeks committed, the Nazis did worse."

The continued ascendency of creditors (banks) and the determination to conflate moral issues with economic issues has been unwise.

"Another former IMF official, Anne O. Krueger, an appointee of George W. Bush, recently reiterated her call for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for indebted countries. When she first proposed the idea as deputy managing director of the IMF in 2002, Krueger was fairly shouted down by officials of the US Treasury and leading bankers. In January 2013, she argued that ‘a clear mechanism [to allow nations to use bankruptcy] could have prevented all sorts of problems in the eurozone.’ With a Chapter 11 law, Greece could have written off old debt and used new borrowing to finance new growth, just like a private corporation. Even acknowledging past bad behavior (as in the case of many corporate bankruptcies), a Chapter 11 for countries could sensibly combine incentives for honest bookkeeping with macroeconomic policies that write off old debt for the sake of recovery."

Kuttner provides this summary statement:

"The particulars no longer involve the sequestering of sheep or the seizing of vineyards. But the ten million Americans at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure, or recent graduates who cannot qualify for mortgages because of their monthly payments on college loans, have become modern debt-peons. At the same time entire economies abroad, indentured to past debts, find themselves in a metaphoric debtors’ prison where they can neither repay creditors nor resume productive livelihoods."

Nicely said!

Will the Coming Energy Revolutions Breed Political Revolutions?

2013-05-01T01:15:00.001-07:00

Most in the United States view the possibility of energy independence in the near future with unmitigated joy. An article by Benjamin Alter and Edward Fishman in the New York Times reminds us that all actions produce reactions, and that the withdrawal of the US from the world energy market as a consumer will have repercussions. Their piece is aptly titled The Dark Side of Energy Independence.

The authors provide this projection:

"A wave of new technologies has made it possible to extract oil and gas from shale rock formations, and the results have been astonishing. By some estimates, the United States is on track to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer as early as 2017, start exporting more oil and gas than it imports by 2025, and achieve full energy self-sufficiency by 2030."

Based on that assumption, they make this prediction:

"....America’s oil and gas bonanza will drive down global energy prices, undercutting the foundations of petrostates everywhere. According to Francisco Blanch, the head of commodities research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, oil could fall to just $50 a barrel within the next two years, which could unleash unrest in regions crucial to American interests. Far from releasing the United States from the burden of global leadership, this process would force Washington to assume an even greater international role than it currently plays."

A number of countries are highly dependent on oil income and have created societies and economies that assume the price of oil and gas will be kept high.

"Consider Bahrain, which earns 70 percent of its revenues through petroleum production and refining. The small island monarchy has undergone deeply destabilizing protests since the start of the Arab Spring. A drop in global energy prices would hurt the already weak government, breathing new life into opposition forces. A populist revolution in Bahrain could empower the country’s long-repressed Shiite majority, who already resent Washington’s support for the ruling Sunni al-Khalifa family. A new regime in Bahrain might even seek to expel the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, complicating America’s efforts to protect international shipping lanes, fight piracy and check Iran’s regional ambitions."

"Even more alarming is the prospect of instability in Saudi Arabia. In 2011, the Saudi royal family was able to head off an Arab Spring-style revolution because of its enormous oil revenues, doling out $130 billion in benefits to pacify the country’s younger and poorer inhabitants. Should lower oil prices make such patronage impossible in the future, the kingdom could face domestic unrest — making the country a far less reliable partner for America in fighting terrorism and countering Iran. Moreover, if Saudi Arabia has less of its own money to spend on regional security, Washington will have to make up for the shortfall."

A dramatic fall in the price of oil would have repercussions outside the Middle East with the possibility of political fallout in places such as Russia, Venezuela, and in select nations of Africa and Central Asia.

The authors wish to disabuse everyone of the notion that life will become simpler once they become independent of the international oil market.

"Americans should cheer the energy revolution. It will do wonders for the American economy, and the democratic politics it could encourage in the Middle East and Russia may ultimately serve American interests. But in the meantime, Washington should expect a world far less stable than the one it is used to — and, in turn, prepare to adopt an even more outward-looking foreign policy."

Alter and Fishman consider the issues that might arise from the US attaining energy independence. Obviously, there are other countries out there who would also like to reduce or eliminate the need for imported fossil fuels. Is there a means by which other countries could follow the projected path of the US? That is a topic covered by an interesting article by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic: What If We Never Run Out of Oil?

Mann acknowledges the seeming inexhaustibility of the various oil sources that have been discovered. He also recognizes that other nations are likely to have the opportunity to take advantage of new technologies and new sources such as fracking for shale oil and gas. However, he is most interested in the possibility of exploiting yet another source of natural gas: methane hydrate, undersea deposits of methane "frozen" into a water lattice at high pressures and low temperatures.

"In the 1970s, geologists discovered crystalline natural gas—methane hydrate, in the jargon—beneath the seafloor. Stored mostly in broad, shallow layers on continental margins, methane hydrate exists in immense quantities; by some estimates, it is twice as abundant as all other fossil fuels combined."

Estimates of quantities are uncertain. At least as interesting as its perceived abundance is its ubiquity. It seems to be available to just about any country that has coastal access to relatively deep seawater.

Life flourishes in the seas near land. When living matter dies it sinks to the bottom and forms sediment. Microorganisms exist that feed off this accumulating residue.

"In a process familiar to anyone who has seen bubbles coming to the surface of a pond, the microbes emit methane gas as they eat and grow. This undersea methane bubbles up too, but it quickly encounters the extremely cold water in the pores of the sediment. Under the high pressure of these cold depths, water and methane react to each other: water molecules link into crystalline lattices that trap methane molecules. A cubic foot of these lattices can contain as much as 180 cubic feet of methane gas."

"....water pressure and temperature keep them stable at depths below about 1,000 feet. Scientists on the surface refer to them by many names: methane hydrate, of course, but also methane clathrate, gas hydrate, hydromethane, and methane ice."

There are a number of technically-advanced countries that would like to have access to their own large sources of natural gas rather than be required to import most of their fossil fuels. Mann emphasizes the large and long-term investment that Japan has made in attempts to mine this prevalent nearby source. The Asian nations of China, India, Korea, and Taiwan have their own research efforts. A number of Western nations are also involved, including the US and Canada.

Mann provides a view of the extent of the Japanese effort by describing the activities of the research ship Chikyu (Earth).

"....a $540　million Japanese deep-sea drilling vessel that looks like a billionaire’s yacht with a 30-story oil derrick screwed into its back. The Chikyu, a floating barrage of superlatives, is the biggest, glitziest, most sophisticated research vessel ever constructed, and surely the only one with a landing pad for a 30-person helicopter. The central derrick houses an enormous floating drill with a six-mile "string" that has let the Chikyu delve deeper beneath the ocean floor than any other ship."

"The Chikyu, which first set out in 2005, was initially intended to probe earthquake-generating zones in the planet’s mantle, a subject of obvious interest to seismically unstable Japan. Its present undertaking was, if possible, of even greater importance: trying to develop an energy source that could free not just Japan but much of the world from the dependence on Middle Eastern oil that has bedeviled politicians since Churchill’s day."

"Japan, which has spent about $700　million on methane-hydrate R&D over the past decade, has the world’s biggest hydrate-research program....In mid-March, Japan’s Chikyu test ended a week early, after sand got in the well mechanism. But by then the researchers had already retrieved about 4　million cubic feet of natural gas from methane hydrate, at double the expected rate. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry is eager to create a domestic oil industry; at present, the nation produces just one one-thousandth of its own needs. Perhaps overoptimistically, the ministry set 2018 as a target date for commercializing methane hydrate."

If the notion of an abundant new energy source becoming available in about ten years sounds farfetched, Mann reminds us of the history associated with fracking.

"Twelve years ago, a magazine asked me to write an article about energy supplies. While researching, I met petroleum geologists and engineers who told me about a still-experimental technique called hydraulic fracturing. Intrigued, I asked several prominent energy pundits about it. All scoffed at the notion that it would pay off."

If Alter and Fishman were concerned about the effects of the US attaining energy independence, what would they anticipate happening if countries like Japan, Korea, China, and India were able to one day soon greatly diminish their need for imported fossil fuels?

If methane hydrate becomes a commercial source of natural gas, Mann anticipates numerous international disputes and widespread turmoil.

"A methane-hydrate boom could lead to a southwest-to-northeast arc of instability stretching from Venezuela to Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan to Siberia. It seems fair to say that if autocrats in these places were toppled, most Americans would not mourn. But it seems equally fair to say that they would not necessarily be enthusiastic about their replacements."

"Augmenting the instability would be methane hydrate itself, much of which is inconveniently located in areas of disputed sovereignty....Methane-hydrate deposits run like crystalline bands through maritime flash points: the Arctic, and waters off West Africa and Southeast Asia."

It is both fascinating and frightening to think that such large changes can occur over the span of a decade.

Hang on, we are about to experience the curse of living in "interesting times."

The Underground Economy: Are We Becoming Greece?

2013-04-28T01:30:00.000-07:00

Several references have appeared in the media discussing an estimate that about $2 trillion went unreported as income last year. Have we become a nation of tax dodgers? Is this a sign of a decaying society? Are we finally in danger of becoming Greece?

James Surowiecki provides a good summary of the issues in an article in The New Yorker.

"When we all finished filing our tax returns last week, there was a little something missing: two trillion dollars. That’s how much money Americans may have made in the past year that didn’t get reported to the I.R.S., according to a recent study by the economist Edgar Feige, who’s been investigating the so-called underground, or gray, economy for thirty-five years.

One usually associates tax avoidance on such a large scale with organized crime syndicates. That is not the case here.
"This unreported income is being earned, for the most part, not by drug dealers or Mob bosses but by tens of millions of people with run-of-the-mill jobs—nannies, barbers, Web-site designers, and construction workers—who are getting paid off the books."

The existence of this underground or shadow economy and its size helps explain why the economy appears to be healthier than one might expect given the persistently high rate of unemployment.

"....even though the percentage of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly....Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the Economic Outlook Group, estimates that, based on historical patterns, current retail sales are actually what you’d expect if the unemployment rate were around five or six per cent, rather than the 7.6 per cent we’re stuck with. The difference, he argues, probably reflects workers migrating into the shadow economy."

Although the recent recession has probably contributed to the growth of this shadow economy, it has always been around.

"The increasing importance of the gray economy isn’t only a reaction to the downturn: studies suggest that the sector has been growing steadily over the years. In 1992, the I.R.S. estimated that the government was losing $80 billion a year in income-tax revenue. Its estimate for 2006 was $385 billion—almost five times as much (and still an underestimate, according to Feige’s numbers)."

Most of the people working in this shadow economy are probably low-wage workers who are spending all that they earn. Much of the unpaid taxes can be thought of as an unplanned stimulus program. Of greater concern is the effect this growing trend has on society. There is a degree of unfairness associated with all who participate. While not paying taxes might be seen as a plus, one also loses the benefits that accrue from having been a taxpayer.

"....the damaging effects of this trend are clear. It’s hard for businesses to play by the rules if their competitors aren’t paying payroll taxes or workers’ comp. And off-the-books workers have no benefits or Social Security, and not much recourse if a boss decides to shortchange them."

The oft-quoted claim that we are about to become Greece is usually associated with concerns related to national debt and budget deficits. That is not the issue about which we should be worried.

The function of a society depends upon the vast majority of its citizens playing by the rules. People will tend to not break rules if they believe others are obeying the rules. Once the notion is propagated that many, or most, are not following the rules, then others will be encouraged to also break the rules. We can have a reinforcing virtuous cycle, or a reinforcing destructive cycle.

In Greece, the tax dodging, bribery, and other forms of corruption are so pervasive that it is a wonder that the society continues to exist. The Greeks have lost all trust in their fellow citizens and in their national institutions.

Is our growing shadow economy a trend suggesting that we might one day lose faith in our institutions and in our neighbors?

Perhaps a bit of perspective is in order. An article in Bloomberg Businessweek provided estimates of the size of shadow economies in a number of nations.

It would seem that by this metric we have a long way to go before we begin to resemble Greece. We also have a ways to go before we begin to resemble Canada.

It is appropriate to be concerned about this shadow economy, and it is important to create conditions whereby it can be limited in size. Rather than worry about lost revenue, we should be focused on the threat to the credibility of our society’s institutions.

The greatest threat arises not from tax dodgers, but from politicians who continually criticize our government and its efforts for political gain. People who continually hear outrageous claims by politicians parroted by what passes for media reporting will eventually begin to believe the nonsense. Then we really have a problem.

Transportation and Fuel: Trucks and Trains

2013-04-26T02:15:00.000-07:00

Fracking for oil and natural gas has greatly expanded the domestic supply of both quantities. Analysts now see a day when we will reach energy independence and become a net exporter of both crude oil and natural gas. While the domestic price of oil is still determined by the larger international market, natural gas prices are set mainly be domestic supply and demand. These new sources have proved to be so effective that some are expressing concern that the supply of natural gas will drive prices so low that some drilling will no longer be cost effective.

A recent article by Diane Cardwell and Clifford Krauss in the New York Times suggests that new uses are growing that will limit any excess supply of natural gas and lead to cheaper and cleaner transportation options.

Natural gas driven vehicles have already made inroads in short-haul applications.

"Vehicle use of natural gas in the United States is still negligible but it has been growing. Among fleets whose vehicles travel shorter routes, like transit buses, refuse haulers and delivery trucks, use of compressed natural gas is much further along. Last year, more than half of newly purchased garbage trucks ran on compressed natural gas."

The big new development involves the investment in the infrastructure necessary to convert the long-haul diesel trucks to natural gas. This requires fueling facilities and cost-effective trucks capable of utilizing liquid natural gas (LNG).

"This month, Cummins, a leading engine manufacturer, began shipping big, new engines that make long runs on natural gas possible. A skeletal network of refueling stations at dozens of truck stops stands ready. Major shippers like Procter & Gamble, mindful of both fuel costs and green credentials, are turning to companies with natural gas trucks in their fleets."

"And in the latest sign of how the momentum for natural gas in transportation is accelerating, United Parcel Service plans to announce in the next few days that it will expand its fleet of heavy 18-wheel vehicles running on liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., to 800 by the end of 2014, from 112. The vehicles will use the new Cummins engines, produced under a joint venture with Westport Innovations."

A significant move by truckers to LNG would have economic and environmental impacts.

"It is cheaper, saving truckers as much as $1.50 a gallon, and it burns cleaner, making it easier to meet emissions standards. The domestic fuel also provides some insulation from the volatile geopolitics that can drive up petroleum prices."

"The move could also cut the country’s oil import bill. There are currently about eight million heavy and medium-weight trucks consuming three million barrels of oil a day while traveling the nation’s highways. That is nearly 15 percent of the total national daily consumption and the equivalent of three-fourths of the amount of oil imported from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Roughly two-thirds of the diesel used as transportation fuel nationwide feeds three million 18-wheelers, the main trucks hauling goods over long distances."

The main issues limiting the move to natural gas are the initial cost of the LNG-driven vehicles and the availability of fueling stations. The trucks cost about twice as much as a diesel vehicle, so the economic viability depends on how long it takes to recoup that investment. Here, there is significant difference in opinion. The authors quote a representative of U.P.S. that claims it takes seven to eight years to break even. Note that U.P.S. seems to think that is a cost effective time frame for them, but may be limiting to others.

Another opinion comes from a long-time investor in natural gas for transportation: T. Boone Pickens. He has teamed with Chesapeake Energy to form the company Clean Energy Fuels. Representatives of that organization provided a more sanguine view.

"....Clean Energy executives say that the margin between the fuel prices is so wide that the time for recouping the investment is shortening — perhaps to as little as one to three years."

US energy officials are also projecting a rate of conversion to LNG.

"The federal Energy Information Administration last year projected that if enough L.N.G. filling stations were built and economic conditions were right, sales of heavy-duty natural gas vehicles could increase to 275,000 in 2035, equivalent to 34 percent of new vehicle sales, from 860 in 2010."

The provision of sufficient LNG fueling sites to make this work would seem to require a prohibitive investment if it is required to overlay the grid of available diesel sites. Fortunately, that is not necessary. Here is an optimistic projection:

"Mr. Pickens predicted that a majority of the nation’s long-haul truck fleet would be fueled by natural gas in seven years because 70 percent of the 18-wheelers operate in defined regional areas, and a natural gas truck can drive 600 miles on a single fill-up."

"’I promise you it will all fit together and the stations will be there,’ he said."

Pickens seems to be putting his money on the line—along with others.

"Clean Energy Fuels....has peppered major routes with 70 stations, many at truck stops operated by Pilot Flying J."

"Clean Energy has plans to complete 30 to 50 more by the end of the year. Shell has an agreement to build refueling stations at as many as 100 TravelCenters of America and Petro Stopping Centers while ENN, a privately held Chinese company, hopes to build 500 filling stations as well."

These developments should create new jobs, stimulate new private investment, lower emission of green house gases, lower transportation costs, and improve our balance of payments problem. It is difficult to not be enthusiastic about this development.

An article in The Economist also indicates there is encouraging news coming from another transport sector—one that we do not normally think of as either innovative or growing: trains.

"Europeans have long pitied Americans for their rotten passenger trains. But when it comes to moving goods America has a well-kept freight network that is the most cost-effective in the world."

Apparently, while few have been paying attention, the railroads have been gearing up for a profitable future.

"Since the Staggers Act of 1980 deregulated the sector....rail companies have invested about 17% of their revenues in their networks. This is about half a trillion dollars of private money over the past three decades. Even the American Society of Civil Engineers, which howls incessantly (and predictably) about the awful state of the nation’s infrastructure, shows grudging respect for goods railways in a recent report."

Even the present, with its hangover from the Great Recession, indicates a healthy industry.

"In 2011 the seven largest freight railways had operating revenues of $67 billion (up from $47.8 billion in 2009). Net income was $11 billion, with returns on equity averaging 11.1%."

This chart is provided to summarize the recent history of the railway freight industry.

The industry believes it will see increased demand for its services, and that it will better compete with long-haul trucking.
"By 2035 the demand for rail freight is expected to double. A great deal of new business is coming from shifting consumer goods. Containers are lifted off ships and trucks, loaded onto trains and whizzed to their destination. This business pays well and is growing fast."

"Tony Hatch, a rail analyst, says improvements in scheduling and timekeeping mean that trains are now winning business they might not even have bothered bidding for before. Although railways cannot deliver to your door, as lorries can, Mr Hatch says big-box retailers are making more use of them because it is the cheapest way to move bulky things long distances over land."

"Moving goods by rail is four times more fuel efficient than by road, and railways can increase their capacity in the future. So America’s trains may soon nibble at trucks’ market share—particularly for journeys that take longer than a day by road."

One of the issues with new sources of energy is that they are emerging in areas in which the infrastructure to move them to where they can be processed is not available. One might build new, intrusive pipelines, or one might take advantage of the existing rail routes.

"America could build more pipelines to move domestic oil, but the rail network is already there. In the last quarter of 2009 about 2,700 carloads of crude oil were moved by rail. This had grown to 81,100 in the last quarter of 2012. Whatever loads America needs to shift in the future, railways are well placed to do the job."

Here we have yet another development that promises lower fuel consumption and cheaper transportation costs.

Let’s appreciate good news when we are able to find some.

Politics as History; History as Politics

2013-04-21T23:11:00.000-07:00

Jill Lepore has assembled a remarkable collection of essays in her book The Story of America. Her essays all deal with our history and how that history has been presented to us by those who wrote about the events that make up our national heritage. She is troubled by the inevitable intertwining of history and politics, and the need to recognize the differences between the two.
"History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence."

Note that she does not describe history as a collection of events, dates, and people. History is rather one person’s interpretation of the past in light of what that person knows about the present. History is an opinion.

Politics is the art of telling a story about the past in order to excite the imaginations of those living in the present. Both professions share an interest in the past, but they should be vastly different in intent.

"Politics involves elections and votes and money and power, but the heart of politics is describing how things came to be the way they are in such a way as to convince people that you know how to make things the way they ought to be."

"This is curious and worth pondering, because it reveals how much politics has in common with history. Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present."

To a great extent, what we believe about ourselves and about our nation is informed by what we are told is our history. Who gets to write history, and what they choose to include, is important then in determining the character of our nation.

"All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination....The story’s plot, like the nation’s borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting....Who tells the story, like who writes the laws and who wages the wars, is always part of that struggle."

It would seem that collusion between politicians and like-minded historians is an unavoidable danger, and Lepore is correct in being concerned that the two remain intellectually separate.

She tells us this:

"Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence."

But is "evidence" really something that can be relied upon? The dynamics of a nation are so complex that it is inconceivable that anyone could monitor all the factors in play at any instant. As time and the nation rumble on, some evidence of what transpired is left behind, other evidence is obscured or destroyed. The data the historian has available to concoct her story tends to be random and incomplete. The historian then has much leeway in assembling the set of "evidence" that will be used in constructing a story. Another historian can assemble a different subset of "evidence" and arrive at a different story. Historians tend to sort these conflicting claims out by arguing among themselves until a majority line up behind one or another story and it is then assumed that tale is the correct one. It should be recognized that this approach is designed to damp out troublesome controversies when people tire of argument. It is by no means a determination of the "truth."

Politicians have a simpler method for resolving historical uncertainties: they can pick the version of history that is consistent with their preconceptions or prejudices.

This fungibility of history and its evidence is troublesome. One thing that experience has taught us is that researchers usually begin their work with a story in mind, and they tend to find evidence that supports that story. Whether the topic is economics, or psychology, or medical science, it is frighteningly easy for preconceptions to bias results. Why should history be any different?

E J. Dionne Jr. addresses this intersection between history and politics in his book Our Divided Political Heart. He recognizes the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves and attributes our current political polarization to our inability to agree on a single story.

"Americans disagree about who we are because we can’t agree about who we’ve been. We are at odds over the meaning of our own history, over the sources of our national strength, and over what it is, philosophically and spiritually, that makes us ‘Americans’."

He includes a chapter with the intriguing title The Politics of History: Why the Past Can Never Escape the Present.

"To say that the politics of the moment influences history is neither to justify the intentional distortion of our story for partisan purposes, nor to assert that one account is as ‘good’ or ‘valid’ as another, regardless of its factual basis. It is simply to acknowledge that the heart of the historian’s task lies ‘in explanation and in selection,’ as the scholar Morton White noted in his classic book Foundations of Historical Knowledge. In describing events, the historian ‘depends upon generalizations,’ White noted, and ‘because he records certain events rather than others, he may depend upon value judgments that guide his selection’."

Dionne then proceeds to provide the reader with an example of how biased reporting of history corrupted our society for a century.

"But in certain areas, the politics of history is especially raw and contentious. Nowhere is this more obvious than in how historians have dealt with our nation’s long struggle with race, and no aspect of our story has undergone a more thoroughgoing revision and counter-revision than our view of what happened during Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War."

The initial views of this time in our history would be determined by racial attitudes.

"But at the heart of the argument over Reconstruction, from the beginning and ever since, was the moral and political question of whether southern blacks would be offered rights genuinely equal to those of whites. Would African Americans be empowered to shape the decisions that determined their fate as individuals and as a community? Or would they be denied the basic rights of citizenship and treated as an inferior group?"

During Reconstruction the Republicans, then the party of Lincoln, essentially occupied the South and imposed equal rights for the blacks. The Democratic Party, then the home of the racists, fought back politically, and the southern whites fought back by instituting a reign of terror aimed at disarming blacks so they could not defend themselves and ignoring any voting rights the blacks had been granted. Eventually, the federal authorities withdrew and left the field to the southerners to do as they wished.

The historians who told the story of Reconstruction in the first decades of the twentieth century seem to have been captured by notions about the superiority of whites. Any attempt to raise blacks to the same level could then only be viewed as a misguided or corrupt political maneuver. Dionne reminds us that these were respected historians working out of some of our most highly-regarded universities.

"It is strange to our ears now, but the whites who overthrew the Reconstruction governments, imposed a color line, and stripped African Americans of their rights were known, proudly, as ‘redeemers’."

"The scholars who wrote the history of Reconstruction from the turn of the last century into the 1920s saw the foes of Reconstruction just that way in accounts offered when the nation’s inclinations turned conservative (one could also fairly say racist) on matters of civil rights. Works by James Ford Rhodes, William Dunning, John W. Burgess, and their students painted Reconstruction as a disastrous interlude. They described the Reconstruction governments as dominated by corrupt ‘carpetbaggers’ and ‘scalawags’ and accused them of imposing misrule on the South, partly by granting power to ‘ignorant’ freed slaves. Southern whites who used violence and fraud at the polls to overthrow the Reconstruction governments were defended, not condemned. Burgess called Reconstruction ‘the most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans had ever been called upon to behold.’ Rhodes called the work of the Radical Republicans ‘repressive’ and ‘uncivilized’ and cast them as politicians who ‘pandered to the ignorant negroes, the knavish white natives and the vulturous adventurers who flocked from the north’."

Dionne recalls encountering this picture of Reconstruction as an elementary school student. I also heard the same tale as a child and can still recall an image provided of a rather nasty looking individual carrying a carpetbag and meant to represent the "vulturous scalawags."

"Their accounts became the conventional wisdom of American history—and they were still affecting the presentation of the period in American history textbooks I first encountered in elementary school in the 1950s and early 1960s. These approaches to Reconstruction, in turn, reinforced racial attitudes that undergirded southern segregation."

Another era, and a century of learning that blacks were quite capable of determining their own future, led to the issuance of books and articles reconstructing Reconstruction and placing it in the context of well-meant, if not always wise attempts to both rebuild the southern economy and to provide civil rights to blacks who were demanding them.

Dionne refers to a massive study by Eric Foner, Reconstruction, issued in 1988 as being representative of these efforts. Ironically, Foner produced his history at Columbia University which had been at the forefront in producing the original picture of Reconstruction. Dionne quotes Foner’s description of the power of (bad) history.

"For it was at Columbia at the turn of the century that William A. Dunning and John W. Burgess had established the traditional school of Reconstruction politics, teaching that blacks were ‘children’ incapable of appreciating the freedom that had been thrust upon them, and that the North did a ‘monstrous’ thing in granting them suffrage. There is no better illustration than Reconstruction of how historical interpretation both reflects and helps to shape current policies. The views of the Dunning School helped freeze the white South for generations in unalterable opposition to any change in race relations, and justified decades of Northern indifference to southern nullification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments."

Jill Lepore is correct in warning us about the danger of mixing politics and history. E. J. Dionne Jr. provides us with an excellent example of the damage that biased historians can cause.

Politicians and activists have learned the lesson of manipulating history well. The easiest way to defeat an opponent or an opposing idea is to rewrite history in order to make your enemy look evil, foolish, or ineffective.

Gun Ownership and Regulation at the Birth of Our Nation

2013-04-18T01:34:00.000-07:00

The Constitution provides little direct guidance on the issues related to gun ownership and gun restrictions, and what it does provide has been perplexing to subsequent generations of citizens. The Second Amendment is rather terse:
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Taken alone, this statement could be understood as being focused on "well-regulated militias;" or it could be focused on the rights of the citizens to bear arms. For many years, the Supreme Court supported the former view. It wasn’t until 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that the Court finally concluded that gun ownership by individuals is protected by the Second Amendment.

Adam Winkler has produced a fascinating review of the legal wrangling leading up to that 2008 decision. In the process he also provides the historical background required to understand the thoughts that might have been motivating our founding generation. Winkler is convincing in leading the reader to conclude that the right to bear arms was so obvious to the writers of the Constitution that it should have been beyond question. Winkler is equally convincing in making the case that placing restrictions on gun ownership in order to further the common good was also obviously assumed as a function of the government. Winkler’s book is titled Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.

The writers of the Constitution were of English descent. It is only natural that their view of personal rights would borrow heavily from those established in England.

"William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century jurist whose Commentaries on the Laws of England are still cited today as the authoritative account of old English law, described the English Bill of Rights as recognizing ‘the right of having and using guns for self-preservation and defense.’ The right to have arms, he said, was an ‘auxiliary’ right necessary to preserve the basic rights of man: ‘personal security, personal liberty, and private property.’ English court cases from the 1700s were in accord. Judges, like those in the 1744 case of Malloch v. Eastly, repeatedly recognized that it was ‘settled and determined’ law that ‘a man may keep a gun for the defense of his house and family’."

The occasion for the cementing of this right in the English Bill of Rights was the attempt by a Catholic king to confiscate the arms of potentially troublemaking Protestants. That king lost his job as a result.

Now consider what happened a century later when another English king tried to contain dissent in his American colonies by limiting access to firearms.

"In 1774, King George III ordered the cessation of all exports of firearms and ammunition to the colonies. The next year, he ordered British commanders to disarm certain provinces, especially in the north...."

"The American colonist had no standing army of their own, but had for decades formed militias composed of ordinary men to fight the Indians. These militias relied on the privately owned guns of the men called out to serve, in addition to stockpiled guns and gunpowder put away for times of need. The British began seizing these stockpiles to make it harder for the colonies to rebel—a move that only inspired the colonists to see to it that George III’s reign over them ended quickly."

It was an attempt by the British to confiscate arms being stockpiled in Concord that led to the confrontation that initiated the Revolution.

"It was the start of the American Revolution—a war ignited by a government effort to seize the people’s firearms."

After the successful revolution, the dependence on hastily formed militias was no longer sufficient. The response was not only to allow anyone to possess a gun, but to demand that they possess a gun. This was a mandate to purchase a commercial product no less. These guns had to be registered, kept in working order, and they were subject to confiscation by the government if necessary for the public good.

"With national defense becoming too important to leave to individual choice or the free market, the founders implemented laws that required all free men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to outfit themselves with a musket, rifle, or other firearm suitable for military service....Every man of military age was legally mandated to acquire a militarily useful gun. This mandate was enforced at ‘musters,’ public gatherings held several times a year where every person eligible for militia service was required to attend, military gun in hand. At the musters, government officials would inspect people’s guns and account for the firearms on public roles—an early version of gun registration."

"If the government decided that a privately owned gun was needed, the founding fathers used a temporary form of gun confiscation known as ‘impressment’ to seize the gun from its owner. Ten of the thirteen colonies impressed privately owned firearms for the war effort against England."

Winkler tells us that at the time it was also assumed that privately owned guns would be available so the citizens could participate in combating crime.

"Not only did the founders lack a standing army; they also had no organized police departments. For decades after the Revolution, when crimes were committed, ordinary individuals were expected to respond to the ‘hue and cry,’ armed if necessary, and bring criminals to justice."

If there is yet any doubt that the right to bear arms was deeply imbedded in the psyche and structure of the nation when it was formed, Winkler provides this additional insight.

"Each of the fifty states has its own constitution that guarantees the fundamental rights of its citizens. Forty-three of the fifty state constitutions contain language that clearly and unambiguously protects the right of individuals to own guns. Several of these provisions date back to the founding....As the state courts have recognized since the early 1800s, such provisions directly protect the right of individuals to own guns for self-defense."

Winkler spends a comparable amount of his book detailing how gun restrictions have always been a part of our society.

"The right to bear arms in the colonial era was not a libertarian license to do whatever a person wanted with a gun. When public safety demanded that gun owners do something, the government was recognized to have the authority to make them do it."

Selective disarmament was recognized as within the government’s purview as blacks, free or slave, and people of mixed race were considered too dangerous to allow them to possess guns. And for a while in Maryland there was a law that barred Catholics from possessing guns.

An example more relevant to our times comes from Boston. City government was sufficiently concerned about fire hazards that they passed a law in 1783 fining anyone who kept or brought a loaded firearm into a building within the city.

"Yet there is no record of anyone’s complaining that this law infringed the people’s right to keep and bear arms. Even though the inspiration for this law was prevention of fires, not, say, protecting children from accidental shootings, the lesson remains the same: pressing safety concerns led Bostonians to effectively ban loaded weapons from any building in the city."

And finally, Winkler provides this conclusion:

"The founding fathers had numerous gun control laws that responded to the public safety needs of their era. While our own public safety needs are different and require different responses, the basic idea that gun possession must be balanced with gun safety laws was one that the founders endorsed."

The history of guns in our nation is misunderstood by both sides in the arguments over rights versus regulations. Winkler’s book should help clear up many misunderstandings.

Winkler’s history of how gun regulation has evolved over time is an interesting story also. It will, perhaps, be described in a subsequent article.

China Poisons the World

2013-04-16T01:26:00.000-07:00

Many countries pursue environmentally harmful paths, but none has been accused of pollution on a scale that threatens the entire planet—at least until now. Thomas N. Thompson directs that accusation towards China in an article in Foreign Affairs: Choking on China: The Superpower That Is Poisoning the World.

China is known to be the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and thus the largest contributor to global warming. While this contributes to a worldwide problem, Thompson’s focus is on more immediate threats to health and prosperity.

"The dangers of China’s environmental degradation go well beyond the country’s borders, as pollution threatens global health more than ever. Chinese leaders have argued that their country has the right to pollute, claiming that, as a developing nation, it cannot sacrifice economic growth for the sake of the environment. In reality, however, China is holding the rest of the world hostage -- and undermining its own prosperity."

The danger pollution poses for China’s city dwellers has been widely reported, with most focus on high counts of particulates, the so-called PM2.5s. Particles with diameters less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter are small enough to damage lung tissue and enter the blood stream.

"According to the World Bank, only one percent of China’s 560 million urban residents breathe air considered safe by EU standards. Beijing’s levels of PM2.5s -- particles that are smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter and can penetrate the gas exchange regions of the lungs -- are the worst in the world. Beijing’s 2012 March average reading was 469 micrograms of such particles per cubic meter, which compares abysmally with Los Angeles’ highest 2012 reading of 43 micrograms per cubic meter."

The main source of these particulates is assumed to be the ubiquitous burning of coal. Does this particulate creation constitute a worldwide threat?

"In 2006, researchers at the University of California–Davis discovered that almost all of the harmful particulates over Lake Tahoe originated in China. The environmental experts Juli Kim and Jennifer Turner note in their essay "China’s Filthiest Export" that "by the time it reaches the U.S., mercury transforms into a reactive gaseous material that dissolves easily in the wet climates of the Pacific Northwest." At least 20 percent of the mercury entering the Willamette River in Oregon most likely comes from China. Black carbon soot from China also threatens to block sunlight, lower crop yields, heat the atmosphere, and destabilize weather throughout the Pacific Rim."

While not very many Californians are yet worried about pollution wafting over, China’s Asian neighbors are quite concerned. An article in the Washington Post by Michiyo Nakamoto provides background on the response by Japan.

"The new provisional guidelines, compiled by the environment ministry, recommend that people stay indoors if the average amount of air pollutant, PM 2.5, is projected to exceed 70 micrograms per cubic meter – or twice the ministry’s maximum permissible level of 35 micrograms a day. Beijing’s pollution regularly exceeds 10 times that level...."

"Since April 2012, levels over 70 micrograms per cubic meter have been recorded at six monitoring stations in Japan."

"Levels of PM 2.5 are being monitored at more than 500 stations across Japan but the government aims to increase that to 1,300."

Thompson indicates that the pollution being produced by China is imposed on other countries in multiple ways.

"Carbon dioxide emissions from cars in China are also growing exponentially, replacing coal-fired power plants as the major source of pollution in major Chinese cities. Deutsche Bank estimates that the number of passenger cars in China will reach 400 million by 2030, up from today’s 90 million. And the sulfur levels produced by diesel trucks in China are at least 23 times worse than those in the United States. Acid rain, caused by these emissions, has damaged a third of China’s limited cropland, in addition to forests and watersheds on the Korean Peninsula and in Japan. This pollution reaches the United States as well, sometimes at levels prohibited by the U.S. Clean Water Act."

China’s polluted rivers produce a regional problem.

"China has also completely botched its waste-removal efforts. Eighty percent of the East China Sea, one of the world’s largest fisheries, is now unsuitable for fishing, according to Elizabeth C. Economy, a China and environmental expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Most Chinese coastal cities pump at least half of their waste directly into the ocean, which causes red tides and coastal fish die-offs. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the country is now the largest polluter of the Pacific Ocean."

Thompson also seems to suggest that China might also be considered a potential exporter of epidemics.

"Most recently, the country has been shaken by a mysterious virus, H7N9, which has already killed six people and has spurred health authorities to order the slaughter of thousands of pigeons, chickens, and ducks thought to carry it. In the United States, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has begun work on an H7N9 vaccine."

This is a curious thought. While not generally considered a pollutant, a virus can be considered a form of poison. Is there something unique about China that might make it a likely breeding ground for dangerous viruses? An article by Florence Williams in the New York Review of Books provides some insight. It is titled How Animals May Cause the Next Big One. Williams is reviewing a book by David Quammen: Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.

Many recent threatening illnesses have been derived from infections that have moved from animals to humans. The spread of the SARS virus is perhaps the most intensely studied.

"Many of us will remember the virus SARS as a scary bug that flamed out quickly. But SARS is worth a long look for what it almost was. Quammen guides us back, step by unnerving step, to the time before eight thousand people were infected and 774 died. A seventy-eight-year-old Canadian grandmother delivered the virus to Toronto from Hong Kong in February 2003. Within weeks, it had arrived in the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan."

"He describes how determined scientists eventually traced the SARS virus all the way back to Guangdong province....It turns out that Guangdong is ‘a province of ravenous, unsqueamish carnivores’ whose appetites fuel the biggest and most diverse live-animal markets in the world. Eventually, the culpable coronavirus was found in a civet cat, a mammal in the mongoose family, bound for a kitchen pot. More sleuthing showed that civets weren’t SARS’s main animal host. The civet had caught it from a horseshoe bat."

"How did the bat and the civet connect with each other? The gruesome live markets of southern China are an enterprising virus’s dream come true: such close quarters and all those stacked cages in a region where increasingly adventurous tastes demand a supply of exotic animals, including horseshoe bats."

Globalization entails more than the import and export of physical goods and the international exchange of financial instruments. As Thompson details, it involves the exchange of all the byproducts of human existence, including the noxious, the poisonous and the infectious.

Brain Games: Can They Improve Intelligence?

2013-04-14T02:23:00.000-07:00

Gareth Cook posted an article at The New Yorker titled Brain Games are Bogus. He was specifically referring to one approach to brain exercising focused on improving short-term memory.
"A decade ago, a young Swedish researcher named Torkel Klingberg made a spectacular discovery. He gave a group of children computer games designed to boost their memory, and, after weeks of play, the kids showed improvements not only in memory but in overall intellectual ability. Spending hours memorizing strings of digits and patterns of circles on a four-by-four grid had made the children smarter. The finding countered decades of psychological research that suggested training in one area (e.g., recalling numbers) could not bring benefits in other, unrelated areas (e.g., reasoning). The Klingberg experiment also hinted that intelligence, which psychologists considered essentially fixed, might be more mutable: that it was less like eye color and more like a muscle."

Klingberg took this idea and commercialized it. A number of companies are now providing such brain-enhancing aids. The goal is to improve short-term or "working" memory

"Cogmed and the other companies stake their claims on "working memory," the ability to keep information the focus of conscious attention, despite distractions—mental juggling, in other words. There is powerful, widely accepted evidence that working memory plays an important role in everything from reading ability and problem-solving to reasoning and learning new skills....Working memory is also closely related to "executive function," the brain’s ability to make a plan and stick with it, an active and fruitful area of psychology with broad social implications. Many psychologists consider working memory to be a core component of general intelligence. People who score highly on intelligence tests also tend to perform well on working-memory tests."

There have, of course, been a number of subsequent studies that corroborated Klingberg’s original conclusion, and a number of studies that conflicted with his finding. Cook claims that this state of confusion has been resolved by some researchers who have performed a "meta-analysis" of all the data.

"A pair of scientists in Europe recently gathered all of the best research—twenty-three investigations of memory training by teams around the world—and employed a standard statistical technique (called meta-analysis) to settle this controversial issue. The conclusion: the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life."

Cook would have us conclude that such games are a waste of time. But before we succumb to this reasoning let’s think about what we have just learned. And let’s also remind ourselves that studies of human responses are extremely difficult and easily biased. As was reported in Education: Testing and Conditional Intelligence it is rather straightforward to purposely, or inadvertently, affect performance in taking an intelligence test.

What we could be observing here is nothing more than researchers performing studies that generally produce the results they set out to obtain. The subsequent meta-analysis that was assumed to resolve all issues was merely an analysis of the previous analyses. Someone decided which studies were accurate and applicable and which were not; then a grand summation of the acceptable data was performed and a conclusion drawn. If one takes an average of a bunch of biased studies, does the bias disappear? Are those who perform meta-analyses automatically rendered free of bias? Can anything be known for sure?

Cook may be correct in concluding that the specific approach he discussed has been hyped beyond any defendable level. But his statement seems to deny the utility of all attempts to use mental exercises to improve brain function. That is going too far. He implies that those who resort to such mental exercises are mainly:

"....ambitious parents with new assignments for overworked but otherwise healthy children."

There is much more at stake than the desires of "ambitious parents." While Cook correctly pointed out the importance of "executive functions" and the tie between working memory and performance on intelligence tests, Paul Tough provides another perspective on these subjects in his book: How Children Succeed.

"For a while now, we’ve known that executive-function ability correlates strongly with family income, but until recently, we didn’t know why."

Tough tells of a study by Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University. They tracked 195 children from birth to age seventeen. Half the children originated in families then having incomes below the poverty line, and half from middle class families. The goal was to assess their working memory as they aged. The tool they used was essentially the old Simon game where a child was presented with a sequence of colored lights and asked to reproduce the sequence.

Their studies concluded that performance on this working memory test was, in fact, correlated to the amount of time spent living in poverty.

"....kids who had spent ten years in poverty....did worse than kids who had spent just five years in poverty."

This finding is consistent with the correlation between executive function and income, but does not provide a mechanism for this effect.

These researchers had also sought to monitor physiological attributes of the children. In particular, they were concerned with the effects of stress.

"When the children in the study were nine years old, and again when they were thirteen....researchers took a number of physiological readings from each child, including blood pressure, body mass index, and levels of certain stress hormones, including cortisol. Evans and Schamberg combined these biological data to create their own measure of allostatic load: the physical effects of having an overtaxed stress-response system."

When they combined the physiological data with the poverty data and the working memory data, they concluded that the diminishment in working memory function was not due to poverty itself, but rather to the stress that could be induced by living in poverty. The subject of stress and physiological response was discussed in more detail in Poverty and Stress: The Ability of Children to Learn.

This research suggests that the ability of a child to utilize the brain he was born with is being compromised by physiological effects induced by his environment that effect brain function. These effects are best interpreted as interfering with the child’s ability to learn, rather than diminishing his intelligence.

"The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school."

There is hope that these effects can be alleviated, if not reversed.

"The reason that researchers who care about the gap between the rich and the poor are so excited about executive functions is that these skills are not only highly predictive of success; they are also quite malleable, much more so than other cognitive skills. The prefrontal cortex is more responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain, and it stays flexible well into adolescence and early adulthood. So if we can improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning, we can increase his prospects for success in a particularly efficient way."

There is too much at stake, and it is way too early to give up on the type of mental interventions that Gareth Cook so easily dismissed. Let’s let the researchers continue to contend with each other and hope that positive outcomes begin to emerge.

Oil, Corn, and the Price of Gasoline

2013-04-11T00:23:00.000-07:00

A great energy revolution is said to be taking place. New sources of oil are going to make the US energy independent and we will become a net energy exporter. If we are suddenly producing so much more oil, shouldn’t that allow the price of gasoline to drop? An excellent article in Bloomberg Businessweek by Asjylyn Loder, Mario Parker, and Matthew Philips addresses that issue.
"For the first time since 1995, the U.S. will likely produce more oil than it imports."

A greater supply of domestic oil and a fall in domestic demand for oil might be expected to lead to lower prices for gasoline.

"Even as fuel consumption has fallen to 16 percent below its 2007 peak, gasoline remains about a dollar higher than the average price over the past decade. So far this year, gasoline prices have risen 11 percent nationwide, to $3.65 a gallon."

Prices are being held high by a combination of market competition, logistics difficulties, and perverse effects of government regulation.

"Most of the surge in oil production has happened in places such as North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma, far from refining hubs and big population centers. With competition fierce for limited pipeline capacity, producers have begun moving crude on barges and trains, adding as much as $17 a barrel to the price of domestic oil. That extra cost eventually makes its way to the price at the pump."

Once oil is refined to produce gasoline, it must still make its way from the refineries to the various domestic markets.

"Complicating the equation is a 1920 law called the Jones Act, which requires any cargo shipped between U.S. ports to be carried by vessels that are based in the U.S., made in the U.S., and crewed mostly by U.S. citizens. The law was intended to protect U.S. shipping interests but has made it more costly to move fuel between U.S. ports. This in particular hurts the Northeast, which is struggling to meet its fuel needs after several refineries closed in the last two years. According to Ed Morse, chief commodity analyst at Citigroup, those constraints add between $6 and $8 a barrel to transport costs."

As a result, abundant domestic oil supplies couple with expensive domestic transportation costs to make selling gasoline on the world market more profitable.

"....it’s often cheaper for a Gulf Coast refiner to send gasoline to Brazil than to New York."

Exports of refined oil products have been growing for a number of years. In 2011 the US became the largest exporter of such products.

"’The tools are in place for the U.S. to become an even bigger exporter of gasoline and diesel,’ says Stephen Schork, president of the Pennsylvania energy consulting firm Schork Group. ‘The U.S. has the most sophisticated network and the most technologically advanced refining system in the world, and it has access to a tremendous amount of domestically produced crude oil in a country where demand is stagnant at best’."

The article provides this chart to describe how these exports have grown over time and where they end up.

The refiners have a right to maximize their profits as they decide where to sell their products. They have that right because society gave it to them. Society is, in effect, agreeing to subsidize the profits by agreeing to pay a higher price for gasoline. Society can at least benefit from the flow of money into our economy from these exports and the lower flow of money out as the need to import crude oil diminishes.

The authors point out that there is one more regulatory cost to be discussed: the ethanol requirement. A law was passed in 2005 (and amended in 2007) that required ethanol to be mixed with gasoline in order to limit our dependence on imported oil.

"This year, the law requires U.S. refiners to blend 13.8 billion gallons of ethanol into the fuel they sell to domestic customers. In their calculations when crafting the bill in 2007, lawmakers assumed gasoline demand would continue to rise and that refiners would need all that ethanol to make up 10 percent of the fuel sold to motorists."

Our visionary legislators could not conceive of a situation in which demand for gasoline would fall.

"As a result, refiners don’t need all the ethanol the government forces them to buy. To make up the roughly 400 million gallon difference between the ethanol the industry needs and the amount the government mandates, refiners must buy credits called Renewable Identification Numbers, or RINs."

The cost of these RINs has been increasing. Therefore the cost of dealing with this excess ethanol problem will be borne by the consumer.

"If sustained, the increase may add as much as 10¢ to the retail price of a gallon of gasoline, says Bill Klesse, chief executive officer of Valero Energy, the world’s largest independent refiner."

The idea to convert plant product into ethanol is not a dumb idea—unless the plant stock chosen is a very inefficient one, and one that is also a critical component of the worldwide food supply. The decision to convert corn into ethanol was not only dumb, it was tragic.

World food prices have about doubled in the past decade. Withdrawing about half our corn production from the world market in order to make ethanol has not helped the situation. The decision to follow this path has raised food prices for everyone, including ourselves. This increase may not mean much to most people in the US, but it means a lot to those around the world for whom the purchase of food consumes the biggest portion of their income.

Now we learn that ethanol production is needlessly raising the price of our gasoline.

"The end result is that refiners have an even greater incentive to sell their fuel abroad, where it isn’t subject to U.S. ethanol requirements."

If politicians are really interested in smaller government and less regulation, this law and the associated regulations provide a good place to start whacking away.

The Psychopharmacological Assault on Our Soldiers

2013-04-08T02:21:00.000-07:00

During the war in Vietnam our military leaders put the soldiers in their charge at risk from dangerous chemicals such as Agent Orange. In order to accomplish what they felt was their mission they created a generation of psychologically damaged and physically unhealthy veterans. Recent evidence suggests that the military may be repeating that mistake with the current cohort assembled to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The dangerous chemicals being introduced this time around are not defoliants, but psychoactive drugs designed to alter brain function and control behavior. These drugs have only limited approval for use by the FDA for treatment of those suffering from mental illness.

One of the most disturbing trends within our military population is the increased incidence of suicide. More of our personnel died from suicide than from military action in 2012. This source provides recent data.

Note that the number of suicides has been increasing while the number of soldiers involved in military action has been decreasing.

Richard A. Friedman, director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College, provided an article in the New York Times that notes the suicide issue and proceeds to accuse the Armed Services of misusing psychoactive drugs in an attempt to counter the results of stress experienced by soldiers.

"....according to data not reported on until now, the military evidently responded to stress that afflicts soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan primarily by drugging soldiers on the front lines. Data that I have obtained directly from Tricare Management Activity, the division of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, shows that there has been a giant, 682 percent increase in the number of psychoactive drugs — antipsychotics, sedatives, stimulants and mood stabilizers — prescribed to our troops between 2005 and 2011. That’s right. A nearly 700 percent increase — despite a steady reduction in combat troop levels since 2008."

"The prescribing trends suggest that the military often uses medications in ways that are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] and do not comport with the usual psychiatric standards of practice."

Friedman points out that the military is supposed to carefully assess recruits and weed out those who might have psychological problems. Therefore one should expect less need for psychoactive drugs than exists in the general population. That is definitely not the case.

"The data suggest that military doctors may prescribe psychoactive drugs for off-label use as sedatives, possibly so as to enable soldiers to function better in stressful combat situations. Capt. Michael Colston, a psychiatrist and program director for mental health policy in the Department of Defense, confirmed this possibility. In an e-mail to me, Dr. Colston acknowledged that antipsychotic drugs have been used to treat insomnia, anxiety and aggressive behavior."

This experimental use of drugs on the soldiers is troubling to Friedman.

"The trouble is that we have no idea whether it’s effective — or safe — to use antipsychotic drugs on a continuing basis to treat war-related stress or to numb or sedate those affected by it."

Friedman uses treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to illustrate the issues associated with these practices.

"Note that the military uses antipsychotic drugs to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, even though there is but weak evidence that these drugs effectively treat it. A recent randomized, controlled clinical trial involving nearly 300 veterans found that the antipsychotic risperidone was no better than a placebo as an adjunct in treating PTSD. Yet in 2007, PTSD was the most common off-label diagnosis for those, within the Department of Veterans Affairs, treated with psychoactive medications."

"In treating soldiers who have PTSD symptoms with antipsychotic medications, the military is violating its own treatment guidelines, which clearly state that S.S.R.I. antidepressants are the preferred first line of treatment for PTSD. The military medical leadership has, in fact, expressed concern about prescribing trends. In February 2012, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. Jonathan Woodson, wrote in a memo to the military’s leadership that the ‘greatest concern is the suspicion of the over-prescription of antipsychotic medications for PTSD’."

Dr. Woodson is correct in being concerned.

"Another reason to worry about liberal off-label use of antipsychotic medications is that they have long-term adverse health risks, including tardive dyskinesia, a potentially irreversible movement disorder."

"There are other disturbing prescription trends in the military. The number of prescriptions written for potentially habit-forming anti-anxiety medications — like Valium and Klonopin — rose 713 percent between 2005 and 2011. The use of sedating anticonvulsants — Topamax, Neurontin and Lyrica — increased 996 percent during this period. (Prescriptions for these three drugs increased 94 percent during the same period in the civilian population.)"

"None of these anticonvulsants are F.D.A.-approved for psychiatric use and none are without risk: anticonvulsants can impair short-term memory and fine-motor coordination, which would adversely affect combat performance."

Friedman is careful not to directly accuse the military doctors of unethical behavior, but he cannot help but issue these comments:

"It seems that the military favors quick-acting — and less effective — anticonvulsants and antipsychotics over antidepressants, which can take several weeks to work."

"There is an analogy, perhaps, between the military’s use of psychoactive drugs and the practice of pumping athletes full of steroids so they can continue to compete despite physical pain; athletes — and also soldiers — whose performance is chemically enhanced in this way may, however, unwittingly sustain more serious injuries as a result."

An article by Martha Rosenberg is less kind in evaluating the military and its drug prescribing practices. She points out that many of the drugs being discussed are known to increase the probability of suicidal behavior.

"One in six service members was on a psychoactive drug in 2010 and ‘many troops are taking more than one kind, mixing several pills in daily 'cocktails' for example, an antidepressant with an antipsychotic to prevent nightmares, plus an anti-epileptic to reduce headaches--despite minimal clinical research testing such combinations,’ said Military Times."

"The pills and pill cocktails many troops are prescribed are clearly linked to suicidal thoughts and behavior. Antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil, antipsychotics like Seroquel and Zyprexa and anti-seizure drugs like Lyrica and Neurontin all carry clear suicide warnings and all are widely used in the military. Almost 5,000 newspaper reports link antidepressants to suicide, homicide and bizarre behavior on the website SSRIstories.com. The malaria drug Lariam is also highly correlated with suicide and its use actually increased in the Navy and Marine Corps in 2011, according to the Associated Press."

David Healy is a psychopharmacologist who occasionally arouses the ire of his colleagues by dredging up inconvenient historical data. He looked up suicide rates for schizophrenic patients before the age of medicinal treatment (1875-1924) and compared them to the rates that exist when current medications are used (1994-1998). He concluded that the use of modern antipsychotic medications—the ones being prescribed to our soldiers—increased the suicide rate among schizophrenics by a factor of 20.

Rosenberg seems to have a point.

Rosenberg takes yet another step and raises the issue of unethical behavior.

"Several powerful military psychiatrists and administrators are also consultants to Big Pharma who shamelessly enroll veterans in drug studies and promote the pills that drug companies pay them to promote. Who can say conflict of interest?"

If this statement strikes the reader as a bizarre dip into a conspiracy theory, the reader should remember that conspiracy theories are popular because, occasionally, conspiracies actually exist.

Let us turn now for some insight to Ben Goldacre and his book: Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients.

"....we will see that pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice....Doctors spend forty years practising medicine, with very little formal education after their initial training. Medicine changes completely in four decades, and as they try to keep up, doctors are bombarded with information: from ads that misrepresent the benefits and risks of new medicines; from sales reps who spy on patients’ confidential prescribing records; from colleagues who are quietly paid by drug companies; from ‘teaching’ that is sponsored by industry; from independent ‘academic’ journal articles that are quietly written by drug company employees; and worse."

Drug companies do wondrous things at times, but in the field of interest here, mental illness, there is little science to go on, and what exists is mostly created by the drug companies themselves. That is a situation reeking with potential ethical issues.

Russia’s Demographics: Stress and Health

2013-04-06T02:40:00.000-07:00

Russia’s demographic issues have been a subject of considerable discussion. It has a rapidly declining population characterized by low birthrates as well as low life expectancies. Tony Wood takes a fresh look at Russia and its population in an article titled Russia Vanishes that appeared in the London Review of Books. Low fertility and high emigration rates are relatively easy to explain. But how does one create poor health and premature deaths in a modern society? Wood’s musings on how that might occur prompt another attempted explanation: one based on more modern research into the role stress can play in determining health outcomes.

Wood provides interesting background material. He reminds us that about a century ago Russia was expected to become a modern colossus.

"In 1929 Warren Thompson, one of the founders of demographic transition theory, predicted that ‘the growth of Russia during the next three or four decades will be one of the outstanding events of the modern world,’ and that "Russia may very well rival China and India in numbers by the year 2000’."

What is Russia’s population outlook in the twenty-first century?

"Since 1992, according to data from Rosstat, the state statistical agency, deaths have exceeded births by a cumulative total of 13 million, a figure far exceeding the numbers of immigrants. Russia’s population declined by an estimated 6.4 million between 1991 and 2009, an annual average drop of 337,000."

"Russia is still the ninth most populous country in the world, with 142.9 million inhabitants at the time of the 2010 census. But its demographic contraction is set to continue relentlessly: the UN Population Division envisages a drop to 136 million by 2030, and to 126 million by 2050; by the start of the next century it could be as low as 111 million. This decline – equivalent, by 2100, to more than a fifth of the current population – will push Russia down the global demographic hierarchy: the fourth most populous state in the world in 1950, by 2050 it will have dropped to 18th place, overtaken by Pakistan, Ethiopia and Egypt."

What the early demographers missed was the role that history would play in tormenting the Russian people. An unending sequence of catastrophes descended upon Russia. It began with the First World War, the revolution and civil war that followed, the era of Stalinist repression, and peaked with the slaughter associated with the Nazi invasion.

"This sequence of catastrophes, then, killed somewhere between 50 and 65 million Soviet citizens. The demographic consequences reached backwards as well as forwards in time: mass fatalities effectively cancelled out many of the childbearing efforts of previous generations, while the extermination of so many people obviously had an immediate impact on fertility levels. The Second World War killed 40 per cent of men between the ages of 20 and 49, and 15 per cent of women in the same bracket, removing at a stroke a large part of the child-producing population."

The postwar years have not been particularly easy either, with significant levels of political and economic turmoil. This history leads to easy explanations for why birthrates might fall and emigration might rise. But what is the mechanism that would cause people to die at a younger age?

Wood provides necessary background on the health of the Russian population.

"....from the mid-1960s Russian life expectancy entered a period of decline that lasted until the early 1980s – by a grim historical irony, a time when the country was being ruled by an increasingly gerontocratic Politburo."

"The arrival of Gorbachev coincided with a brief improvement: in 1986-87 Russian life expectancy equalled its Khrushchev-era peak. But then another phase of decline began, which turned into a headlong plunge after the collapse of the USSR: between 1991 and 1994, male life expectancy fell by six years, from 63.4 to 57.4; female life expectancy from 74.2 to 71. There has been some recovery since: in 2009, the figure for men was 62.7 and that for women 74.7. But overall life expectancy, at 68.7, was still below the level achieved in 1961."

"In the 1960s Russians could expect to live 23 years longer than those in the world’s ‘less developed regions’, but by 2010 their advantage was down to 1.9 years. Russian men can now expect to live 2.7 years less, on average, than men in the developing world – with shorter lifespans than men in India, Bangladesh or Ghana."

Attempts to correlate poor Russian health with a deficient healthcare system and poor personal habits have thus far fallen short of the target.

"What explains this terrible state of affairs? Among the factors are the astonishing prevalence of cardiovascular disease in Russia, the country’s notorious drinking culture, problems with child and adult nutrition, lack of healthcare expenditure, and the impact of the shocks of the post-Soviet capitalist transformation. Death rates from cardiovascular disease are four and a half times higher than in Western Europe, at 900 deaths per 100,000 according to figures from 2002. But this isn’t enough to account for the disparities in life expectancy."

"For many experts, having weighed all the factors, the continuing high mortality rates remain an enigma: in Eberstadt’s view, ‘the country is pioneering eerie new modern pathways to poor health’."

Wood suggests that the health of the population might be attributed to the horrible circumstances of World War II.

"In 1985, the German demographer Reiner Dinkel noted that the Second World War, as well as causing enormous and immediate loss of life, may also have had long-term effects on a population’s overall health. With a large proportion of a given country’s conscription-age inhabitants killed or wounded, the population left behind would have a lower average life expectancy. Is it far-fetched to imagine that a Soviet populace shattered by years of war, repression and famine might also suffer disproportionately from health problems, which would then be bequeathed to succeeding generations?"

Wood seems to be suggesting that killing off the healthiest members of the childbearing population in warfare would leave behind a relatively unhealthy segment of the population to reproduce and create the next generation. Genetic deficiencies leading to poor health could then propagated across generations.

Wood makes an interesting point. The death rates were high enough that if only the healthiest were killed a sort of "non-survival of the fittest" would ensue. Given that the deaths were high throughout the population during the war, including among civilians, it is not clear how selective this process might have been.

What might be more suggestive of an explanation resides in this statement: "Is it far-fetched to imagine that a Soviet populace shattered by years of war, repression and famine might also suffer disproportionately from health problems..."

Paul Tough has written about recent research into the effect of childhood trauma on health outcomes as an adult. Trauma in this context does not necessarily relate to physical injury, but rather to any situations in which high or persistent levels of stress are experienced. Years of warfare creates many opportunities to experience stress.

Tough discusses the issue of childhood trauma and its affect on educational prospects of children in his book How Children Succeed.

He provided a more general discussion of health issues in an article in The New Yorker: The Poverty Clinic. This article carried the lede:

"Can a Stressful Childhood Make You a Sick Adult?"

In the 1990s Kaiser Permanente initiated a survey of patients for whom it had a comprehensive health assessment. These people were asked to respond to a questionnaire about adverse childhood experiences (ACE). The type of experiences sought included:

"parental divorce, physical abuse, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse, as well as growing up with family members who suffered from mental illness, alcoholism and drug problems."

They discovered that the respondents, a rather typical middle class assemblage of around 17,000, had experienced many more of these adverse situations than expected. Of greater surprise was the fact that there was a direct and almost linear correlation between the degree of childhood adversity and poor adult health. The researchers constructed a rough "ACE score" for each of the respondents from the number of adverse experiences reported.

"....the higher the ACE score, the worse the outcome, on almost every measure, from addictive behavior to chronic disease. Compared to those who had no history of ACEs, those with ACE scores of 4 or higher were twice as likely to smoke, seven times as likely to be alcoholics, and six times as likely to have had sex before the age of fifteen. They were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, twice as likely to have heart disease, and four times as likely to suffer from emphysema or chronic bronchitis. Adults with an ACE score of 4 or higher were twelve times as likely to have attempted suicide than those with an ACE score of 0. And men with an ACE score of 6 or higher were forty-six times as likely to have injected drugs than men who had no history of ACEs."

Even when poor health habits as adults were factored out, the correlation persisted.

"The researchers looked at patients with ACE scores of 7 or higher who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink to excess, and weren’t overweight, and found that their risk of ischemic heart disease (the most common cause of death in the United States) was three hundred and sixty percent higher than it was for patients with a score of 0. Somehow the traumatic experiences of their childhoods were having a deleterious effect on their later health, through a pathway that had nothing to do with bad behavior."

Since this study was published the relevant pathway to poor health has been associated with the human body’s response to stress.

"The key pathway is the intricately connected system that our brain deploys in reaction to stressful events. This system activates defenses on many fronts at once, some of which we recognize as we experience them: it produces emotions like fear and anxiety, as well as physical reactions, including increased blood pressure and heart rate, clammy skin, and a dry mouth. Other bodily reactions to stress are less evident: hormones are secreted, neurotransmitters are activated, and inflammatory proteins surge through the bloodstream."

"As a response to short-term threats, the system is beneficial, even essential. But researcher like Bruce McEwen....and Frances Champagne....have shown that repeated, full-scale activation of this stress system, especially in early childhood, can lead to deep physical changes. Michael Meany....and his colleagues have found that early adversity actually alters the chemistry of DNA in the brain, through a process called methylation. Traumatic experiences can cause tiny chemical markers called methyl groups to affix themselves to genes that govern the production of stress-hormone receptors in the brain. This process disables these genes, preventing the brain from properly regulating its response to stress."

"When it comes to adult health, the most important element of the stress response is the immune system, which, during moments of acute anxiety, releases a variety of various proteins and other chemical signals into the bloodstream. In the short term, this process promotes resistance to infection, and prepares the body to repair tissues that might be damaged. After the short-term threat disappears, this inflammation subsides, unless the system gets overloaded, in which case these chemicals can build up, with toxic effects on the heart and other organs."

If one accepts the truth of these results, then one would also expect a generation of extremely unhealthy and dysfunctional adults to emerge from the cohort of Russian children of World War II. The trauma of having dysfunctional parents can then reproduce the poor health and dysfunction in another generation.

The idea that Russia’s population has been broadly affected by such a mechanism is intriguing, but it is pure hypothesis.

Paul Tough used the results of these studies to correlate health and learning problems with the type of traumatic experiences that children encounter in poverty-stricken communities. The notion that poverty and insecurity experienced in childhood can lead to poor adult health outcomes is on much firmer ground.

As poor nations become wealthier they are beginning to suffer from chronic ailments such as diabetes and heart diseases that are usually associated with the poor lifestyle habits of wealthier nations. What if personal habits are not the main causes, and the problem was determined decades ago through childhood experiences that included physical, social, and nutritional insecurity? That is something to ponder over. And that is something to worry about.

Is Our Government As Dysfunctional As It Appears? Can It Recover?

2013-04-03T01:38:00.000-07:00

Two articles have recently appeared that provide insight into our manner of governing ourselves. Each was generated by a need to figure out if our nation was coming totally unglued, or was this just another saga in a long tale. Both highlight an aspect of our governance that we often overlook, and together they leave us with a bit more optimism about the future than might currently seem justified.

David Runciman provides a British perspective in a wonderful article in the London Review of Books with the engaging title: How Can It Work? He begins by reminding us that in the eyes of the world our country was always viewed as an implausible contrivance.

"American democracy is an amazing, fascinating, bewildering thing. There has never been anything else like it. Even now, as democracy becomes an ever more familiar feature of our world, there is still nothing like the American version. During the early years of the American republic, in the first half of the 19th century, what fascinated outsiders was its sheer implausibility. Could you really do politics like this, with such fractured and chaotic popular input? It seemed unlikely anything so ramshackle could last long. It was also implausible, especially to British eyes, for the simple reason that it was so clearly fraudulent: slavery made a mockery of it."

Runciman grants that the US has generated the successes that would normally be associated with a successful form of government, but suggests that its politics is too complicated to ever be able to understand, and thus one can never feel comfortable about its future.

"This is a system of politics that has held its ground under all manner of unpropitious conditions. It has been stress-tested almost to death. So does it work? You’d think we would know by now. But we don’t know. In a recent essay in the LRB (3 January), John Lanchester said the simplest summary of the state of knowledge in macroeconomics is ‘nobody knows anything.’ The same is true of macro-politics. In micro-politics, as in microeconomics, we are drowning in knowledge. The minutiae of the inner workings of American democracy are better understood than they have ever been, not least because many thousands of academics make a decent living studying them. But on the big question of whether it really makes sense to keep doing politics like this we don’t know."

Runciman, as do so many others, accords Tocqueville the prize for producing the greatest insight into how the US system actually functions. Tocqueville toured the country in 1831 as a young man.

"He got off the boat in New York, and like many first-time visitors was overwhelmed by what he found. His first impression was that it was a mess: stupid, chaotic, haphazard, impatient, relentless. He didn’t see how it could possibly work."

However, during his travels he concluded that the frenetic activity that surrounded him was deceptive in that it suggested it was incoherent and aimless. He described an overlaying opacity that shielded one from a view of activities occurring in depth.

"Tocqueville said of American democracy that more goes wrong, but more gets done as well, which means nothing bad lasts for long. Or as he put it elsewhere: more fires get started, but more fires get put out."

"He spotted the irony that it’s the openness of democracy that produces the opacity, because the excess of surface activity makes it hard to know what’s really going on....In a vibrant democracy the dissent, the noise, the anger, the incompetence are all readily apparent, yet out of this, over time, come stability and progress."

R. Shep Melnick provides insight into the process by which order seems to occasionally emerge from what is an apparently disorderly system. His article, The Gridlock Illusion, appeared in The Wilson Quarterly.

Our system of government was designed to make legislating difficult.

"Our unusually complex structure of government—one that combines separation of powers, bicameralism, and federalism—not only embeds numerous ‘veto points’ in the legislative process, but frustrates accountability by making it nearly impossible for voters to know whom to blame or reward for public policy."

Melnick addresses the "opacity" that Tocqueville referred to in arguing that the congressional contentions and discord at the national level block from our view the full suite of actions and legislative experiments being performed at other levels.

"The stalemate/gridlock argument is misleading not only because it ignores so many accomplishments, but also because it focuses so intently on just one small part of domestic policy, namely passage of major pieces of legislation at the national level. Lost in this picture are the daily decisions of administrators, judges, and state and local officials, as well as members of Congress engaged in the quotidian business of passing appropriations, reauthorizations, and budget reconciliation bills. Taken individually, these decisions might seem like small potatoes, but collectively they can produce significant policy change."

"Critics of the Constitution overlook the fact that by creating multiple ‘veto points,’ our political system simultaneously creates multiple points of access for policy entrepreneurs and claimants. Every ‘veto point’ that can be used to block action is also an ‘opportunity point’ that can be used to initiate or augment government activity."

For examples of how incremental activities can lead to broad policy positions he describes how a combination of court rulings, state and local legislation, and interactions between state, local and federal agencies can create policies and programs.

"How did affirmative action—highly unpopular with the American public—become embedded in so many federal programs? Slowly, subtly, and at times surreptitiously, a long series of court decisions, agency rules, and complex legislative provisions injected the presumption of proportional representation into federal civil rights programs. How did the federal government come to set national standards for state mental institutions, schools for the developmentally disabled, nursing homes, and prisons? Largely through litigation and consent decrees negotiated by the Department of Justice."

"To take another example, how did Congress manage to pass controversial legislation guaranteeing every disabled student a ‘free appropriate public education,’ complete with an ‘individualized education plan,’ provision of ‘related services,’ and a promise that each student would be placed in the ‘least restrictive environment’? The answer is that the courts acted first, suggesting (rather obliquely) that students with disabilities might have a constitutional right to an adequate education. This forced state governments to spend much more on special education, which led them to demand that the federal government provide the money needed to comply with this federal mandate, which led Congress to provide both more money and more federal regulation, which led to more litigation and more federal requirements, which led to state demands for even more money, and so on. This is a vivid illustration of how separation of powers and federalism can produce not gridlock, but a game of institutional leapfrog that results in a steady expansion of government programs."

Although the federal government has not been able to produce any legislation that is directed at the carbon management problem associated with global warming, that does not mean that no progress is being made.

"But state governments have acted. Nine northeastern states reached an accord promising to reduce power plant emissions by 10 percent by 2020. In 2006, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an agreement to curb global warming by capping certain emissions, declaring, ‘California will not wait for our federal government to take strong action on global warming’."

"More important, the Supreme Court has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. In response, the EPA has issued new rules that limit carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources. This is just the beginning of its regulatory efforts. Given the structure of the Clean Air Act, it is unlikely that this will be a particularly effective or efficient form of regulation. But the worse the EPA proposal, the stronger the incentives for congressional action. After all, if Congress fails to act, the EPA’s flawed plan will go into effect."

Melnick’s discussion provides insight into how government policy has evolved in the past, and it explains why we can have some hope that progress will continue to be made in the future. But the past is not prologue to the future. And that brings us back to Runciman’s concern for our country.

While Melnick has provided some substance to Tocqueville’s claim that there is more going on than is apparent, it does not allow one to conclude that order will necessarily emerge from chaos when necessary. This belief that "things are not as bad as they seem" implies a faith in the workings of our democracy. This leads Runciman to pose a question.

"This is the dilemma facing American democracy now: how can anyone know how bad things are, given that they are rarely as bad as they seem?"

Faith alone does not guarantee salvation.

"The problem is knowing how much to take on trust at those moments when things really do seem to be going badly. The opacity of democratic life makes it tempting to think the most important thing is not to overreact. If you lose faith during the rocky times, there is a risk you will stifle the restless adaptability that enables the system to correct itself over time. But of course there is also the risk that this time things really are as bad as they look – that something has gone fundamentally wrong – and if you keep waiting, you will end up standing by as the ship goes down."

Runciman points out that the historical record actually provides little comfort.

"But it is too easy to suggest that, when the time is right, this flexible democracy will seize its moment to act decisively. The waiting is likely to get in the way of the seizing. Moreover, history suggests that the time will only be right when things have gone very badly wrong. Those golden moments many Americans and outsiders look to as examples of democracy at its best were also moments when it had just been at its worst: Lincoln could not have been Lincoln without the Civil War; FDR could not have been FDR without the Great Depression; LBJ couldn’t have got his civil rights programme through Congress without the assassination of JFK."

He suggests that more recent history may suggest a country that has grown more complacent and less resilient.

"The oil crisis of the 1970s wasn’t in the end bad enough to shake the faith, though it came close. The recent financial crisis wasn’t bad enough to engineer a fundamental rethink, at least not yet; the financial system, run by people who learned the lesson from past crises, has managed to patch itself together, for now. So what would it take? Another civil war? Another depression, with a quarter of the country unemployed and a third of output lost? Another assassination, taking place against a backdrop of seething racial discontent? Could present-day America really cope with any of these?"

Runciman does not claim to know the answer to that question, and he warns us to not believe that anyone else knows.

"Behind these questions lurks the basic reason we don’t know anything: history provides no sort of guide. There is, in fact, nothing to go on. America is still a fantastically rich, prosperous, dynamic society. Its military remains unmatched, its universities the envy of the world, its culture voraciously consumed, its currency the bedrock of global finance. We don’t know what happens when such a society goes into decline because it has never happened before."

While faith cannot be depended upon; despair definitely provides no help. We will just have to persevere and keep trying.

Defining a Minimum Wage: Economics or Social Philosophy?

2013-04-01T00:48:00.000-07:00

When a country decides to raise or lower its minimum wage, it is essentially decreeing that money will be transferred from one set of pockets to another set of pockets. This movement of funds will change spending patterns for all people involved. These changes will ripple through the economy causing widespread secondary effects. The spending decisions made will depend on economic, political, and emotional considerations that need not have a rational underpinning, and will certainly be a function of the precise conditions at the time they are made. There are no fundamental laws at work here.

The response that economists are trained to give is that raising wages will always eliminate jobs. However, when economists actually try to extract data that might prove that contention, they arrive at a variety of conclusions: some predict jobs are actually created, some predict jobs are lost, and some see no effect. One suspects that if one works at it one can always find data to support whatever conclusion one wishes to reach. The problem seems to be too complicated for economists to figure out. That is fortunate because the definition of a minimum wage is, in fact, too important to be left in the hands of the economists.

President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour over a few years from its current value of $7.25. Let’s put this proposal in perspective and evaluate it in light of other countries’ experiences.

An article in The Economist provides this data from the OECD:

"Mr Obama’s proposal would boost the nominal wage to $9 per hour by 2015, restoring it, in real terms, to its 1979 level, though relative to median wages it would still be lower than in many other rich countries. Thereafter, it would be indexed to inflation. He would also raise the minimum wage for workers who receive tips for the first time in over 20 years."

If raising the minimum wage is such a job killer, why do other countries seem to do quite well with a value much larger relative to their median income? Japan has a minimum wage equal, relative to median, to that of the United States at 0.38 (2011). The OECD data indicate that only the Czech Republic at 0.35 and perhaps Mexico for whom data is not provided have a lower value. France is not the country most generous to its lowest wage workers; that honor goes to Turkey at 0.71. It also has a relatively healthy economy.

Usually the United States and the other English-speaking countries follow similar logic when it comes to social and economic positions. In this case, the United States is a definite outlier: Australia, 0.54; Canada, 0.45; Ireland, 0.48; New Zealand, 0.59; United Kingdom, 0.47.

If there are economic laws, they seem to behave differently in the United States.

This source provides added insight.

If the current value for the minimum wage is projected back in time in current dollars, one determines that the value of the minimum wage was actually highest in the1960s at the equivalent of about $10 per hour. There were a lot of problems in the 1960s, but it is difficult to recall a too-high minimum wage being one of them.

An article in Bloomberg Businessweek by Karen E. Klein and Nick Leiber provides additional background.

A number of states have already raised their own minimum wage above that set by the federal government.

The states of Washington and Oregon are already at the value proposed by Obama. They seem to have escaped economic calamity.

The authors indicate that there is now significant support from within the business community for raising the minimum wage.

"Now, with public anger over income inequality deepening and economic research challenging the notion that higher wages suppress employment, a growing number of small business advocates support a hike."

"That includes dozens of business groups and networks composed primarily of small business owners such as the Main Street Alliance, the National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association, and the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. ‘Our women [business owners] who pay a living wage have an advantage over their larger counterparts who don’t,’ says Margot Dorfman, chief executive officer of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, an organization with 500,000 members, three-quarters of whom are small business owners. ‘Whether Obama’s proposal is high enough or the time frame is fast enough is the question’."

The traditional view persists.

"Two of the nation’s biggest small business groups, the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Small Business Association, oppose any increase. ‘Ben Bernanke isn’t printing the money. It has to come from somewhere,’ says Jack Mozloom, a spokesman at the NFIB. ‘If you artificially increase demand in the form of minimum wages, you’re going to suppress demand elsewhere, and that’s going to come directly from the employer’s side’."

In spite of what these spokespersons might be saying, business owners have essentially decided the matter already. Most are already paying a higher wage than the federal minimum because they find it a more efficient way to run their businesses; they attract better workers and suffer less employee turnover. This owner states the case nicely.

"John Schall, whose Mongolian barbecue restaurant Fire + Ice in Harvard Square employs around 40, starts his workers at $10 an hour. The argument about a minimum wage hike imperiling small business ‘never rings true,’ says the longtime restaurateur. ‘If somebody came to you with a business plan and said, ‘If I can pay $8 an hour, this is a great business and you should invest in it, but if I have to pay $9 an hour, I’m screwed,’ nobody would take the business seriously, he says. ‘It would be way better if the minimum wage was higher across the board for everybody, and everybody had to pay an entry-level position at a living wage’."

The responses to a proposed rise in the minimum wage are predictable. Those who worry about the health of society are in favor; those who worry about the income of employers are opposed. Economics is not the issue. One’s view of society is what is being disputed, with politics being the vehicle for waging the argument.

Physicians, Nurses, and the Future of Healthcare

2013-03-29T00:45:00.000-07:00

The number of people scheduled to obtain some form of health insurance is in the millions. We also have a greater fraction of our population moving into the post-retirement phase of their lives when medical care needs increase. Some have interpreted this situation to mean that this will result in a shortage of doctors. That is the wrong interpretation. We already have too many doctors and our healthcare system is burdened by the need to provide the lofty fees necessary to cover their income demands and the overhead they create. We don’t need more doctors; we need to develop practices that make better use of their skills.

The traditional approach where the patient endures a sequence of 10 minute sessions with a personal physician in his office while the physician tries to figure out what is going on is no longer acceptable. A different form of care is required, particularly for the elderly and those with one or more chronic conditions. These are the people who generate the large medical bills. These patients need a more extended and intense interaction with caregivers than a doctor can provide.

The solution is for as many responsibilities of doctors to devolve to care givers who can spend more time with patients. Just having someone who will verify that patients are following their doctor’s orders would improve efficiency greatly and lower net costs. These workers would have an appropriate level of training for the activities they participate in and they would be paid at a lower level than physicians.

In 2010 the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a report studying how nurses might best be used in our evolving healthcare environment. It produced these recommendations:

"Nurses should practice to the full extent of their education and training."

"Nurses should achieve higher levels of education and training through an improved education system that promotes seamless academic progression."

"Nurses should be full partners, with physicians and other health care professionals, in redesigning health care in the United States."

This was clearly a call to allow nurses to assume a greater role. The IOM report also presented evidence of the efficacy of allocating more responsibility to nurses based on experience involving the Veterans Affairs Department (VA) when that agency was faced with a large influx of new enrollees. An article in Modern Healthcare provided this summary:

"In response, the VA moved away from a system of hospital-based acute care and toward community-based delivery emphasizing primary care and chronic-disease management—roles filled by registered nurses and skilled nurse practitioners, the IOM said."

"The result? Studies showed that higher proportions of veterans received appropriate care relative to comparable Medicare enrollees, and spending per beneficiary rose more slowly—30% cost growth for VA patients between 1999 and 2007, compared with 80% for Medicare beneficiaries over the same period, according to the Congressional Budget Office."

This is the path recommended above; it provides better healthcare outcomes at a lower cost.

Since the report was issued pressure has been placed upon nurses to upgrade their educational credentials, presumably in order to assume a more responsible role. Meanwhile, the doctors unions and their lobbyists have been out there trying to suppress competition by limiting the roles available to nurses in hopes of preserving the lofty incomes and privileged positions that doctors have been enjoying.

An article by Shannon Pettypiece in Bloomberg Businessweek, Nurse Practitioners, Doctors in Tug-of-War Over Patients, provides some context.

"Nurse practitioners must complete a master’s or doctoral program in nursing practice—which adds two years or more beyond the four years of school required to become a registered nurse and includes training in diagnosing acute and chronic illnesses, pharmacology, and health-care ethics. Depending on the course of study, they can provide basic primary care or specialize in such fields as pediatrics, women’s health, or cardiology. They do not typically perform surgery or invasive procedures such as colonoscopies or tumor biopsies."

Pettypiece builds the article around the experiences of Christy Blanco, a nurse practitioner who has invested in gaining a nursing doctorate and in setting up a clinic focused on low income women. She has been unable to begin practice because the physicians’ lobby has installed restrictions that require nurse practitioners to have doctor oversight.

"Christy Blanco’s health clinic is sitting empty. A nurse practitioner in El Paso, Tex., Blanco says she has all the necessary equipment and a doctorate in nursing practice that prepared her to perform routine physical exams and treat diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, and many other common ailments. About 50 miles away in Las Cruces, N.M., dozens of nurse practitioners at clinics like Blanco’s are busy caring for patients. The only difference is that in Texas, nurse practitioners are required to contract with a doctor to sign off on medical charts; the physician must also spend 1 out of every 10 days at the clinic. In New Mexico, no doctor is necessary. "I just want to get started," says Blanco, who’s tried for nearly two years to recruit a physician for her clinic, which will specialize in care for low-income women. ‘I’m trying to work for the poor,’ she says. ‘I’ve spent thousands of dollars of my own money. I have a waiting list of patients, and I have to tell them I can’t practice’."

There are about 155,000 nurse practitioners caught in a battle with physicians over who has access the cash crop of patients.

The situation is made murky by a disparate collection of state laws and restrictions.

"States regulate how much oversight nurse practitioners must have. In 16, including Colorado, New Hampshire, and Washington, they can evaluate and diagnose patients, order diagnostic tests, and prescribe drugs. That means they can start a practice or work out of a clinic with no doctor on staff. The remaining states have a patchwork of regulations. In Florida and Alabama, nurses can’t prescribe certain drugs for pain, insomnia, or attention deficit disorder that are considered controlled substances. In New York, they need a written collaboration agreement with a doctor, and there’s a limit on how many each doctor can work with, effectively creating a cap on the number of nurse practitioners."

Doctors may have political clout, but they have little data to support their arguments.

"Elizabeth Dears, a senior vice president for the Medical Society of the State of New York, said in testimony to lawmakers that removing doctor oversight of nurse practitioners "would seriously endanger the patients for whom they care." This claim, echoed by lobbyists for doctors in other states, is contradicted by at least two high-profile studies. A 2009 report by Rand Corp. found no evidence that nurses provide lower-quality care. A 2010 study of nurse practitioners published by the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, recommended an end to state laws requiring doctor supervision."

The states seem to recognize the lobbying for what it is: an attempt to preserve an unnecessarily high healthcare cost burden on them.

"New York Governor Andrew Cuomo intends to do away with doctor collaboration agreements for primary-care nurse practitioners. Lawmakers in at least 10 other states, including New Jersey and Massachusetts, are considering legislation that would allow them to operate independently."

This is serious business. Our nation is in danger of collapsing under the burden of unnecessarily high medical costs. To fix this, everyone has to do their share—including physicians.

Education and Affluence: Privilege and Burden

2013-03-26T02:22:00.000-07:00

Paul Tough focused mainly on disadvantaged children in his book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. His thesis is that our educational system is narrowly focused on cognitive progress on things that can be measured with a test such as math proficiency or reading comprehension. To be successful in life a student must combine cognitive skills with certain non-cognitive attributes like self-control, conscientiousness, self-confidence, and optimism. No matter how intelligent a student might be, learning to the extent of one’s ability will always be difficult, time-consuming, and subject to failure. The same could be said about succeeding in later life. One requires the persistence and self-confidence to recover from disappointment and keep trying. Many students acquire these non-cognitive skills in their family environment and do well in school and later life. Children from impoverished backgrounds are much less likely to acquire them in their environments. If they are to succeed, these non-cognitive skills must be provided to them as part of their educational experience. Tough provides examples of how this can successfully be accomplished.

Paul Tough’s ideas have been discussed previously in Education: Success, Failure, and Character, and in Poverty and Stress: The Ability of Children to Learn.

Tough also described concerns on the part of some educators that the children of the most affluent might also be lacking in certain necessary non-cognitive skills due to deficiencies in their upbringing. Surprisingly, some of these deficiencies arise in ways remarkably similar to those experienced by the children of the very poor.

Tough describes extended interactions with the staff of Riverdale Country School located in a wealthy area on the fringe of New York City.

"When you visit the school today, what impresses you first is its campus, the largest of any school in the city, twenty-seven rolling acres adorned with stone buildings and carefully tended lacrosse fields....it is the kind of place members of the establishment send their kids so they can learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that’s for prekindergarten."

It is clear to the staff at schools like Riverdale that they are working for the parents of the students, not for a publicly determined school board. This arrangement can have deleterious consequences.

"Although they would almost certainly not express it this way, wealthy parents choose a school like Riverdale for their children, at least in part, as a risk-management strategy....for a school that has been producing highly privileged graduates for 104 years, it boasts very few real world changers."

There seems to be more focus on producing children who will conform to expectations for the children of the wealthy rather than on producing children who will excel in any given way.

This is the way the meritocracy propagates itself. God help us!

"Traditionally, the purpose of a school like Riverdale is not to raise the ceiling on a child’s potential achievement in life but to raise the floor, to give him the kinds of connections and credentials that will make it very hard for him ever to fall out of the upper class. What Riverdale offers parents, above all else, is a high probability of nonfailure."

This affluent milieu places great pressure on the children to avoid failure, and great pressure on the school staff to help them avoid failure. But isn’t the best lesson a child can learn that failure is something one can recover from and be able to keep trying? Isn’t that the way life works?

These pressures experienced by the children of the affluent are not without effect. Tough reports on the research of Suniya Luthar, a psychology professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Luthar performed a comparison of affluent, white tenth-graders with a cohort of mostly black, low income urban tenth-graders.

"To Luthar’s surprise, she found that the affluent teenagers used alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and harder illegal drugs more than the low income teens. Thirty five percent of the suburban girls had tried all four substances, compared with just 15 percent of the inner-city girls. The wealthy girls in Luthar’s survey also suffered from elevated rates of depression; 22 percent of them reported clinically significant symptoms."

In another study in which Luthar followed middle school students over a several year period she reported the following results.

"About a fifth of these high-income students, she found, had multiple persistent problems, including substance use, high levels of depression and anxiety, and chronic academic difficulties."

There seem to be some similarities in the parenting patterns of the very wealthy and the very poor.

"She found that parenting mattered at both economic extremes. For both rich and poor teenagers, certain family characteristics predicted children’s maladjustment, including low levels of maternal attachment, high levels of parental criticism, and minimal afterschool adult supervision. Among the affluent children, Luthar found, the main cause of distress was ‘excessive achievement pressures and isolation from parents—both physical and emotional’."

The issue of substance abuse has arisen in several contexts of late. The use of addictive amphetamines as study aids is said to be prevalent at elite high schools and colleges. The use of addictive prescription pain killers as a means of escaping the tensions and disappointments of real life is also becoming more common.

Poverty can certainly be devastating for a young child. It is somewhat startling to learn that affluence can also be devastating for a child.

Perhaps some good old fashioned income redistribution would deliver each from their demons.

Education: Testing and Conditional Intelligence

2013-03-24T01:39:00.000-07:00

Our education systems place a place a great amount of trust in standardized tests of our children. Beginning in preschool, little three and four-year-olds are quizzed and graded. Based on those tests, educators make grand conclusions about the intelligence and life prospects of the child. In Education: The Danger in Testing Five-Year-Olds we discussed some extremes to which this trend could be taken. We quoted from an article by Stephanie Simon:
"A national push to make public schools more rigorous and hold teachers more accountable has led to a vast expansion of testing in kindergarten. And more exams are on the way, including a test meant to determine whether 5-year-olds are on track to succeed in college and career."

The idea that such a determination could be made for a young child on the basis of a test is rather disturbing considering that the SAT and ACT tests that graduating high school seniors take are not all that good at predicting college success. Could it be that we have mistakenly placed too much faith in the products of educational marketers? Could it also be that children are malleable, complex entities whose attributes cannot be assessed by merely inserting a dipstick?

Paul Tough, in his excellent book How Children Succeed, suggests that assessing a child’s capabilities is not a simple task.

The basis for most testing of children is the belief that cognitive capabilities have already been established and they are measurable. To address that issue, Tough reports on what is referred to as the M&M candy study. Back in the 1960s a researcher named Calvin Edlund collected a group children aged five to seven from mostly lower economic classes.

"The children were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. First, they all took a standard version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Seven weeks later, they took a similar test, but this time the kids in the experimental group were given one M&M for each correct answer. On the first test, the two groups were evenly matched on IQ. On the second test, the IQ of the M&M group went up an average of twelve points—a huge leap."

Should we be surprised that the test performance of children depends on some mixture of capability and motivation? Must we conclude that the intelligence test has an uncertainty of at least 12 points? Can we not tell the difference between above average and below average intelligence?

Tough also alerts us to another test-confounding phenomenon: stereotype threat.

"If you give a person a subtle psychological cue having to do with his group identity before a test of physical or intellectual ability....you can have a major effect on how well he performs."

If you tell a black student that a test is designed to measure intellectual capability and cause him to be reminded that some believe blacks are less intelligent than whites, he will tend to do less well on the test than the black student who was not so prompted. If a girl is reminded that girls are not expected to be as good at math as boys, then she will tend to do less well than if she had not been prompted it that manner.

The notion that prejudice can become prophecy is truly disturbing.

An article by Annie Murphy Paul in the New York Times elaborates on the notion that intelligence and social context are intertwined.

"Mr. Aronson, an associate professor at New York University, has been a leader in investigating the effects of social forces on academic achievement. Along with the psychologist Claude Steele, he identified the phenomenon known as "stereotype threat." Members of groups believed to be academically inferior — African-American and Latino students enrolled in college, or female students in math and science courses — score much lower on tests when reminded beforehand of their race or gender."

"It’s just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. As parents, teachers and students settle into the school year, this work should prompt us to think about intelligence not as a ‘lump of something that’s in our heads,’ as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as ‘a transaction among people’."

"The evolving literature on stereotype threat shows that performance is always social in nature. Even alone in an exam room, we hear a chorus of voices appraising, evaluating, passing judgment. And as social creatures, humans are strongly affected by what these voices say."

Fear of confirming a stereotype is not the only social issue that can affect test performance.

"In a 2002 study led by Roy F. Baumeister, a psychologist now at Florida State University, participants were given an I.Q. test and then a personality inventory. Some of the participants were randomly selected to receive false feedback from the personality inventory, informing them that they were ‘the sort of people who would end up alone in life’."

"The participants then took another test. Those who had been told they would be loveless and friendless in the future answered significantly fewer questions correctly than on the earlier test."

If concern about social exclusion can render one less "intelligent," what about the physical fear that children living in high crime areas or in dysfunctional families experience?

"If the threat of social exclusion can decrease the expression of intelligence, so can a perceived threat to physical safety. It’s common to blame disadvantaged children’s poor academic performance on their ‘environment.’ By this we usually mean longstanding characteristics of their homes and neighborhoods. But research on the social aspects of intelligence suggests that much more immediate aspects of kids’ surroundings can also affect their I.Q.’s."

"In a study conducted on the troubled South Side of Chicago, for example, students whose neighborhoods had been the site of a homicide within the previous two weeks scored half a standard deviation lower on a test of intelligence."

Paul concludes with some advice for how we should treat our children in our schools.

"This research has important implications for the way we educate our children. For one thing, we should replace high-stakes, one-shot tests with the kind of unobtrusive and ongoing assessments that give teachers and parents a more accurate sense of children’s true abilities. We should also put in place techniques for reducing anxiety and building self-confidence that take advantage of our social natures. And we should ensure that the social climate at our children’s schools is one of warmth and trust, not competition and exclusion."

This advice from Paul may seem a bit extreme given that what she suggests is counter to all current practices that have taken root in our education system. However, we do have an example of a school system that follows exactly the path Paul recommends. It is an important example because it is a school system that the United States recognizes as providing more successful educational outcomes.

Whenever comparison tests of math and science proficiency between students from a variety of countries are taken, Finland’s students perform among the best, while the United States’ students end up in the middle of the pack.

Finland’s children receive education in non-cognitive skills such as curiosity, self-control, self-confidence, and conscientiousness while learning how to socialize with other children. This process goes on until age seven. It is only at that age that they begin to introduce academic subjects such as math and reading. Their children are never given standardized tests before they reach an age equivalent to our high school. And their children are never separated into groups labeled fast learners and slow learners.

There appear to be a number of ways to produce good academic results. Perhaps we should try one.

The current dependence on testing to justify all things is foolish and dangerous. The notion that all learning depends on the quality of the teacher, and the teacher’s competence can be measured by student test results, ignores the role of the student in the process. Teachers can teach, but students must do the learning. As Paul Tough recommends, we should focus more on providing the students with both the cognitive and non-cognitive skills they need to succeed rather playing a blame game with teachers and focusing entirely on cognitive skills.

Poverty and Stress: The Ability of Children to Learn

2013-03-21T00:51:00.000-07:00

Those who study the data on the academic attainment of our children must inevitably conclude that poverty is a factor in determining whether an individual child is likely to be successful. Given that knowledge, what does one do about it? How can one provide better educational outcomes for children who live in poverty? Most often the response is to provide more of what seems to be successful with advantaged children, but the results have been disappointing. Could there be an association with poverty that is deeper, more fundamental, and more complex than we have imagined? That is the thesis Paul Tough presents in his book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.

Tough’s story begins with a remarkable study performed by Kaiser Permanente in the 1990s. This health maintenance organization began surveying members with a focus on gathering information on traumatic childhood experiences. The information collected could then be correlated with the organization’s medical records for the survey participants. The results were tabulated for a large group that was representative of the middle class rather than having any particular association with issues of poverty. The results were published in a paper written by Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda under the title The Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead. This work is commonly referred to as the ACE study with the acronym representing "adverse childhood experiences."

The first revelation from the study was the frequency of childhood trauma.

"More than a quarter of the patients said they had grown up in a household with an alcoholic or a drug user; about the same fraction had been beaten as children. When the doctors used the data to assign each patient an ACE score, giving them one point for each category of trauma they had experienced, they found that two-thirds of the patients had experienced at least one ACE, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more."

When correlations were made between the results of the survey and the health outcomes of the patients, startling results were obtained.

"The correlations between adverse childhood experiences and negative adult outcomes were so powerful that they ‘stunned us,’ Anda later wrote. What’s more, those correlations seemed to follow a surprisingly linear dose-response model: the higher the ACE score, the worse the outcome on almost every measure from addictive behavior to chronic disease."

We are used to thinking that social and emotional problems can lead to unhealthy lifestyles that can cause enhanced probability for disease, but there is more going on than that.

"When they looked at patients with high ACE scores (7 or more) who didn’t smoke. didn’t drink to excess, and weren’t overweight, they found that their risk of ischemic heart disease (the single most common cause of death in the United States) was still 360 percent higher than those with an ACE score of 0."

The conclusion that was reached by the authors and subsequent researchers was:

"The adversity these patients had experienced in childhood was making them sick through a pathway that had nothing to do with behavior."

Researchers have since concluded that the villain in this story, the one that causes physical and mental damage to bodies, is the response to stress that evolution has developed in our bodies. For most of our evolution stress was associated with life or death situations. The appropriate response in that case is to max out all possible reactions to a threatening situation. Unfortunately for modern humans, stress has become frequent, often long and drawn out, and sometimes chronic. A response system designed to be life saving, can be life threatening if over used.

"Our bodies regulate stress using a system called the HPA axis. HPA stands for ‘hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal’....when a potential danger appears, the first line of defense is the hypothalamus, the region of the brain that controls unconscious biological processes....The hypothalamus emits a chemical that triggers receptors in the pituitary gland; the pituitary releases signaling hormones that stimulate the adrenal glands; and the adrenal glands then send out stress hormones called glucocorticoids that switch on a host of specific defense responses."

Some of these responses are apparent to us such as higher blood pressure and a faster heart rate. Others are less observable to us:

"....neurotransmitters activate, glucose levels rise, the cardiovascular system sends blood to the muscles, and inflammatory proteins surge through the bloodstream."

The burden this stress response places on the body is referred to as alostatic load. Too high an alostatic load:

"....especially in infancy and childhood, produces all kinds of serious and long-lasting negative effects—physical, psychological, and neurological."

How does this specifically relate to poverty and learning? Being poor is not detrimental in itself, but poverty makes it likely that children will experience more frequent and more intense stressful situations. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse become more likely. Physical security and emotional security are often at risk. Not knowing where your next meal will come from can definitely be stressful.

Those who study the physiology of stress have learned that the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain most susceptible to damage in children subjected to abnormal amounts of stress.

"The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school."

Tough refers to these "self-regulatory activities" controlled by the prefrontal cortex as "executive functions." He does not view the fact that these processes have been compromised in many poor children as the end of the story.

"The reason that researchers who care about the gap between the rich and the poor are so excited about executive functions is that these skills are not only highly predictive of success; they are also quite malleable, much more so than other cognitive skills. The prefrontal cortex is more responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain, and it stays flexible well into adolescence and early adulthood. So if we can improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning, we can increase his prospects for success in a particularly efficient way."

Tough provides examples where disadvantaged children with poor early educational experiences were converted into productive students with potentially bright futures. He emphasizes that the rehabilitation of these children’s educations requires not just better approaches to subjects like math and reading comprehension, but it also requires a conscious effort to help students attain greater control of these executive functions.

What matters most in a child’s development....is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character."

Further discussion of Tough’s book and the subject of enhancing the performance of disadvantaged children can be found in Education: Success, Failure, and Character.

Education: Success, Failure, and Character

2013-03-18T01:51:00.000-07:00

Paul Tough has written a book that should cause all those arguing the rights and wrongs of school reform to stop and reconsider. The focus of most advocates of reform has been on the development and measurement of cognitive skills that are quantifiable, such as reading comprehension and mathematics. The goal seems to be to take children as early as possible and begin drilling them on these topics. It is assumed that with good teachers, students will have a satisfactory learning experience. However, Tough reminds us that teachers can only teach. It is the students who must learn, and we cannot assume they are blank slates just waiting to be written upon.

Paul Tough’s book is titled How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. He discusses a growing body of evidence that suggests the path to educational attainment is much more complex a process than merely cramming facts and figures into developing young minds.

"....in the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate congregation of economists, educators, psychologists, and neuroscientists have begun to produce evidence....What matters most in a child’s development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character."

Tough argues that learning is a difficult process for all children, no matter how fundamentally intelligent they might be. If they are to perform up to their potential, it will be necessary that they possess the characteristics he has listed above.

He makes his point in a number of ways. For example, he points out that the SAT and ACT tests were devised in order to allow colleges to assess the probability of student success no matter where the student was educated. Prior to these standardized tests being available, the only data generally available on students were GPA (grade point average) and teacher recommendations. The colleges worried that they would be unable to compare students from affluent urban areas with those from poor rural areas, for example. The SAT and ACT tests measured cognitive qualities: intelligence and prior education. Presumably, they do a good job of that. But do these tests determine who is best suited to perform well in college?

Tough reports on a study described in Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities by William G. Bowen, Michael S. McPherson, and Matthew Chingos.

"The authors....discovered that the most accurate predictor of whether a student would successfully complete college was not his or her score on the SAT or the ACT, the two standardized college admissions tests. In fact, it turned out that, except at the most highly selective public universities, ACT scores revealed very little about whether or not a student would graduate from college. The far better predictor of college completion was a student’s high school GPA."

The conclusion to be drawn is that it is easy for a bright student to score well on an isolated test, but in order to generate a high GPA, he/she must be willing and able to apply themselves diligently over a long period of time while negotiating the depressing setbacks, delightful distractions, and complex social interactions of adolescence. In order to attain a lofty GPA a student must exhibit the attributes that Tough refers to as character. And that seems to be quite important in college performance.

Tough also delves into the experiences of the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools in trying to produce students who are able to perform well on standardized tests and also able to succeed in later life after they have left the KIPP environment. The KIPP charter schools accept middle school students from disadvantaged backgrounds via a lottery system. The purpose of the lottery is to avoid selecting only the most promising of the potential students. The KIPP approach was very successful at producing children that performed well academically.

"....[KIPP’s] formula seemed to have worked, and remarkably quickly: in the eighth-grade citywide achievement test in 1999, the students of KIPP academy earned the highest scores of any school in the Bronx and the fifth highest in all of New York City. Those scores—unheard of at the time for an open-admission school in a poor neighborhood....."

What the KIPP leaders learned over time is that the academic lessons and training they were providing their students was insufficient to enable them to attain their academic potential. The students who excelled in graduating to high school were referred to as the Class of 2003 for the year they would be entering college.

"Almost every member of the Class of 2003 did make it through high school, and most of them enrolled in college. But then the mountain grew steeper. Six years after their high school graduation, just 21 percent of the cohort....had completed a four-year college degree."

This performance was unacceptable, and inconsistent with the early achievements of the students. After much soul searching, the KIPP people concluded that the students they were training were being sent out into the world with only a fraction of the tools they would need to succeed. They had been focusing on cognitive results, but the results indicated that once the students left the KIPP support system they did not necessarily possess the noncognitive tools they needed to succeed.

The traits that KIPP believed it needed to focus on were:

grit
self-control
zest
social intelligence
gratitude
optimism
curiosity

The schools and the teachers set out in enhance these characteristics in their students. They went so far as to begin issuing two report cards to students: one for academics, and one for "character."

KIPP has a goal of a six-year graduation rate of 75%. Since this new focus was established the college graduation number has improved.

"....the six-year graduation rate had gone up from 21 percent for the Class of 2003....to 46 percent for the class of 2005."

The personality traits that KIPP is trying to generate are usually developed in early childhood. Research indicates that the quality of that experience for the child is important in determining the characteristics of the child. In particular, it appears to be critical that the child grow up in a relatively stress-free environment where it can feel secure and have at least one person to which it can form a strong and comforting attachment. This is precisely the type of environment that is difficult to attain for children who emerge from endemic poverty. Perversely, it seems that this type environment might also be difficult to attain for the children of the very affluent.

KIPP, and others who have come to the same realization, seem to be on the right track now. Sadly, decades have been wasted following the wrong approaches. The most important thing to take from this discussion is that these traits that are necessary for success can be developed and improved even into adolescence.

Teachers can only teach; students must do the learning. Let us focus on helping the students directly and stop blaming everything on the teachers.